Presbyterian Crosswalk: Short Story (3 page)

“Don’t you think her head
looks
smaller?” Beth said, and both she and Joyce considered Helen’s head, which
had
looked smaller in the bedroom, but now Beth wasn’t so sure. In fact,
she was impressed, the way she used to be when she saw Helen only once in a while, by just how big Helen’s head was. And by her lumpy, grown-up woman’s body, which at this moment was collapsing onto a kitchen chair.

“You know, I think maybe it
does
look smaller,” Joyce said brightly.

“Wait’ll Dr. Dobbs sees me,” Helen said in a tired voice, folding her arms on the table and laying her head down.

Joyce gave Helen’s shoulder a little punch. “You all right, kiddo?”

Helen ignored her. “I’ll show him our chart,” she said to Beth.

“Hey,” Joyce said. “You all right?”

Helen closed her eyes. “I need a nap,” she murmured.

When Beth returned home there was another message from her mother in her father’s wastepaper basket.

This time, before she could help herself, she thought, “She wants to come back, she’s left that man,” and she instantly believed it with righteous certainty. “I
told
you,” she said out loud, addressing her father. Her eyes burned with righteousness. She threw the message back in the wastepaper basket and went out to the back yard, where her grandmother was tying up the tomato plants. Her grandmother had on her red blouse with the short, puffy sleeves and her blue skirt that was splattered with what had once been red music notes but which were now faded and broken pink sticks. Her braid was wrapped around her head. “She looks like an immigrant,” Beth thought coldly, comparing her to Joyce. For several moments Beth stood there looking at her grandmother and feeling entitled to a few answers.

The instant her grandmother glanced up, however, she didn’t want to know. If, right at that moment, her grandmother
had decided to tell her what the messages were about, Beth would have run away. As it was, she ran around to the front of the house and down the street. “I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” she said, holding her arms out. She was so light on her feet! Any day now she was going to float, she could feel it.

Her father came home early that evening. It seemed significant to Beth that he did not change into casual pants and a sports shirt
before
supper, as he normally did. Other than that, however, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Her father talked about work, her grandmother nodded and signalled and wrote out a few conversational notes, which Beth leaned over to read.

After supper her father got around to changing his clothes, then went outside to cut the grass while Beth and her grandmother did the dishes. Beth, carrying too many dishes to the sink, dropped and smashed a saucer and a dinner plate. Her grandmother waved her hands—”Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter!”—and to prove it she got the Sears catalogue out of the cupboard and showed Beth the new set of dinnerware she intended to buy anyway.

It wasn’t until Beth was eating breakfast the next morning that it dawned on her that if her mother was coming back, her grandmother would be leaving, and if her grandmother was leaving, she wouldn’t be buying new dinnerware. This thought left Beth feeling as if she had just woken up with no idea yet what day it was or what she’d just been dreaming. Then the radio blared “… Liver …” and she jumped and turned to see her grandmother with one hand on the volume knob, and the other hand held up for silence. “Doctors report that the transplant was a success,” the announcer said, “and that Kevin is in serious but stable condition.”

“Did they find a donor?” Beth cried as the announcer said, “The donor, an eleven-year-old girl, died in St. Andrew’s hospital late last night. Her name is being withheld at her family’s request.”

Her grandmother turned the volume back down.

“Gee, that’s great,” Beth said. “Everybody was praying for him.”

Her grandmother tore a note off her pad. “Ask and it shall be given you,” she wrote.

“I know!” Beth said exultantly. “I know!”

Nobody was home at Helen’s that afternoon. Peering in the window beside the door, Beth saw that the mauve suitcase was gone, and the next thing she knew, she floated from Helen’s door to the end of her driveway. Or at least she thought she floated, because she couldn’t remember how she got from the house to the road, but the strange thing was, she didn’t have the glowing sensation, the feeling of glory. She drifted home, holding herself as if she were a soap bubble.

At her house there was a note on the kitchen counter: a drawing of an apple, which meant that her grandmother was out grocery shopping. The phone rang, but when Beth said hello, the person hung up. She went into her bedroom, opened the drawer of her bedside table and took out the message with her mother’s phone number on it. She returned to the kitchen and dialled. After four rings, an impatient-sounding woman said, “Hello?” Beth said nothing. “Yes, hello?” the woman said. “Who’s calling?”

Beth hung up. She dialled Helen’s number and immediately hung up.

She stood there for a few minutes, biting her knuckles.

She wandered down to her bedroom and looked out the window. Two back yards away, Amy was jumping off her porch. She was climbing onto the porch railing, leaping like a broad jumper, tumbling on the grass, springing to her feet, running up the stairs and doing it again. It made Beth’s head spin.

About a quarter of an hour later her grandmother returned. She dropped the groceries against a cupboard door that
slammed shut. She opened and shut the fridge. Turned on the tap. Beth, now lying on the bed, didn’t move. She sat bolt upright when the phone rang, though. Five rings before her grandmother answered it.

Beth got up and went over to the window again. Amy was throwing a ball up into the air. Through the closed window Beth couldn’t hear a thing, but she knew from the way Amy clapped and twirled her hands between catches that she was singing, “Ordinary moving, laughing, talking …”

She knew from hearing the chair scrape that her grandmother was pulling it back to sit down. She knew from hearing the faucet still run that her grandmother was caught up in what the caller was saying. Several times her grandmother tapped her pencil on the mouthpiece to say to the caller, “I’m still listening. I’m taking it all down.”

If you enjoyed “Presbyterian Crosswalk” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection
We So Seldom Look on Love
.
E-book:
9781443402484
Print:
9780006475231

B
ARBARA
G
OWDY
was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.

Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.

Her first book,
Through the Green Valley
(a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published
Falling Angels
to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection,
We So Seldom Look on Love,
was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into
Kissed,
a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich.
Falling Angels
was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.

Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—
Mister Sandman
(1995),
The White Bone
(1998) and
The Romantic
(2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including
Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English
and the
Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.

Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The Romantic
earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in
Harper’s Magazine,
singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”

Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel,
Helpless,
was published by HarperCollins in 2007.

She lives in Toronto.

THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY
FALLING ANGELS
MISTER SANDMAN
THE WHITE BONE
THE ROMANTIC
HELPLESS

“Presbyterian Crosswalk” © 1992 by Barbara Gowdy.

All rights reserved.

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

This short story was originally published in
We So Seldom Look on Love
by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in print form in 2001, and in an ePub edition in 2011.

Original epub edition (in
We So Seldom Look on Love
) April 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40248-4.

This ePub edition DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-42184-3.

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