Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Read online

  She settles on: “No. He isn’t married.”

  “He’s good-looking. What does he do?”

  “He’s a tax lawyer.”

  Sheila leans over the counter, closer to the mirror, and blues her transparent lids. “I have a daughter. She’s a social worker.”

  Inge is even about to offer up additional information for friendly good measure—she has a daughter too—when an explosive report from the bathroom stall behind interrupts her.

  Sheila cries, “I’m not going to stand here and listen to that!” She snatches up her cosmetic bag and sails indignantly out, leaving behind a relieved Inge.

  Back home Inge gets started on dinner, slicing cabbage on the board then tipping the purple shreds into the pot. The salt shaker is almost empty. When she goes to refill it she finds a Sifto box of air. This gives her pause—since when would she put an empty box back in the cupboard? And she shivers, like she did this morning when she saw the pentagram.

  Five sharp points embedded in a circle.

  Quickly, she pushed the box back under the bed.

  She wears her white hair very short, shaved at the nape. The stubble reared. All over her bare arms the follicles puckered. She stayed kneeling on the carpet for several minutes. But why? She’s not religious. Her upbringing was entirely secular. She was born in 1933, in Heideman, near Dresden, to a German mother and a British father who had the good sense to take his family home as soon as he smelled what was on the wind. Technically she’s Jewish, because her mother was, technically, though Inge has never crossed the threshold of a synagogue. For her own also technically Jewish children she provided the usual neutered symbols: Christmas trees, Easter eggs.

  Despite all this. Even though, if pressed to reveal something so personal, she would say atheist. Notwithstanding the fact that she isn’t superstitious in the least. Present her with a ladder and she will walk right under it to prove it! Really, she doesn’t believe in a malignant supernatural being—Satan, Beelzebub, Who-have-you. The Devil didn’t make the Nazis do it.

  She’s worried, very worried about her son.

  Alone, Inge would be happy with a green salad, or cottage cheese and an apple. Or she’d make soup on Sunday and eat it every night for a week, Saturday directly out of the pot. But now that Wallace has come home, she’s succumbed to a maternal compulsion to nourish her child. Sometimes Wallace works late or goes out after work so isn’t even there to eat. She doesn’t ask him to call her on these occasions. She wants him to feel free to come and go as he likes.

  When he is there for dinner, it’s almost worse. He never mentions Nicole, his “partner.” Inge phoned Nicole last week and assured her she would always consider her family. In actual fact, Nicole and Wallace haven’t been married long enough for Inge to take her daughter-in-law into her heart, though she likes her well enough. Is there any hope of reconciling? Inge expects not and didn’t ask. When they couldn’t even refer to each other as husband and wife? She sighs. So much for passion.

  There is this painful unbroached subject, and now there is another. Tonight the meal is made worse—excruciating for Inge—by the pentagrammed box under Wallace’s bed downstairs.

  “How was your day?”

  When Wallace looks up, Inge sees what that kooky Sheila saw—a face that could launch a thousand biddies across the deep end on flutter boards. Smooth jaw, tidy haircut. She can still see her baby in his face. He’s also something of a comedian, a quality that aggrieves her now that she knows he’s in trouble. She’d like straight answers to the questions she can’t ask. What Inge would do to get a little of her howler back.

  “I’ve got a case at the moment,” Wallace tells her, “a guy who’s gone twenty-three years without paying taxes.”

  “My goodness. How did he get away with that?”

  Wallace shrugs. “He just never filed. What did you do today, Mom?”

  “I went to Aquafit. I’ll sleep like a baby tonight. How’s the pork chop?”

  “Pork chop. Pork chop.”

  “Have more cabbage. I know you like it.”

  Wallace forks in the last of it. He looks at his watch. “Mom. I’ve got a meeting.”

  “A meeting?” Cloaked figures spring into her head. The moon rises, full and red. “There’s strudel!”

  As though dessert could save him.

  Wallace gets up from the table. “Please, Mom. Just go on as you usually do. Pretend I’m not here. Hopefully, I’ll be out of your hair in a few months.”

  Inge cups both sides of her head. “You’re not in my hair.”

  He disappears down the basement stairs to his old room. As a teenager he used to pound down the second he could escape the table. A minute later the music would start. Inge didn’t think of it as music at the time, but compared with today—at least they played instruments. At least they sang. This was the reason she put him in the basement, to spare herself and Lisa. In those days his cave was postered with ghoulish characters, white faces, tarred eye sockets, tongues protruding. There was one, a man with a woman’s name. Another parent told Inge he bit the heads off live chickens during his concerts. “He’s diabolical,” the woman had said.

  Inge is rinsing the dishes and loading them in the dishwasher when Wallace comes back up. He’s in a T-shirt and jeans, carrying his father’s old briefcase, much larger than the one he uses for work. Inge feels queasy wondering what’s in it.

  “Will you be late?”

  “Probably.” He offers her a hug. “I’ll want strudel when I get back. If anyone comes to the door, don’t answer. Particularly if they’re holding an empty plate.”

  Alice. That was his name. And oh! Shudder! She’s just remembered another: Black Sabbath!

  I will not go down, Inge tells herself. I will not look in that box.

  Those girls. That was the start of it, she’s sure. Why else would they suddenly pop into her head after all these years?

  Ponytails. Knee socks. Bunny barrettes.

  Nowadays ten-year-old girls do not dress like that. They wear vinyl miniskirts and platform shoes and teeny tops that stop short of their belly buttons. They probably wear thong underpants. Inge has seen her share of the thong at the Kerrisdale pool, vast pale buttocks separated by a string. What is the point? Today’s ten-year-old wears the lip gloss and cross earrings and temporary tattoos her older granddaughter in Calgary expressed a fervent wish for over the telephone when asked what she wanted for her birthday. “Do you let her wear those things?” Inge asked. Lisa said, “How can I stop her?”

  The girls who rang Inge’s doorbell were innocently dressed. The picture of sweetness. When Inge answered, they quickly showed teeth too big for their mouths.

  “Yes?” Inge said, discounting cookies, because they were in street clothes.

  The girls introduced themselves; Inge does not remember their names. “We’re starting a Sunday school,” said the one with spaniel ears. “We want to know if Lisa and Wallace want to come.”

  “But it’s going to be on Saturday,” said the dark-haired girl with barrettes. “Because we have real Sunday school on Sunday.”

  Inge smiled. “Saturday school?” Then Lisa appeared and pushed her way out, awed and disbelieving she could be so lucky as to receive these two on her porch. The girls explained about the Saturday-Sunday school. It was to be held in the basement of the ponytailed girl’s house. They would round the children up and lead them there themselves. It would last half an hour. Bible stories, songs, games. They would bring them all home again.

  Lisa clutched Inge’s arm and jumped up and down.

  “I’ll have to speak to your mothers about it,” Inge hopes she said.

  On Saturday morning the girls returned for Lisa. Inge had decided to allow her to go. Why not let Lisa decide for herself what she believed? She would come home with questions they could talk about. But when she and Wallace came out on the porch to wave goodbye, Wallace saw the three children waiting on the sidewalk with the dark-haired girl while the ponyta
iled one escorted Lisa down the walk. Naturally, he wanted to go too. Inge hustled him back inside to receive his planned dose of undivided attention—the other reason she’d let Lisa go. He wouldn’t have it. He threw himself down, screaming and rolling on the floor as though his clothes were on fire. Inge settled resignedly on the bottom stair, helpless to intervene until his rage was exorcised. When he got like this she used to wonder, jokingly of course, if he wasn’t possessed.

  After Wallace leaves for his meeting, Inge goes directly downstairs to his room. It’s decorated now with a yellow flower-print comforter and matching shams, for when her granddaughters come to visit. Instead of ghouls, Renoir girls in impractical dresses flounce across the walls. The first thing Inge did when Wallace moved back was take Lisa’s old dolls and stuffed toys that lined the shelves and repack them in the cedar trunk.

  She creaks down onto her knees, feels around under the bed-skirt. Sliding the box out, she can tell it’s lighter than when she struck it with the vacuum nozzle this morning. A white box with reinforced corners. Inge saw these same boxes the last time she was at Ikea. They come in various sizes. This one is about six inches deep, ten inches wide and eighteen inches long. It looks like he traced around a bowl with a black marker to make the circle then used a ruler for the star.

  Her son, the artist.

  She jostles the box. Something inside slides back and forth.

  Open the lid.

  If she does, she’ll turn into a different kind of mother from the one who averted her eyes as she stripped and balled his tacky sheets, who, after she’d done the wash, returned the Baggie to his jacket pocket and the condom to his jeans. Who never said a thing.

  Inside is another box, rectangular, stamped Made in China.

  Candles.

  Eyes stinging with relief, Inge pulls off the lid.

  Salt.

  She remembers the Sifto box she crushed before dinner. Twisted off the metal spout, dropped the box on the floor and stamped it flat so it wouldn’t take up so much space in the recycling bag.

  She pokes a tentative finger in. Burrows to her middle knuckle. Her finger hooks on something. She pulls.

  The handle is bone, the blade silver.

  Despite Aquafit, she does not sleep well that night. Every time the house talks in its sleep, Inge sits up and listens. She gets out of bed and looks out the window to see if Wallace’s car is there yet.

  The rest of the week Inge is fretful and distracted, even though Wallace stays home and works, except Saturday, when he goes to a movie with a friend. She believes him. Why shouldn’t she? She doesn’t enter his room, not even to clean it. Salt tops the shopping list. Two separate trips to the store and both times she forgets. She thinks about calling Lisa but she wouldn’t be able to say what’s really troubling her apart from the dissolved marriage. She respects Wallace’s privacy.

  What every mother wonders: is this my fault? How remiss has she actually been, how negligent, how blind? This business with the girls: how could she have let it go on for so long? And were there other signs, incidents at school, for example, that no one told her about?

  Every time the girls brought Wallace and Lisa home, Inge quizzed them about what they’d done at Saturday school. They each had a picture they’d drawn and Inge could generally figure out Wallace’s by looking at Lisa’s. Jesus walking on water. The miracle of the loaves and fishes.

  “What do you make of all this?” Inge asked them, but they seemed to have no opinion. Apparently the girls used a felt board when they told stories. Wallace liked how, afterward, he was allowed to stick the people and animals on upside down.

  Aquafit would have been a relief if it weren’t for Sheila. But when Inge gets into the pool she sees so many old people she wonders if Denise can keep track of them all. Would she notice if one, succumbing, slipped below the surface, or would she keep on calling out, “Hop, hop, hop!”? The rest of them can hardly be depended on. Eyeglasses spattered with water droplets or left in lockers, they’re practically blind. Sheila is in the front row. Inge stations herself at the back.

  After class Inge stays in the near-empty pool and backstrokes a few lengths. Without the piped music, she finds it peaceful and relaxing to glide along watching the light off the water crinkle an aurora across the domed ceiling. For the first time since she opened the box, her anxiety subsides enough to allow for rational thought. There is such a thing as evil, no one could deny it, but is Wallace involved in it? She passes under the string of coloured flags, straightening her arms to break the impact.

  On the homeward length an idea, gestated in her confusing week, is finally born. There are two kinds of evil. Inge borrows names for them from her nursing days: petit and grand mal. Grand mal evil makes the news, makes history. Petit mal is personal, insidious. The Nazis were grand mal. The girls on the porch—petit mal.

  And Wallace?

  The shower room is empty. Nor is Sheila among those still in the change room. The pool is part of the community centre, which also houses the library where Inge goes today once she’s dry and dressed. There must be a book that could help a person in her predicament, but as she passes through the clicking detector she realizes she won’t be able to approach the librarian and request it. Old men sit at the tables reading newspapers or tomes about the war. Always the war. People line up to use the computers. Inge doesn’t know how.

  The encyclopedias live together in one section of shelf. Inge uses two hands to pull out S of the Britannica.

  “Boo!”

  She slams it with a start. There is Sheila in her turban, some kind of witch materializing stoutly to fill half the aisle. “How’s that gorgeous son of yours?”

  Inge cringes at the over-loud voice. Sheila hasn’t even met Wallace, for heaven’s sake. She clapped eyes on him once. He’s not the boy next door. Even as she’s thinking this, it occurs to Inge that she knows what Sheila looks like naked, where she’s scarred and where she sags—and vice versa. Immediately she wishes they didn’t share so intimate a knowledge.

  “How old is he? He looks so young.”

  Inge turns to fill the crevasse made by the extracted volume, showing Sheila her rigid back. “He’s forty.”

  “My daughter is thirty-six. She isn’t married either.”

  It is only this second, hearing this telltale comment, that Inge realizes Sheila is matchmaking. That Sheila is Jewish. Now it all makes sense. Inge softens at the same time something inside her twists. Coiled in her every cell, the guilt of a survivor.

  “Come to my place for tea,” Sheila says.

  “I can’t. I’ve got to get home and get dinner on.”

  “I’m divorced,” Sheila says.

  “I’m cooking for Wallace. My son. I’m widowed.”

  “And he comes over and eats dinner with his mother!” Sheila raises her ringed hands in the air and shakes them, as though to say, Oy, oy, oy. “Off you go. But you’ll come tomorrow? Here.” She yanks her purse off her hip, plunges into its overstuffed depths. “I’ll write down the address.”

  And Inge can’t say no.

  She phones Lisa when she gets home. Inge thinks: this is what a daughter is for. A son you baby. A daughter you confide in. “About your brother,” she says after the pleasantries. Your brother and the Prince of Darkness.

  “Is he still there? Oh my God.”

  “When did you talk to him last?”

  “A few weeks ago. Is he even looking for a place?”

  “How did he sound to you?”

  “Fine,” Lisa says. “Maybe too fine. I mean, if Barry kicked me out, I’d jump off a bridge.”

  “No you wouldn’t.”

  “You’re right. I’ve got the girls. I’d threaten to!”

  “Did she kick him out?” Inge asks.

  “I assume so—”

  Inge hears a plaintive voice in the background, her younger granddaughter. “I’m talking to Oma,” Lisa tells her. “I’ll be there in a second.” To Inge she says, “Does he seem depr
essed?”

  “Depressed? No. It’s just—I worry.”

  “That’s your job.”

  Inge wants to ask her about the Saturday-Sunday school. Does she remember? What really happened? The extension clicks and mouth breathing fills the line.

  “Erin?” Lisa says.

  “Oma!” the little one screams.

  Sheila is still lifting the newspapers and the opened and unopened mail stacked all over her sideboard. She looks taller dry, hair teased high and crisped with spray, a wasps’ nest. “What’s your last name, Inge?”

  “Brenner.”

  “And you’ve lived in the neighbourhood long?”

  “Almost forty years. I’m on Forty-fifth. Just down from the church. The green house.”

  “It’s gone downhill, I’m sure.”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “I’ve never seen so many Chinese!”

  Denise, their Aquafit instructor, is Chinese and probably born in Vancouver. Inge states the obvious. “I’m an immigrant myself.”

  “I can’t find it, damn it.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A paper. Since you’re here I was going to ask you to do me a favour. Forget it. I’ll get the kettle on.”

  She leaves Inge at the table. It’s as disorganized as the sideboard, and Inge wonders if she should clear a place to set the teapot. “How long have you lived here?” she asks.

  “Six months,” Sheila calls through the pass-through window.

  Inge thinks of that term she keeps hearing on the CBC: downsized. Sheila has apparently moved the entire contents of her house into this one-bedroom apartment. In the corner a wicker chair leans against the wall. It’s supposed to hang from the ceiling by a chain like a birdcage. Lisa used to have one. Such clutter. The woman is a pack rat.

  “Where were you before?”

  “Peterborough. I wanted to be closer to my daughter.”

  When she comes back, Inge notes that Sheila’s taste in clothes runs along the lines of her taste in upholstery—big floral prints. “These are diabetic cookies.” She sets the plate down on the Crossword Digest and smiles at Inge with front teeth outlined in gold. Inge supposes they’ll be planning the wedding this afternoon. Maybe they’ll get as far as naming the grandchildren.