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The sloping ceilings made the rooms look makeshift, as if they were only pretending to be anything but bedrooms. But they were crowded with serious furniture-dining-room table and chairs, kitchen table and chairs, living-room sofa and recliner-all meant for larger, proper rooms. Doilies on the tables, squares of embroidered white cloth protecting the backs and arms of sofa and chairs, sheer curtains across the windows and heavy flowered drapes at the sides-it was all more like the aunts’ houses than I would have thought possible. And on the dining-room wall-not in the bathroom or bedroom but in the dining room-there hung a picture that was the silhouette of a girl in a hoopskirt, all constructed of pink satin ribbon.
A strip of tough linoleum was laid down on the dining-room floor, on the path from the kitchen to the living room.
Alfrida seemed to guess something of what I was thinking.
“I know I’ve got far too much stuff in here,” she said. “But it’s my parents’ stuff. It’s family furnishings, and I couldn’t let them go.”
I had never thought of her as having parents. Her mother had died long ago, and she had been brought up by my grandmother, who was her aunt.
“My dad and mother’s,” Alfrida said. “When Dad went off, your grandma kept it because she said it ought to be mine when I grew up, and so here it is. I couldn’t turn it down, when she went to that trouble.”
Now it came back to me-the part of Alfrida’s life that I had forgotten about. Her father had married again. He had left the farm and got a job working for the railway. He had some other children, the family moved from one town to another, and sometimes Alfrida used to mention them, in a joking way that had something to do with how many children there had been and how close they came together and how much the family had to move around.
“Come and meet Bill,” Alfrida said.
Bill was out on the sunporch. He sat, as if waiting to be summoned, on a low couch or daybed that was covered with a brown plaid blanket. The blanket was rumpled-he must have been lying on it recently-and the blinds on the windows were all pulled down to their sills. The light in the room-the hot sunlight coming through the rain-marked yellow blinds-and the rumpled rough blanket and faded, dented cushion, even the smell of the blanket, and of the masculine slippers, old scuffed slippers that had lost their shape and pattern, reminded me-just as much as the doilies and the heavy polished furniture in the i
Bill stood up and shook my hand, however, as the uncles would never have done with a strange girl. Or with any girl. No specific rudeness would have held them back, just a dread of appearing ceremonious.
He was a tall man with wavy, glistening gray hair and a smooth but not young-looking face. A handsome man, with the force of his good looks somehow drained away-by indifferent health, or some bad luck, or lack of gumption. But he had still a worn courtesy, a way of bending towards a woman, that suggested the meeting would be a pleasure, for her and for himself.
Alfrida directed us into the windowless dining room where the lights were on in the middle of this bright day. I got the impression that the meal had been ready some time ago, and that my late arrival had delayed their usual schedule. Bill served the roast chicken and dressing, Alfrida the vegetables. Alfrida said to Bill, “Honey, what do you think that is beside your plate?” and then he remembered to pick up his napkin.
He had not much to say. He offered the gravy, he inquired as to whether I wanted mustard relish or salt and pepper, he followed the conversation by turning his head towards Alfrida or towards me. Every so often he made a little whistling sound between his teeth, a shivery sound that seemed meant to be genial and appreciative and that I thought at first might be a prelude to some remark. But it never was, and Alfrida never paused for it. I have since seen reformed drinkers who behaved somewhat as he did-chiming in agreeably but unable to carry things beyond that, helplessly preoccupied. I never knew whether that was true of Bill, but he did seem to carry around a history of defeat, of troubles borne and lessons learned. He had an air too of gallant accommodation towards whatever choices had gone wrong or chances hadn’t pa
These were frozen peas and carrots, Alfrida said. Frozen vegetables were fairly new at the time.
“They beat the ca
Then Bill made a whole statement. He said they were better than fresh. The color, the flavor, everything was better than fresh. He said it was remarkable what they could do now and what would be done by way of freezing things in the future.
Alfrida leaned forward, smiling. She seemed almost to hold her breath, as if he was her child taking unsupported steps, or a first lone wobble on a bicycle.
There was a way they could inject something into a chicken, he told us, there was a new process that would have every chicken coming out the same, plump and tasty. No such thing as taking a risk on getting an inferior chicken anymore.
“Bill’s field is chemistry,” Alfrida said.
When I had nothing to say to this she added, “He worked for Gooderhams.”
Still nothing.
“The distillers,” she said. “Gooderhams Whisky.”
The reason that I had nothing to say was not that I was rude or bored (or any more rude than I was naturally at that time, or more bored than I had expected to be) but that I did not understand that I should ask questions-almost any questions at all, to draw a shy male into conversation, to shake him out of his abstraction and set him up as a man of a certain authority, therefore the man of the house. I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future. The only observation I had made of couples was of my aunts and uncles and of my mother and father, and those husbands and wives seemed to have remote and formalized co
Bill continued eating as if he had not heard this mention of his profession and his employer, and Alfrida began to question me about my courses. She was still smiling, but her smile had changed. There was a little twitch of impatience and unpleasantness in it, as if she was just waiting for me to get to the end of my explanations so that she could say-as she did say-”You couldn’t get me to read that stuff for a million dollars.”
“Life’s too short,” she said. “You know, down at the paper we sometimes get somebody that’s been through all that. Honors English. Honors Philosophy. You don’t know what to do with them. They can’t write worth a nickel. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?” she said to Bill, and Bill looked up and gave her his dutiful smile.
She let this settle.
“So what do you do for fun?” she said.
A Streetcar Named Desire was being done in a theater in Toronto at that time, and I told her that I had gone down on the train with a couple of friends to see it.
Alfrida let the knife and fork clatter onto her plate.
“That filth,” she cried. Her face leapt out at me, carved with disgust. Then she spoke more calmly but still with a virulent displeasure.
“You went all the way to Toronto to see that filth.”
We had finished the dessert, and Bill picked that moment to ask if he might be excused. He asked Alfrida, then with the slightest bow he asked me. He went back to the sunporch and in a little while we could smell his pipe. Alfrida, watching him go, seemed to forget about me and the play. There was a look of such stricken tenderness on her face that when she stood up I thought she was going to follow him. But she was only going to get her cigarettes.