“That’s okay,” said Sophie. “It won’t be a wedding wedding.”
And until this summer, Eve had not seen her again. There was the lack of money at both ends, in the beginning. When Eve was working she had a steady commitment, and when she wasn’t working she couldn’t afford anything extra. Soon Sophie had a job, too-she was a receptionist in a doctor’s office. Once Eve was just about to book a flight, when Sophie phoned to say that Ian’s father had died and that he was flying to England for the funeral and bringing his mother back with him.
“And we only have the one room,” she said.
“Perish the thought,” said Eve. “Two mothers-in-law in one house, let alone in one room.”
“Maybe after she’s gone?” said Sophie.
But that mother stayed till after Daisy was born, stayed till they moved into the new house, stayed eight months in all. By then Ian was starting to write his book, and it was difficult for him if there were visitors in the house. It was difficult enough anyway. The time passed during which Eve felt confident enough to invite herself. Sophie sent pictures of Daisy, the garden, all the rooms of the house.
Then she announced that they could come, she and Philip and Daisy could come back to Ontario this summer. They would spend three weeks with Eve while Ian worked alone in California. At the end of that time he would join them and they would fly from Toronto to England to spend a month with his mother.
“I’ll get a cottage on the lake,” said Eve. “Oh, it will be lovely.”
“It will,” said Sophie. “It’s crazy that it’s been so long.”
And so it had been. Reasonably lovely, Eve had thought. Sophie hadn’t seemed much bothered or surprised by Daisy’s wetting the bed. Philip had been finicky and standoffish for a couple of days, responding coolly to Eve’s report that she had known him as a baby, and whining about the mosquitoes that descended on them as they hurried through the shoreline woods to get to the beach. He wanted to be taken to Toronto to see the Science Centre. But then he settled down, swam in the lake without complaining that it was cold, and busied himself with solitary projects-such as boiling and scraping the meat off a dead turtle he’d lugged home, so he could keep its shell. The turtle’s stomach contained an undigested crayfish, and its shell came off in strips, but none of this dismayed him.
Eve and Sophie, meanwhile, developed a pleasant, puttering routine of morning chores, afternoons on the beach, wine with supper, and late-evening movies. They were drawn into half-serious speculations about the house. What could be done about it? First strip off the living-room wallpaper, an imitation of imitation-wood panelling. Pull up the linoleum with its silly pattern of gold fleurs-de-lis turned brown by ground-in sand and dirty scrub water. Sophie was so carried away that she loosened a bit of it that had rotted in front of the sink and discovered pine floorboards that surely could be sanded. They talked about the cost of renting a sander (supposing, that is, that the house was theirs) and what colors they would choose for the paint on the doors and woodwork, shutters on the windows, open shelves in the kitchen instead of the dingy plywood cupboards. What about a gas fireplace?
And who was going to live here? Eve. The snowmobilers who used the house for a winter clubhouse were building a place of their own, and the landlord might be happy to rent it year-round. Or maybe sell it very cheaply, considering its condition. It could be a retreat, if Eve got the job she was hoping for, next winter. And if she didn’t, why not sublet the apartment and live here? There’d be the difference in the rents, and the old-age pension she started getting in October, and the money that still came in from a commercial she had made for a diet supplement. She could manage.
“And then if we came in the summers we could help with the rent,” said Sophie.
Philip heard them. He said, “Every summer?”
“Well you like the lake now,” Sophie said. “You like it here now.”
“And the mosquitoes, you know they’re not as bad every year,” Eve said. “Usually they’re just bad in the early summer, before you’d even get here. In the spring there are all these boggy places full of water, and they breed there, and then the boggy places dry up, and they don’t breed again. But this year there was so much rain earlier, those places didn’t dry up, so the mosquitoes got a second chance, and there’s a whole new generation.”
She had found out how much he respected information and preferred it to her opinions and reminiscences.
Sophie was not keen on reminiscence either. Whenever the past that she and Eve had shared was mentioned-even those months after Philip’s birth that Eve thought of as some of the happiest, the hardest, the most purposeful and harmonious, in her life-Sophie’s face took on a look of gravity and concealment, of patiently withheld judgments. The earlier time, Sophie’s own childhood, was a positive minefield, as Eve discovered, when they were talking about Philip’s school. Sophie thought it a little too rigorous, and Ian thought it just fine.
“What a switch from Blackbird,” Eve said, and Sophie said at once, almost viciously, “Oh, Blackbird. What a farce. When I think that you paid for that. You paid.”
Blackbird was an ungraded alternative school that Sophie had gone to (the name came from “Morning Has Broken”). It had cost Eve more than she could afford, but she thought it was better for a child whose mother was an actress and whose father was not in evidence. When Sophie was nine or ten, it had broken up because of disagreements among the parents.
“I learned Greek myths and I didn’t know where Greece was,” said Sophie. “I didn’t know what it was. We had to spend art period making antinuke signs.”
Eve said, “Oh, no, surely.”
“We did. And they literally badgered us-they badgered us- to talk about sex. It was verbal molestation. You paid.” “I didn’t know it was as bad as all that.” “Oh well,” said Sophie. “I survived.” “That’s the main thing,” Eve said shakily. “Survival.”
Sophie’s father was from Kerala, in the southern part of India. Eve had met him, and spent her whole time with him, on a train going from Vancouver to Toronto. He was a young doctor studying in Canada on a fellowship. He had a wife already, and a baby daughter, at home in India.
The train trip took three days. There was a half-hour stop in Calgary. Eve and the doctor ran around looking for a drugstore where they could buy condoms. They didn’t find one. By the time they got to Winnipeg, where the train stopped for a full hour, it was too late. In fact-said Eve, when she told their story-by the time they got to the Calgary city limits, it was probably too late.
He was travelling in the day coach-the fellowship was not generous. But Eve had splurged and got herself a roomette. It was this extravagance-a last-minute decision-it was the convenience and privacy of the roomette that were responsible, Eve said, for the existence of Sophie and the greatest change in her, Eve’s, life. That, and the fact that you couldn’t get condoms anywhere around the Calgary station, not for love or money.
In Toronto she waved goodbye to her lover from Kerala, as you would wave to any train acquaintance, because she was met there by the man who was at that time the serious interest and main trouble in her life. The whole three days had been underscored by the swaying and rocking of the train-the lovers’ motions were never just what they contrived themselves, and perhaps for that reason seemed guiltless, irresistible. Their feelings and conversations must have been affected, too. Eve remembered these as sweet and generous, never solemn or desperate. It would have been hard to be solemn when you were dealing with the dimensions and the projections of the roomette.
She told Sophie his Christian name-Thomas, after the saint. Until she met him, Eve had never heard about the ancient Christians in southern India. For a while when she was in her teens Sophie had taken an interest in Kerala. She brought home books from the library and took to going to parties in a sari. She talked about looking her father up, when she got older. The fact that she knew his first name and his special study-diseases of the blood-seemed to her possibly enough. Eve stressed to her the size of the population of India and the chance that he had not even stayed there. What she could not bring herself to explain was how incidental, how nearly unimaginable, the existence of Sophie would be, necessarily, in her father’s life. Fortunately the idea faded, and Sophie gave up wearing the sari when all those dramatic, ethnic costumes became too commonplace. The only time she mentioned her father, later on, was when she was carrying Philip, and making jokes about keeping up the family tradition of flyby fathers.