to go Way Back to pick up the fallen. We have to carry Way Back and Back Then and Now, all in our heads at once. And bear it. Like she did.
If you can’t knit, you’ll learn. This is your yarn too. You’re as finite as the rest of us. Grab a loose end and set your needles clacking. I’ll set the dials for the year 1954. One windy autumn. For Tab B, wind yarn over index finger, insert finger, turn page here:
HAZEL #13
Mumsie sat me down on her visit last Sunday and told me point blank that Walter was the best I’d ever do for myself, especially now, so I should quit playing Missy Nose in the Air and put his ring on my finger right quick. Janie tried to stick up for me, saying she’d only accepted Kevin when she felt good and ready, but Mumsie interrupted, saying it was all very well for pretty girls to wait, but not a plain and getting plainer girl of twenty-three with a dainty younger sister who’s already tied the knot. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ She looked right at me as she said it. ‘And damaged goods is exactly that – damaged for good.’
She’s right. She’s right. I know she’s right. Walter is a good girl’s dream. Short but darkly handsome (if you like pomade and thin moustaches), and forty is young, to be Accounts Manager that is, and the bank is so stable. Mumsie’s always saying if Granny’d had half a brain when she got off the boat from Inverness, she’d have done what she set out to do and gone straight to the city to marry her fortune instead of falling for a penniless boy farmer before they shouted, ‘Land, ho!’ (Mumsie knows something about penniless boy farmers, having fallen for one herself.) She’s always said that the only way her girls will make the same mistake is over her dead body, insisting that we should find a good catch in a bank or an oil company so we won’t have to have to get our hands dirty all day long like she does.
Kevin works his dad’s farm weekdays (Janie would never move to the city like me), and weekends he drives an oil truck. Not usually one for compromises, Mumsie approves. Kevin gave her a big felt banner, red and green with white writing. Mumsie said it looked just like Christmas! It had a smiling gas attendant in a smart uniform tipping his hat, ‘BA: The Largest Oil Company Owned by Canadians.’ She tacked it over the kitchen cupboard with the very best teacups and gave Kevin permission to marry her baby. Walter’s job is better than Kevin’s, so what am I waiting for? Her equal approval? Hell won’t ever get that cold.
Maybe if I put it down on paper, maybe then I’ll get some sleep.
I used to love writing in this diary, but here it sits, untouched since the night before: Thursday, October 14, 1954. ‘Tomorrow is payday. At lunch I’m going over to Eaton’s and I’ll buy those cream gloves with the sassy pearl buttons. See if I don’t! And a new umbrella, too, since Mr. Bad News (that’s what Mumsie calls the radio) predicts showers yet again. A girl mustn’t look bedraggled if she wants to get engaged!’ How pathetic! The Star says over 4,000 homeless and more than 80 dead! I should quit my quiddling. In that hurricane, I was one little puff of wind.
It had been raining off and on for days. I left without my breakfast and, to my eternal regret, without saying goodbye to Gladys. I was double guilty; I’d borrowed her locket without asking. I trudged up the hill from Pleasant Valley already drenched, vowing to get an umbrella and cursing, for the umpteenth time, at being so far out in the west end that it took a ridiculous forty minutes to get to work. I remember reminding myself that Gladys and I were in her grandmother’s trailer rent-free and that I should be grateful. (Yes, I should be.)
Despite the rain, the Long Branch streetcar arrived on time, but at Union I had to wait forever for the Yonge car. I know I should have taken the subway. It’s been open since March, running safely for a full six months. Mumsie scolds me for a fool but I can’t do it. I’m not going underground so the planet can collapse on top of me. I’m just not.
When Walter saw the sodden lump that was me, he said, ‘Late again, Miss Johnston? You’re not a Country Bumpkin anymore, my dear. Get a watch!’ I know he only said it to keep up appearances. Some tellers were in hearing distance – tellers are always in hearing distance – because later, during dictation, he reached under his desk and squeezed my knee. (Mumsie says to smile and let him. Once, but never twice.)
At lunch I headed over to Eaton’s. I could barely see the curb. I slipped, and out of the blue, who do you think appeared like Superman to save me? Angus! He said he was in town to check out a building on Yonge Street he’d be bricking next Monday and was on his way to ask me out to lunch. (Mumsie always says that what a man don’t know can’t hurt you, and besides I wasn’t officially engaged yet and that was Walter’s fault, not mine.) Angus was an old flame, but he was still my roommate’s brother, so we ducked into Eaton’s cafeteria, just like old times.
On the way back, the storm was much worse. He had to hold me up, and even then I nearly fell, three times in fact (and only once on purpose). When we reached the bank he asked if, considering the weather, I’d like a ride home. He had another errand and then would be heading west to see Gladys and drop off some of their mom’s preserves before heading north and home himself. A ride to my own door sounded heavenly. (It almost was!)
Walter kept me late. Around 6:30 he tipped his fedora and told me to be careful, saying it was ‘Positively heathenish!’ out there. (Mumsie says I should appreciate his education and stop wishing he talked more like normal people. Janie says I’d better keep him away from Kevin, who’d laugh in his face.) But there was good old Grade 10 Angus in the lobby, happily chatting up a Boy Scout peddling his wares for Apple Day. Angus saw me, grinned and loosened his tie. His pants were bulging.
We had to shove full force against the big bank doors and, once outside, could barely hear each other. We decided to go to Fran’s for a coffee until it let up. I made it up for him the way he likes it: three cream, no sugar. As impossible as it sounds, the rain got even worse. And the wind! It took forever to reach his car. (Back in high school, I called it Nessie, the Long-Lost Scottish Behemoth. I’d tease Angus, asking how a car that weighed a trillion stone could move at all!) I was so eager to get in that I sat on his mother’s strawberry-rhubarb jam, ripping the note to Gladys attached. I transferred it to the back seat and took its place. That big old front bench, as welcome as my own bed. That’s when Angus decided to tell me he had only one working wiper, and it was on the passenger side. He leaned over. ‘I can drive with my head in your lap, can’t I?’ He only said it to break the tension. When I pushed him off, he laughed.
We headed on to Lake Shore, and it was some slow going. And dark. (Black as Mumsie’s warning card, the Ace of Spades.) We talked a couple of times about getting off it, but were strange roads were any better? I know the devil you know is still a devil, but we couldn’t stop, not with only thirteen cents between us. There was a beat-up green Packard with tartan seats behind us that must have decided the same thing; he’d been there awhile. Angus called us a Celtic Crappy-Car Caravan. I smiled. So we kept going, slower than snails. We were all but home. (But I could hear Mumsie: ‘Forget close! Close only counts in horseshoes.’)
We got to Mimico Creek. We could hear water snarling beneath the car. In the flash of a second, you could see things floating by. It wasn’t my imagination. A hockey stick. A garbage can, then some boards and a bicycle. A furry thing. A man’s fur coat? A big fuzzy pillow? Angus said he thought it was a sheep. I said, ‘That’s ridiculous! The storm’s getting to you, Farmer Boy.’ That’s my nickname for him, the title of our Grade 4 novel, one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. He grinned and played the part, ‘If’n you say so, little lady!’
As we crossed the bridge, the wind tensed like a wolf pack, poised to pounce. From behind us came a growl, then a crack. I turned. It was a tree, and I mean a full-sized maple tree, not a limb, careening after us, a tree on a hungry brown wave, licking the car behind us. Angus gunned it. He veered up the embankment and punched the emergency
