Waiting for Joe (6 page)

“Check this out, it just came in.” The tap dancer rushes toward Laurie holding up a leopard pattern knit dress.

Holy. Shades of Maryanne Lewis, the pastor’s wife. “Does it come with a matching pillbox hat? Never mind,” Laurie adds with a laugh when the young woman looks puzzled.

“I’ll bet it’d look great on you. Why not try it on?”

“No thanks,” Laurie says too quickly and adds, “but thanks, anyway.”

She continues browsing among the sweaters, remembering Maryanne Lewis in the leopard-spotted suit and pillbox hat, stationed at the church entrance greeting parishioners on one of those rare occasions when Laurie let Joe talk her into going. Maryanne in a zebra-striped sheath dress conducting the children’s choir. For a time Joe kept a photograph in his meditation book as a marker. A picture of himself as a boy, holding up a Bible he’d won in a Sunday school contest. Maryanne is at his side, in a faux wolf vest and pencil skirt, plastic daisies clipped in her platinum hair, her arm about his shoulder.

That woman didn’t resemble the person Joe used to go
on about, the pastor’s wife who had slaved away in the church basement teaching young women to sew. While with the other hand, apparently, she baked half a dozen or so loaves of bread to send home with them. He and Pastor Ken would launder the clothes that piled up in boxes and bags on the church steps, while Maryanne ironed and patched, the clothing destined for the drawers and closets of families known to be less fortunate than most. Maryanne had gone knocking on doors for donations of rice and raisins, sardines and flannel blankets. She’d raised a tractor-trailer load of care packages that she and a committee of women assembled and shipped to World Vision for their orphanages in Vietnam; and when Saigon fell, she organized an ecumenical city-wide day of prayer for the safety of the children.

Laurie grew to dread picking up the telephone and hearing the woman’s jelly bean voice. She would call to remind Joe of a church meeting, and then again, if he’d happened to miss it. Why don’t you tell her you got tangled up in my pyjamas? Which, on the occasional Sunday morning when Laurie brought breakfast to bed, was what did happen—a leisurely, long sex-saturated morning, the clock radio turned up to cover the sounds of their lovemaking. After the Lewises left Winnipeg, the calls continued for a time, but less frequently—praise the Lord, as the pastor was forever saying—and then stopped. Their contact with Joe had been severed, or so she thought.
Something good is going to happen for Joe
. Of course, Maryanne’s prediction hadn’t included her.

Her cheeks are hot, her legs shaky from trying on clothes in the cramped cubicle in the corridor of cubicles, the
doorways hung with brightly printed curtains. The usual moans are coming from behind the curtains, the exclamations, the disconcerting heavy sighs. The tap dancer has ventured out from her refuge to preen in the three-sided mirror, and as Laurie emerges from hers the young woman looks at her as though expecting a compliment or a least an envious glance. That trim figure is not going to last long, Laurie tells her silently.

At the counter she unknots the sock and spills her loose change, feeling that in purchasing second-hand merchandise she is doing penance for what she spent the day before. She unrolls the bills and realizes that she’s not going to be able to buy everything. She decides between two sweaters and sets one, and a black tulip skirt, aside.

“Well, you did good,” the young clerk remarks cheerfully. “Is this the first time you’ve been here?”

“It’s the first time I’ve been to Regina. My husband and I are travelling and we decided to stop here for a few days.” Laurie suddenly feels the weight of her words come to rest on her shoulders.

Joe’s gone. The thought is a dart flying across the room and lodging in her chest. A sudden outburst of laughter from the dressing rooms is like a rain of pebbles thrown against the window. She has just lost Joe.

“I hope you enjoy the rest of your visit,” the clerk says as she pushes the large plastic bag toward her.

The bag knocks annoyingly against the side of her leg as she walks out the door, and immediately she feels chilled. It’s not Joe who’s gone, she reassures herself, zipping up her sweat jacket. It’s Alfred she’s missing. She woke up mornings still expecting to hear him moving about in his room.

Getting downtown is one thing, but getting back will be another. Her body is beginning to feel the lack of food, the early morning workout in bed, the walk. Pointless, she thinks, when she comes upon yet another strip mall that houses an insurance broker, a hearing aid store, and a florist. Within moments she’s inside and ordering flowers to be sent to Deere Lodge. And then she’s outside, her thoughts churning as she wonders how to go about telling Joe that the last of their credit is gone.
Laurie, you are such a fool
, she tells herself. Then she squares her broad shoulders and retraces her steps to Clara’s Boutique.

The women in the store are startled by her abrupt entrance, her grim impatience as she waits for the clerk to be finished with the woman in front of her.

“I want to return what I’ve just bought.” Laurie plunks the bag on the counter, as though the clerk is somehow responsible for her impulses.

“You’ve read our return policy?” the clerk replies carefully. She gestures to a sign on the wall behind the counter. “We don’t refund cash, but we’ll be happy to give you a credit. You have six months to spend it on anything in the store.”

“I’m not from here, and so I won’t have a chance to use the credit. Couldn’t you take that into consideration?” Laurie feels the women listening.

“I’m sorry, I can’t make an exception,” the young clerk says.

“Pardon me for asking.” Laurie turns away, and when she wrenches open the door, the bell above it jangles sharply.

She takes off at a brisk walk down the street, her stride made long and quick by anger, the bag thumping against
her leg. Within moments the shopping centre comes into sight and with it, the motorhome, and her anger turns to relief. The Meridian’s silver length is interrupted by whirlwind swirls of purple and white, and by the slide-outs jutting from its sides that allow space for the queen-sized bed and a drawer chest in the bedroom on one side, and the dinette suite on the other. She’s grateful for its relative spaciousness. She’s grateful that the owner gave Joe a break on the rent, otherwise they might be living in a smelly and rusting dinosaur. Otherwise, they might be homeless.

As she steps inside she’s enveloped by the almost overpowering odour emanating from the Formica and carpeting, the maple veneer and pressboard of the cupboards, closets and storage spaces. She drops the bag on the floor and sinks down into the leather lounger. The wine glass with its bridal etching is in the cup holder in the lounger arm, its rim printed with the boysenberry shape of her lip. The empty wine bottle and Joe’s glass are on the dinette table, as are the postcards she bought when they arrived, intending to send one a day to Alfred.

At the sound of voices she gets up and slides in behind the dinette table where she can look out the window. Coming across the parking lot is the woman she saw on the apartment balcony earlier in the morning, wearing the long beige tunic and the head scarf. A little girl in a pink sweatsuit lags behind, her dark hair shining as though lacquered. She’s trying to take in all the sights at once, as her mother tugs at her hand to hurry along. As they pass by the motorhome, the girl peers up at it, her eyebrows scrunched in concentration. A gust of wind plasters the woman’s skirt against her body, revealing the outline of
her long slender legs. She’s wearing orange plastic clogs, a surprising shot of colour.

They continue on toward Walmart, the girl walking backwards now to stare at the Meridian. Although Laurie is certain she can’t be seen at the window, she feels the power of the child’s scrutiny. She lowers the blind and goes over to the media centre above the cab of the motorhome where she keeps a folder and returns to the dinette with it. She takes out her notebook, and a bundle of photographs secured with a red ribbon slides out onto the table. She opens the notebook.
Postcards, $18.49, Walnut Crest, $11.95
, are the last entries she’s made. Beneath that she writes,
Clara’s Boutique, $88.87
.

Her eyes stray from the page and come to rest on the bundle of photographs. On top is a picture of her grandmother with Joe’s mother, Verna.
Pals forever
, someone wrote in black ink across the bottom. They pose in front of a café in winter in the small northern town where they grew up. Her grandmother’s hair is curly, like her own, while Verna’s hair is stiff and blunt, cut in a style that makes her look like a sphinx. Her grandmother was already a widow when the picture was taken. She’d been left to raise Laurie’s mother alone before Verna was even married. When Alfred returned home from Japan, he’d come upon Verna and Laurie’s grandmother having a coffee in that same café, and Verna swept him off his feet, according to the story he liked to tell.

Laurie unties the ribbon and shuffles through the pictures, finds the one she’s looking for and cradles it lightly in her long fingers as though it’s brittle and in danger of crumbling. Her mother, Karen Rasmussen. While Laurie
doesn’t often contemplate her future, she does contemplate her past, the young mother she never knew, her sliver of a smile like a new moon suggesting there’s much more to her than what meets the eye. In the photograph she rests a drinking glass on top of her pregnant belly, her long fingers, like Laurie’s fingers, wrapped around it.

It’s the only picture she has of her mother and herself. Verna took it on the veranda steps of the house on Arlington Street, the day Laurie was born. The day her mother, and Verna, also died. In the picture, her teenage mother looks as untroubled and unsubstantial as a paper doll, although only minutes after it was taken she went rushing off toward the river—and Verna went rushing off after her.

All three women are gone now. Laurie’s grandmother, who raised her, struck down by a terrible stroke several years ago while still living in her cramped three-room house in the northern town, collapsed on the kitchen floor. The neighbours found her when Laurie alerted them that she hadn’t answered their usual Sunday afternoon telephone call. Verna drowned trying to rescue Laurie’s mother after she fell from the train trestle bridge.
Fell
, Laurie’s grandmother preferred to say, although it was well known around town that Karen Rasmussen had got herself pregnant, been sent to a girls’ home in Winnipeg where she threw herself off a bridge. On the twenty-seventh day of July, 1967. The year Trudeau proclaimed the government had no business being in the bedrooms of the nation, people still thought they had the right to know the business of pregnant unmarried women.

The newspaper account of Laurie’s rescue is near the bottom of the stack of photographs. She unfolds it and
begins to read, although she knows by heart how the class of graduating nurses were having their picture taken on the lawn of the Misericordia Hospital when they heard her crying. They followed the sound down to the riverbank and saw her mother lying on the small island. Soon after Laurie was rescued by the river patrol who found her cradled between her dead mother’s legs. The island she was born on, and where her mother bled to death, is within walking distance from Arlington Street, and when seen from the height and distance of the train trestle bridge, it looks no larger than a doormat.

Her hands tremble when she folds the clipping, gathers the photographs, her meagre history, and binds them once again with the red ribbon. Such a small bundle of pictures culled from the albums days before they left Winnipeg. She gave the albums to her friend Sandra, for safekeeping. Albums filled with pictures of Alfred and Joe taken throughout the years. Alfred and Joe, her linchpins.

She awakens hours later, sunlight flooding the bedroom’s west-facing window. When she stretches to ease the tension in her body, the heat and movement releases the odour of their lovemaking from the sheets. She realizes she’s hungry. Avocado and Melba toast. All the necessary building blocks her cells need for healthy and normal reproduction. Yes! she says, in the unlikely event that cells respond favourably to a positive frame of mind. Divide and conquer. Ha, she says, and grins.

But when she gets up and sees the plastic bag lying on the floor, she groans, then grabs it by the bottom and upends it, her folly dropping in a crumpled heap. What possessed her to buy the clothes? And where will she put
them? The closet and drawer under the bed are already jammed; some of the clothes have never been worn, a blazer, blouses she’d bought on sale at Jones New York still have the price tags attached. Sell them. Take them to Clara’s Boutique. The idea, at first startling, begins to grow. Of course. She could end up with more money than what she’d spent.

The silver fox, she thinks, as she rifles through the closet. She hasn’t worn the fur jacket for years, given that fur is fur, and it makes her look like a bloated marshmallow. It was one of Joe’s first real gifts, followed by the blue leather parka he paid too much for in an Edmonton leather store, and which she has also seldom worn because it’s too heavy, like lugging a pregnant walrus around on her back.

In her search she comes across the fern-printed sundress and remembers the bolero she bought. She takes the dress out and drapes it across the bed, then quickly strips. When she reaches for the bolero on the floor, she sees herself in the mirror closet door.

She straightens, runs her fingers across the scar, the silver ridge on the bronze geography of her abdomen, silky smooth to the touch. What kind of mother would she have been? She thinks of the three shoppers in the second-hand store, the forbearance and generosity of the two older women toward the youngest. She remembers Joe standing at the foot of her hospital bed, white-faced, his lips moving as he prayed silently while Pastor Ken and Maryanne prayed aloud that her hemorrhaging would stop. They read from the Bible of the miracles performed by Jesus, including the one of the woman who had bled for twelve years, and who believed that if she only touched the hem of his
garment, she would be healed.
Thy faith has made thee whole
, Jesus told her, and she was.