The Freedom in American Songs Read Free Page A

Marianne interjected. She felt inadequate. Mrs. Ruby started talking about her other new calendar, hung over the stove, from her son in Norway. Ice, snow, coloured wooden houses.
    â€œNo different from here,” ventured Marianne.
    â€œSure ‘tis no different from here,” Mrs. Ruby snapped at Marianne’s sentence like a trout at a worm then spat it back. She monitored the window for signs of weather, on account of Sister Jean navigating the roads. “Come over and look,” she told Marianne. “See how it’s coming over that dip in the mountains.” Marianne looked out at a silkscreen of wooded hills dark in the foreground but becoming whiter with each hill. Soon the whiteness drew close, huge flakes nosing up to the steamed-up window like white moths.
    â€œYou hang your cup towels,” complained Mrs. Ruby, “and expect them to blow fresh, but the line comes down a bit and that old tomcat, look, rubs and rubs himself all over them. Here …” she gave Marianne tea in a new gold-rimmed china cup out of the good cabinet in the other room, and thrust slices of homemade bread toasted on the woodstove. “And cake, I’ve only got this bit left over from Christmas …” a thin piece, spiced and fragrant.
    â€œMr. Carlyle, the man who lives by himself, he …” Marianne wanted to ask about his thirteen Christmas cakes, but Mrs. Ruby interrupted.
    â€œWhat in the name of God do you want to be tangled up with him for? Gerald—tell her.”
    â€œLeave the girl alone, Margaret. Let her visit whoever she wants.”
    â€œTalk about dirty-looking! It’s a wonder he never …” but the door blew open and Sister Jean came carrying bags with coat-hanger hooks sticking out of their tops and the bundle somehow took up half the kitchen. She gave Marianne a conspiratorial look—Mrs. Ruby is old but we are not—but Marianne did not want to become part of the conspiracy.
    â€œI’d better go,” she got up.
    â€œChild,” protested Mrs. Ruby, “you’re welcome as the flowers in May …” but the protest was a ritual. The kitchen was too full. It was bursting with heat and laundry and the kind of trivial, pent-up arguments that scurry under kitchen tables and hide behind the tea tin and the biscuit box. Mrs. Ruby ducked behind the door that led into what used to be her old shop and came out with a plastic bag knotted at the top and bulging with tins and boxes. “Here,” she slid it across the floor to Marianne.
    â€œWhat’s in it?”
    â€œWe’ll talk about it later. Go on.”
    On the road, in the falling snow, she peeked in through the knot. Spaghetti, beans, a jar of strawberry jam, and something else, rolled up … Marianne unfurled a corner and looked into the blue eyes of Jesus on Sister Amelia’s calendar from Ecuador.
    She took the shortcut through a field littered with mussel and winkle shells and crusts of urchins upturned like cups and full of meltwater reflecting the sky. She imagined beaks drinking from them. One tree grew in the field: the blackest spruce in the cove. In summer you always saw Ezekiel Vardy’s black pony standing under the boughs. The spruce looked lonesome without the pony. She climbed over the fence and navigated the crumbling bank to the stony beach.
    The beach was all green glass globules, polished, and mother-­of-pearl cracked in winter, and magic lantern figurines made of bits of fish spine—the vertebrae. She slipped shells and bones in her gloves and climbed the boat-littered wharf, past the shredded flag in the yard of a new bungalow in whose driveway two men were fixing a truck. The flag had half its maple leaf when she moved here last spring. Now the leaf was gone, and so was all the white part. All that was left were shreds of the red bar close to the pole, and the red had faded to pink.
    â€œBeen shopping down on the beach,” one