The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy Read Free Book Online

cagey, although once Mrs. Bendy said,“Hell, I’d rather eat an apple.”
    The closest my mother got to mentioning sex with my father was the time she told Mrs. Bendy about this other baby. She said that right after she brought me home from the hospital, my father couldn’t keep his hands off her, and when I was six months old she thought she was pregnant again. It turned out to be a false alarm, but in the days before she went to the doctor she lived in terror.
    “I swear I could feel it growing,” she said. “I knew it would be a girl. I could even picture it. Sawyer’s bulging eyes and sallow skin. What a nightmare. I remember standing at the sink, washing the dishes and crying my heart out.”
    “I can’t imagine you crying,” Mrs. Bendy said,“let alone your heart out.”
    “Well, I did,” my mother said, sounding amazed herself. “I remember the tears falling into the dishwater.”
    As soon as Mrs. Bendy was gone, I asked my mother what she would have called that baby if it had been born.
    She shrugged. “Who knows?”
    “Grace?”
    “I hate people who name their kids after themselves.”
    “Phyllis?” After Mrs. Bendy.
    “Are you kidding? She’d grow up to be an alcoholic with a face like a can of worms.”
    “How about Laura?”
    “What’s with the third degree?”
    But I couldn’t stop now. “Okay,” I said,“what if I die?
Then
you might have another baby. What will you call her?”
    She gave me a long, empty look. “Louise,” she said at last. “I’ll call her Louise.”
    “Who?” I was confused.
    “Who do you think? The baby.”
    “But that’s
my
name.”
    “It’s the only name I like. Why waste it?” She stabbed her cigarette in the ashtray. “Anyway,” she said sternly,“you’re not going to die.”
    The idea of my dying disturbed her! This was such unexpected, heart-swelling information (oh, I knew she didn’t want me dead, I’d just never imagined her having much stake in my being alive) that the little-sister fantasy dropped from my mind completely. It never returned.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    On Valentine’s Day, my father’s older sister, Aunt Verna, comes up from Houston to take over the housekeeping and to help find my mother. As a young woman, Aunt Verna quit her well-paying secretarial job to go to Houston and look after her parents (my father’s parents, too, of course), who, in the belief that extreme heat thins the blood, had retired there six months earlier. They both died of heart attacks anyway, within weeks of Aunt Verna’s arrival and only three days of each other. Grandma and Grandpa Kirk. Mutt and Jeff, my father says when we look at the black-and-white photograph of them on their wedding day, Grandpa being at least a foot taller than tiny Grandma. They were well matched in attractiveness, however, he with his dark hair and high cheekbones and she with her plump little face under a heap of blond hair stacked up like a temple. In the wedding photo they each hold a hand over their own heart, to seal the marriage pledge, so my father says, but to me that gesture, in combination with their severe expressions, has always been them warning the future,“Our hearts will kill us. You’ll see.”
    After the funeral, Aunt Verna stayed on in Houston and got a job working as a secretary for a private investigator named Mr. Crimp. It was her idea to trim his business cards with pinking shears, and this so delighted my father that hetook to keeping one in his wallet, along with a colour snapshot of her being kissed on the cheek by the actress Sophie Tucker, whose kidnapped Siamese cat Aunt Verna single-handedly located, bound and gagged but alive, in a hotel laundry hamper.
    People he shows the picture to invariably say, ‘Your
twin
sister?” and who can blame them? If he had hair the colour of concrete, short kinky hair identical to poodle fur, he would be her. I can’t quite believe she isn’t a man. Over six feet tall, spindly, no bosom, no make-up, not even