Annabel - Kathleen Winter [28]
“You didn’t like it.”
Wayne could not protest this.
“The boys have been practising it all week. They’re pretty good too. I thought you’d like that. I got them to put on a special performance just for us.” He leant forward. “Go up and tell Otis you liked it.”
“Dad.”
“Just say you thought the boys did a good job. Come on.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Just come with me, then, while I say it.” Treadway pulled Wayne up by an elbow. Wayne followed him to Otis’s rig.
“Well, Otis, my son didn’t want to tell you this himself, but you know what he told me?”
“Dad.”
“He told me you’ve done an excellent choreographing job on that backhoe ballet.”
Otis threw down a banana and Wayne tried to catch it but it fell in the dirt. It had been bruised and now it was dusty too. Wayne picked it up and held it all the way back home. When he got home, he put it on the kitchen table and went to his room and waited until he heard his dad click the back door, then he slid the Eaton’s catalogue from under his bed and found the bathing suits. There were only two pages, and Wayne had circled the best suit of all. The others were plain: raspberry with a cream stripe, green with a yellow gusset, a lot of blue. Wayne had circled a flame orange suit with a necklace of oval sequins the colour of the eyes in a peacock feather: emerald and copper sulphate. The suit was twenty-six dollars, and he had saved up nineteen.
8
Wally Michelin
JACINTA DID NOT LISTEN TO commercial stations or to talk shows where people called in about the politics of the day, the state of potholes, or ailments of their houseplants. She kept it tuned to a station that played Chopin and Tchaikovsky and Schubert.
“I know it’s not real company,” she told Wayne, “but the radio is something. It’s a comforting voice that lets you know you’re not entirely alone in the world. I need that.”
All children, she thought as she watched him, could be either girl or boy, their cheeks flushed, their hair damp tendrils. Wayne looked at her so trustingly she badly wanted to sit beside him, to look at him and honestly explain everything that had happened to him from birth. At nine, she thought, a child has a capacity for truth. By age ten the child has lengthened and opened out from babyhood, from childishness, and there is a directness there that adults don’t have. You could look in Wayne’s eyes and say anything true, no matter how difficult, and those eyes would meet yours and they would take it in with a scientific beauty that was like Schubert’s music.
Treadway had said he liked classical music when he and Jacinta were first married. And he had. He had felt that the radio graced the rooms in his house. He had liked the way music floated from one room to another through an open door. But Jacinta had it on all the time, and Treadway longed for silence as well. And in his house there was no silence. There was always that radio. Now he thought of it as an incessant banging on pianos and operatic foolishness, and it irritated him. But he did not ask her to turn it off. Treadway had his outside world, his magnificent wilderness, and he could go out in it any time it pleased him, and he also had restraint.
Because Treadway was not a man who could reach out to his wife, and because Jacinta had her own inner world, her memories of the city, and her tormented wish for a world in which her child did not have to be confined to something smaller than who he was, the two of them grew separate throughout Wayne’s childhood. Each grew more silent outwardly and more self-sufficient, but lonesome inwardly. From the outside they looked the way many middle-aged couples do. Both were models of sensible good behaviour. Treadway was considered such a good husband that many of Jacinta’s friends wished they had married someone like him instead of being fooled by wit, grace, passion, or a handsome face. Their own husbands did not bring in as much wood as Treadway did before he went away on his trapline. They did not come back home as early or as