“My bowels are just fine,” I muttered aloud.
“So are mine, but I don’t tell my mirror about it.”
I swung around to see Madge standing in the doorway, her poppy-red mouth moving playfully. “You probably take all that stuff…” I said.
Madge shrugged, her grey eyes laughing. “Whatever works. That’s what I say – whatever works.”
I laced up my running shoes and looked at her. She was wearing purple leotards topped by a hip-length, banana-yellow sweatshirt with the words DO IT on the front in bright red letters. Huge silver hoops hung from her ears.
“You don’t have to tell me – I’m bright.” Her lips curled mischievously.
“Let’s put it this way, you’ll never be called a dull, shrivelled-up old lady.”
“None of that white-haired, fade-away stuff for me. No way.” She blew a gust of air out of her crimson lips. “If I’m going to die, and I haven’t decided that I will, I’m going out with a bang, not a whimper.”
I chuckled as we headed down the road, Charlie leaping ahead. Madge pumped her arms as she moved into the rhythm of our race walking.
“The only reason I do this,” she huffed “is that when I’m ninety, I’ll be able to mountain climb with my forty-year-old lover.”
Great puffs of air billowed out of my mouth into the cool spring air as I laughed. We settled into a steady, but brisk pace along the country road. Around us the cottages were just visible through the leafless trees. Cottages. Once upon a time they’d been truly that: little cabins in the Muskoka woods for people to escape to. The “escapees” were mostly from Toronto and other southern Ontario towns, but some were Americans, travelling from as far away as Chicago and Pittsburgh and even Baltimore.
In the early days, people nestled their cabins unobtrusively into the woods, painting them bark-brown or coniferous green. And behind each cottage was another structure: the outhouse. Often designed with a half moon cut into the door, these little wooden stalls were fitted with windows that overlooked the lake and stocked with the prerequisite array of Reader’s Digests and Dell Crossword Puzzles.
But the affluence of the seventies and eighties had hit Muskoka like a hallucinogenic drug. Suddenly the simplest of cottages burgeoned into an architectural fantasy with guest quarters, laundry facilities and the inevitable Muskoka Room with its handcrafted wooden furniture and glass from floor to ceiling. In these fashion-magazine cottages, washrooms with saunas and hot tubs replaced the old outhouses, which were then torn down or turned into meditation huts.
On the water, boathouses blossomed out onto the lake, boathouses with four or five boat slips, topped with huge sun decks ornamented with yellow umbrellas and designer lawn furniture.
“I’d like to know where these summer people get all their money,” Madge said as a truck loaded with lumber rumbled by.
“And these are second homes,” I added. “Used a few weeks of the year.”
“Crazy,” Madge sighed. “But we’d be lost without them. Summer renovations are what feed the locals. For Boyd, they’re his bread and butter.”
“You mean his champagne and caviar!” Boyd was a contractor renowned for bleeding the summer people like a leech.
“City people should pay city prices – that’s what he says.
I couldn’t hold myself back. “Just because he’s got a license to steal doesn’t mean he should use it.”
“Come on, all the locals gouge the tourists.”
“They jack their prices up – that’s different from robbing them.”
I didn’t want this conversation. I knew it wasn’t one I could have cleanly. I didn’t like Boyd, although I couldn’t say why. It was strange. In my psychotherapy practice, I saw drug addicts, wife beaters, liars and cheats. Yet I always managed to establish an unerring belief in each person’s potential redemption. With Boyd, however, I couldn’t rally much compassion. And I felt guilty about it.
A lot of people said he’d done a great deal for our community. Just that morning I had read an article in the paper about a development project he’d finished. And Robyn had thought the world of him when he’d been her swim coach in high school. She used to keep a photograph of him on her wall. For years, a blond and boyish Boyd had smiled down on her bed, his white teeth shining.
The photograph had been one that Robyn had taken herself. Once upon a time, she’d been enthralled with photography, sometimes spending hours in the woods with her camera and tripod.
“I saw him again last night,” Madge said.
“Oh?” I tried to keep the concern out of my voice. I was nervous about Madge dating Boyd. First of all, there was the age thing – Boyd was in his late thirties, Madge was almost fifty. For her, however, that probably only added to his attraction. But there were other things as well. “Doesn’t it bother you that he’s married?”
Madge snorted. “Everyone knows he and his wife have separate lives.”
“Then why doesn’t he separate officially? Instead of trying to cut it both ways?”
“Politics, I guess. Some people don’t approve of divorce.”
I frowned. Yesterday someone told me they’d seen Boyd at a bar with Donna. Donna was a client of mine that he’d dropped rather brutally a few months before. Did this mean they were seeing each other again?
“The guy’s a complete rascal.” Madge chuckled. “Obviously very used to getting his own way.” She gasped for breath. “I managed to kick him out before he got into my –” she cleared her throat, playing for time – “bed. But it wasn’t easy.”
I flinched but kept my mouth shut.
“I must admit,” Madge went on, “it’s awfully nice having a man around again.”
“It’s nice having certain men around,” I wanted to correct. Instead I said, “I don’t know which is better, living alone and dealing with the loneliness or being with someone and having to deal with all their hangups.”
Madge elbowed me. “You forget the delights.”
“You forget the hassles!”
“It’s been six months since Ed moved out. And we weren’t doing diddly squat at the end there. That’s long enough for me to do without sex.”
“Six months? Try six years!”
Madge hooted. “I can’t.”
I thought about Ed’s narrow eyes and the way they used to wander over my breasts when he didn’t think I would notice.
“The one good thing about menopause,” Madge said, “is that, for once in my life, I don’t have to worry about birth control.”
“Just all those deadly little diseases,” I added, unable to stop myself.
Madge groaned. “Here I am, finally free to have free sex and its not free anymore.”
“If it ever was …” Oh, Jessie, don’t be such a prude.
We walked faster, neither risking more conversation.
Fifteen minutes later, we reached the outskirts of town. Tea shops and country inns were coming to life again as winter took off its coat of snow and the tourist season approached. The town was large enough to have a movie theatre, a small shopping mall, a swimming pool and bakery, all of which functioned year round. But by May 24th, the annual metamorphosis would be in full swing. Dozens of stores, in business only from May to Labour Day, would open their doors and hang “Welcome Back” signs in their windows to greet the influx of summer people who would soon triple the area’s population.