says, “Daddy and I are starting a new shoot, a big Christmas one for an important magazine. We’re going to be really, really busy for a while, at least the whole of this week.”
“Christmas in the summer?” Darcy asks.
“Crazy, isn’t it?” Meredith answers. “Just like Australia. But that’s how long it takes a magazine to prepare an article like this. Come straight home from mask camp, Lizbett. Brygida will be here and will get you dinner if we’re not home yet.”
Brygida Breischke is their Polish housekeeper who has been with them since Meredith went back to work and she is their lifeline. She keeps them corralled the way a border collie herds sheep, with an indomitable, tireless energy. As it is, she is inefficient and hurried, the kind of woman who runs through her work whacking the vacuum against baseboards and furniture and missing dirt and dust everywhere. She breaks a lot of dishes. In a day she can clean the house, do laundry, and iron shirts and pillowcases and still have time to make perogies or a veal-and-pepper stew. When the girls were little, she was doting, but firm, and took them to the park every morning. In the afternoons, they curled up on a sofa with her and watched soap operas. She thought they improved her English.
Her daughter Aniela often came to the Warnes’ with her mother during school holidays and Lizbett and Darcy love her. Meredith thinks of Aniela almost as a niece. When Aniela graduated from art school, the Warnes helped her to get a job at a gallery. Both Brygida and Aniela have spent nights at the Warnes’ to get away from Tadeusz, the husband and father, when he knocked them around.
Now Brygida only comes in the afternoons and stays to get Lizbett and Darcy’s dinner if Thompson and Meredith are late. But they don’t like her cooking. They find it greasy and mushy.
“I don’t have to eat here tonight,” Darcy says. I’m having supper at Stephen’s.”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”
“And Mom. I wanted to go to the library to look at mask books. I told you.”
“There’s going to be a big storm, Lizbett. I think you should come right home.”
“Mom! The teacher told us to. I have to. Storms don’t matter. I always go to the library by myself.”
Lizbett is keen to please her teacher. She has engaged with Mr. Searle … Melvyn (he has told them they can call him Melvyn) … with Melvyn in a compelling way. She thinks about him a lot; finds him cute. His suggestions for her work flatter her. He is not like other teachers. He doesn’t have that grown-up distance. It’s not that he jokes or even fools around. He is simply kid-like, maybe because he is closer to their size, maybe because he has a young face. Maybe because he is right in there with them and seems to like them so much. She even thinks she might be his favourite and she likes that.
Thompson says, “Let her, Mer, if it’s so important to her. She’s a big girl. And the storm may not happen, anyway.”
Meredith acquiesces. The library is three subway stops north from the museum and Lizbett has made the trip many times. Maybe Thompson’s right. Maybe the rain will hold off. In any case, she’ll be mostly underground.
“All right, lovey, go. Now, off you go, lambies, or you’ll be late. Don’t dawdle. And Lizbett, take your umbrella.”
“I already have it,” she says, going out the door where Stephen and his mother are waiting for Darcy.
3
A Monday Afternoon in July 1986
Thompson and Meredith
Later, when Meredith thinks about the superficiality of her day — that she was moving pieces of food by centimetres — while her daughter was being violated, she will feel sick with disgust. Her life on her daughter’s last day on earth was meaningless.
And after today, July and Christmas will never again be the same for Meredith, but for now she is the only one of the crew on the shoot for RARITY who feels Christmasy. It is muggy and dark outside. The air is heavy from the threatening storm. But the heat reminds her of Christmases in Australia when she was growing up. Steamy, debilitating heat. Yuletide heat. On Christmas Eve, her father’s parishioners would bring blankets and sit outside in the sultry summer air on the lawn of the church and everyone would light candles and sing traditional carols.
On Christmas morning in the close heat of the white clapboard church, her father, every year, talked of the importance of the birth of hope and grace and how that was what they were celebrating, not the secular festivities. Jesus was our Saviour, he said, because as the Son of God, in giving us his life, he gave us enlightened purpose. His arrival this day was a Supreme gift, the gift of a Saviour.
Rubbish and bunk, Meredith thought. The same, year after year. The words fused into a big, boring lecture. They were about duty, not Christian duty, to which she felt petulantly antagonistic, but duty to her father, to appear to listen and understand and believe. When she was young, all she could think of was the presents waiting for her and her older sister Abbey under the Norfolk pine decorated with tinsel and glass balls. As she got older, the words made her recoil because she found them duplicitous. Christian salvation was a misogynist myth and had nothing to do with the actual teachings of Jesus.
What she understood least about her parents was their lack of questioning. How could they trust so implicitly something as tenuous as Divine, immortal goodness when everything about the human condition indicated that it did not exist?
Still, she loved the lush time of year: that it was the end of school and the beginning of summer holidays and she and her sister had free days ahead. Her mother, Dora maintained all the traditions of an old-fashioned English Christmas with Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” and gift exchange, then roast goose and plum pudding after the Christmas-morning service. What was best of all was the afternoon trip to the beach to play in the surf and make sand sculptures. Sometimes, on Boxing Day, if her father could find the time, they’d go off camping.
Meredith is in a reverie, thinking about it. All those joyous Australian Christmases. Now she has to reproduce that spirit in July. She is grateful for the stifling heat.
This is a substantial pictorial Christmas spread. RARITY caters to an elite readership accustomed to luxury and excess.
They are unfortunately almost a month late getting started. The longtime lover of Lew Chan, the art director, has died of AIDS and Lew has taken the time to recover. Though Lew had nursed Kirk through obscene suffering for long months before his death, he has been distraught to the point of helplessness.
This is the third friend Meredith and Thompson have lost to AIDS. These days, most social gatherings have the pall of the mysterious new disease. Some people are seeing it as a scourge for a lifestyle. The Warnes see it as something terrifying, ruthless and haphazard.
When Kirk died, Meredith had thought, What a punishing way to die, although she did not believe for a moment in the hideous “God’s Punishment” theory of AIDS. But she must have some aggravating, insidious Christian tendrils within her because when she was in the middle of her affair with Allan, she had thought, “Will I ever be punished for this?”
This shoot, which is meant to be about joy and festivity, will be sombre, and Lew, who is persnickety and anxious to begin with, will be feeling pressured because of the delay and the overhang of his grotesque loss. The Warnes are prepared for a rough time.
The menu is one of the most
