An Imperfect Librarian - Elizabeth Murphy [36]
Cyril jabs at the toaster. The kitchen smells of burnt toast, smoke and whatever Mercedes sprayed on the oven. I start on the tea with a date square. They’re not coffee drinkers. Mercedes starts on me with her usual questions and comments, punctuated with the name Nancy. I tell them about the highlights of the visit to Cliffhead: the dogs, the hexagons, my boot, the trail, the rowboat, the blister, the fox, the horses, the char, partridgeberry-cognac sauce and, finally, the lights of the city on the drive to town.
Cyril twitches his head to the side like I’ve seen some men do since I came to Newfoundland. “Yes, b’y. Give ’er,” he says.
Mercedes thinks my shirt is too wrinkled and my trousers are too big. “You can’t go on a date looking like a streel,” she says. “If you were with Nancy, you’d have all your shirts ironed.”
Cyril twitches his head again. I imitate. He laughs. “You’ll get it right one of these days. Don’t give up.”
After my snack, Mercedes irons my shirt and Cyril lends me a belt. One side of the buckle imitates a plug, the other a socket. I don’t have far to walk to the restaurant because it’s only at the bottom of Cathedral Street. Watch for the mermaid, Norah wrote in her email. It would have been hard to miss the statue or sign: St. John’s Mermaid, Bar and Restaurant. The inside is an imitation of the interior of a seventeenth-century ship. The waiters are dressed as sea captains and pirates. The waitresses’ legs are wrapped in sparkling mermaid tails. Norah is ordering a drink as I arrive. She introduces me to a couple she knows from the trail association. There’s the usual “Where do you belong? How long you here for?” Then, the mermaid interrupts: “Ready to go to the main deck?” she says.
Norah smiles at me. We follow the mermaid along a corridor bordered by canvas sails. The main deck looks authentic except that it’s filled with tables and chairs in addition to barrels, cannons, rigging, ropes and a ship’s wheel. Our wooden table has a clear glass-top finish. In the centre there’s an oil lamp. We study the menu in a dim light. I settle on Corte-Real’s Bacalhau. Norah doesn’t like salt-cod dishes so she takes a Captain Eastwood’s peppered halibut steak. She orders a bottle of wine that costs more than both our dishes combined.
Elsa rarely drank wine because she was afraid it might interfere with her performance as a runner. Meat interfered with her yoga so we hardly ever ate that at the flat or when we went out. Any form of fast food was out of the question. I only ever ate hamburgers or French fries when she wasn’t around.
“Are you athletic?” I ask Norah when we begin eating.
“Chopping wood, cutting hay, shovelling horse dung or snow, chasing chickens or the dogs, digging in my garden, grooming the trails – I guess you could call that athletic. At Cliffhead, every season has its...”
While we eat, I try to listen to her description of life at Cliffhead. The couple at a nearby table distracts me. I can’t see the woman’s face but from behind she has the same style blond hair as Elsa.
Norah continues to talk while the mermaid tops up her wine glass. “If they’d stop giving me new courses every semester I’d have time to do the chores and...”
On the far side of the room, people sing happy birthday as a mermaid walks into the room carrying a cake with sparklers on top.
“...he thinks he can make me teach in an area I’m not qualified for. I told him I didn’t know anything about Canadian history. It’s not my area. ‘We didn’t hire you to teach Newfoundland history,’ he said. I said, ‘Well you...’”
I remember when Elsa and I blew the last of our English pounds on an expensive restaurant for our final meal before we moved to Norway. We talked about where we’d live and whether, one day, we’d be able to afford a house. Elsa said she’d only buy a house together if we were married.
The couple at the other