Read Online The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy - Free Book Online Page B

find Mrs. Carver in her coat out on the front walk. She points, and I turn and see, parked down the street, a big yellow van into which three men in yellow overalls have just disappeared. “Holy cow,” I say at so much good luck. A mirror-fronted cabinet emerges from the van and coasts above a hedge that hides the men from view. The mirror is like a fallen sheet of sky, just hanging there, just floating along on its own.
    “The O’Hearns must have moved,” I say. Immersed as I’d been in my current serial daydream (which has me as a beautiful Egyptian princess and the members of the Smart Set Club as my slaves), I’d failed to notice the van.
    “Oh!” gasps Mrs. Carver. The setting sun is caught in the mirror.
    “It’s like an orange,” I say. A moment later the orange bursts and then vanishes as the cabinet reaches the end of the hedge and the men beneath reappear.
    I look at Mrs. Carver, who, as you’d expect, is smiling. “They’ll be nice people,” I say about the new neighbours as I try to imagine how the good luck will reveal itself.
    Mrs. Carver nods deeply.
    “Very
nice,” I say.
    The next afternoon, I come home from school to an unprecedented event: neighbours inside the house, and one of them—Mrs. Dingwall—being somebody my mother swore would cross our threshold over her dead body. The other two are Mrs. Dingwall’s four-year-old twins, Gord and Ward, whom I find lying on our living-room floor in front of the blaring television. I cross the room and turn the volume down and they gaze up without expression. Because they are prone to such wordless stares and because they have no eyebrows, I’m not convinced they’re sane. ‘You don’t want to go deaf,” I say, but it’s poor Mrs. Carver I’m thinking of.
    Now I can hear Mrs. Dingwall’s voice rolling out of the kitchen. “Oh,” she sighs when I enter and say hello. “Here’s Louise.” She gives me a few slow blinks. Her eyes are the same watered-down gold as the twins’, ginger-ale-coloured eyes, but unlike the boys’ they reach out to you, her entire round face reaches out, sloshed in gloom and craving. She has on one of her husband’s old shirts over those baggy red slacks of hers, which my mother used to call clown pants and said Mrs. Dingwall should be shot for even owning let alone wearing outside the house.
    I go to the other side of the table, where Mrs. Carver sits very straight in her chair and furiously kneads the red food-colouring bud in a bag of margarine while ogling the disaster of crumbs, sugar and spilled milk surrounding Mrs. Dingwall’s coffee cup. Two lemon cookies are left in the tin, which was full at lunch. I ask if I might have one.
    “Help yourself,” answers Mrs. Dingwall. “I just came over for a little visit with Mrs. Harver here.”
    “Carver,” I say.
    “Carver? Oh. Well, that’s me for you, deaf as a post on account of the drops I used to take for my ear infections. If it isn’t one darn thing it’s another. With this cold weather, it’s my lungs acting up.” She produces a cough. “Anyways, I was just asking what your dad might have told you about the people who bought the O’Hearns’ place.”
    “Why would he know anything?”
    “According to Mr. Dingwall …” She glances at Mrs. Carver. “That’s my husband of going on nineteen years. Bill. Anyways, he says that where your dad works they drew up the whatchamacallits, the mortgage papers.”
    Mr. Dingwall is a clerk for the government, and the nature of his job occasionally brings him into my father’s law office.
    “He worked late last night,” I say about my father. “I’d already gone to bed by the time he got home.”
    “They moved in yesterday. You must have seen the van. I was laid up all day with my bad chest, missed the whole thing. All’s I know is what Dora O’Hearn told me, and she only met them the one time. They’re German, you know. Came here after the war, so that’s going on fifteen years, but they