Free The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy Page A

bathroom where, after using the toilet and washing my hands and face, I brush my hair with my mother’s glass-handled brush. I then apply a drop of her baby oil under each of my eyes and rub Jergens lotion into my elbows. I tell myself I am fighting wrinkles (according to my mother, I have the kind of thin skin that is prone to premature aging), but my mind is on the transgression, which I would never commit if I thought my mother might catch me and so, because I do commit it, I feel that there can be no possibility of her coming back. I am closing the lid on her coffin. Bang. (Although I don’t think of her as dead.) I sometimes consider wearing her perfume and her scarves, except there is still my father to contend with, his incurable hopes.
    A few minutes later I go down to the front hall and manage to shove the door open against a bank of snow. Just as I’d thought, there’s no newspaper or milk bottle; I’d have seen the footprints of anybody who had walked up the drive. But it has become my morning routine to fetch the milk and paper and then to pour out two glasses of orange juice. On weekday mornings I percolate a pot of coffee for my father, but on Saturdays and Sundays, because he sleeps late, I don’t bother.
    I drink my juice, standing at the kitchen window. All the junk on the Dingwalls’ lawn is buried, the broken tricycles and chairs. You can’t even see the picket fence between our yards. There is no private property today, there are noeyesores. Under parcels of snow our four cedar trees bow down in postures reminiscent of Aunt Verna carrying her steamer trunk. When she said goodbye to me, the night before she went back to Texas, I drew away from kissing her, but only because I wasn’t used to kissing people, and she said,“Oh, I know you’re cross with me for leaving!” and her eyes reddened. I think of Mrs. Dingwall crying and of the German family—the Richters. I decide to walk by their place after breakfast.
    By the time I am getting ready to go out, my father is up and stalking from window to window, flourishing a putty knife. “How will the fire trucks get through?” he exclaims. “The ambulances?” With the knife he takes swipes at the frost. “Don’t have a brain seizure, Louise! Don’t burst your appendix!”
    “I won’t,” I say, getting into my snowsuit. He hasn’t been this chipper since before my mother left.
    “If you do, I’ll be forced to operate!” Bathrobe billowing, hair on end, he flies down to the landing and scrapes at the long window next to the door.
    “Could you?” I ask, surprised.
    He considers. “I’d have to consult my atlas of human anatomy. Sharpen the paring knife.” He presses his forehead against the pane. “Virgin snow,” he says. “Pristine.”
    “Somebody walked on our lawn.”
    He scrapes a bigger clearing.
    I say,“It was the German boy, I’ll bet.”
    We discussed the Richters last evening. Mrs. Dingwall was right about their lawyer being somebody my father knows, a man from his office. Six years ago, my father himself was involved in drawing up the papers for the adoption of the boy, whose name he couldn’t remember. What he did remember was how the Richters had wanted a baby girl, having lost their own baby girl ten years earlier, but at a church orphanage they found themselves taken with a boy, and not a baby either, a three-year-old. Which was better all around, my father felt. He said it would have been hard for people the Richters’ age to get a healthy newborn.
    “Abelard,” he says now. “That’s his name. Abelard.”
    I leave the house and plough my way to the trail of footprints. Once I’m in them, walking is easy enough. Everywhere, people have started shovelling. The older set of Dingwall twins, Larry and Jerry, are on the roof of their carport, heaving off shovelfuls of snow from each side and in time with each other so that what I see are white wings opening as the snow is thrown, folding as it drops. Behind them