The Fifth Part of Chapter 10: Thanksgiving

Upon arriving home, they deposited their bags in the bedroom and went to Ryan and Patricia’s house for Thanksgiving, which had a much more intimate atmosphere than Margaret’s house, for three reasons: their house was smaller and cosier, their house was older and had a century’s worth of accumulated character, and lastly, there were no children in the family. Ryan and Patricia both wanted that last aspect changed, but so far were luckless: Katherine, after her divorce, had decided that she didn’t particularly want children, and Clarissa and James didn’t have any children as of yet.

Ryan and Patricia, unlike Margaret and Hyram, were much warmer in attitude to their children; Patricia was particularly doting, and looked fondly at James as he helped himself to extra gravy. “How were Margaret and Hyram?”

“They were all right, but they’re a bit fussy. Well, Margaret in particular was fussy. Their house was almost absurdly clean; it looked something like a museum,”

“Mom and dad can always find something about which to complain; she criticised Jimmy’s waistline, and I can’t see anything wrong with it,”

“Mike was kind of like that, except he wasn’t too fussy in his complaining; it was simply that anything I did was open to criticism. Hence the divorce,”

Patricia made a face at this; she would have preferred Katherine to be more prudent in her choice of men, and she, for one, saw through all of Mike’s façades after only a week of knowing him, whereas it had taken Katie five years to get the divorce, and she simply didn’t see what, if anything, this had to do with her decision against children. “So, are you seeing anyone interesting, Katie dear?” she asked. To be fair, the question was loaded, and Katherine was in no hurry to answer, or solve it.

“No, singlehood appeals to me. I can do whatever I want, and there’s nobody to criticise it.”

“Oh, I think it’s all a question of finding the right person; that’s the way it was with Patty and I. We met in university, and we decided we loved each other. It’s been forty years now.”

The remainder of the dinner passed amicably, and James and Clarissa talked about what was going on at their respective offices.

“So, a lot of people are nervous about layoffs, and corporate-speak isn’t helping. You know, when someone says ‘work smarter, not harder’, ‘we need to consolidate’, ‘rationalise the staff’, and all that. Our office isn’t like that, thank goodness; Maurice doesn’t go so much for the corporate doublespeak: he simply goes right out and says what’s what.”

Ryan, upon hearing the phrases repeated, recalled the Dilbert comics that ridiculed them so well. At eight, after dinner and apple pie, it was time to leave.

“Thank you for the dinner, Ryan,”

“Thank you, dad,”

“It was very nice to see all three of you again. Good luck with raising a family,” said Patricia; she really wanted to see grandchildren; so did Ryan, but he kept his sentiments to himself.

Upon arriving home, James asked, “So, what do you think? Should we get busy and start a family?”

Clarissa laughed at this; “we’ll see,” she said.

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The Fourth Part of Chapter 10: Thanksgiving

From there, the conversation switched to matters that are more domestic, and Alice said, “So sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry, Alice; boys will be boys,” said Hyram. Margaret, on the other hand, glowered at Sean, and he pointedly avoided her withering gaze; despite being only two, he had already learned to avoid his grandmother’s wrath.

“I hope this phase in his development will be over soon,” she said. “Watching him in August was no picnic, let me tell you; he would jump out of bed at six or some ungodly hour, and run around the house without any clothes on. He would only let me catch him after he had had his fun, and then he would fight me in trying to get his clothes on, saying he wanted mommy. He played with his Brussels sprouts; he stuck his carrots up his nose, and liked to play catch with me with the peas. There was that one time when he ran down the road after I had tried to give him a bath. He was screaming, “Save me from the monster!” at the top of his lungs, and this was, unhappily, after I had taken his clothes off. I’m glad it’s you taking care of him and not me, Jacob.”

Alice smiled a little, while Sean was pulling faces at nobody in particular. Margaret had repeated the story about him running away from his bath many times in Jacob’s presence, and this was easy to do given that they lived in Mississauga, not at all far from Willowdale. This repetition was an implicit criticism of the younger Varrettes’ parenting style, without her saying straight out that she thought Alice and Jacob were raising her grandchild poorly.

Margaret, in an attempt to change the subject, said, “it’s very interesting how some people’s predictions about certain individuals can be taken to heart; Time Magazine detailed the President’s life, and how all along people were predicting he would be great, and look where he is now. I remember a similar thing happening to Bruce Meach; it was in 2001 that Mark Gainly tapped him as a man to watch, and he said Meach would be Prime Minister one day. You know, that’s Mark Gainly, who’s a pollster now, and quite a good one, I might add. Of course, Andrea Colm was none too pleased about that: she pointedly said that only one person could be Prime Minister of the country at any one time, and that was that,”

“Mom, I find it amazing that you remember who wrote that article in the Globe and Mail; that was nine years ago!”

“Well, Clarie, I have a good memory for that sort of thing.”

James gave Clarissa a look that said, “What do you want to do tonight?” in a suggestive manner. They would be staying over in the room Clarissa slept in as a kid, and he wanted to get down to business; the simple thought of it made him lusty. Margaret paid no attention, fortunately; she was eating her scalloped potatoes sautéed in milk, which were particularly delicious.

Clarissa asked Mary, “How’s teaching?”

“I have three classes, one of which is quiet and seems to be made up of all the good kids, though the other two are quite boisterous; all it takes is a couple of rabble-rousers, and then the whole class becomes…well, exciting, shall we say,”

It was at this point that James had zoned out completely; perhaps it was the turkey, but he found that he was tuning out. Food had a way of doing that, and at this point, the volume dropped down, and the only thing audible was the clinking of metal cutlery against the plates. James reached for the salt and sprinkled it liberally on the remaining turkey and scalloped potatoes, and made eye contact with nobody until the plate was empty.

After dinner, James, Clarissa, Alice and Jacob were resting in the downstairs living room, working off the meal. Sean on the other hand had different ideas.

“Daddy, read me a story.” He commanded, waving Hop on Pop in front of Jacob’s face.

“You didn’t teach him please?”

“Uncle James is right, Sean. Say 'please'.”

Sean pouted.

“Sean, we want you to be good.”

“Peese,”

“Close enough, I guess.”

Sean climbed into his father’s lap, and handed him the story; they finished the book in ten minutes, longer than usual because he had kept pointing to the various characters and said things like “what’s dat?” or “why is dat guy’s nose so funny?” For him, bed-time reading was a competitive sport; whoever fell asleep first was the loser in his eyes, and by this measure, Sean was about to beat his father.

Having won over his father, he advanced on his mother.

“Mommy,”

“All right Sean, but promise me you’ll fall asleep,” so you won’t bother me anymore, she thought. It was lucky for her that she had brought along more Seuss than simply Hop on Pop, and she reached into the bag and pulled out The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

“I promise, mommy. Why I no had to say peese?”

“Uh...”

“Peese?”

James smiled; he’s finally learning his manners, he thought. This would be much easier than getting him to fall asleep after Hop on Pop; The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins was a much longer story.

“Why does the king look so much like the one from the oobweck?”

“It’s the same king,” said Alice. She started the story, and sure enough, Sean eventually fell asleep; at that moment, Alice was reading aloud. “The executioner leaned across the chopping block and flipped off Bartholomew’s hat,” looked down, and when she saw that Sean was asleep, stopped reading.

“Now we’re assured of a quiet drive home,” she said.


Clarissa and James left Margaret’s house on Sunday morning, satisfied overall with seeing Clarissa’s family. Margaret, on the other hand, was not happy; James had seemed able to find fault with various things: her over-fussiness, the dryness of her turkey, and the unimaginative, bland salad they had that dinner, to say nothing of what she had talked about. What was there wrong with politics as a dinner table discussion?

James had not seen what Margaret’s problem was: he wasn't alone in dishing out gratuitous criticism; she dwelled rather significantly on his pudgy midriff, and he thought she was overly fastidious. Hyram had a waist similar to this, but he was in his sixties, as opposed to James’s relatively youthful thirty-three. For the way back home, they walked to the subway station and rode it to Union station, which cheered James up; he was no longer grumpy about having been criticised for his waistline, and anyways, what was wrong with a few extra pounds? At Union Station, they had only to wait fifteen minutes before the train that they boarded left. James pulled out a novel he had been reading (Robertson Davies’ Leaven of Malice), and passed the rest of the journey with it.

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The Third Part of Chapter 10: Thanksgiving

Conversation had been winding through people’s work––the Government for Clarissa, economic consulting for James, teaching for Mary, software programming for Andrew, while Jacob and Alice had stayed silent, as the rest of the family save Clarissa considered approving credit card applications a boring affair.

Clarissa was saying, “That’s what the president said about the American budget: it had grown far out of control, much like ours, and had they not gone on a spending binge, they wouldn’t be in the position of raising taxes and cutting services, like they are now.”

James, at that moment, was not paying attention to the talk, but rather to his dinner plate, which as Margaret had noted, was piled high; he was eating, as was everyone else, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t keep track of conversation; his mind was on other things, as were his eyes and ears. He took in the house that he had last visited in August and marvelled at its museum-like cleanliness, and the fact that the elder Varettes were eminently tasteful in their decoration; every table had some small arrangement of objects, in each case achieving a careful balance and harmony with the others. On a large table in the adjoining living room, for instance, sat a porcelain figurine of a longhaired orange cat, unaccompanied by anything else on said table. On a small table with spindly legs sat a wooden bowl with wax fruit. In a glass cabinet were displayed delicate ceramic men and women in 1890s period costume, five to a shelf, arranged as in some kind of dance. The whole house spoke of a relentless effort to impose order, and within it was successful, in contrast to the inherently chaotic without. At this moment, the real cat strolled into the room, and indifferently surveyed the eight people sitting at the dinner table. The only difference between this cat and the porcelain cat was that this cat moved; it was, James thought, the only tasteless thing about the house.

Clarissa, sitting opposite James, had noticed his eyes wandering, and she smiled.

“Have you heard what some people are saying? Well, certain groups are petitioning for the ground rules to be changed; a sort of shirking of responsibility, as it were,” said Jacob. The certain people were the posse of lunch buddies he had at work in a gleaming office tower downtown.

Hyram was of the same mindset as his son: “That’s completely inappropriate; they went on a spending binge over the last twelve years under that doofus and his successor, and only now are they cleaning up. We went through the same thing, but they apparently had to discover what we had learnt back in the ‘90s: if you run deficits year over year, they will come back to bite you; there’s simply no avoiding that reality. What do you think of that giant spending spree?”

Margaret directed the question at Alice.

“They had to pay sometime, didn’t they? We see it all the time with people with poor credit histories. They, like the American government, wanted everything, and didn’t grasp the concept that they had to pay for it, and credit isn’t really a method of payment. It’s sad really, the disconnect between what people earn, and what they think they can buy; a lot of people’s eyes are far bigger than their wallets,” she said, putting a twist on the old figure of speech.

Her husband had more to add: “Oh yeah, there was this one guy I was reviewing at work, and he had five credit cards going, which is a warning flag right there; there really isn’t a need for more than one credit card if people know what they’re doing; more than that, and it will eventually get out of hand. I don’t know why people are allowed to pay one credit card off with another. This guy was also carrying about seventy thousand dollars in debt, even though his mortgage was paid off, and only had one car. The rest of that stuff came from knickknacks and expensive trips to Florida. He was rejected,”

Mary, however, could not get over something about the credit market that had long troubled her, and represented an obvious risk and was guaranteed to fail when left unchecked: “What about the part of the business where your best customers are those with dodgy histories?”

“Well, we do get to charge them high interest rates because of that,” Jacob admitted.

Alice added, “But we can’t have too many; that was one of the causes of the credit crisis.”

Margaret hadn’t been paying attention to the discussion about credit cards, being instead focussed on dinner, so she turned to a new subject with Mary, who was sitting beside her.

“Did you hear about Nicolas Pompon?”

“He’s Meach’s Quebec lieutenant, isn’t he?”

“Yes; anyways, there seems to be some sort of disconnect in him between brain and mouth; he said that Québec City didn’t matter to Meach.”

“That’s not a wise thing for someone from the Beauce to say,”

“He seems to have dropped a lot of balls lately,”

“That’s what Pretique Sid Nuit said,” said Mary, referring to the Montréal-based commentator who seemed to have it in for Nico Pompon, calling him everything under the sun, in both official languages. Everyone knew, although Meach denied it, that he was essentially a cheerleader, a job even he, in his otiose ways, did poorly.

Jacob asked Andrew, “I think the personalities are so interesting, don’t you?” This referred of course to American politics, which Andrew understood after he asked a question in return.

“You mean the way in which the guy is so flashy? I don’t find that particularly interesting; I don’t find his romantic dalliances that interesting either, whether they involve the wives of congressmen or actresses,”

Alice said, “I don’t know which affair was more lurid, the one with the congressman’s wife or the actress. You know, there’s something uniquely American about his politics: he goes for glitz, for big impact statements that are at the same time vacuous. Remember him at the opening of the new bridge to Detroit? ‘This link will play an integral role in bringing our peoples together, in bridging the divide that sometimes opens between us, and it is a reflection that all of us are fundamentally friends’, complete with the fluttering flags in the backdrop and the skyline. His PR people really know what they’re doing, and SEAN, PUT THAT DOWN!”

Sean, who had finished his dinner, was doing what two-year-olds did best: he was causing a ruckus. The object his mother was referring to was the life-size porcelain cat on the table in the living room. Sean, always attracted by things shiny, had climbed onto the couch beside the table and got a hold of its tail.

“But mommy––”

Alice did not answer him, but rather strode over, plucked the orange and white object out of his hands, placed it on the other end of the table away from his reach, and dragged him to the dinner table, where Alice said “I can keep my eye on you,” all the while ignoring his loud protests; the bowl of wax fruit on the spindly table was also a concern, and was simply asking to be tipped over by Sean.

Clarissa blocked Jacob on one side and Mary did so on the other side, while he, sitting opposite Alice, had his back to the buffet, and had not seen Sean in the role of miscreant.

James thought that Sean was cute, but was thankful that he did not have the duty of caring for him himself; he hoped that any children he had with Clarissa would be well behaved. The incident itself provided a welcome distraction from the dinner conversation, which he thought had turned boring; need we go into the irrelevant minutiae of that man’s neon-lighted glitzy persona? All that stuff was boring and he could not believe that CNN would report on only that. Infrastructure was relevant; health policy was relevant; what the Federal Reserve was doing was relevant, but a detailed analysis of the President’s speech patterns, presentation style and even clothing was decidedly not relevant.

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The Second Part of Chapter 10: Thanksgiving

Finally, they arrived at the Varrettes’ house in Willowdale; to James the journey seemed nearly as long as the train ride to Toronto, even though that train ride had lasted several hours, and he was not sitting in leather-upholstered seats, as were in the Mercedes; it was simply the concept of car travel that irritated him. This dissatisfaction also had much to do with the significant complaints against the car: that it was heavily polluting, that it was socially ostracising, that it turned what should be a co-operative exercise of getting to where one needs to go into a needless race, and of course there were the endless traffic jams and the thought that one could be killed at a moment’s notice by someone driving recklessly, not to mention that they were also obesogenic; yes, all of these were reasons behind their decision not to use a car, but rather live downtown and walk everywhere. His dislike for cars was further justified by Margaret’s observed habit of muttering under her breath while driving.

Margaret preferred that the relationship go another way; I already started on a slippery slope at the wedding, there’s no need to continue on that track now, she thought.

“Mary’s already here, and Jacob and Alice will arrive tomorrow afternoon,” said Margaret.


Mary was standing at the doorway, taking in the scene at Margaret’s return with James and Clarissa: Margaret was looking at her watch, mildly irritated, which Clarissa and James evidently didn’t notice; they had eyes only for each other, as this was still the soppy phase of their marriage. They would get out of that soon enough, she thought, as soon as Clarissa smells his dirty socks or something.

“Hello, Miss Sunshine!”

“Mary! It’s so nice to see you!”

Mary said, chuckling, “Clarissa, you make it sound like we haven’t seen each other in ages! I was at the wedding, you know.”

Margaret was thinking of the game plan; they are all going to stay overnight, and tomorrow will be the big turkey dinner. As Clarissa was walking up the front steps, she tripped. James rushed to her side, but twisted a tendon in his leg, and had to stop, grimacing. Margaret caught her, and wondered what Clarissa would do if her husband were unreliable in catching his wife in a fall; it was an important trust issue, and an insight into the nature of their marriage.

“I’m fine, don’t worry about it,” said Clarissa.

Clarissa and James spent the following afternoon relaxing and chatting with Mary and Andrew. They were in the den at the front of the house, and they could see the road.

“I hadn’t noticed this room the last time I was here,” said James.

“That’s because you two had eyes only for each other,” said Mary. The equivalent phase in her marriage had passed by and now she and Andrew were simply comfortable.

“There are very many books in here,” James commented.

“We have a lot of books in our sitting room too, Jim; it’s not like you haven’t seen one.”

“It’s not just that; I haven’t seen so many massive books in one place. Look: there’s War and Peace, on that shelf is The Man Without Qualities, and there’s The Count of Monte Cristo.”

Those weren’t the only books of that size in the room either, as James noted; he could see a massive tome subtitled The History of a Young Lady. He thought that perhaps these books were there to make one appear more learned; seeing them there made him believe that Margaret had read these volumes at some point.

Clarissa was saying, “I don’t know why mom’s always pushing me to be virtuous,” she said.

“I’ve always wondered why she did that; she never spent any time with me giving moralising lectures; it was simply ‘just don’t get into any trouble’, and she left it at those six words. It wasn’t like the hours she spent with you.”

“’In all circumstances, one must be virtuous, and hold your head up high’” quoted Clarissa. “Perhaps it was in the hope that I would be redeemed later on,”

“Well, attitude counts for a lot, as they say,” said Andrew.

At that moment, Jacob and Alice arrived with Sean in tow. He was behaving properly, which was unusual; he was simply dawdling and had stopped to look at the flowers and shrubbery. He picked at a colourful flower with his hand.

“Sean, we need to get inside,”

“I wanna show gramma,” he said, holding up a flower.

“Grandma doesn’t want her plants yanked up by the roots, Sean. Put that down,”

Sean sullenly obeyed his mother.

Alice had a bag with her; she always did when Sean was around, with which to carry his toys and things with her wherever they went. Margaret said she was spoiling him by doing this for him; he ought to learn to keep still and not play with everything, she had said. Alice replied that it was either the toys or something made of glass or some other delicate material.

Margaret greeted them at the door, and Sean tried to hide behind Jacob’s leg; Jacob did not let that happen and instead held him by his side.

“Hello Jacob,”

“Hello, Margaret,”

“Hello little Sean,” Sean did not respond.

“Sean, say hello to your grandmother,” Sean simply stared rather than obey his father’s instruction.

“Sean––”

“Hello, Granma,”

Margaret smiled sweetly, in a grandmotherly way, but it was apparent that he had been slow to forget his ordeal with her when his parents had left him alone with Margaret at the family cottage, and he tried to stand at the other end of the room when he could.

“I go play, ‘kay?”

“First, you have to take off your shoes,” and before Sean could protest, Jacob held his shoulder while Alice removed his shoes. They were adept at this by now, as Sean had learned to walk just after his first birthday.


It was Thanksgiving dinner, and James had just piled his plate high with all the things he loved: dark meat, potatoes, the stuffing, and his favourite part of the bird, the pope’s nose, which preference nobody else seemed to share. Margaret seems cold to me, he thought, and as he looked up from eating his large portion, he saw Margaret looking at his dinner plate. Her plate, by comparison, had relatively little on it: two cuts of the white meat, cranberry sauce, Brussels sprouts, steamed carrots, a small portion of potatoes, and no gravy.

“Enjoying your dinner,” Margaret’s address to him was more of a statement than a question; maybe she thought he should be dieting? Life’s too short to diet; one must have fun, after all, and she made an excellent turkey.

“Very much, thank you.” Margaret, looking at James’s dinner plate, was not impressed. If this is how he eats, with loads of gravy on everything, and only one Brussels sprout, then his bulging waistline was entirely unsurprising. Clarissa must have married for things other than his looks, which is always appreciated; perhaps it would have been worse were she looking only for male eye candy. Perhaps it was the jokes he told, or maybe that she had found a kindred spirit in another economist. On the other hand, she would greatly appreciate looking at some handsome man rather than this slightly doughy husband.

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The First Part of Chapter 10: Thanksgiving

Clarissa told James that she would be buying the tickets, as first of all they were visiting her parents rather than his, and secondly James was much busier than Clarissa during the last week of September, which became clear when they compared their schedules; this wasn`t always the case; on some occasions, Clarissa would be busier, and that last week was one when James had a heavier workload; Clarissa had been fielding questions from the Minister, while James had been making calls to various companies and doing complicated financial analyses and assessments of the markets for various products. That night, they greeted each other in the usual way, which at that point in their marriage was a passionate kiss. There was something else on James’s mind; last night, he and Clarissa were passionate in bed as usual, but James found something wrong, and it was starting to gnaw on his mind, but he could not place it.

“Is there something the matter, dear?”

“No, nothing; just some account at work,”

“Well, then, let’s hear all about it,” said Clarissa. James felt very lucky that he had her; he thought very few women would be interested in hearing the details of a publishing house looking to make some more money, particularly as romantic conversation.

The ride on the train passed largely without incident, and it was quite a pleasant trip, far more relaxing and much faster than travelling by car or coach. It also had its romantic aspects. James and Clarissa passed most of the ride holding hands, or glancing out at the passing scenery, which was forest at first when they left the city, interspersed with some swamp, followed by idyllic pastoral scenes. They ordered dinner off the trolley, which consisted of turkey sandwiches and some cheese, for which Clarissa had a taste and James simply adored.

They ate quietly and enjoyed the view, which meant the forests passing by, the marshes, and each other. James considered the train to be the most relaxing method of travelling long distances; the bicycle was the most relaxing of all, but it was unsuitable for travelling further than 100 kilometres. Not that he found train travel entirely pleasurable; each form of travel had its limit of pleasantness and for the train, this was about four hours, similar to the limit for bicycling. For walking, it was one hour––enough to take one seven kilometres on a brisk stroll, while any more than ten minutes in the car was uncomfortable for a passenger, and any time at all in those boxes was jarring for James when he was driving. The trip to Toronto would last five hours, just long enough for him to need to stretch his legs once they reached Union Station; the best location for doing this was obvious for anyone: the Great Hall, purpose-built to inspire awe in anyone visiting the city; it was a message that one would like to have communicated about their city: “Welcome to Toronto”, if not visible at any point in the interior space, was etched into the spirit of the place.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered, not considering how schmaltzy he sounded at that moment.

“I love the sound of your voice,” replied Clarissa.

The sun had set, and the view of the countryside visible out of the window in the day had to be imagined; James pictured forests interspersed with some farmland.

James fell asleep after the train left Kingston at seven, somewhat sedated from dinner, and much more so from the effects of not moving much for some time, and it was nine o’clock when they arrived in Toronto. The city, illuminated, presented itself against the dark backdrop, and it was beautiful as it glittered in the still-warm air without, while James slept on Clarissa’s shoulder in the air-conditioned carriage. James woke up after the train had passed Danforth Station, and he could see the bank towers, the office buildings, the high-rise condominiums, and the CN Tower outside the window as the train curved south; this view was presented to them for a minute before it slipped away again as the train slowed and turned west.

James was slightly groggy from the effects of sleep as the train emptied into the underground concourse, but the feeling went away to some degree as he crossed the concourse and went into the cavernous and ornate Great Hall.


Margaret thought, finally; we can introduce the married couple to the rest of the family; I’ll admit, to myself at least, that I was perhaps judging James a bit hard, as if we started off on the wrong track; I can’t start over, which is unfortunate, but maybe I can smile a little to him. She looked at her watch, and then at the elegant terminal building lit orange by the streetlights; they ought to be here soon, she thought. One always needs to be candid to oneself; how will one get through life otherwise? Oh, that simply sounds like I would be hiding behind a mask, doesn’t it? No matter what, I will extend a hand to James. At least I started out right with the other two; now we have a beautiful family, though I feel slightly uncomfortable with a second now; she’s moving so fast. They should just enjoy each other’s company for a few years, and then get down to business. Speaking of which, there they are now. Margaret got out of the car she was waiting in and went to greet Clarissa and James. It then occurred to her: why had they neglected to buy a car? She knew James had one, but she considered that car non-operational; he put his garbage can in front of it, and stored his grill there, too. After ten years of living alone, one would think one would have gone out, and purchased a decent, serviceable compact car, or a sedan, or something; but no, I have to drive down here from Willowdale, through terrible traffic––on the way back, of course; there weren’t too many cars on the highway travelling south––because they wanted to take the train here. Are they familiar with how congested Front Street can get in front of Union Station? Damn cabbies!

“Hi mom,”

“Hello Mrs. Varrette. You know, we could have easily taken the subway to Finch, and you could have picked us up there.”

“But that would involve going into the smelly subway; I wouldn’t want you to experience that,”

“This is Toronto, not New York, you know. And anyways, it’s far safer than travelling in the car,”

Why must he be so grating? Always poking holes in my plans.

“Well, I’m here, so please get in the car,” said Margaret.

Not wanting to cause any more of a fuss, James got into her Mercedes, and Clarissa followed. It being rush hour, traffic was crawling from the moment they got on the Gardiner, all the way up the Don Valley Parkway. What had taken Margaret no longer than twenty minutes now took nearly an hour going the other way. Margaret was irritated, and were she not, she would have noticed the natural beauty of the Don Valley, with the maples, elms and oaks showing the first colours of autumn. She normally liked the drive down the Parkway in almost any season, as it looked pretty with all the trees, with their various shades of green in the summer, or yellow, orange and red in the fall. It lent a relaxing atmosphere to what would have been an irritable drive were the trees absent. Now, however, her mind was on the road, on the over-crowding of all the cars around her, in particular that man in the convertible in front of her. She didn’t like the look of the two people in the van slightly ahead of her and to the right, either. That she was not alone in the car made things worse; she didn’t wish others to see her temper, particularly not her son-in-law.

“Had we taken the subway to Finch, we wouldn’t be in this problem.”

“Yes, well, here we are,” grumbled Margaret, peeved at the incessant needling.

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