The Stubborn Season. Lauren B. Davis
sometimes sat for hours, her dust cloth in hand, rereading the paper. All across Canada manufacturing plants closed and men wandered the streets in rising numbers. Construction, in the middle of a boom just a year before, came to a complete halt. As the country grew more despairing and more desperate, Margaret kept pace. Like the winds on the drought-ridden prairie, Margaret’s depression was invisible, guileful and exhausting. She began to scratch the back of her hands until they were red, and when Douglas told her to stop it, for it annoyed him, she looked at him blankly, and then at the back of her wounded hands, as though she had no idea where the marks might have come from. Her speech became peppered with negatives. Douglas teased her, called her Cassandra, prophetess of gloom, but no one laughed.
With every plant closing, with every layoff, she hoarded more food. When the massive layoffs came to the mechanics in Windsor, she put up cans of everything from tomatoes to plums. She was convinced that soon they would starve. She went to sleep grinding her teeth and woke up wringing her hands.
Irene came home for lunch one day and couldn’t open the door. Puzzled, she rang the bell.
“You locked the door,” she said to her mother when she opened it.
“And it’ll stay locked from now on,” said Margaret.
“Why? We don’t lock our doors.”
“There was a tramp at the door last week, and this morning I found another hanging around the back. It’s not safe anymore.”
“I’ll have my own key, then?” asked Irene.
“No need for you to have a key. I’m always here, aren’t I?”
Several weeks later Margaret drew all the downstairs curtains, saying she didn’t want the men who came looking for handouts peeping in and spying on her. A few days after, the upstairs curtains were closed as well. Irene was confused at these precautions because none of her friends’ houses were locked up this way, but when she asked her father about it, he simply said, “I’m sure your mother has good reason.”
Irene was frightened by the strange woman who had come to take her mother’s place, who looked like her mother but behaved so oddly. She hoped her father was right. She pictured her mother’s depression like a shadowy fog that slipped around doorways and through plaster cracks and along the pipes. She couldn’t escape it, and it made everything too close, too blurry. Where did one person end and the other begin?
“The neighbourhood’s going downhill,” Margaret said to Irene one Sunday in April. “I worry about you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“What do you mean?” Irene said. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to understand,” said Margaret. “You will stay home, where I can keep an eye on you.”
When Irene looking pleadingly at her father, he only buried his head in the Globe and said nothing.
“Daddy . . .,” Irene stage-whispered. “Pleeease . . .”
“Didn’t Grandma send you a new Girl’s Own Annual?” Douglas’s parents had taken it into their heads last year to return to Scotland, and had sent Irene the book for her birthday.
“But, Daddy.” Irene came to the side of his chair and clasped her hands under her chin. “It’s so nice out. You always say I should be out in the sunshine, don’t you?”
“Douglas!” Margaret hissed through gritted teeth. “Don’t you dare undermine my authority. She’s only playing us one off against the other.”
“Now, Irene, you can’t have looked all through your annual.”
“I’ve read it all.” She pouted, and then her face lit up again. “Checkers! Play Checkers with me, Daddy.”
“Maybe later, Pet.”
Irene moaned and shuffled away to her room, dragging her feet in an exaggerated way. Douglas had begun to loathe Sundays, when he was stuck in the house. You could do nothing on Sundays in Toronto. Couldn’t even buy a box of chocolates, let alone a bottle of beer.
He went out to the shed, where he kept a dusty bottle of whisky hidden behind the clay pots and rat poison. He took a good long swig. The whisky loosened the knot in his stomach. He lit a cigarette and leaned back on the doorjamb. Was it any wonder he’d begun to stay away from the house, preferring at the end of the business day to visit the Rupert Hotel at Queen and Parliament? There in a quiet booth a man could drink a beer and read his paper, or talk to his friends in peace. No women were allowed in the Rupert Hotel bar.
He was thinking how good a beer would taste just now and wondering if he could risk slipping out for an hour or two, when he noticed Irene looking out from her bedroom window; she looked as mournful as any kid ever had, cooped up on a fine day like this. Poor little mouse, he thought. But he didn’t think it would hurt her to stay home and keep her mother company.
As he was looking up at the window, Margaret came out the back door.
“Douglas. Douglas.” Her voice was small again. “I’m so sorry.”
She came down the steps and across the garden to him. Her arms were held out and her head was tucked up to one side. Her face was tear-streaked. She put her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him.
“I don’t know why I get so scared.”
“I don’t know why you do either.”
“You’ll take care of us, won’t you?”
“Of course I will.”
“I know you will. We’re going to be all right.”
“We’re going to be fine, my dear.”
“Do you love me?” Her lips pressed against his neck and he could feel the heat coming off her.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Douglas, I do. You know I do.”
“Of course you do.”
Her display of affection and need, so raw, and out here where the neighbours could see them, made him uncomfortable. But he also felt himself harden inside his trousers. He drew her hands away from his neck and held them down at his side.
“Will you come inside?” said Margaret. “I’ll make tea. Scones. With currants, just as you like.”
“I was thinking I’d go for a walk.”
Margaret felt the tears coming again. She did not want him to go for a walk. She wanted him to stay and have tea and they would be a family and she would be a gracious wife and he would see that and not disapprove of her. But there was no way to insist without being exactly what she did not want to be. The sour taste of resentment made its way up into her mouth.
“I could come with you,” she said and was a little surprised to hear herself.
“Come with me?” Douglas said as though it was an odd idea. “Do you want to?”
“Yes,” she said, and stood up straight. She would go for a walk, like any other woman, with her arm linked through her husband’s, and they would talk of pleasant things and he would tip his hat at the neighbours. But her hair was a mess, and the neighbours would gawk and ask where she’d been and why didn’t they see her these days, and she would have nothing to say. And there was the canning. It was so important to have enough food. She was tired then, thinking of all the things she had to do, and the idea of walking out on the busy streets made her heart beat a little too quickly.
“No,” she said, her shoulders slumping. “I don’t suppose I should go. But don’t be long, will you? I’ll be making supper soon.”
“I won’t be long,” Douglas said, and tried not to sound relieved. He looked up again and saw Irene watching them. “Why not have tea with Irene?”