Free Crossings by Betty Lambert Page B

fat!’
    â€˜Would you put it back in the frying pan?’ says the husband about the limp French toast. He is lying in bed, being a genius.
    Gladys encourages me and on Tuesday I do better.
    By Wednesday I have ironed all the genius’s shirts.
    By Thursday the house is running smoothly. ‘It hasn’t been this clean in months,’ says the genius. ‘Why don’t you live here per­manently? ‘ says Gladys.
    By Friday Gladys has her dress and everything is arranged.
    And every night, I lie in their downstairs room and hear them making love upstairs. Or, I hear someone. Making violent love.
    Saturday morning, Gladys screams at me: ‘You want me to fail. You’ve done this on purpose. You’ve planned the whole thing.’
    I’ve arranged for a dozen red roses to be delivered after the recital. The card says, ‘See? It wasn’t so bad after all.’ She gets them before she goes on. Oh god.
    I have missed a CBC cocktail party because of the housekeeping and Sunday a man arrives at the house to see me. ‘You were the guest of honour,’ he says. ‘Didn’t you know?’
    â€˜I was babysitting,’ I say.
    â€˜Well,’ he says, ‘if the mountain won’t come to … etcetera.’ He sits on Gladys’s chesterfield and says extravagant things about the play. And offers me a job. A play for Festival.
    After he leaves, Gladys comes out of the bedroom and says, ‘I can’t stand the act.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜The innocent act. “Oh Mr Winters,”’ she imitates, ‘“but I’m really only little me. I really couldn’t write a big important play for Festival. I’m really no good at all.” I wish you could hear yourself. I wish you could hear how sickening you sound.’
    â€˜Did I say that?’
    â€˜And you bounced up and down and said “Goody!”’
    On Monday morning I slip out of the downstairs room early. I haven’t slept much, what with all the hypnagogic loving going on upstairs all night. Down on Marine Drive I get the first paper.
Gladys Turner has great sensitivity of phrasing. One could only wish she had a talent or at least a voice commensurate with that sensitivity
.
    I go back up the hill to the still-sleeping house, pack my suitcase, and catch the bus to the clinic. All the buses to the clinic. I am sitting there, in my blue jeans and T-shirt, when the Nut Lady arrives.
    â€˜You’ve got to put me away,’ I say. ‘I’m dangerous.’
    She gives me a pill and lets me lie down in the little green room for a while. A green underwater room. The nurse brings me a cup of tea. Then I go home.
    I am sitting in the front room and Mik walks in the door.
    It couldn’t have been that day. That day I was wearing a blue skirt and a fussy blouse. The red suede slippers. The day Mik walked in and did the double-take. But it seems to be that other day. The day I came home from the clinic. It can’t be, because of the blue jeans. But it was.
    The key turns in the lock and he bangs into the entry hall. A great thick red-faced man in khaki. A man with a bald head. He sees me and he does a double-take. But it is a joke. I laugh.
    â€˜You the landlady?’ he says.
    This is after the five-day bash. He tells me later he expected the lock to be changed.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜You don’t look like a landlady,’ he says.
    I laugh. He laughs. That’s the start.
    Mik wasn’t bald. I just looked through my I. Magnin box of old photographs and found the one of Mik and me.
    It’s a street picture. There’s a sign behind us, over our heads. You can see ’ancy’s.’ And another sign: ’ot donuts.’ Mik is two steps ahead of me, and I am leaning over, listing to starboard, so that I disappear behind his shoulder. He is wearing the sports jacket and trousers we bought that day with Ben’s credit card. Not the day