chapter 4

Our relationship warmed up and graduated to “lights off,” a signal familiar to all responsible families with daughters who were dating in the 1940’s. A farewell left-handed wave to parents meant the porch light should be left on and the wildly waved right hand meant go ahead and blow the fuses. We hadn’t dated long before the lights were automatically turned off but if they forgot and left them on, Hal was unfazed

He was always strapped for cash so we broke the rules and pooled our meager funds for dates and depended on public transportation to get us where we wanted to go, leaving us with lots of time to get to know one another. On the first and last time in his life when he had a cash surplus of seventy-five dollars he bought a decrepit green Studebaker named Maggie, who was old and crotchety and chronically parched for gas and oil. One memorable day she ran out of brake fluid and we coasted safely and miraculously through a red light at the busiest intersection in town. If I caught my children doing that they would be grounded for ten years.

I spent more and more time with that skinny guy with the floppy hair. I don't remember a moment when I thought I was madly in love. I just couldn't imagine not being able to see him every day.

He proposed in a park across from English Bay, after sunset. We walked for a while under the trees and stopped to spread down the car rug. It was so dark we hadn't realized we were stationed directly across a pathway, and if we hadn't been so intent on an agenda that was going to affect the rest of our lives, we might also have noticed the almost constant flow of couples picking their way carefully around us. I still don't think it was necessary for that man to mutter, "For god sake, say yes and get off the trail." He did speed us up, though, and I said yes and we got off the trail.

We made vague plans to marry after he finished university. We did have a plan of a sort; after getting married we would save enough money to get us to England where he'd begin a distinguished newspaper career on Fleet Street, and during the brief time it would take for this to happen I would continue working before starting a family.

London seemed a good place to raise children. We had the notion that the English popped the little mites into boarding school immediately after nanny got them potty trained and they were returned years later with all the rough corners smoothed off.

Way off at the opposite end of the city we found a basement suite in a tiny bungalow occupied by a fertile couple with eight children. "How can they possible keep on producing children when they haven't any place to put them," we smugly asked one another. God got us for that. The place met our rental requirements, forty-five dollars a month, offering an enormous living room with adjoining bedroom and kitchen, and when it was necessary to use the bathroom, a phone booth- sized room with no tub but a shower that never quite shut off, the route was through the basement door past the coal furnace. I never got over the fear that some nameless THING would grab me on the way, and I took to rushing inside and slamming the door, an exercise that forced the landlord to conclude that either I had a serious bladder problem or we fought a lot.

Before the wedding we painted the ugly brown Masonite walls a cheerful chartreuse and one end wall a splash of flaming red. There was a window in that room, high up on one wall. It didn’t give any light but it was nice to know it was there.

My mother joyfully devoted the next part of her life to the phone, committing large sums of money to flowers and petit fours and declaring that absolutely no one has a chocolate wedding cake so put that out of your mind young lady and my father said it would be worth his while to give us the money and a ladder and my mother cried and said how can you be such so callous with your only daughter and hardly anyone asked our advice, although we did get to choose our sterling silver pattern, just the thing for a couple who couldn't even afford to have a telephone installed.

Mum, who could have ended World War Two faster if she'd been in charge, worried about my cooking repertoire, Belgian meat balls and tinned finnan haddie on toast, so I bought a cook book and began to study it. It was her own fault, really; she'd breeze into the house from bridge and tear through the kitchen organizing a meal, shooing us out of the way until it was time to set the table or do the dishes. Hal was a decent cook, having earned his university fees one summer working as a cook on a commercial fishing boat, but it never occurred to us that he should take on this task. Today's system of sharing the chores makes better sense but back then no one could beat my husband at making French toast. You can be sure no one was trying.

Our families got together for strategy plans; weddings don't just happen, they're calculated events. We were called to the summit occasionally about the color of the flowers or the length of the veil and to be truthful, this did not hold the full attention of my beloved, who was by this time juggling a night shift reporting job at the Vancouver sun while finishing his last year of classes. He could look reasonably attentive while the discussion waged on over calla lilies versus sweetheart roses but he was using the time to rough out his assignments in his head

I envied his capacity to tune out, and he had it perfected by the time we were enduring heavy monologues with adolescents on whether or not waist-length hair was acceptable for boys, even if it was going to be washed every three hours and that meant the drains would be clogged again.

On the eve of our wedding he stopped off at the apartment to leave some clothes before heading off to his bachelor party, and ended up absent-mindedly putting the final touches to the last wall, which we'd abandoned for lack of time. The party members soon tracked him down and the party began. His work was evident the next day when I slipped his wedding ring over a puckered chartreuse finger.