Crossings by Betty Lambert Page B

she sees her, downtown, going into the Greyhound building with our cousin. Mom goes into Safeway’s and comes over faint with it, just in front of the meat counter. She has a packet of lamb chops in her hand and she puts it back, feeling too ill to go through the cash aisle. Out on the street, a woman stops her and searches her shopping bag. My mother is furious. ‘I was poor all those years!’ she says to the woman, ‘and I never stole one thing.’ She hires a lawyer and sues Safeway’s for defamation of character. She still has the letter in her cedar-wood chest on her bureau: the apology from the manager.
    At least I would bet anything she had. And she has never forgiven Francie for lying that day. Either.
    â€˜It wasn’t exactly a lie,’ says Francie. ‘I just didn’t say I was going to look for a job.’
    â€˜But she got Aunt Foster to drive you to school that day. Because it was so cold.’ I can feel my lips going tight.
    Francie and I are still hung up about money. When Aunt Carrington died, she left terrible fearsome sums to all of us. But to me she left the most. Francie sent hers to Oxfam and Biafra, but I spent mine on the mortgage. Jocelyn paid off their bank loan. The last time Jocelyn and I went shopping together at Zeller’s, she loaded up her shopping cart with knickknacks, toys for the kids, jokes for David, and, at the counter, she grins at me and says: ‘Isn’t it wonderful to have money!’ But, later, driving home in the car with all our loot, she says, ‘Still, it’d be hard. I don’t know what I’d have done if she’d left me so much.’ She chuckles, ‘I guess you’ll just have to suffer the guilt.’
    â€˜Of getting so much?’
    â€˜No,’ says Jocelyn, ‘of being loved so much.’
    Â 
    I BEGIN TO PLAY CHESS with Mik. He doesn’t explain where I went wrong. He doesn’t suggest I take that move back. He doesn’t hold post-mortems on the game. He just beats the shit out of me. I stop writing. As soon as Jocelyn leaves for classes, I get out the chess board and we start to play. We play all day and then I start dinner. After the dishes, we play all night. About two weeks later, Paul comes over and I beat the can off him.
    It’s summer now. One night Mik says, ‘Let’s go for a swim.’ But I say I can’t. I don’t have a bathing suit. I do, but it’s size twenty. The next day I go down and find one on sale for seven ninety-five. A vulgar leopard-skin one-piece. Two thin black straps on each shoulder. Size seven.
    The next night we walk to Kitsilano and then beyond, down the beach to a lonely stretch of sand. Below the high cliffs.
    â€˜I haven’t been swimming at night for ages.’
    â€˜Yah. It’s nice at night.’
    He takes off his sweater and shirt and I see the tattoos.
Cream
and
Coffee.
    I don’t know what to say. I say nothing. I feel terribly embarrassed for him. I think I know why he has said, ‘No, let’s go on,’ why he hasn’t wanted to swim on the public beach. While we are swimming, the sun goes down. Now it is black, the water smooth and warm, silken. I go far out. Toward the deepest point of blackness, where the sky meets the sea. Where darkness oozes out of the water into the black hole of the night. When I come out, I am shivering with cold. My skin feels as though it will break off in icy hunks.
    Mik is building an illegal fire. He puts his sweater around me and rubs me briskly. He does it roughly, efficiently. It is the first time he has touched me. I sit, his sweater on over my suit, and stare into the fire.
    â€˜Take it off, you’ll just get cold again,’ he says.
    But I haven’t brought underwear.
    â€˜Take it off,’ he says, and throws me my jeans. So I do, wriggling out of the wet suit underneath the sweater, which comes to my knees. He is getting more wood for the fire