Cottage life

AS A PUP, THE NEWFOUNDLAND RETRIEVER LOOKS LIKE A BEAR CUB. IT GROWS into a massive, imposing dog on the same dimensions, roughly, as a St. Bernard. It's a powerful looking creature, a huge head on a neck thick with muscle and fur. Once used for hauling in fishermen's nets, the Newfoundland, for all its size, is remarkably gentle, docile, loyal. Big feet, big head, big legs. "This dog does best," I read, "near water in a cool climate."

The only one I knew lived near water. Near a freshwater lake in Northern Ontario where it would swim to get some relief from the sand fleas and black flies. He belonged to a family, or what used to be a family before it became simply two people, fine-tuning their ability to torture one another under a roof that had recently been covered in aluminum shingles, guaranteed to last forever. But way before that, when the girls were alive and their mother sometimes laughed, the Newfoundland puppy, Baby, practised retrieving balls and sticks from Hart Lake, thumping heavily into the water with what looked like a grin on his face. When he grew large enough, he started hauling in tree branches that had been swept into the lake by the sudden storms that hit us in the summers that we spent at our cottage just southwest of there.

In the summer we drove east in my uncle's car through Toronto, past the arrows pointing the way to Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Bowmanville and Port Hope. We turned north on 45. It was a pilgrimage of accumulating debris, of chocolate bar wrappers and chip bags and empty coke bottles, and the griminess of sitting in the car all day only to arrive at a cottage built on concrete blocks at the top of a muddy embankment leading down to the river. Cracked linoleum covered the floor of the main room and the bedrooms. There was a kitchen of sorts and particle board walls between rooms so that in the dampness, the cottage smelled like sawdust. Our summer place. On my way to Ottawa last spring I was shocked to see the turn off at Cobourg still there, directing the naive to Hwy 45 north. Sometimes I thought I dreamed those cottage years. But I didn't. The exit is still there, pointing the way, as though anybody would want to go up that road.

We went every summer. My brothers, much older than I, sometimes came if they wanted to. Our mother bought the cottage when she was a new widow and could have used that money to take driving lessons and buy a car. Then I could have been driven, as my friends were, to movies and dances and stores. Instead I picked trilliums, the provincial flower, risking fines and maybe, I thought, jail time.

In the grove of trees behind the cottage, upwind from the outhouse, grew thousands of trilliums that turned in late June from white to pink to a deep rose before dying. They inspired me to ballet, and I remember dancing in them with my hands raised, feeling my feet lift off the ground. In dreams I could fly from the mossy ground where the flowers grew, around the cottage, liquid, vivid, and dive into the river. Wake up gasping, having pounded my legs against the force of the current.

At night my cousins and I played strip poker with our bathing suits on underneath all the clothes we brought with us. My cousins planned to lose and would dance around the couch with small, erect penises. Our parents were next door at my uncle's playing cribbage. Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, and three is eight. When, I wondered, is three ever eight?

I HAD LEFT MY DOG AND MY MOTHER AT OUR COTTAGE TO GO WITH Brenda and her dad to visit Brenda's uncle William and Poor Susie. Is that what they said to my mother? Can Connie come with Brenda to visit William and Poor Susie? Would my mother have glanced up from her book before saying yes? She might have taken a drag from her cigarette and blown smoke over the page first, to give the impression of having thought about it.

"Wait," Brenda said, "till you see their dog?

Brenda's family had dogs but didn't like them. Brenda herself thought they were disgusting. She had assessed them, found them wanting in manners and personal hygiene, and discarded them. Fetched the bag for her dad when he went to drown the puppies. One summer we were enemies. She told me I should think about doing sit ups. I said it was too bad about her ankles. But that July, we were still friends, blood sisters, having pricked our fingers, mingled our blood, and sworn devotion. She had to go to her uncle's and I went with her. As this freed my mother for hours of smoking and reading time, she agreed that sending me for the day to drive in a car with Brenda's alcoholic, puppy-murdering father to visit a suicidal lunatic, was a good idea. So we drove for ages down the oiled road, turning left into Cordova Mines and right into Kenwood. I tried to memorize the trip in case I was dumped by the side of the road, but I fell asleep in the car and when I woke up, Brenda was watching me.

I had slept and dreamed of climbing an escalator, my mother telling me, "You don't have to climb. If you just stand still...." A sentence she never finished because the moving staircase becomes suddenly, a corridor that, in turn, narrows to a point at a looming horizon. Backing up, feeling my way along the wall for my way back to my mother. I smell Export-A burning and think I am close. I hear my dog barking the way he does when he wants a treat. The dog is a great rhetorician, using the persuasive bark, exerting the full force of his tail for the emotional appeal. My mother is reading in a room at a chrome table. Am I making dog yelps in my sleep? When I wake up, Brenda is watching me. She's capable of anything.

THERE'S A NEW SHOW ON TELEVISION CALLED "COTTAGE LIFE." APPARENTLY THE cottage life industry is huge, generating demonstration fairs at the CNE and the monthly Cottage Life magazine. Do people, I wonder, need a manual for this? And accessories? When I heard the invitation to watch "Cottage Limb" on pay-per-view television, I shuddered.

But Goldie Hawn has a cottage in the Muskokas, right next door to the Kawarthas, where my cottage used to be. Maybe she watches Canada's new cottage life show so she can learn how to build her own deck and roll her sleeping bag properly. It probably is everything you want to know about cottage life. Maybe Goldie even appears on the show, explaining how she deals with dry rot in between talking about how to have great sex, enviable sex, with Kurt Russell. Maybe we care.

PROBABLY IT'S BEST IF WE DON'T FIND OUT THAT OUR COTTAGE NEIGHBOURS ARE nothing like Goldie. Back when Goldie was jumping and shaking on "Laugh-In," Poor Susie wore fashionable tennis accessories though there wasn't a tennis court for miles. She was wearing terrycloth sweatbands around her wrists when I met her, and a matching one around her forehead. She said hello to Brenda, whom sine knew, and then to me, whom she didn't. As I was vain of my hair and self conscious about my new pimples, I liked her right away when she said, "what a pretty girl"' and "what hair," which could have meant anything. Of course, there was the dog. A Newfoundland retriever. Black and drooly, desperate for love. I could have said, "what a pretty dog," or "what hair."

SUSIE SERVED ROAST BEEF AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, PASSING THE MASHED POTATOES and gravy and corn with shaking hands while William watched. While we watched William watching. After dinner I played checkers on the floor with Brenda, stopping to scratch and stroke Baby's coat. Poor Susie cleaned up the kitchen and sat in a chair beside us. There's nothing in checkers to distract you enough when someone is staring. I made bad moves. Brenda quickly won three games, apparently unable to see her aunt while I could barely see anything else.

Susie spoke abruptly. "Come up and see the girls' room."

Girls' room? All over the house, on the console television, the fridge, the mantle, were photographs of two girls, who might bc teenagers. Brown hair and blue eyes, sporting various costumes, figure skating, tossing batons, tap dancing. Busy, smiling girls. Brenda didn't look up.

Where were these girls? Brenda's father and uncle spoke insistently of the superiority of the slant-six engine in the Dodge Dart. I said, "Well, we're just playing checkers."

Susie said, "You should see the Barbies they have. They each get one every year for Christmas."

Brenda and I were way too old for Barbie. I looked at the black and red squares till they glowed. Susie waited. Brenda finally exhaled. "We'd better go see," she said.

"But we're right in the middle of a game."

"No we're not. I won."

I thought we should leave. I thought my mom would be worried.

"You just have to come up and look. Then you can come back down."

"What's up there?"

"It's just their room."

"Whose room?"

Susie interrupted. "It's Cindy's and Karen's room, silly. You'll love it. It's a room any girl would love to stay in."

LET'S SAY YOU GET TIRED OF LIVING. DESPAIR, PAIN, ANY COMBINATION of ache and loss drive you to stop your own breath. You don't know about the other side. You're hoping for the tunnel, well-lit, well-attended. You are maybe hoping for the first breath that comes after the last one. You are not thinking about actual perdition. You're ready, at worst, for annihilation. So you go downstairs and the music is blasting "Louie, Louie." Horrible trashy song with the f-word right in it. Have your angels become demons? They share a stereo. The kind that looks like a suitcase with a speaker on either side and a fold-down turntable that can balance a dozen albums and play them in sequence and the music doesn't stop ever. The dog is barking. Barking at the garage door and barking at the girls' door and nobody is listening. Newfoundlands only look stupid. The girls, the sluts, painting their toenails a garish red, "Paris Red," are sitting on their matching lavender beds. Karen mouths "dumb dog" over to Cindy who shakes her head carefully so she doesn't disturb the sponge rollers. The girls are going to a party. There will be beer and boys and no parents. They are going to have fun. Escape this prison. Escape her. They agree, but slowly. Nodding, yawning. They need naps before the night comes. That's clear. They are yawning their heads off.

You have to wonder, don't you? Just how loud the music was. How they must have had training bras and bikini underwear in obnoxious, psychedelic colours strewn over what was now an immaculate dusty rose carpet. How they must have maybe sometimes had noisy sex with their boyfriends on the lavender bedspread, knocking off the stuffed bears and crocheted dolls in a frenzy of rebellion. Was that enough? Was that enough to send their mother down to the shelf by the garage door? She was thinking when she picked up the keys. Thinking: That's it. We've all had just about enough.

You can see in her eyes how she's finding out that "enough" is a gaping maw that's never filled.

WE WENT UP THE STAIRS, SINGLE FILE. WHEN WE HIT THE TOP STAIR we could hear a thud in the living room and Baby's paws scrabbling on the hardwood and his jingling tags as he lurched his body into motion, running up the stairs and past us to the bedroom and the closed door. He started barking, scratching at the wood trim around the door. Baby wanted badly to retrieve something. Susie was shaking. William came with the leash to take Baby outside for a walk.

Susie cleared her throat. "Baby's really Cindy's dog, though we got him for both the girls. Newfoundlands are very good watch dogs."

I could see that. Baby had been deeply asleep, paws and eyelids twitching, when we came upstairs. What dreams set him roaring with the last footfall on the stair? How do old Bill and Susie ever get to go to bed?

I said, "It must make it hard to go to bed at night."

"I don't sleep here," said Susie.

Strange places permit the acceptance of mysteries. Parts of this house were unfinished. William had built it, poured the foundation, framed it himself. It was out of plumb though. Floors shifted, doors swung open unexpectedly. Even parts of sentences were left hanging, askew. I just had supper with a woman who left her sweatbands on to eat and to do dishes. Brenda had kept her head bent throughout the visit, as though she'd turned her neck the wrong way and couldn't look anywhere but down. Now, Susie doesn't sleep here. She didn't really look like she had slept anywhere for a long time.

MAYBE POOR SUSIE DOESN'T KNOW THEY'RE HOME. MAYBE THEY'RE wearing their school uniforms, sitting at their matching white desks working on Algebra. Algebra is very tiring, at least as tiring as getting ready for a party. Not that they'd be going to a party. They're angels, Karen and Cindy, and must remain so. They wonder when they'll be allowed to wear makeup and go on dates. When are they ever going to use Algebra? Did Pythagoras maybe ask his teacher that? Look how wrong he was. Where would he be without Algebra. Oblivion, that's where. They hear the car start and wonder where she is going. The hum of the engine is so constant, soothing, that they forget about it. The dog's barking is merely annoying."

"Stupid dog," says Karen, "It's so annoying."

"It slobbers everywhere," says Cindy.

Algebra would be a lot easier if the dog would shut up. "Speaking of bras, mine's killing me." Cindy takes hers off underneath her white blouse and pulls it out one sleeve. This makes them laugh. Wearing these stiff brassieres, complaining about them, is part of the thrill.

They're sick of homework. They're sleepy. They want to watch TV. They like Bewitched, but only the shows before Tabitha. They couldn't believe that Samantha would ever "do it" with "Dust-bin," though they knew she really didn't.

SUSIE OPENED THE DOOR TO A LAVENDER AND PINK DREAM. RUFFLED priscilla curtains, white against a pink carpet. Two elaborate canopy beds with bears and dolls sitting expectantly. Two white desks, two closets with clothes, mostly on hangers but some were heaped on the floor where girls in a hurry to change might have left them. There were shelves on the wall which, instead of holding Nancy Drew or the Narnia Chronicles contained Barbie after Barbie, some Kens, and a pink car. On the bottom shelf were gift wrapped boxes, Christmas presents accumulating, waiting. On one of the desks a transistor radio played.

"What do you think?" Susie went in and showed us Karen's favourite Barbie and Cindy's favourite shoes. When I stepped across the threshold to follow her she turned and stared.

"We just got the girls new mattresses. Try it out."

I sat on the bed and politely bounced. "Great," I said, "Where are the girls?"

Susie smiled.

WHERE ARE THE GIRLS? ALL THIS STUFF WAITING. WAS I JUST A LITTLE shit? Did I really not know? I was terrified. Susie was looking at me. Brenda stayed in the hall, looking in. All this froth. Was the canopy made of whipped cream? I felt on the verge of being eaten, forced to stay forever, maybe on the shelf with Ken. Susie needs two girls. Here we are. Were there ever any girls?

The radio was still playing. The radio was on! The station had not been touched for seven years; only the batteries had been replaced. And she killed them. The stupid girls were dead, rotten, cavernous, worm eaten stinks. All this stuff. Every year she got them a new Barbie at Christmas. She killed them. Sick of them, or sick of herself, or of everything.

You can see her if you close your eyes. She combs her hair and puts on lipstick in front of the mirror that is hung beside the door to the garage. William parks his truck outside always. This door is for Susie. The black comb is kept with the lipstick in the drawer below the mirror. Does she blot her lips? Does she believe she's going out to run an errand? She goes out to start the Ford that William bought so she could take the girls to lessons and do groceries without waiting for him. She starts it with her key. The one that's attached to the "World's Best Mom!" medallion, but she's way beyond irony. The car is new and runs beautifully while Susie waits. Breathing.

Why didn't she die? The phone rang maybe. Maybe the phone in the kitchen was ringing so she left the garage, left the car running. She would just answer the phone and then finish the job. But the mailman came. Maybe he brought the new Sears catalogue. So she would maybe step out onto the porch to clear her head, have coffee in the lawn chair and fall asleep in the sun. When William came home from work the clocks would stop in that purple space.

And she would keep on trying to kill herself. They aren't sweatbands, you idiot. They're bandages. Covering the botched razor slices, horizontal instead of vertical. Poor Susie, on a day pass from the sanatorium to cook roast beef.

THERE WE WERE. SUBSTITUTE GIRLS WITH BABY, CALMER NOW AFTER his walk, parked outside the open bedroom door. And Susie, conversing reasonably, continuing the tour as though she hadn't heard the question. Brenda had been through it before. She was looking at her the way she would examine a spreadsheet in twenty cars, locating discrepancies. I looked at the Barbies and the clothes. Gifts waiting. Love and grief stored up. Susie invited us to sleep over. Brenda's dad shouted up the stairs that it was time to go.

We left Susie and William standing in the door, waving. Susie had hugged me and asked me to come back soon.

"Sure" I said. As if.

MY KIDS GO TO THE LIBRARY. SINCE THEY DON'T HAVE A DOG, THE longing for one has compelled them to sign out picture books, to do research on the kind of dog they're going to have some day. They signed out Ralph Peterson's Guide to Dogs, and I found his description of a Newfoundland Retriever.

I know it's just a dog book and not a can of worms, but my son knows to bring the kleenex box and my cigarettes when he sees me flipping through it.