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© Zoë Landale
Zoë Landale
There it was in the Delta Optimist in the "B.C. Classifieds," just like her friend Elaine had said. Dollie propped her elbows on the kitchen table, rested her head comfortably on her palms and, breathing heavily, sceptically, through her nose, read it several times. "Dorothy Redford (nee Huskins), formerly of Alert Bay. Contact your sister Miriam in Powell River to learn something to your advantage." A phone number followed.
She took a pull on her bottle of Blue. Wouldn't it be nice if some relative she'd never heard of had died and left her some money? She could afford to move upcoast again. The thought was so vivid, Dollie could inhale clean air, see frost sparkling on the wharf at Port Hardy, blue mountains against the sky. Her longing was like a pain in her stomach. Then reality snapped her back to the tiny kitchen, the smell of meatloaf and roast potatoes. Her beer was getting warm.
Dollie snorted at her own gullibility. She was a tall woman with a white face and white hair. Like most people who cut their own hair, Dollie thought she did a pretty fair job. Think of how much money she saved herself! A more critical, or wealthier, woman might have guessed that Dollie turned a herd of mice loose to graze on her head. By the time the mice reached the back, the females were pregnant. They tore off chunks of Dollie's coarse hair to line nests for their babies. In the compact she tilted this way and that, her back to the bathroom mirror, Dollie, whose glasses came from the thrift store, never saw that in places her skin showed through pink at the back of her head.
She folded up the paper and laid it tidily to one side of the imitation marble arborite table. Maybe she'd tell Tom about the ad when he got home from the garage, maybe she wouldn't. Jeez, imagine Mirrie thinking Alert Bay was the last place she'd lived. She'd lived in Hardy for ages after that. Why, she'd been down in The Big Zit for five. Five years livin with Tom! She wouldn't have thought they'd have lasted that many months.
Dollie lived with Tom in Ladner, an old fishing village, in a house surrounded by a green picket fence. Just south of Vancouver, Ladner had been recently tarted up to appeal to seniors cashing in on inflated values for their city homes. As far as Tom was concerned, he still lived in the country, though he did admit it was getting a little built up. To Dollie, Ladner's jumble of housing developments, condominiums, and strip malls qualified it as The Big Smoke. Condominium ads glowingly claimed it was "forty minutes easy driving" from Vancouver's downtown core.
The spreads in the papers made Dollie shake her head. Catch developers ever mentioning the awful words "rush hour"? On the rare occasions she had to go downtown, it took her an hour and a half by bus, and that was in the middle of the day. From what Tom said, Dollie figured Ladner must have been a nice place up to about twenty-five years ago.
Tom gave her a place to stay and, as the old saying went, there might be snow on the mountain, but there was fire beneath. These were good things, but the city was not where she'd ever planned to end up. At least Ladner still had a lot of fishermen left. That was cheering. Whenever Dollie got low or missed upcoast too much, she took a hike down to the boat basin and smelled the wonderful smell of guys working on their boats, tar, paint, putty, the sizzle and scorch of someone burning off paint with a blowtorch.
To Dollie, it seemed as if her whole life had just happened to her. Nothing she'd done had made any impact on the slide of events. Her early years, the arthritis that bothered her, the tiny disability pension she received, the men who came and went, none of it bore any relation to what she did, or thought. She failed to perceive any course of action that demanded she see herself as worth anything, or able to change her circumstances.
She finished her beer, the first of the day, and got up to check on dinner. Dollie believed in value received, value given. Cooking, for her, was a mystical exchange of infinite value. She prided herself on never serving anything out of a can. Cheaper that way too. Dollie could pinch a mean penny. She made a virtue out of it. What had started as necessity because none of the men she'd lived with had ever given her enough for food, had become over the years, something that made her better than other women. Now sixty-one, Dollie would survey their shopping carts in the supermarket and sniff that same contemptuous inhalation of air that had greeted her sister's ad in the paper. Catch her, Dollie Redford, buying that junk? Foamed up marshmallow cookies covered with cheap chocolate? Not likely! Tom wanted cookies, she made him cookies. The real thing. Nice crisp oatmeal cookies to take in his lunch, chocolate chip cookies that'd make a person drool. Why, her lemon meringue pie was enough to make a strong man weak just lookin at it, all those lovely brown tips to the meringue topping. She hadn't spent fifteen years cooking in logging camps for nothing.
Dollie wondered what kind of cookies Mirrie made. If she was anything like their mother, Mirrie bought Dad's cookies in the large economy size package. For company she might splurge and get Peek Frean's "Nice" cookies, sugar-covered and crunchy.
Mirrie was trying to make her think there was money.
"I forgot you had a sister," Tom said after dinner. "I guess I thought she was dead or something." He got up and went to the kitchen cupboard above the sink. Damn it! Dollie knew exactly what he was after. Mint toothpicks.
Tom looked like an unpeeled, kindly potato with glasses. He knew that picking his teeth bugged her, but he didn't care. It was his house, wasn't it? "There's lotsa things you doan know about me," Dollie said. She kept her voice light. "Yah, I figured that." Tom smiled so his face wrinkled up like a brown paper bag used until it was soft as kleenex. The color in his face was from birding. When he wasn't working, he was roaming around Reifel Bird Sanctuary, binoculars in hand. His fingernails usually had one or two black blood blisters under them, the sign of a man who works with unforgiving metal. Tom was head mechanic at the Husky station.
Dollie's heart always lurched when Tom's skin crunkled, she felt sideways, off-balance. Lord, lord, she'd think to herself. How can I be with an old man? She'd remind herself she too was old, but it always felt like a story someone would tell to a child; she never really believed it. Inside, she was the same wild girl she'd always been. This other self, the one who had a gimpy knee and white hair, that was some kind of disguise she'd put on temporarily.
Tom was good at putting pieces together. That's what he did all day long down at the garage. He'd figured out early on that Dollie talked exhaustively about her time in the camps and not a whole lot else. He didn't know a thing about the missing years, nor did he care, really, but he'd found that hinting was a good way to make her back down. He watched her drop her eyes, decide to say nothing about the toothpicks. For once. Dollie swept some crumbs from the table onto her plate. She wondered what color her sister's hair was now. She'd been blonde as a four-year-old, then for the rest of her life insisted she was just restoring her natural colour. But she couldn't still be bleaching her hair, could she?
"Mirrie must be mmm, fifty-five. I wonder if her husband's still alive. He looked like a piece of soft cheese, that man. Worked in the mill in Foul River. He had pretty severe heart problems as I remember."
"How long's it been since you talked to your sister?" Tom had found his toothpicks and brought the box back to the table. He was now industriously poking away at his teeth.
Dollie glanced toward the window, away from Tom's open mouth. He'd found a big gob of something. Was he going to eat it or put it on his plate? "Twenty years...must be. Maybe less. Not since Mumma died."
"Uh huh?" Tom said. Encouragingly. He'd learned not to push. Dollie was a big woman, she looked strong even if she limped, but the bad dreams that woman had. His guess was she'd had a life that shouldn't happen to a dog. She said she didn't remember dreams.
"Mirrie's one of these types that...how can I tell you what she's like? She got married when she was eighteen and she's been a housewife all her life. She bleaches her hair and no lie, says, 'The sun did it.' She wears a pound a pancake makeup and mascara out to here." Dollie gestures to an absurd length.
Tom cleared his throat.
"No, it's not sour grapes," Dollie said, guessing his meaning. "Just cause I'm allergic to hairdye. I'm tellin ya what my sister's like. I'd be bored out of my mind if I'd a-lived the way she has. I mean, how long does it take to clean up a house in the mornin? And do laundry? If Mirrie wants a beer, she won't have it till her husband gets home. She'll by dyin for one, and maybe he'll be late, stand around shootin the shit with the boys after work, and Mirrie figures it's her duty or something to wait. She's proud of it.
"They never had any kids. She fusses over that man like he was one. His heart, his leg, his this or that, I tell you. They used to have this cat called Motormouth. I figure Mirrie should've been the one called that, she ran on and on about her husband and how good she was to him."
"So what's this got to do with when your mother died?"
"Keep your shirt on, I'm gettin to that. I was workin up Bentick Arm then. We had a radiotelephone at camp so Mirrie calls and leaves a message for me. I call back and I had to go through the Campbell River operator and she got the Powell River operator and there's me standin in the office at camp, and Mirrie, she gets on and starts arguin with me about Mumma's funeral."
"What?"
"She didn't want me to come. She had one excuse after another. Her husband had a curling tournament; he couldn't pick me up from the plane. I couldn't stay with them cause they were 'redecoratin.' 'Seein as how you and Mumma haven't been exactly close, I think it's kinda late to turn on the tears now,' Mirrie says to me.
"I mean, okay, Mumma and I didn't get on. God, she was hard on me. That's why I left home when I did, ya know. She used to give me lickings with a wooden spoon. The last time she come after me with a gaff." She saw by Tom's face he didn't know what she meant. "One of those wooden things, you know, long as yer arm with a big metal hook on the end of it for stickin through a fish's gills. Wood part thick around as my wrist. Awful thing ta getta beatin with. I tell ya, I didn't know if she meant to hit me or spike me.
"Mirrie could twist Mumma around her little finger, but I never got the knack of it. It used to make me sick watchin her get Mumma to do what she wanted. She never got after Mirrie with the wooden spoon.
"But anyway, she was my mother too. I coulda got a sked down to Powell River the next day and then chartered a plane to be back in time to get dinner on the table. The manager even said the company'd pay for the charter; it'd be cheaper for him than tryna get someone else in to cook. Anyway I listened to Mirrie, her and her stupid 'over's' when she finished talking, I been around radiotelephones all my life and that really bugged me, and I thought about the two operators listening and the manager and I heard Mirrie's voice gettin higher and higher and I thought, if I'm not careful, Mirrie's gonna drag my whole life out here. She doesn't want me. I GOT YOU FINE ON THAT, jeez, it took me long enough, my whole adult life, I guess, to realize she hated me."
"Nah, not hated," Tom said. He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, looked uncomfortable. He didn't like it when Dollie got all worked up.
"Sure she did. Probably still does. I was the black sheep of the family, you know."
"Yah, I gathered."
Tom smiled at her and dragged on his cigarette. He'd finished picking his teeth. He batted away the smoke with his black hands. He didn't want Dollie to get up and do the dishes just yet, this sister and the ad all sounded too interesting. In the perverse manner of smoke, it curled around and made straight for Dollie, who had given up cigarettes some years before.
Dollie leaned away from the smoke. She looked at Tom across the uncleared dishes and thought how comfortable it was to sit around the kitchen with him. He wasn't a big man, Tom, but he felt like he wasn't going to go anywhere. He wasn't quarrelsome, wasn't prickly, he didn't go over what she said and look for something to get mad at. Dollie felt a sudden rush of liking for him. He probably had put more together about her than she figured. "So why'd you think Mirrie, who never wanted to see me again, why'd she put an ad in looking for me?"
"Who've you got in the rest of your family that might have money?" Tom said.
Dollie snorted. "If you'd seen the shack we grew up in in Lund, you wouldn't ask. And Mumma, workin every day at the store, bringing home bags of overpriced bought cookies."
"Your Dad?"
Dollie considered this. "After he took off, Dad ran a gyppo logging show up Teakerne Arm for a while. I was about eight, I guess. I don't think I heard of him after. He might've won a lottery, I suppose." Her square face looked sceptical. "He'd be in his eighties now, Tom."
After they'd batted about possibilities for another half an hour, Tom said, "This is getting ridiculous." The dishes still weren't done and the slight thrill of difference in their routine had gone. "I want my coffee, Doll. Why don't you just phone your sister and see what she says? I'll pay for it."
Dollie swallowed. She'd been waiting for Tom to say he'd pay, but even that pleasure was outweighed by the horrible fact that if she phoned Mirrie, she'd have to talk to her. "We haven't talked since Mumma died. I never did go to her funeral, ya know. I figured if Mirrie wanted me to stay away that bad, maybe I'd better."
"Yah, well, she sounds like a prune, but give it a try. The shoe's on the other foot, this time, Doll. She's trying to find you. Must be something biting her."
Dollie opened another bottle of Labatt's Blue. She was particular about her beer; it had to be Blue and it had to come in bottles. All the guys she'd known in Hardy were agreed: aluminum was bad for you. A couple of them had got sore mouths drinking out of cans.
The line was busy. Dollie wondered if she should ever have told Tom about Mirrie. What if it was to do with money? Would he want in? Half? Nah, she'd known the day she'd met him on the ferry crossing Jervis Inlet that he was a nice guy. He wouldn't say a thing if she packed up and moved.
Busy, busy. Maybe if she got a lot of money they could get one of those new cordless phones, better'n that old black thing on the wall.
What was she thinking of? If she got her hands on some money, she'd be off like someone lit a match under her.
Would she? She'd miss the way Tom smelled, smoke and crankcase oil, the way his hands would....
Oh no, it was ringing. That couldn't be pee squirting out all hot, could it? Lately her control wasn't so good. She laugh or fart and uh-oh, seemed like her undies were a bit wet.
Tom heard her intake of breath, looked across the table at the halo of her chewed hair. Wouldn't break his heart if Doll came into some money. She could buy herself a decent pair of glasses. She couldn't tell a bush tit from a white-crowned sparrow in those things. He'd offered her new glasses for a Christmas present, but she wasn't having any of it.
Wouldn't his kids be shocked if Doll came into a pile of money. They said...hell, he didn't even want to think about what they'd said about Doll.
"Hi, I'd like to speak to Mirrie."
"Mirrie. M-I-R.... Oh, it IS you. It's Dollie calling. I saw your ad in the paper."
Tom winced. It was just like Doll not to beat around the bush. No hi, how are you, whatchabeen doing for the last twenty years.
"I'm fine," Dollie said flatly. It was a statement like wiping a perfectly clean counter. Fttt, and it was done. Dollie would've said the same if she'd been having a heart attack: I'm fine.
She wished she'd gone to the bathroom before she'd called. "I'm phonin from Vancouver. Look, Mirrie, let's not fool around. You didn't want me to come to Mumma's funeral, I didn't come. But don't think I forgot the way you embarrassed me in front of the whole camp. Don't come over all nicey-nicey. You put an ad in the paper, a friend saw it, I phoned. Now what the h--" she bit it back, just in case there did happen to be real money involved, "whaddya want?"
Tom turned away so Doll wouldn't see him laughing. Would it make any difference to his kids if Doll didn't wear stuff from the thrift store, pants like she had on now, dark, stretchy things that didn't fit right? Tom had a sudden vision of him and Doll marching up the aisle, Doll in a white dress and a ridiculous veil, looking quite glamorous, actually, considering her age. He hastily lit another cigarette. Had he missed something?
"Yah, yah," Doll was saying impatiently. "A farm where? Nova Scotia? I'm sorry, I don't understand."
Tom could tell from the flatness of her voice, it was not great news.
"Yah? I see. Uh-huh. So you want me to sign it. And this what's-er-name, Rachel, gets it? Oh, I see. All debts. That's too bad.
"Yah, okay, I'll do it." Dollie bit off the words as if they tasted bad.
"Well, we're actually in Ladner...." Tom guessed Doll'd been asked for an address. She obviously didn't want to give it, but having said yes to something, she couldn't think of a reason to refuse.
Dollie wished they had a fake post box number. She hated the idea Mirrie'd know where to get to her. The minute she saw that ad, she knew her sister would cheat, and she has. It was just to get her to sign some legal form so some cousin she'd heard of but never met could sell a worthless ten-acre farm in Nova Scotia. The cousin wouldn't even get the money, it'd go to pay the debts of her long-dead father, a Huskins. The only satisfaction, if there was one, is that she, Dollie, is the last one. The cousin, who's been waiting for umpteen years to get all the signatures she needs will now be able to sell.
But wait, could Mirrie even now be trying to cheat her again? What if the ten acres was prime development property on the outskirts of Halifax?
"What's the 'to my advantage' part of the ad?" Dollie demanded of her sister. She snorted, repeated for Tom's benefit. "Fifty bucks. For my time." That Mirrie. If she thought that she, Dollie Redford, was born yesterday, she could think again. Before she signed anything, she was gonna get a lawyer to check it out. She knew just the person too. One of the guys at the garage, his son was going to law school. There were advantages to Tom being head honcho. Fifty bucks was better'n a boot in the head.
Slowly, reluctantly, she gave the street number, their postal code. Maybe Mirrie'd think they live in a glamorous waterfront condo. That's what people nowadays thought when they heard "Ladner," not green picket fences.
Dollie knew that Tom figured she wasn't going to be rich. She could tell because he'd lost interest in the conversation, had gone into the living room, turned on the TV and was flipping through the channels. She forced herself, finally, to say to her sister, "So, what's new with you?"
Tom was paying.