Collected Stories. Carol Shields
going into this senior-citizen place. They’ve got a nice TV lounge, big screen, bigger than this little bitty one, color too. I always—”
“Sad,” Ivy says, when we escape at last and get into the car.
“The house or the mother?” I ask her.
“Both.”
“At least it’s not a D.H.” (This has become our shorthand expression for divorce house.)
“Wait’ll you see the next place,” Marge Little says, swinging into traffic. “The next place is fabulous.”
Fabulous, yes. But far too big. After that, in a fit of desperation, we look at a condo. “I’m not quite ready for this,” I have to admit.
“No garden,” Ivy says in a numb voice. She looks weary, and we decide to call it a day.
The ad in the newspaper reads: WELL-LOVED FAMILY HOME. And Ivy and Marge Little and I are there, knocking on the door, at nine-thirty in the morning.
“Come in, come in,” calls a young woman in faded jeans. She has a young child on one hip and another—they must be twins—by the hand. Sunlight pours in the front window and there is freshly baked bread cooling on the kitchen counter.
But the house is a disaster, a rabbit warren of narrow hallways and dark corners. The kitchen window is only feet away from a low brick building where bodywork is being done on imported sports cars. The stairs are uneven. The bedroom floors slope, and the paint is peeling off the bathroom ceiling.
“It just kills us to leave this place,” the young woman says. She’s following us through the rooms, pointing with unmistakable sorrow at the wall where they were planning to put up shelving, at the hardwood floors they were thinking of sanding. Out of the blue, they got news of a transfer.
Ironically, they’re going to Toronto, and in a week’s time they’ll be there doing what we’re doing, looking for a house they can love. “But we just know we’ll never find a place like this,” she tells us with a sad shake of her head. “Not in a million zillion years.”
After that we lose track of the number of houses. The day bends and blurs; square footage, zoning regulations, mortgage schedules, double-car garages, cedar siding only two years old—was that the place near that little park? No, that was the one on that little crescent off Arbutus. Remember? The one without the basement.
Darkness is falling as Marge Little drives us back to our hotel. We are passing hundreds—it seems like thousands—of houses, and we see lamps being turned on, curtains being closed. Friendly smoke rises from substantial chimneys. Here and there, where the curtains are left open, we can see people sitting down to dinner. Passing one house, I see a woman in a window, leaning over with a match in her hand, lighting a pair of candles. Ivy sees it too, and I’m sure she’s feeling as I am, a little resentful that everyone but us seems to have a roof overhead.
“Tomorrow for sure,” Marge calls cheerily. (Tomorrow is our last day. Both of us have to be home on Monday.)
“I suppose we could always rent for a year.” Ivy says this with low enthusiasm.
“Or,” I say, “we could make another trip in a month or so. Maybe there’ll be more on the market.”
“Isn’t it funny? The first house we saw, remember? In a way, it was the most promising place we’ve seen.”
“The one with the view from the dining room? With the broken light in the bathroom?”
“It might not look bad with a new fixture. Or even a skylight.”
“Wasn’t that a divorce house?” I ask Ivy.
“Yes,” she shrugs, “but maybe that’s just what we’ll have to settle for.”
“It was listed at a good price.”
“I live in a divorce house,” Marge Little says, pulling in front of our hotel. “It’s been a divorce house for a whole year now.”
“Oh, Marge,” Ivy says. “I didn’t mean—” she stops. “Forgive me.”
“And it’s not so bad. Sometimes it’s darned cheerful.”
“I just—” Ivy takes a breath. “I just wanted a lucky house. Maybe there’s no such thing—”
“Are you interested in taking another look at the first house? I might be able to get you an appointment this evening. That is, if you think you can stand one more appointment today.”
“Absolutely,” we say together.
This time we inspect the house inch by inch. Ivy makes a list of the necessary repairs, and I measure the window for curtains. We hadn’t realized that there was a cedar closet off one of the bedrooms. The lights of the city are glowing through the dining-room window. A spotlight at the back of the house picks out the flowers just coming into bloom. There’ll be room for our hi-fi across from the fireplace. The basement is dry and very clean. The wallpaper in the downstairs den is fairly attractive and in good condition. The stairway is well proportioned and the banister is a beauty. (I’m a sucker for banisters.) There’s an alcove where the pine buffet will fit nicely. Trees on both sides of the house should give us greenery and privacy. The lawn, as far as we can tell, seems to be in good shape. There’s a lazy Susan in the kitchen, also a built-in dishwasher, a later model than ours. Plenty of room for a small table and a couple of chairs. The woodwork in the living room has been left natural, a wonder since so many people, a few years back, were painting over their oak trim.
Ivy says something that makes us laugh. “Over here,” she says, “over here is where we’ll put the Christmas tree.” She touches the edge of one of the casement windows, brushes it with the side of her hand and says, “It’s hard to believe that people could live in such a beautiful house and be unhappy.”
For a moment there’s silence, and then Marge says, “We could put in an offer tonight. I don’t think it’s too late. What do you think?”
————
And now, suddenly, it’s the next evening, and Ivy and I are flying back to Toronto. Here we are over the Rockies again, crossing them this time in darkness. Ivy sits with her head back, eyes closed, her shoulders so sharply her own; she’s not quite asleep, but not quite awake either.
Our plane seems a fragile vessel, a piece of jewelry up here between the stars and the mountains. Flying through dark air like this makes me think that life itself is fragile. The miniature accidents of chromosomes can spread unstoppable circles of grief. A dozen words carelessly uttered can dismantle a marriage. A few gulps of oxygen are all that stand between us and death.
I wonder if Ivy is thinking, as I am, of the three months ahead, of how tumultuous they’ll be. There are many things to think of when you move. For one, we’ll have to put our own house up for sale. The thought startles me, though I’ve no idea why.
I try to imagine prospective buyers arriving for appointments, stepping through our front door with polite murmurs and a sharp eye for imperfections.
They’ll work their way through the downstairs, the kitchen (renewed only four years ago), the living room (yes, a real fireplace, a good draft), the dining room (small, but you can seat ten in a pinch). Then they’ll make their way upstairs (carpet a little worn, but with lots of wear left). The main bedroom is fair size (with good reading lamps built in, also bookshelves).
And then there’s Christopher’s bedroom.
Will the vibrations announce that here lived a child with little muscular control, almost no sight or hearing and no real consciousness as that word is normally perceived? He had, though—and perhaps the vibrations will acknowledge the fact—his own kind of valor and perhaps his own way of seeing the world. At least Ivy and I always rewallpapered his room every three years or so out of a conviction that he took some pleasure in the sight of ducks swimming on a yellow sea. Later, it was sailboats; then