since the houses were less than a mile apart, it was convenient too, an easy walk down the hill from Mount Royal into Elbow Park, though returning home up the hill was another matter.
Each time she entered the house, Opal remembered that day in 1915 when Mac had carried her across this very threshold and put her down in this very foyer. She remembered in both her body and her mind how what had met her eyes had bafï¬ed and hurt her and caused their ï¬rst serious ï¬ght. She had wondered since if they had ever really got over that fight: in some ways it seemed to have marred their entire life together. She shook her head at the recollection. If becoming a married woman werenât strange enough in and of itselfâï¬lled with the struggle to form a new identity ï¬rst as wife and then as wife and mother, her own family left behind in Winnipegâshe had struggled also, struggled hard, and alone, and unappreciated, with living in an environment deï¬ned almost completely by a strangerâs belongings. It hadnât been until they moved up the hill that her trousseau was completely unpacked. More than twenty-ï¬ve years after the wedding, she ï¬nally felt she was home .
The living arrangements in the house were different now. Upstairs, the bedroom where Opalâs two daughters had been born was now Jimmyâs sickroom. Mabel Maude slept in what had been the maidâs room. The three boys shared the master bedroom, their three single beds like lozenges in a row andinhabited by the eldest, Michael, and youngest, Jack (who wanted to be nearest the door), with Wilson in the middle.
Spring ended and with the start of summer Pearl returned home from McGill. A month later May graduated from high school. Opal attempted to engage both her daughters in helping their uncle and his family, not together, of course, since Pearl still despised her sister. May helped willingly, but Pearl, with her nose crammed in one book or another all the day long, obviously considered herself above all that pedestrian stuff like family, and she did not, she said plainly, like sickness. She did not, she said, like children. They were utterly annoying. âYou might occasionally think beyond yourself,â said Opal, a comment which fell, like most of her comments to Pearl, on deaf ears. In fact, all her words met with a stony silence that commented, it seemed to Opal, more on Opalâs stupidity for asking than on Pearlâs hardness of heart.
So sometimes with May but more often alone, Opal faced the slog back up the hill at the end of a long day of helping out. As she left Jimmyâs house, turned right and began the climb, Opal reminded herself that she needed the exercise. Like her own mother, she tended towards plumpness, and her fondness for pies and ice cream didnât help. Strawberry ice cream. Blackberry pies. Vanilla ice cream. May had inherited her motherâs build, so she would have to watch out too when she got older, but the golf she played with her father had so far kept plumpness in check. Pearl was luckier: she would not have such a problem to struggle with. Pearl was compact, smaller-boned, sturdy, like her father. And hard. Headed. Hearted. Faced. Her struggles would be of a different order.
Funny, Opal thought as she trudged, how one child will inherit one aspect of a parent, another child another, and sometimes the combinations are complementary, sometimes not. The two girls were as light and dark in mood as they were fair and dark in hair and complexion. May was so easy to get along with. She did what she was told, and she came readily to her mother for affection. Pearl stood to one side and glared balefully, as though she had been refused affection before she had even sought it, which she seldom did.
As Opal felt her own heart pumping and her own lungs working harder and harder to provide her with the oxygen she needed to climb the last part of the hill, she thought of her