Karin said, “Why would she want to? Sell it?”
“Money,” said Derek. “Try money.”
“Doesn’t Rosemary pay her enough rent?”
“How long is that going to last? The pasture isn’t rented this year, the land’s too soggy. The house needs money spent or it’ll fall down. I’ve worked four years on a book that isn’t even finished. We’re running low. You know what the real-estate guy said to her? He said, ‘This could be another Sudbury.’ He didn’t say that for a joke.”
Karin didn’t see why he would. She knew nothing about Sudbury. “If I was rich I could buy it,” she said. “Then you could go on like now.”
“Someday you will be rich,” Derek said matter-of-factly. “But not soon enough.” He was putting the camera away in its case. “Keep on the right side of your mother,” he said. “She’s rich as stink.”
Karin felt her face heat up, she felt the shock of those words. It was something she’d never heard before. Rich as stink. It sounded hateful.
He said, “Okay-into town to see when they’ll develop this.” He didn’t ask if she wanted to go along and she could hardly have answered him anyway; her eyes were filling up disastrously. She was struck and blinded by what he’d said.
She had to go to the bathroom, so she walked over to the house.
There was a good smell from the kitchen-the smell of some slow-cooking meat.
The only bathroom was upstairs. Karin could hear Ann up there, moving around in her room. She didn’t call or look in at her. But when she started to go downstairs again, Ann called her.
She had put makeup on her face so it didn’t look so blotchy.
There were piles of clothes lying around on the bed and on the floor.
“I’m trying to get things organized,” Ann said. “There’s clothes here I’d forgotten I had. I have to get rid of some of them once and for all.”
That meant she was serious about moving out. Getting rid of things before she moved out. When Rosemary was getting ready to move out she packed her trunk while Karin was at school. Karin never saw her choose the things that went into it. She just saw them turn up later, in the apartment in Toronto and now in the trailer. A cushion, a pair of candlesticks, a big platter-familiar but forever out of place. As far as Karin was concerned it would be better if she had not brought anything at all.
“You see that suitcase,” Ann said. “Up there on top of the wardrobe? Do you think you could just climb up on a chair and tilt it over the edge so that I could catch it? I tried but I got dizzy. Just tilt it over and I’ll catch it.”
Karin climbed up and pushed the suitcase over so that it teetered on the edge of the wardrobe, and Ann caught it. She thanked Karin breathlessly and plopped it down on the bed.
“I’ve got the key, I’ve got the key here,” she said.
The lock was stiff and the clasps hard to pry open. Karin helped. When the lid fell back a smell of mothballs rose from a heap of limp cloth. The smell was well known to Karin from the secondhand stores where Rosemary liked to shop.
“Are these your mom’s old things?” she said.
“Karin! It’s my wedding dress,” said Ann, half laughing. “That’s only the old sheet it’s wrapped up in.” She picked the grayish cloth away and lifted out a bundle of lace and taffeta. Karin cleared a place for it on the bed. Then very carefully Ann began turning it right side out. The taffeta rustled like leaves.
“My veil, too,” Ann said, lifting a film that clung to the taffeta. “Oh, I should have taken better care of it.”
There was a long fine slit in the skirt that looked as if it could have been made by a razor blade.
“I should have had it hanging up,” said Ann. “1 should have had it in one of those bags you get from the cleaner’s. Taffeta is so fragile. That cut came from where it was folded. I knew that too. Never, never fold taffeta.”
Now she began to separate one piece of material from another, lifting it bit by bit with little private sounds of encouragement, until she was able to shake the whole thing into the shape of a dress. The veil was loose on the floor. Karin picked it up.
“Net,” she said. She talked to keep the sound of Derek’s voice out of her head.
“Tulle,” said Ann. “T-u-l-l-e. Lace and tulle. Shame on me for not taking better care. It’s a wonder it lasted as well as it has. It’s a wonder it lasted at all.”
“Tulle,” said Karin. “I never heard of tulle. I don’t think I ever heard of taffeta.”
“They used a lot of it,” Ann said. “Once upon a time.”
“Do you have a picture of you in it? Do you have a picture of your wedding?”
“Mother and Dad had a picture, but I’ve no idea what became of it. Derek isn’t one for wedding pictures. He wasn’t even one for weddings. I don’t know how I got away with it. I had it in the Stoco church, think of that. And I had my three girlfriends, Dorothy Smith and Muriel Lifton and Dawn Challeray. Dorothy played the organ and Dawn was my bridesmaid and Muriel sang.”
Karin said, “What color did your bridesmaid wear?”
“Apple green. A lace dress with chiffon inserts. No, the other way round. Chiffon with lace.”
Ann said all this in a slightly skeptical voice, examining the seams of the dress.
“What did the one who sang sing?”
“Muriel. ‘O Perfect Love.’ O, Perfect Love, all human love transcending-but it’s really a hymn. It’s really talking about a divine kind of love. I don’t know who picked it.”
Karin touched the taffeta. It felt dry and cool.
“Try it on,” she said.
“Me?” Ann said. “It’s made for somebody with a twenty-four-inch waist. Did Derek get away to town? With his film?”
She didn’t listen to Karin say yes. She must of course have heard the car.
“He thinks he has to get a pictorial record,” she said. “I don’t know why all the hurry. Then he’s going to get it all boxed and labelled. He seems to think he’s never going to see it again. Did he give you the impression the place was sold?”
“Not yet,” said Karin.
“No. Not yet. And I wouldn’t do it unless I had to. I won’t do it unless I have to. Though I think I will have to. Sometimes things just become necessary. People don’t have to make it all into a tragedy or some personal kind of punishment.”
“Can I try it?” Karin said.
Ann looked her over. She said, “We have to be very careful.”
Karin stepped out of her shoes and her shorts and pulled off her shirt. Ann lowered the dress over her head, shutting her up for a moment in a white cloud. The lace sleeves had to be worked down delicately, until the points they ended in were lying on the backs of Karin’s hands. They made her hands look brown, though she wasn’t tanned yet. The hooks and eyes had to be done up all down the side of the waist, then there were more hooks and eyes at the back of the neck. They had to hold a band of lace tight around Karin’s throat. Wearing nothing underneath the dress but her underpants, she felt her skin prickle at the touch of lace. Lace was more deliberate, in its here-and-there contact, than anything she was used to. She shrank from feeling it against her nipples, but fortunately it was looser there, pooked out where Ann’s breasts had been. Karin’s chest was still almost flat, but sometimes her nipples felt swollen, tender, as if they were going to burst.
The taffeta had to be pulled out from between her legs and arranged into a bell-like skirt. Then lace fell in loops over the skirt.
“You’re taller than I thought,” Ann said. “You could walk around in it if you just held it up a bit.”
She took a hairbrush from the dresser and began to brush Karin’s hair down over her lace-covered shoulders.
“Nut-brown hair,” she said. “1 remember in books, girls used to be described as having nut-brown hair. And you know they did use nuts to color it. My mother remembered girls boiling walnuts to make a dye and then putting the dye on their hair. Of course if you got the stain on your hands it was a dead giveaway. It was so hard to get out.