Miss L's Travails—Chapter II

 

 

CHAPTER TWO—I WENT NOWHERE

 

It was Elaine and Gloria, never Gloria and Elaine. Her family moved into the upper duplex my parents owned when she was seven years old. We shared the same birthday, October 29, but I was exactly one year younger, and she never let me forget it. Everyone who didn’t know better assumed we were sisters. She had two of those; I had none.

We were both scrawny little creatures with fine light brown hair that we deplored as being the most humdrum colour of all. She had pretty green eyes; mine were a less glamorous hazel, though Elaine insisted they were merely light brown.

Elaine had more gumption than I did. I was a shy, clingy little thing with a defiant spirit seemingly trapped underneath my ribcage. Because of the age difference, Elaine avoided me, first at the elementary school we both attended—Westhaven, and then at Royal Crest High.

I watched from the sidelines as she bloomed into a comely teenager, wasp-waisted, lanky, long, shiny hair highlighted beach-blonde. In contrast, my awkward stage spanned four seemingly endless years. My pert nose grew big and lumpy, my body thickened and I was assaulted by cystic acne that was as painful as it was hideous. I still have scars from those infected pustules, but blemished skin on a 67-year-old goes pretty much unnoticed.

We went to different universities, both in Montreal, and I rarely saw her anymore. We no longer visited each other’s homes, and even though she was living above my nose, I lost track of her. She married young, moved first to Toronto, then New York, then London, then Los Angeles. From time to time her mother, Sarah, showed me updated photos: Elaine with a reasonably presentable but balding husband, Elaine with identical twin baby girls, Elaine on vacation in a black and white polka-dotted bikini, looking sun-kissed, lovely and lithe.

In 1983, Elaine’s father died. Two of the three daughters were scattered to the winds by then, and didn’t attend his funeral, which my parents found shocking and indefensible. The middle daughter, Ruth, the dutiful daughter managed the funeral arrangements and invited her mother to move in with her family in Westmount. My parents never tried renting out the upstairs after it was vacated. Over the years, they were often approached by people who knew people who knew that the flat was unoccupied, but my parents would smile and say they preferred it that way.

I went nowhere. I became an elementary school teacher at Westhaven, my first alma mater, and worked my entire career there. It was located just a few blocks from where I lived. I took two years off to care for my mother when she sickened from cancer and I did the same for my father shortly thereafter. After he died, I was alone in their house, which had become my house and I also decided against renting the upper duplex. I didn’t have the temperament to oversee the myriad details that comprise the duties of a landlady.

It was a bitterly cold Sunday in mid-April,1997. I was cleaning the upper duplex, a mind-numbing task I performed once a month. One might think it would be easier to clean empty rooms than ones filled with furniture and other objects, but I didn’t find this to be the case at all. There were no visual distractions, and that made the washing of counters, baseboards, tiles and linoleum surfaces dreary indeed.

I was running the bathwater, making a paste of Old Dutch cleanser in order to scour the tub when I heard the doorbell ring. The upper duplex, unlike the lower one, had a pleasantly musical door chime. I came close to ignoring it, but my curiosity got the better of me, and I buzzed open the front door downstairs. A rangy woman stood in the doorway.

“Hey stranger. It’s been like what, a million years?”

I recognized the husky voice immediately. It had been so attractively distinctive when she was a girl. Now it made her sound old and hard.

“Elaine!” I shrieked, gripping the bannister as I awkwardly tripped down several curving steps to meet her more or less halfway. The long, winding stairwell reeked of nicotine.

Our embrace was bony.  Both of us were thin middle-aged women although I wanted to believe that time had been kinder to me than it had been to her.

It didn’t surprise me in the least that once again we resembled siblings. We both wore our hair long, were dressed in muted medieval colours and our eyes were rimmed with inky liner.

As soon as we entered my flat, Elaine exclaimed, “Why, it hasn’t changed at all! Have you been living here all this time?”

I admitted that I had been. By this time we were in the kitchen, where the light was crisp and bright. I noticed that Elaine looked somewhat downtrodden. Her long olive-green skirt was muddied at the hem; her sensible lace-up shoes were scuffed and nicked. Much of the prettiness had been leached out of her narrow face.

She sat down unsteadily, holding on to the table-top as she did so. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

Actually, I did. Mind. I did, but I was uneasy saying so. Instead, I mumbled, “If you absolutely must…. I’ll get something you can use as an ashtray.” She had already fished a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of her deep skirt pocket. I fetched a teacup saucer, and she ran her yellowed fingers over its porcelain rosebuds.

“Your parents?” Elaine had liked them and appreciated their subdued, restrained ways. She had often told me so when we were children.

“Both dead. Cancer. My mother’s was lung, my father’s pancreatic. Would you like something to drink? Rosehips tea? Coffee? A glass of white wine?”

“When? When did they die?”

“What does it matter?” I thought but didn’t ask. Instead I answered dutifully, robotically. “Mother died in 1992, Dad in 1994. What about your mother? And tell me about your sisters, and your daughters. How old are they now? Your daughters, I mean. Not your sisters or your mother.”

Elaine laughed. It sounded like the bark of a small dog. “A glass of wine would be lovely. Will you have one as well?” I nodded repeatedly as I stood up.

“My girls are seventeen years old. They live with their father in New York. My mother has Alzheimer’s. She’s been a patient at Spinoza Geriatric Hospital for the last couple of years. My sister Ruth is her designated caregiver. Lucky Ruth. She’s the only one of us still living in Montreal, so she got the position by default.”

I surprised myself by asking, “Your cigarette looks very appealing. Can I bum one?”

“Be my guest.” She slid the rumpled pack and miniature lighter toward me.

I couldn’t help thinking, “What a charming picture we must make! Two old broads smoking cigarettes and drinking wine in broad daylight.”

“So listen, Gloria.” Elaine’s eyes looked at me nervously. I sensed what was coming. “Can I crash here for a few weeks, until I get on my feet? I’m staying with an ex-boyfriend, but his welcome for me is wearing thin. Truth be told, it wasn’t thick to begin with.”

The request had a certain charm. My own company wasn’t all that entertaining. My personality struck me as being mechanically melancholic. My little rituals, quirks if you will, bored me senseless. So I was tempted to say “Yes. Yes of course. You can stay here as long as you like.” But that unspoken assent was instantly waylaid by a better, bolder, brighter idea, which sprung out of my mouth like a newborn snake. “The upper duplex is empty, has been for years. You could stay there, rent-free for as long as you like. It’s very sparsely furnished, though. You’ll have to buy a shitload of stuff and split the Hydro and Gaz Métro bills with me.”

I’ve always been a cautious, many would even say fearful person, but it seemed like the perfect offer to be making at the time, and I never had cause to regret it.