The Ladies' Lending Library Read Free Page A

too tired. But tomorrow, after a day spent fixing the roof or tinkering with the septic system or replacing the rotten wood on the porch steps; after getting too much sun, and putting up with the kids quarrelling over who is to hand him the nails, and who will hold the hammer when he doesn’t need it—then he’ll turn out the lights after they’ve undressed with their backs to one another; he’ll turn to her and she’ll lie there beneath him, good as gold. What else can she do, when you can hear through the skin-thin walls every sigh or cry anyone makes in their sleep?
    Max wants a son. Ever since she was pregnant that first time with Laura he’s had the name picked out: his father’s name, Roman. A boy called Roman had followed her home from school all one winter, a skinny, dwarfish boy she couldn’t stand to have near her. Give him his son and he will never bother her again, that’s what it means, his turning to her each Saturday night, his body so heavy it crushes the life from her. And yet no one is a better dancer—so light on his feet, whirling her across the floor as if she were swans-down chased by a summer breeze. She sees herself and her husband like those tiny dolls placed on the top tier of wedding cakes, gliding over the stiff white icing, while all around, people are watching, envying.
Law’s such a respectable profession; he’ll go far, all the way to
Q.C.
Such a handsome man, so distinguished looking in histuxedo, the spotless white cummerbund, the deep red carnation in his lapel. He would always bring her a gardenia—roses were common, he used to say: she deserved something as rare as she was. A gardenia, a cummerbund—had she really married him for that? And has it really led her to this? A house in the suburbs, a tumbledown summer cottage, a body scarred with stretch marks, like silverfish crawling over her belly and across her thighs: an aging body stranded in the washed-out garden of her pyjamas.
    Never mind, she has one sure consolation: her dress for the Senchenkos’ party. She has hidden it away, like the book in the night-table drawer. Sonia tiptoes to the closet, reaching into its soft depths, finding the dress
—the gown
—by the metallic feel of the fabric. She can hear her mother’s tongue clucking at the clinging folds, the low-cut neck, but as she holds the dress up against herself she is overcome by its sheer gorgeousness, the cloth dropping from her breasts like golden rain. Slippery and cool like rain, her skin drinking in the gold. If she were to step into the dress, study herself in the mirror, move in the clinging fabric as if she were on a runway and about to launch herself on a sea of unknown, admiring eyes … But she resists the lure: she makes herself shove the dress to the very back of the closet; she swears not to look at it again, to try it on, until the night of the Senchenkos’ party, lest she damage its rareness with too much looking.
    Sitting on the end of the bed, facing the satin headboard (too good to be thrown out, too soiled to use at home), Sonia counts the waves beating against the shore as if they were knocks at a door she’d double-bolted. She longs for the city—not the vast, empty-seeming suburb where she lives now, but downtown where she used to work: the streetcar sparks and honking of horns, the wholesale fabric sellers on Queen, the roar of sewing machinesin the factories on Spadina. Her mother’s house on Dovercourt Road: sitting out on the porch on summer nights, people walking by, calling hello, everyone breathing in the scent of melting chocolate from the Neilson factory nearby. And it doesn’t matter how hot it gets on summer days, how steamy and drenching; in spite of the lake, in spite of Sunnyside pool, no one expects you to jump into the water.
    Whereas here, if one of the children were drowning she wouldn’t be able to run in and rescue her. It’s got so bad now that she can’t go down to the water’s edge without the hairs on