A Brief View from the Coastal Suite Read online

  Tell me about it, Mandalay had thought. She didn’t have much sympathy. Everyone was a baby at some point. And her babies didn’t cry that much. It was just that there were two of them.

  The woman had moved out soon after that. Duane brings up the absence of a tenant once in a while, but Mandalay doesn’t want someone living downstairs again. She needs the room for storage. The boys play downstairs, too, during the long rainy winters. They need the room. Duane must see that. The main floor alone is too small. The boys have to share a bedroom and there’s only one bathroom.

  But it’s a great house, and around her a neighbourhood has emerged, over the past few years. That is to say, the neighbourhood has been there a long time, but it has gradually taken shape in her consciousness, like a photograph in developing fluid: the long-time residents of the street, the Asian grocery, doctor’s and dentist’s offices where she takes the boys; the thrift store and hardware store, the pharmacy, the bus stops, the elementary school, the Anglican daycare, and garage and electrical repair shop, as well the little retail shops. It’s older, definitely, but it has so much character and ethnic richness. And now the families of the twins’ classmates from kindergarten and first grade, who come to her house to play and invite the boys and her over sometimes. Well, some of them. And she has her old friend Belinda who lives nearby, and Belinda’s colleagues and students, other artists. Even some of her own classmates. She is lucky. She knows that she is lucky.

  It’s a great neighbourhood, despite what Duane says. The incidence of crime isn’t really that high, not nearly what the media makes it out to be. They’re happy here, she and the boys.

  CLIFF HAS STOPPED at the Briteway Café on Hastings for a coffee and sandwich, his usual stop if he has time. He likes it because it is small and inexpensive and not fancy, but homier than Tim Hortons, where most of his crew like to go. The main waitress/cashier/sandwich-maker, Helen, is a woman of maybe his mother’s age. She’s familiar and not alarming and speaks clear English. The same food is always on the menu: thick-cut, foamy white or half-and-half bread, Schneiders deli meats, French’s mustard, iceberg lettuce. Soups made out of potatoes and chunks of beef or chicken, and vegetables whose names he knows how to pronounce. There are five wooden tables and spindle-back chairs, and a checked café curtain that matches the tablecloths. Nobody else he knows goes there, so he doesn’t run the risk of having to talk when he doesn’t feel like it. The café gives him a quiet space in the day, a way to drop out of his life for just a few minutes.

  Especially, his wife, Veronika, and his business partner and brother, Ben, don’t come here. Ben never eats at places like this; he only likes Joe Fortes or fancy places like that, where you have to drop forty bucks for lunch. Veronika doesn’t eat lunch.

  They are the closest people to him in his life: Ben his brother and Veronika. But even so, he needs a little space away from them, once in a while.

  His phone buzzes and he sees that in the time it has taken him to leave his parked car, walk to the café, and sit down, he has four new messages. Three are from people he works with and one is from Veronika, but he won’t read any of them right now. This is the small part of the day when he doesn’t want to look at messages.

  There are no messages from Ben. He suspects that Ben is at Whistler, boarding, or maybe even backcountry. He’s been trying without luck to get hold of Ben for a couple of days. He wishes Ben would get back to him. There are a few things Ben needs to be on top of, things that could fall apart, that Ben should handle. If he doesn’t take care of them, clients will be unhappy and the company will lose money.

  Ben knows this. It’s not Cliff’s job to tell him, to be on his case. But he wishes Ben would answer his messages. He tries to be polite and give him space, but he wishes Ben wouldn’t leave these gaps that complicate Cliff’s life.

  Helen brings him his food then, so he puts away his phone. Coffee in a nice thick white china mug, with a little stainless steel cream pitcher and sugar bowl. Sandwich on a white paper doily, cut in two, each half stuck through with an extra-long toothpick tipped with a coloured cellophane frill, pickle on the side, glass of water.

  He opens and pours in the packets of sugar, then the cream. He admires the miniature pitcher and bowl — especially the pitcher. It’s a nice shape, simple and elegant. Sometime if he’s passing a second-hand store, he’ll go in to see if he can find one like it to take home, but he’s never seen any quite this shape, with the same proportion of spout and handle and bellied bowl.

  Anyway, Veronika would think it too plain, too utilitarian.

  He used to come here with Ray, who had been his boss, but then Mrs. Cookshaw, the owner, had died, and had left the company in her will to Cliff. That was a surprise to everyone.

  Cliff hadn’t known how to run a business. Didn’t have a clue. He thought he would learn from Ray, only of course not making the mistakes Ray did, talking big, promising clients things he knew at the time he couldn’t deliver on, screaming at the crews. But Ray had quit — hadn’t even shown up for work after the news got out. The dispatcher had kept them going and Cliff had to find a bookkeeper and his sister Cleo had said: You should take a small business course; they’re at night and almost free. And Cleo’s husband Trent had shown him some computer programs. That was for the accounting end.

  What he’d needed was a replacement for Mrs. Cookshaw, who was still dealing with the clients and making the weekly schedules and contracts up to when she died, at eighty-seven. She hadn’t taught anyone else to do this. She hadn’t shown anyone else. Cliff had to figure it out, to look at Mrs. Cookshaw’s coloured charts and lined notebook and find a software program that could do it for him. He’d had to become Mrs. Cookshaw.

  Nicki who worked with him had helped him. They had decided she would be the manager, take over Ray’s job. That was supposed to be temporary, though. Nicki had anxiety: if she had to deal with people and timetables and conflicts, she would lose it. She only wanted to work with the vegetation. Cliff kind of understood that.

  Then Cliff’s brother Ben had said he would take it on. He could do it. He needed a job; he liked to work outside. He would sign on for the summer, while they were short-handed. So Nicki could go back to mowing and weeding, which she said didn’t tax her.

  Ray had said, when Cliff went to see him in the hospital: Of all the dumb luck. I guess you’re the luckiest son of a bitch in the universe, Cliff. You can land on your head and come up with violets in your teeth.

  Which wasn’t funny because Cliff had actually landed on his head a few years before that, and fractured his skull. Mrs. Cookshaw had visited him several times and brought him cookies with Smarties in them, which was kind of weird but somehow just what he wanted, and had told Ray he had to keep Cliff’s job open for him.

  But that could be what Ray meant. Ray was an odd guy.

  He hadn’t told Ray that it wasn’t all violets. The equipment was all falling apart: there were always a couple of vehicles in the shop. There weren’t enough crew to do all of the jobs on schedule; they were always behind, but there wasn’t any money to hire additional crew or buy new mowers or trucks. Cliff had started looking at second-hand stores and garage sales for used loppers and pruners and even rakes and shovels. Everything they had kept breaking.

  But then Ben, or actually Ben’s adopted father, had decided that Ben should buy in and become a partner. So everything had changed.

  Cliff finishes his sandwich and coffee and slides a toonie under the saucer and stands up to go. He feels the phone buzz in his pocket, but he’ll wait to look at it until he’s back in the truck. In the Briteway, it’s his time.

  Out on the sidewalk, he looks at the sky, trying to see if it will rain in the next couple of hours, or not. He had learned from Ray to do that. Look at the sky and make the call: is it worth getting out the mower? That kind of thing. He’d learned most of what he knows about landscaping from Ray. Ray was a good landscape worker. A bad boss, but good with landscaping.

&nbs
p; As he’s getting into his truck, he sees, in traffic, a vehicle just like his, moving eastward. His vehicle’s twin, white, with the same green tree logo and Lund Brothers Landscaping curving around the tree, in a circle. It gives him a thrill to see that. His company’s vehicle.

  He watches the other truck until it disappears into traffic further down Hastings.

  Equity

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, after her shift at the bakery, Mandalay walks along East 11th to Commercial, turns left at Commercial, then right onto 15th, walking along the park toward Knight. It’s one of her favourite walks, if it’s not raining, if the twins are cooperative, or if there’s enough time on the babysitting meter. She hasn’t done it for ages, though — long enough that she notices some changes: houses being renovated, with new roofs and paint and shingles, new front doors of fresh, heavy wood, with more substantial and modern hardware. New fences and hedges and porches, and builders’ vans everywhere. On one street, a row of adjacent houses all for sale, by the same agent, and in the next street over, a row of adjacent houses all vanished, and a construction site.

  Is the neighbourhood getting gentrified? But that’s not a bad thing, is it? The price of her house might go up, and maybe Duane won’t keep talking about her moving.

  She’s passing, now, a new block of townhouses with lots of cedar beams and huge windows and coloured tile and concrete facades. They’re quite attractive, Mandalay thinks: Not ostentatious or monolithic at all. But they look expensive. What will that mean?

  On the main thoroughfare, the dry cleaner’s and the little diner and the independent travel agent’s shops boarded up. She hadn’t noticed from the bus, and she usually walks the side streets. There’s a new high-rise office block and chain stores going in; in fact, there’s a giant billboard announcing this, with an architect’s rendering. It’s kind of attractive, actually. But it’s so much change. And what does it mean for the neighbourhood, those little independent businesses being shut down?

  Not that she had ever patronized most of them, she has to admit. But they must be an important piece of the neighbourhood.

  She passes the old theatre, the marquee gone, the doors boarded and graffiti-splattered.

  Suddenly her house with its back porch and wide baseboards and coved ceilings, even its drafty windows, its buttercup-choked lawn, feels threatened. A vague panic lifts suddenly in her chest, spreads and coalesces. It’s a sort of anticipatory nostalgia; she’s felt it before, this swelling ache for what has not yet, but will soon change and pass. The familiar shell of the house she has lived in the last seven years, the bonds with her sons, the complete lack of distance or barrier between her sons and herself, the balanced triangle that is her life. All seems, or shows itself, as ephemeral, as vulnerable.

  Around her, the soft living air, the cool blue light. The sun is setting over the rise of Cambie Street to the west, illuminating the laurel and the catalpa trees along the streets; the panes of windows and automobiles reflect spangles of pale citron. The sea, which is not visible from this neighbourhood, sends up swathes of blue mist in the morning; the horse chestnuts and maples, giants of trees that have fed on gentle winters and ample rainwater, arch over even the shabbiest street, tint all green. The ornamental cherry trees are in blossom, clouds of pink festooning the streets. Camelia, forsythia, tulips in neighbourhood gardens: the early blooming of the West Coast spring.

  Her lungs fill with the good soft air. Her hip and knee joints move freely. Her arms and shoulders relax, let go of the motions of gathering, carrying. Her hands surrender the memory of grasping and pressing and spreading. Her spine re-aligns as a confident supportive column. She can always find the best of herself, walking the tree-sheltered streets of this neighbourhood.

  THE BOYS RETURN, as always, Sunday evening.

  Owen climbs the front entrance stairs with an exaggerated rolling gait and Aidan says: We went on a sailboat.

  Her heart nearly stops. (Sudden squalls; being run down by large boats; hitting the rocks.) She’s learned not to ask what they’re doing beforehand. So far, rock-climbing at a gym (Owen had pinched a finger badly in a clamp of some sort), kayaking lessons (both boys had been soaked, but that seemed part of the deal), tennis lessons (Owen had sprained his thumb), trips to Science World (Aidan had been lost for fifteen minutes).

  She swallows and breathes. Did you like it? What did you like best about sailing? (Whose sailboat? Had Duane taken them out on his own? Had they worn life jackets, at least?)

  It’s not that she doesn’t trust Duane with their safety. Her fears are totally irrational; she knows that. But they clutch at her, gibbering possibilities of maiming, even death. They are so persuasive, so convincing. It is difficult to quiet the insistence of her instincts.

  She had not let them go off with Duane, without her, until they were four. She would not have got away with delaying it that long except that Duane had said that he didn’t want to do outings with them until they were toilet trained.

  It was awesome, dude! Owen says, suddenly lit up, careening around the room with his arms in a triangle over his head.

  But Aidan comes over and leans against her. I was frightened, he says. She hears that he still doesn’t nail his Rs; he has an accent. Also, Aidan says, I was kind of nauseated.

  Nauseated! Owen shouts, gleefully. He mimes retching.

  Did you help sail the boat? she asks, fishing.

  Yes! Owen screams. Watch the boom! Man overboard!

  Aidan says: No; Dad and his friends did all of it.

  Yeah? Which friends? But suddenly both boys are wigged out, hollering and running and throwing punches, apparently deaf to her voice.

  She’s also anxious now about how Duane might be influencing the boys — let’s face it, he’s more materialistic than she can approve of. He lacks, she thinks, a social conscience. He has a sort of ruthlessness. Basically, he’s a bully. It’s all going to be pretty corrupting. A sense of imposition, of something bordering on violation, washes over her.

  Why had she agreed to the visits? The arrangement hadn’t been what she wanted. She’d been unfairly manipulated, in some way. Why had she let him into the boys’ lives? She can’t see it’s really going to do them any good, having a relationship with Duane. Already she can feel them growing unwholesome new aspects of their characters.

  She’d been weak. Well, not weak, really — broke. Out of options. She must not beat herself up anymore about it. She’d made the best decision she could, at the time, probably. Her options had been to take Duane’s high-handed offer, which had seemed only generous at the time, or move in with her mom, Crystal, and live in the back of beyond. She’d made the best decision she could, at the time.

  The boys ricochet around the house, yelling, slamming each other with pillows. Pretty soon they’ll start banging into things, hurting themselves, crying.

  So much negative energy! This is the kind of influence Duane has on them.

  Then the phone: Duane calling her from his car, though he has just dropped the boys off.

  I want to talk to you during the week, Duane says. I have a proposition.

  Well. She’ll have a proposition for him, too. Once-a-month visits.

  An opportunity has come up, he says. I think the boys will love it.

  She waits.

  I’ll call you again, he says.

  She puts the boys in the bathtub, though they seem clean, though they complain they showered that morning, at their dad’s. She pours in a capful of lavender oil, lights candles, turns out the bathroom light. She puts on a CD of monks chanting, but Aidan says it gives him a headache, so she turns it off, puts on an old Miles Davis CD, turned low. Turns her own agitation down, lets her own negativity slip away, froth on a stream.

  The bathroom is dim and steamy. She can ride her breath for five, six counts before she’s distracted. Aidan calms down first, slides down under the water so that only his flushed cheekbones and forehead, his nose and lips and closed eyelids emerge. Owen splashes aro
und a while longer. Shh, shh, she says, and then all is quiet.

  Finally, Aidan stands up in the tub and silently holds out his arms, and she wraps a towel around him and lifts him up, straight out of the tub and onto the mat, and while he turns himself slowly, ritually, she dries the little wings of his shoulder blades, the small ridges of his ribs and vertebrae, his flat belly, his orchid-like, drooping scrotum and penis, his bony knees and sharp shins. She holds his pajama pants open while he steps into them, resting his hand on her shoulders as he lifts one foot, then the other.

  Then Owen, who sags against her dramatically, as she begins to rub him down, who says, I could fall asleep right here, and lays his head on her back.

  In her own bed, later, she thinks, They’re mine. I made them. She knows that they are not hers: your children are not your possessions. But she cannot deny that fierce sweetness, that one-ness with them.

  She can barely remember, now, their younger selves. How small they were at birth, five pounds each, barely. She can scarcely remember their wrinkled necks, their stubby grasping hands, the rolled-up sleeves and dangling empty feet of their sleepers.

  The twins had gone nearly full-term. Nice healthy babies, the midwife had said. But Mandalay’s feet, in the last weeks, had swollen into oblong blocks that she could barely squeeze into extra-wide Birks. After that, she’d completely lost control of her life. She’d barely been able to get out of bed. She’d been overwhelmed, coming home with two newborns, a great incision across her belly, no core muscles to speak of. She’d had no idea. She’d imagined herself having long periods of leisure while the twins slept, time to do yoga, read. Had pictured herself getting really fit pushing the double jogging stroller along the park trails. Her biggest worry had been how she’d deal with the boredom during the six months of EI benefits she was eligible for. Nothing had prepared her for the chronic and progressive sleep deprivation, the forty minutes of breast-feeding out of every two hours, the mounds of soiled diapers and cloths, the inability to do things like have a shower, get groceries, cook a meal. On top of that she was experiencing waves of depression.