The Second Part of Chapter 23: A New Leaf

It was a Tuesday, and after Margaret arrived home early after finally hiring a better graphic designer, and with nothing better to do at home, she started cleaning the house. She began by wiping down all of the tabletops and counters, and she was thorough. She removed the pictures that she put on the buffet, and there were a lot of them; she had three married children and a grandson, after all. She then wiped the buffet top down until it was dully lustrous, not quite the same as when it was new, but close enough. She then went into the kitchen to dispose of the paper towel she had been using. Distracted by the time, she then filled the watering can and watered the plants, but had still managed to forget the small, neglected ivy plant that was perched on top of a tall bookshelf in the living room. She then went back to the kitchen via the dining room, but in a moment of clumsiness, knocked her hipbone against the buffet, where she had neglected to put the framed photographs back in one place, but instead left them stacked rather precariously. As her hipbone connected with the buffet, she grimaced in annoyance. At the same time, the top photo fell from its perch onto the floor, and the glass broke. It depicted James and Clarissa on their honeymoon. They were posing opposite Signal Hill in Saint John’s. When she saw this, she thought, oh great! Another mess for me to clean up! She put the empty watering can on the dinner table, and bent over to pick the frame up. The tips of her fingers were still wet, and without her noticing, she brushed the surface of the photograph with them, and then went and replaced the watering can beneath the kitchen sink.

The damage the water did to the photo escaped Margaret's notice until the evening, and Hyram rather than his wife pointed it out: “Say, Marge, what happened to the photo of Clarie and James?”

“Oh, that. I dropped it on the floor; we shall have to get a new frame.”

“Well, glass is cheap to repair, but it looks damaged in another way; it looks like part of it’s been erased,” said Hyram.

“What? Dammit!” She looked at the photo, which by now had been thoroughly damaged by the water, which had trickled down the left side of the photo and erased James’s face, replacing it with a dirty yellow and white area. She regretted doing this; it was bad enough that Clarie had lost a husband, but there was no need for their memory of James to erode as well; we might as well get on with it, and take the losses in stride, she thought. While the photo was a trivial loss, the real loss was not physical, it couldn’t be represented as a number or a figure on a piece of paper; the real loss came from inside the head when she forgot, and she was slowly forgetting: she could no longer recall what James’s favourite food had been.


That same day, Ryan was contemplating the headline after dinner, which proclaimed in banner letters the conservative victory. His reaction, unlike Margaret’s upon reading the same story, was of mild disappointment that the Liberals would not be carrying on their happy tradition of good governance at the helm of the country, as had been the case for a large part of the last century. Not that he had actually voted for the local candidate, Singha, but rather for Wakefield’s local representative; while he really liked the New Democrats, it was also the case that he did not mind the Liberals, and wasn’t sufficiently scared of Cameron Duff to help in some self-defeating effort to keep him out of office in the admittedly futile gesture of strategic voting. In this, he had principle, he said to himself. He still looked to the future with optimism, and thought after some reflection that the Liberals probably needed some time in opposition to get away from the temptations of patronage.

Katherine had just arrived home from school, to confront a pile of marking: she had three tests to give back, one for each class, and there was the assignment that her class had handed in the previous Friday. With luck and a lot of time, she thought, she would be able to finish marking one test, and would leave the rest for the next day. It was not so simple, though; her mother had left a message on her answering machine, in so many words wondering how long she would remain single, and urging her to find a man; she grimaced at her last words, “because I only want to be a grandmother, darling.” It was more than enough pressure to deal with; she would eventually find a boyfriend, she thought, but by no means with certainty. The divorce had left a bad taste in her mouth; must all men be so possessive? On the other hand, Jim had been nice enough before he died; maybe if there were someone similar to him that she could find, then her sister-in-law would be happy. If all else failed, there was still the school: there were enough decent men teaching there, she would eventually find a husband before they all went.

Her thoughts turned to dinner: what to make? Pasta would be too boring, as she had just had spaghetti last night, lasagne the previous Saturday, and fettuccine with Alfredo sauce two days ago. Perhaps she would roast a chicken. As she got the chicken out of the freezer and fetched the seasonings, her mind turned to the election: although she was disappointed by the results (she had voted for the New Democrats, who had failed to win in her riding by only 1,000 votes), she did acknowledge the fact that Meach and his cadre had grown too many of the warts of power, which included cronyism, a dissociation from their electoral base, and an increasingly out-of-touch attitude toward the populace; how else would one explain the bungling early on of the stimulus package that had been meant to create jobs? It was nearly three months overdue, and Duff had threatened to topple the government over that issue, before he actually did so in November.

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