The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy Read Free Book Online Page A

lipstick, knuckles as big as grapes. Her three skirts, one beige, one brown, one dark green, are all made of some heavy, bristly material I’ve only seen before on chesterfields. Her luggage is the steamer trunk my grandfather brought as a young immigrant from Cheltenham, England, and when we first spot her at the airport she’s carrying it on her back, people twisting around to gawk at the strong woman.
    On the way to the parking lot she and my father each take one of the trunk’s side handles. “What’s in it?” I ask.
    “Makeshift office!” she shouts. She shouts all the time and has a southern drawl, although she lived in Toronto until she was twenty-five. She calls me Lou-Lou and honey. It turns out I have met her once before, when I was three years old. ‘You were crazy about my varicose veins,” she shouts. “Kept wanting to touch them.” She holds out one pole-thin, stubbled calf entwined with what look like purple worms. “Well, honey, there’s more to love now.”
    I step back.
    She sleeps on the bed-chesterfield in my father’s study. Her feet overhang the end, her snores travel the air ventsand wake me from nightmares of heavy machinery operated by men trying to break into the house. She works in the kitchen, zooming from the phone to the table to the sink in a wheeled wooden chair she brought with her because the slatted back bows inwards and supports her creaking hips. To fit it into the steamer trunk she took off the legs, which she re-attached using her own screwdriver. My father has a typewriter, a Remington, but there was room in the trunk for her Underwood, so that’s here, too. She says,“I’ve been banging on this bunch of keys so long they know what I’m going to write before I do. Like the old horse that always knows its way back home.”
    I ask (thinking of Texas),“Do you have a horse where you live?”
    She guffaws. “
I’m
the horse where I live!”
    I now remember my mother saying,“Verna’s a card.” So she is, but of a kind I’m not used to in that the jokes are on her. She’s goofy, she crashes into the furniture, she buttons up her blouse wrong and wears different-coloured socks on each foot, and when I draw these mistakes to her attention she slaps her own face and bellows,“What a lamebrain dame!” She burns our suppers. Grease splatters the walls, the ceiling, pots boil over, the spaghetti clumps into one sticky ball “resembling a brain,” as she herself points out. “I could scorch ice!” she roars. When she laughs, her lips ride up her long teeth and show a span of gum I look away from with a shuddering feeling of having glimpsed nakedness.
    But I’m glad she’s here. She is so obviously devoted to keeping our spirits up, although I’m hardly the pining orphan she thinks I am. She clamps her big Texan’s handson my shoulders and blares,“I’m on the case!” At least once a day she says,“Don’t be glum, chum.”
    “I’m not glum,” I say.
    I ask, what if she finds my mother, and my mother tells her to get lost? “Some people don’t want to be found,” I say, quoting the police detective.
    “Depends whether or not she left of her own volition,” Aunt Verna says crisply, professionally.
    “Whether she got lured away, you mean?”
    “Somebody or something might have balled up her good sense.”
    “Fancy Dan,” I offer.
    “Maybe some snake in the grass, maybe not. Maybe a blackmailer. Maybe narcotics.”
    “What are narcotics?”
    Her face slams shut. She didn’t mean to let that slip.
    Whereas I am careful never to let anything slip. I believe, even if nobody else does, that my mother left simply because she hated Greenwoods. She was always saying she did. One day, off she went, with a man or without, what does it matter, nobody ever bossed
her
around. Why should she have to come back? We’re doing fine without her. We play Scrabble every night after supper, we watch television, and nobody ridicules the actors or the way the women in