Marguerite (part five)
The little truck from McIvor’s lumbered up the lane once more, late in the afternoon. The shiny new blanket box came with a man at either end right up to the door. Beautiful reds and yellows of aromatic cedar flaming across the top and sides. She looked down at the box, up to the men, pointed a forefinger back to the truck, and slammed the door. The presumption!! Now she was mad. This was in the cold light of day!
Of course, he came over to find out what had happened. He walked rather briskly up the pathway, puzzled and a little annoyed himself at the unexplained return of the chest. But it was her mother who came to the door and asked him coldly, politely, not to come again; Charlotte wished to have no further contact.
And she really wouldn't see him, didn't speak to him, rebuffed his efforts to reach her and talk it over. She stayed away from the usual places, avoided the people he knew, refused messages and if their paths crossed as if by accident, she turned away … But even then, dancing in some god-forsaken out-of-the-way joint, she’d look up and he’d be there leaning against the wall, watching! It made her so angry, she laughed louder, danced faster, flirted more outrageously!
Then, suddenly…nothing. He wasn't at the dances or the taverns or at the church. No one spoke his name or hinted slyly. She would not ask! Christmas went by, nearly Easter. It was early April when she thought she saw him walking ahead of her on the street but when he turned, it was someone else. His laugh rang out at a crowded party and she looked up in anticipation, but he wasn't there though she searched throughout the house. He could be anywhere! Who else is missing? Any one of them could be making love to him right now! Someone else could be meeting him afterwards outside in the dark. For the first time in her life, she felt invisible and a little afraid. There was no one watching. She began to leave the parties early or stay at home. She stormed up and down the stairs and around the house in fits of energy! Even her mother sighed and fussed at her.
"Come help me in the garden. Nature will help settle you down." Charlie looked at her in disbelief. She had never worked in the garden! She had never worked at home! There were already three women in the house and anyway, it was her mother's job! It was all Charlie could do to make herself stay inside the cubby hole of her own job at the town dry cleaners, folding the clothes exactly, wrapping the packages exactly and speaking politely to the customers. She did like the customers, different people to talk to, different points of view! They stayed to chat with her longer than usual, men and women both. She was lovely.
Finally it was Cissa. She straggled home from school with a paper carefully folded in her pocket. Shamefacedly she dragged it out.
"Charlie, I'm sorry. He said I had to give it to you and he looked at me so…so…up close, I couldn't say I wouldn't so now I have to." Her brow crinkled up in anticipation of Charlie's fury. Instead Charlie snatched the note from her hand and flipped it open with her thumb. "Next time, you'll call me," it read.
"Ha," said Charlie. It didn't sound like a laugh. She stood there with her eyes vague and unfocused, the small paper still open in her hand.
"Charlie?"
"Yeah, don't worry, Sis. It's okay." She tucked the note absentmindedly in her pocket, then, reconsidering, took it out and reached behind her to slip it beneath the precious silk stockings in her dresser drawer. Her mother wouldn't look there. She held up a warning finger to Cissa: "Not one word…" Cissa shook her head side to side, round-eyed.
”I won't, Charlie, I wouldn't!" It was a fairy tale! The beautiful girl, the handsome suitor, the trouble that keeps them apart. Cissa couldn't imagine what the trouble was, but that didn't matter; Charlie always knew what to do.
She was going out a lot now. Men liked her, invited her to parties, to the picture show. She loved the pictures! The people there knew how life was supposed to be. They had fun! No one was poor or on a farm or at least only until they were rescued and set free to find the real world. Everyone was in love. The women wore beautiful clothes and were slim and witty and sexy. These young hard-working, well-meaning, dull farmers' sons did not realize their pursuit was futile; she went out with them to look for the other one.
She delayed as long as she could, determined not to contact him, ruefully catching herself in a daydream of colors for the kitchen chairs or fantasizing falls of lace that would breathe gently at slightly open windows. A house that didn't have mothers and grandmothers, one that would be her own.
To her dismay, her body also went on reliving not the last, but the first time they'd made love! How easily he'd slipped into her, the sensation of cleaving in two and the new wholeness fused around him at its core. The incredible pleasure that could not possibly be more, and then it was. Her belly ached with it.
But simply, and worst of all, she missed him! Everything was incomplete without his being there, no matter how exasperating that could be! She woke up in the morning already waiting and the undefinable expectation kept hanging there just behind her shoulder all day long.
I don't know how she let him know. She didn't say. Llew's younger sister could have wangled an invitation to the family home, but his mother had publicly aired her relief when it looked like being over.
"We're rid of the little flirt!" she'd chortled, as it was reported to Charlie. There was no phone at the farm and Charlie certainly wasn't going to write! Going to the tavern would be out of the question. Perhaps she could have her Dad go find him. He loved her. Llew knew immediately, of course; Charles Franz had never before come in to The Socrates. He didn't even have to ask.
The wedding was in July. Llew could get away from the farm for only a couple of days, it's being the middle of summer, so they got married on Wednesday afternoon and were at Niagara for Friday, the Fourth, the day that George Strathakis, the Greek waiter, sought out fame and fortune in a barrel over Horseshoe Falls. He'd sold the movie rights but there wasn't much to see. The crowd and the newspaper reporter and the camera man waited as the barrel tumbled its way through rushing water over the brink where the world fell away and droplets clinging to their trajectory boiled out into the empty summer air, hanging weightlessly suspended and reflecting rainbows. But all three had disappeared, the reporter, the cameraman, and the crowd, as well as the oxygen supply, before the barrel emerged twenty-two hours later from its hiding place. He'd played it too safe. The barrel was heavy. It did not fly out to ride on the rainbow colors but plummeted straight down to lodge in the rocks behind the falls.
Do you remember the place? You and I were there together, behind the powerful opaque gray curtain rushing down, the roar soaking up our voices, the slippery mud beneath our feet leading out, when we chose to go, into bright sunlight. I wanted to stay in the miracle place. Like the barrel. Like George.
"C'mon," Dad commanded as he urged us along the places he and Charlie had seen together thirteen years before, striding ahead as he had done then, throwing open his arms at every vista, taking in every experience, soaking it into his skin. The world! The world was so..interesting!
"Hurry up; there's more to see!"
She had watched his face lighted up with surprise and discovery. At last he would turn to her and tell it all for her to marvel, too.
Charlotte seldom spoke directly to her mother so it was no surprise that she had announced her intention to wed quite casually as they were getting up from the family dinner table. She watched the older woman for her reaction. There was none. Her dad laughed and said congratulations and reached for his handkerchief to blow his nose. Grandma Franz patted her arm and said good girl. Charlotte picked up the remaining dishes and joined her mother at the sink, standing slightly behind her.
"Mamma?"
"Yes, Charlotte." Charlie swallowed and gritted her teeth.
"You'll arrange for the church?" Her mother was an elder and had taught Sunday School for years, always making sure that everyone, except for her own mother due to incapacity, attended Sunday services plus choir practice, speech nights, and clean-ups.
"No," she said. "We haven't the money for church weddings." She continued to rub the cake of soap in the basin of water. Charlie was struck. She could hardly get her breath. Where was the bride ? The bride in the long, white…and the veil!
"But you have to!" she almost screamed. "We went and sat there every blessed…!" Slowly her mother turned to look at her.
"Charlotte, we are poor people."
"How dare she say that to me!" cries my mother to me across the kitchen table.
Grandma had long ago resigned herself to the fact that the three children were more like her husband’s family than her own. There was no flash of the intellectual brilliance she had seen in her father, no dedication, no control, no loyalty, no piety, no goodness. Not even the pale delicacy displayed by her own mother. They were mediocre and irreverent. She prayed for acceptance, made up for their deficiencies, righted wrongs, cross to bear.
But in regard to the forthcoming wedding, the older woman had even greater doubts. She had reviewed the evidence of Llew McCann's supposed steadiness and reliability in the light of her own perceptions and had come to to the conclusion that he indulged frequently in alcoholic beverages and any number of other sinful behaviors.
The wedding day was getting closer. Charlotte was avoiding her, hardly ever home, running up and down the stairs, busy with things to be done when she was there. When Rachel waylaid her in the kitchen, she was already wearing a white cotton frock to go out for the afternoon. She paused mid-step, one hand on her hip. Whatever does she want now!
Rachel chooses to be blunt.
"Charlotte, you must call off the wedding! There is no alternative. It will be better if he hears it from you, but I will tell him myself if you prefer. Today! Fortunately not many have yet been told so there will be a minimum of fuss.
Charlotte bites her lower lip and looks away, green eyes opened wide perhaps not to cry. The mother reaches out; the daughter shrinks away. Rachel coaxes.
“My girl, Llew McCann is just not... " her voice softens, “just not what we believed him to be. I, too, was deceived. Now I discover that not only does he drink alcohol, as I had suspected on several occasions, but he plays cards! He has been seen at dance halls and taverns!"
Charlotte stands with her back turned against her mother's words, but suddenly whips around, shoulders raised, hissing like a barn cat. "That's the gossip, you mean, Mother? I thought you didn't agree with gossip!" That sardonic tone is so irritating!
"Girlie, girlie, look at where you're going! He's a boy, not a man! What sort of example will he be for your children? What sort of life will you lead?" Charlotte turns away again, now crumpling forward, her shoulders seeming to tremble. Encouraged in her efforts, Rachel circles to pursue her argument face to face.
"You really should not be thinking of getting married yourself! You don't know first thing about cooking or sewing, keeping house or looking after a child. You were never interested! Your father and I won't be around to pick up the pieces! We have our own work to do!"
"What would you know about it!" Charlie spits out, uncoiling from her frozen stance, shaking harder, her laughter spilling out scornfully, deliberately burning her mother in its acid. "We have fun, mother! Do you know what that is? I'll tell you: it's what you've never had in your entire life! And where has that got you? All this working and praying and thinking?" She stalks across the room, escaping the warm envelope of her mother's body.
"Have you ever really laughed? Out-loud? No? Never? Not even a smile? Never! Don't reach out to me with those rough hands! Suffering and sacrifice all the way, every day! Oh, yes, I see it. We all do. We see you think it makes you better!" Charlotte smiles almost sadly. Her voice lowers out of the high pitched anger into a flat sorrow that is no less deadly. "No, mother, not better, just poor! Poor and pathetic! That's where it's got you!"
Rachel blinks her eyes. Yes, this is the daughter she knows and recognizes: stupid, selfish and spiteful. She wipes her hands on the kitchen towel.
"Very well," she says quietly, not really caring whether Charlotte can hear or not, just needing to end it for herself. “Just don't think you can come to us with the hungry babies or the black and blue! You will not come back here whatever the circumstances." So they stood opposite one another in the hot early summer kitchen, not sitting down, not taking time, sharing nothing but the emptiness between them.
I saw a snapshot of the wedding once somewhere in the box of the loose ones. It was taken on the back porch steps. My mother is in a short dress of embroidered silk, flounces floating from a dropped waistline, her breasts bound flat as possible in the style of the day. She looks straight ahead, jaw set, her hand firmly closed around the hand of her new husband. Her mother is at the back. Little Grandma peers around Grandma McCann who stares off into the distance. My dad and your dad frown as if trying to concentrate; they may have been celebrating ahead of time! Maybe Grandpa, too! Behind the newlyweds is Aunt Cissa, where no one can see how big she is or how bewildered.
Uncle Ewen was best man. I don't know the bridesmaid. Her name might be Marian.
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