“Enter my parlour,” Mrs. Macmillan said, unlocking the front door. “Said the spider to the fly!” Estelle resented the allusion, and the metaphor.
The house was small. It had a small living room: there was one couch, two stuffed chairs and a coffee table made out of a flimsy shiny wood that did not look like wood at all. From the living room, Estelle could see through a passageway into the kitchen. On either side of the passageway was a door. Presumably, there were rooms leading off the doors. On the wall, facing them, was a large cheap technicolour print of a man with a very pallid complexion, brown silky hair, and a brown full-length beard; he was dressed in something resembling a nightgown with a red robe covering it. The man’s heart was exposed. It came out of his insides and was planted outside, on top of his chest. Something like flames were surrounding the man’s heart. His eyes seemed as if he were drugged; as if he had been smoking marijuana from the time of his birth. One palm (Estelle had difficulty in determining whether it was his right palm or his left) was raised outward, as if this man intended to bless somebody. A drop of blood was caught in the slow motion of the painter’s realism, and it was suspended an inch below the heart. She could find no hole in the heart out of which the blood might have come. The picture bothered Estelle.
Mrs. Macmillan was turning on lamps: she turned on one lamp that was on the coffee table. She turned on a second one on the television. Beside this lamp was a flowerpot made of porcelain, and in the flowerpot was a bunch of plastic flowers. Mrs. Macmillan then turned on a table lamp, the largest in her collection, which was sitting on the floor beside one of the overstuffed chairs — because there was no table on which it could sit. The room was burning with lamps. She had turned on five lamps in all.
“Well!” she said, like a woman regaining her breath.
“I am so pleased to see you again, Mrs. Macmillan.”
“You hungry?”
“Well, I had a little something on the train …”
“I’ll whip you up something.”
“I’m not really hungry.”
“Child, if you’re hungry, say you’re hungry. If I didn’t have anything to offer you, I wouldn’t put myself out in the first place and I wouldn’t have offered you nothing in the first place.”
“Well, thank you.”
“Don’t be too polite, either. That isn’t a polite place we just walked from. And it ain’t a polite world out there, either.” Mrs. Macmillan was smiling now. She had a great searching power in her eyes. And though her eyes tonight were carrying the glare and the colour of alcohol, they were still piercing. Something about her eyes: they looked at you with a feeling that was divorced from the feeling of the particular topic of conversation, a feeling altogether strange and foreign from the feeling of the silence that lay between her words in conversation. Estelle had noticed this before. But she had mistaken it for periodic lapses in memory, or pauses in attention. Mrs. Macmillan was looking straight at her now, as one would look at something wondrous, that is to say, at something unexpected. It was making Estelle uncomfortable. She hoped Mrs. Macmillan would leave and go to the kitchen.
“Won’t take a minute. I’ll whip you up something. A belly-stopper. Beggars can’t be choosers!” Estelle wondered what she meant by that. That was not what a hostess said to her guest. There was something sinister in the observation. Could there be something altogether sinister in this woman? She had never before confronted anybody as complex, and apparently as easy to read, as Mrs. Macmillan. And what made her even more uncomfortable was that up till now, Mrs. Macmillan had said nothing about her presence in North Bay, although she was supposed to be in Timmins; and she hadn’t explained her presence in this house: there was no noise of sleeping children, no sign of comfort, the kind of comfort Mrs. Macmillan had talked about while they were in the hospital; there was no semblance of a man in the house, either. And Estelle was too scared to mention anything about the holiday she had been seduced into coming north to have.
“How’s that slaughter-house?” Her voice came from the kitchen like a shout. Something was fizzing in a pan. “People still having abortions illegally?”
“You have a lovely place here.”
“It’s a shack!”
“I like it.”
“My mother died last year. This is all she had. This is all she left. This is all I have. I haven’t even moved her things outta the bedroom, as yet.”
“How’re the kids, the children, Mrs. Macmillan?”
“When you saw me tonight in that cheap hotel, I was just talking about you. Says I to the fella who buyed me a couple of beers, says I, ‘I met the prettiest coloured girl in Toronto.’ You’re damn pretty, you know that, don’t ya?”
“Are the children sleeping, Mrs. Macmillan?”
“You want to know something? When a woman has to go out in the night and hustle, child, it
