“It’s hot there, Tera?” Teresa nods. “I know,” Rosa says, taking the tube of cream off Teresa’s end table, “I’ll put this on your legs and you’ll feel better.”
Rosa opens the bottle and squeezes the white liquid into a mound onto Teresa’s sponge. Teresa stretches out her legs, and Rosa smells the flowers, but another smell, too, something Rosa can’t make out, a strong smell, not very nice, maybe the smell of an animal, like her sister said, like the smell on your clothes when dogs get too close to you. Then she remembered walking one day with Teresa when a dog peed on the fence next door. Rosa laughed at the funny streak it made, and Teresa told her dogs do that to show where they’ve been. Now Rosa, too many images in her mind, is confused. Berries. Wolf. Boys. Trash. Dogs. She can’t imagine everything together. Better to concentrate on Teresa’s legs.
“You smell nice, Tera,” Rosa tells her, but Teresa isn’t looking at her. Her face is covered with her arm and she curls herself up into a ball.
When Rosa goes back to bed, instead of looking at her picture book, she takes out her hairbrush and pretends to shave her legs until the bristles scratch her skin. “Look at me. I’m here,” she says to the wolf and the girl in the red dress. Then she turns off the light, and thinks about her secrets.
Tear Stains: You’re the only one who notices them.
The week before Magdala married all those years ago in Portugal, her mamma passed down her wedding dress and her mourning dress. Her own husband had been dead almost twelve years so she didn’t need to wear the full black suit with the veil. She only needed to wear black. Magdala had been staring at the white frilly fabric, the delicately beaded cuffs and collar, wondering if the women had already altered the waist and the lace on her shoulders to suit her own figure when the black attire was thrown on top of her already full arms: an ankle-length starched skirt, a long billowy black knit blouse, and a short veil. “Every woman needs to prepare, Magda,” her mamma told her. “My mamma did the same for me. She wore both of those. You’re next.” She hugged her daughter in rapture, the dresses collecting under Magdala’s chin and bristling her ears, the black veil crossing her face like a net. She could barely see her mamma hunched over, arms wound tightly as string, pinching her ribs. As the smell of the bread rising in the kitchen mixed with the sting of the boiled onions and zucchini, mother and daughter thought of all the preparations that still had to get done before morning. Suddenly, they both started to cry.
Now Magdala sheds her tears on paper, the letters she receives from back home. News about the others, cousins she’s never met, and her only sister, Maria, who stays home with her mamma. They try to keep in touch, offer news about the weather, gardens, weddings, or births, and Magdala smells each sheet of paper as it passes behind the next one, as if Portugal were contained in the neat lines and could be unzipped like a package. Then she carefully folds the papers, ties them with string, and adds them to the others neatly stored in the shoebox of her closet. She received another letter today, but won’t read it until all the laundry is hung and she can retreat to the basement with a cup of hot tea.
As Magdala clips another white undershirt to the line, she wonders, not for the first time, why they decided on this house over twenty years ago. There were other houses made of brick on the same street, but they were red, not grey, and this house’s driveway was clearly marked by two stone walls on each side of the entrance, two stone lions carved at the foot of the road. She wanted the house because of the privacy, the black gates around the front and back, and those grey walls. Now she wishes she had chosen one of the houses with a shared driveway or an open front yard where the children could have played ball or skipped and not run into gate or stone. But there was the issue of money. That’s why they’d picked the Italian neighbourhood in Toronto instead of the Portuguese one. It was closer to Tonio’s work and they didn’t have a car. She thought it wouldn’t matter since they were sending the children to English schools and teaching them bits of Portuguese around the house. But now Teresa knows more Italian than Portuguese, picked up from years of talking to other children and their parents on the street, and Rosa, well Rosa, when they realized what was wrong with her, they were thankful she would grow up in a neighbourhood where the children might tease her in a language she wouldn’t understand. But Rosa too learned Italian. It was only Magdala who did not, and when she hangs her laundry, she can barely see the neighbours, let alone speak to them. Shaking out a wet sheet, Magdala tries to remember the last time she spoke a word outside the house or the grocery store, when she didn’t just wave curiously over walls. Was it last summer? Last fall? Yes, it was last fall, when the Korean couple who run the corner store were robbed. A teenager in a ski mask hit the man over the head and asked for all the money. They called the police, Teresa told Magdala, but nothing could really be done about it, except that the Korean man had four stitches on his scalp. The next time Magdala went to buy a carton of milk, she’d said, “Sorry. So sorry to you and your wife.” She felt like she was about to cry, and he looked confused, asked her if she needed help with something. “No. No. It’s just good that you’re in the neighbourhood,” she said, but she knew she’d said everything wrong, should have made herself clear that she had heard about the robbery. Stunned to be talking to someone, Magdala could barely drop her change in to her purse and walk home.
There was another Portuguese family that lived down the street, beside the parkette, but they moved. They had an extra-large garden and even grew pumpkins in the fall. For a while, Magdala and the other woman exchanged vegetables, recipes, and sympathy cards, although they never went for walks or had tea unless there was a chore involved. Children and husbands had to come first. But it was nice to buy bread or compare fabric prices together, to speak the language of her mamma and her sister with someone besides Tonio. Then, ten years ago, when the last of the woman’s children had left home, they moved to North York, and Magdala was alone once again.
Magdala misses her mother, although she would never write that in a letter. It’s all right for her mother to say she misses her, and Madgala is sure the letter in her pocket will contain this declaration, but for Magdala to say she misses her mother means there is trouble in her marriage, and trouble in the marriage is never something to share with one’s mother. These kinds of things are not to be discussed. Her mamma had outlived her husband already by a generation, and Magdala couldn’t help wondering what her mamma thought about her own life, her own marriage, if she had planned to be with Papa forever, instead of her daughter, and was deeply pained, or if she was secretly relieved Papa had died quickly and young, that she would never have to see him suffer or lose interest in her. These are things Magdala cries over, because it isn’t right to ask. And it isn’t right either to ask why Mamma had been so intent for Magdala to marry an older man, her senior by twenty years. But she knows why. Their village was dying. All the young men were moving to cities, to other countries to find work. Tonio had money, was kind, and was travelling to a better place, if a snowy one.
Oh, the snow! Madgala knows it’s on its way. She can smell its crisp foreboding in the air. Only a few more weeks, maybe less, and she will no longer be able to hang her laundry outside, but will have to retreat into the basement to avoid all the falling leaves and frosts. Mamma, she thinks, staring up at all the billowing fabrics, how I wish I had stayed with Mamma, laid in her arms a little longer, not taken away her dresses whether she wanted to get rid of them or not. Soon Magdala will need the black dress. Tonio can’t hold out much longer; it’s only her constant care that has kept him alive for so long. The blood on the handkerchiefs spells his end, just as the first leaves on the ground spell the end of summer. The doctors are pessimistic about his chances. Yet he holds on lazily, and her hands bleach out the secret messages she can’t write to her mother, can’t tell her neighbours.
What happened to that Italian boy who used to work on the cars at all hours of the night? Magdala doesn’t know, and she can’t