Necessary Lies(29)
Anna tries to nod, but she breaks into tears, instead. Warm, abundant, like a spring shower.
It was no business of hers to write to Marilyn, but she has always been rash, always trying to mend what wasn’t hers to mend in the first place. “I’m sure,” she had written, “that in the face of death a lot can be forgiven.”
Marilyn wrote “No” across Anna’s letter and returned it. Anna still has it in her purse when she is sitting in Julia’s living room in N.D.G. This is a new place, just rented. Anna is sitting in a wicker armchair and she is watching her stepdaughter make tea. At the funeral service she was glad to have Julia next to her, to see her swaying gently back and forth, crumpling a white handkerchief in her hand. Through the mesh of Anna’s veil, Julia’s face seemed darkened, turned into a shadow, but at that time Anna was grateful for the black muslin draped over her own hat, hiding her swollen eyes, dampening the brightness of colours, protecting her grief.
The peace between them is a fragile one. Seven years before, when her stepdaughter stormed out of their Westmount home, Julia was thin and nervous, her long hair tied into a golden ponytail. She always bumped into things, then, bruised her thighs on table corners, cut her fingers when she was slicing bread. Now, at twenty-seven, Anna’s stepdaughter moves with confidence, her gestures slow and deliberate. Her hair is cropped short, making her look slightly boyish, in spite of her full lips and her tight dress.
“Still with honey instead of sugar?” Julia asks her. She is placing a pot of herbal tea on a low coffee table with rattan legs. She holds it firmly by the handle.
Anna doesn’t really like Julia’s new place. It is too noisy, even on a Sunday, and too dark. The furniture is simple. A futon by the coffee table, a pine bookcase, and an armchair. On one of the walls Julia has put the same framed poster she had in her old apartment, the Expose Yourself to Art one William had given her, a man opening his coat to a sculpture of a naked woman.
“Yes, please,” Anna says to the offer of honey. She has been leaning to the side far too long, and now her right leg has gone to sleep. She lifts herself up and limps toward the window. Julia’s windows look right out on Sherbrooke Street.
“I wish I made myself call him,” Julia says. Her bottom lip trembles. She chews on it to stop the trembling. “I wish we had one good talk before he died.”
For the last few years William didn’t even want to speak about Julia. He frowned and shrugged his shoulders, defeated. “I’ve tried,” he said. “You are my witness. We’ve both tried.”
In 1981, when Anna met her, Julia was seventeen. There was a smell of talcum powder around her, then, and something else, something familiar and, at the same time, out of place. “Vanilla,” Anna realised a split second later, “a scent of vanilla.”
They were all rather nervous that evening. When Julia sat down she took a white paper napkin into her hand and began tearing it into small pieces and then, with her index finger and a thumb she rolled the pieces into little balls, and dropped them on the carpet.
“I hate school,” she announced when William asked her how she was doing. She was tall, pale, and very thin. Her lower lip was thrust forward, as if she were sulking, but this, too, could have been a calculated effect, for it gave her the aura of a pretty, spoilt child.
“Wow,” she said when Anna brought in an assortment of cheeses, prosciuto with melon, and smoked salmon spread. “How did you know I loved this stuff,” she asked.
Anna had hoped to become friends with Julia, then, had images of the two of them meeting for ice cream and coffee, or shopping for clothes. She wanted to smooth some of the lingering harshness in the way Julia spoke to her, some uneasiness, jealousy perhaps.
That evening Julia talked all the time, as if afraid to let them have a word, to contradict her. What did she talk about? Anna still remembers Julia’s admiration for some girl who really had class. The friend she so much admired, Marcia, was lethal.“ You should have seen her, Dad. Swinging her purse. Guys just lose their heads.”
Marcia thought it cool to pinch things from stores, a lipstick, a comb, a packet of chewing gum. “There is this older guy, a sick jerk,” Julia went on without a pause. “His fat lips quiver when he sees her. Waiting for her after school in his Jag. ’Just to see you, my angel!’ Julia’s voice rose at the end of each sentence, as if they were all questions, and waited for William to disagree.
“Marcia said he begged her to sit in the car. She sat there and pissed on the seat.”
When she laughed, Julia tossed her head backwards and her shoulders shook. She bombarded them with words, unable to stop the staccato of exclamations and forced, jeering laughter. It was a performance, Anna thought, a rehearsal. She came to hear herself speak and to check her own power, to see William’s eyes following her.
Julia, it seemed to Anna then, paid no attention to her. It was William she wanted, William with this smile on his face that betrayed him. He was so happy to see his daughter again that he would accept everything she told him, pay any price. Agree with everything she said.
“I wish you could speak to Ma!” Julia said, finally. So that’s why she came, Anna thought, to get him to fight her battles. She excused herself and went to the kitchen. From the living room Julia’s voice was a long murmur of which Anna could make only a few words. “You are in my house and you are under eighteen. I’m not going to let you ruin your life … Tell him to get out of here or I’ll call the police … She has no right! Hell, I’m not going to tell her everything.”