Read Online The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy - Free Book Online

closet. I think she’s trying to tell me that somebody is in there. An intruder!
    “Hang it up,” she whispers.
    “Oh.” Breath returns to my chest. “Okay. Sorry.” I open the closet door to another surprise. Coats on hangers. Hangers on the rod. Shoes on the floor, all lined up.
    The kitchen is still in the throes of reclamation. The oven door sprawls open, racks lean against the wall. There arecups and plates all over the counter because she’s laying down new shelf paper. But the table (where only yesterday you had to push aside unpaid bills, pencil stubs, dirty dishes and who knows what else to clear a spot for yourself) has nothing on it except for my lunch: a glass of milk, an eggsalad sandwich quartered on the diagonals, a few sliced carrot sdcks, two small pieces of chocolate cake and an apple that has been cored and sectioned.
    “Everything’s cut into pieces,” I observe, making the curious association between this fact and her name.
    She motions me to sit.
    “What about
your
lunch?” I ask.
    She gestures at an empty plate and glass near the sink.
    “You’ve already eaten,” I say.
    She nods. I feel an ember of satisfaction leap between us. I am beginning to decipher her.
    I take my seat and she abruptly climbs on a chair and gets back to scrubbing the cupboard shelves. She is so small and jerky, like a little kid, but she’s not young, she’s forty-five years old. I know this from Aunt Verna’s interview notes. I know that she was born in Kingston, that she is the widow of a bankrupt inventor (whose best ideas—the electric typewriter and the electric curling iron—were stolen out from under him) and that she has a twenty-two-year-old daughter who got married last June and is now living in Port Hope.
    I await her signal: a questioning glance, or maybe she’ll come right out and ask. I am accustomed, during lunch, to describing my day so far, either a fairly honest account, which is what Aunt Verna demanded, or—what my motherliked—a joking, exaggerated version. But Mrs. Carver just goes on cleaning, and by the time I have finished two sandwich quarters I understand that there will be no conversation. I slump in my chair, relieved. I take a good look at her.
    From the back you can see that her short black hair is thinning, alarmingly so at the crown. And that it’s dyed. In the pink terrain of her balding spot the white roots blaze. She wears the same short-sleeved yellow blouse she wore to her second interview. Stained under the arms, nylon. Her black skirt is a thin flannel. “Cheap fabrics,” I think but without my mother’s derision. Poor Mrs. Carver, with her dead failure of a husband and her unlined throat. Driving a beat-up sedan, forced to clean other people’s cupboards in order to pay the rent on her downtown apartment. Several weeks ago, when Aunt Verna and my father were discussing the need for a housekeeper, I heard Aunt Verna say,“A girl Louise’s age needs a woman around the place.”
    Now, here she is, the woman I needed. Better than a slob, I tell myself. Or a chatterbox. Better than that bossy chatterbox lady. I think of who else I might have ended up with. Mrs. Bendy! Well, better than
her.
Better than an alcoholic with a face like a can of worms.
    Within three days Mrs. Carver has the house in order, if not up to my mother’s standards. For all her incessant cleaning, Mrs. Carver lacks the perfectionism of the scouring angel who appreciates that dirt floats before it settles and that it settles even on vertical surfaces. Thus you vacuum the air and walls. As far as possible you banish landing pads: picture frames, knick-knacks. The last thing you would ever dois transfer, from the back of a kitchen cupboard to the centre of the coffee table, an intricate china basket holding three china cats. The day this basket appears I pick it up and say provocatively,“A magnet for dirt.”
    Mrs. Carver rapidly wipes her hands on her apron, which I take for a raided “Yes,