Dancing in the Dark (17 page)

I could feel his body tightening as it came time to go back to work. On the morning of the first day back, he would be
chattering and laughing, and he grinned back at me as he went out the door.

I did not grin, was not exactly happy; but closed the door behind him with some sense of peace restored.

The trouble when we went away was the tension of words between us. We spoke of what we saw and did, but had little other conversation. Even Harry, without his work, was a bit bereft of words. We said, “Look at that sunset,” and “Shall we drive around the island tomorrow?” and “Did you ever see anything like what that woman is wearing!”

What do other people talk about? Maybe much the same, except that they don’t notice, or it’s enough, or it doesn’t seem important.

Maybe it was that we didn’t belong where we went, and knew that these places were only a space in our time, that endings were coming up. Surely, though, that would be the same for anyone on holiday? A vacation is mainly observation, there is no settling in. Our own lives were not led in sunshine or on sandy beaches, or even in the hotels that might have been anywhere. We watched the natives, the tanned Californians and the brown Caribbeans, but knew less of them than we would have watching television. It was somewhat like watching television, and even seemed as if we had already seen much of it and were still watching from behind a screen. We were fish out of our own waters and not sufficiently relaxed.

And too, not having children made a difference. Holidays must be so simple, if also perhaps more aggravating, for people with children. Then, there are always things to do and places to see. One goes, no doubt, to Disneyland instead of for a walk. A wax museum instead of a long dinner heavy with drinks. Children must provide some form to these things
and a familiar structure. The vital part of home travelling right along with you, making its homelike demands. Harry and I never went to Disneyland or to wax museums. They were hardly to our tastes.

Maybe we should have talked about it; discussed our discomfort at having so little to discuss. Maybe we should have said, “Gosh, three weeks together is really a long time, isn’t it?”

Instead, we touched a great deal more than usual, and made love more often. We reassured each other with our bodies.

There was never a lack of fondness between us; just that there were limited ways of telling our fondness. And with only the two of us for days and days, this was drawn to our attention.

But when I viewed us as a picture, if I observed us as some other person might, Harry’s arm around me when we walked, or bent together over a map on the hood of our rented car, or lying side by side tanning by a pool, reading bits of books or papers to each other—it was a charming picture. We looked so happy.

We were happy. It was only odd, that’s all.

In my head I counted off the days until we would be going home. And Harry, also aware of diminishing moments, said things like, “We only have six days left, we should try to hit the market tomorrow, time’s running out.” The night before we left wherever we had gone, we achieved some gaiety, laughed easily and drank more and talked eagerly about the holiday now gone. In those nights of retrospect, the time away could safely glitter.

When we came home, drove up that street and in that driveway, when I saw our ordinary house, I could have embraced it. Put my arms around it and kissed its doors and
windows. As soon as Harry went back to work, I set about making it fresh and clean again, because in our absence it would have become a bit unused-smelling; not quite musty, but not quite familiar or ours. I did not like it that when we walked out the door, the house could forget us and set about gathering dust and different smells.

Our holidays felt strange, but not disastrous. Unless muteness is a tragedy. But beforehand we were not mute, and I think our true vacations were in the planning of them. Each year we looked ahead as if the weeks away would be perfect, and were as entertained and as excited as the vacations themselves were probably meant to make us.

“I’ve got six weeks this year,” Harry said. “What do you think we should do with them?”

And we would talk about places maybe read about or for which there’d been advertisements on television, where we had already been, and if new places would be much different. Harry would go to travel agents (or send her out to them?) and bring home brochures and schedules of flights and lists of prices. We would stare at the pictures of high-rise hotels and judge their proximity to beaches and imagine ourselves in one of the rooms, standing at one of the tiny windows in the photographs.

People at work told Harry about their holidays, which islands in the Caribbean might be unpleasant this year, with relations strained between natives and tourists, or dangerous, or too dull. For people who wanted more than tans, who liked to keep busy, as we did, some places should be avoided. The Caribbean seemed the natural area to go to, however. There were formulas for the islands, one knew more or less what to expect, and yet they were quite different from home. We hugged ourselves in December, contemplating February on a beach, or buying shirts and straw hats in a market.

“I can’t wait,” Harry would say. “I can’t wait to get away from that damned office.”

Our enthusiasm beforehand never faltered.

Like children, we stared out airplane windows and pointed down, excited, at the clouds.

I was only frightened taking off and landing.

In the little buses that took us to our hotels we looked out windows and judged how interesting this place might be.

I think it was not until we were checked in, unpacking in our room, and just the two of us, that the weariness set in.

I would, I think, have liked to go to Europe. To see castles in Britain and old wineries in France. In Spain, we could even have lain on beaches. But the time of year was never right, it was harder to count on sunshine. And Harry said, “It’s all old there, it’s dying. They’ve only got the past. Who wants to go trailing through museums and old ruins? Nothing’s
moving
over there.” He said it would be boring, and they were his holidays after all, he earned them, and it was he who needed the rest, the break, the change of pace.

Now, though, if I could travel, that’s where I’d go. To cool places: Scotland in autumn, even if it rained, or the mountains in Spain in the spring. I would walk by myself through big cities like Paris and stare at all the old things: buildings and paintings and monuments. I don’t think those things are dying at all. I think I would be reassured to see that some things do survive centuries, they last. Unlike snow or leaves or houses or days.

Or that there have been so many people and events in so many years—the past is huge—that two people in a moment now have no great significance. They may be something only tiny, and all this very little, really.

“T
alk to me, Edna,” he said, although not, I admit, so often in the last few years. It would not be fair to say he didn’t pay attention. (Strange to worry about being fair, which would seem the least of it.)

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you okay home alone like this?” What did he think was happening?

Maybe if something was happening to him, he needed to search out some strangeness in me.

He began to leave for work earlier in the mornings because, he said, “I beat the worst of the traffic this way. I wish I’d thought of it before.” I still woke him gently; just earlier.

It meant going to bed at nights earlier, so our evenings together were shorter.

They were also shorter because he began often to come home later, too. Again, he said, avoiding the rush hour. Or working late. Sometimes he stayed downtown overnight. “It’s this damn job,” he told me, and of course he had been promoted again, to manager of marketing, so it was reasonable to imagine him working still harder. She was promoted along
with him. He told me and laughed because he said it was called rug-ranking, and wasn’t that an odd expression.

We still had most of our evenings, though, even if they became briefer. And our weekends, we had those. There were only small incursions into our time, so subtle and so reasonable. “Of course,” I said. “I understand.” And thought I did.

I leaped and slid past thirty to forty. It went so fast; oddly, because each day was long and full of hours.

Forty. I woke up the morning of that birthday and remembered it was that day and felt the oddest sense of doom. It was, and this was rare, really, hard to get out of bed.

I seem to have had common crises. It must be just that I never learned to deal with them in common ways, that’s it, I guess.

Really a birthday is just a number. But to shift a decade and not merely a year is something; although I imagine the next move, into fifties, won’t be so much now. I lack a sense of future.

Hormones, possibly. My doctor once said shifting moods could usually be traced to shifting hormones. It gave me a particularly helpless feeling: that nothing, it seemed, not even a mood, was just my own.

But that morning, my birthday, was more than hormones. They may have sunk, but everything else was dragged down also.

Because there ought to be a clear view here. A little peak from which one can look back and see forty years in a bundle and look forward and see how it will go and the clarity alone should be satisfying. One ought to have things in place. One ought to be able to say, “I have done that,” and “I will do this.” There should be something like an A on a report card, even a B would be satisfactory. What about Harry? He would, I
suppose, have his promotions and his pay cheques. A steady progress; piles of accomplishments like steps behind him.

But for me? If one does the same thing over and over again, each time properly, each time to the best of one’s ability, still what one seems to have is a handful of endless identical tasks. It’s not like getting anywhere.

There was a purpose, of course. I had my reasons. Just that on this day the vision slipped. Instead of the larger purpose, I saw the tiny tasks. They crowded my head, jumbling into each other, a tumbling of dishes and laundry and dusting and scrubbing and exercises and make-up, of watching the clock to see when Harry would be home. And the second, secret closed-eyed life of being someone else up on a stage, and all the music. In this fortieth birthday light, all that was absurd and sad, and I thought I might not now be able to return to it, having seen it this way.

I stood stock still in the kitchen, a frying pan in one hand, an egg in the other, struck with a thought, not a blow: “This is nothing. This is not anything at all.”

Imagine such a thought on a fortieth birthday: no wonder I had to stand still, breathless for a moment.

Nonetheless, the egg had to be cracked into the frying pan, the toast had to be made, the juice poured, the coffee percolated.

Every move like being on a planet where the gravity is enormous: the limbs weighed down, dragging to the earth. I might just sink, standing there, through the kitchen floor.

And there was Harry, sitting across the table from me, the smells the same as any morning, the sun streaking light across the kitchen table, and it was like every morning of my life; except that the smells were sour and I was dark. The coffee was bitter and my cigarette was dust in my lungs. Small pleasures were only small, after all.

I sighed and heard my mother sighing. Was this what happened?

“Happy birthday,” Harry said. “But you look as if it’s bugging you.” See, I remember that, that he did know, he did pay attention, it was me sitting there across from him, living with him, he did know that.

It’s hard not to come fiercely to his defence, even against myself. It’s difficult to break a habit of more than twenty years. And it’s confusing to remind myself that he also lied, and that there was a time when he needed defending and I was unavailable.

Some time, oh years ago, in the early days of being married, he’d come home from work and we’d have dinner and when it got to be dusk and then dark we’d turn out all the lights and put records on the player and kick off our shoes and dance together in the dark. Snuggled close we’d drift around the living room, eyes closed, to gentle songs. The Mills Brothers harmonized, “You always hurt the one you love.” But we moved to the rhythms, not the words. And who really listens to songs? Who takes them as far as they’ll go?

I can’t quite recall when we stopped doing that. Like other things, some of our hours together, they must have just drifted off and we forgot.

I hadn’t realized how many shiftings there were.

“You sure don’t look forty,” Harry was saying. Even a compliment turned on itself. What did forty look like? One of these days would I crumble, my true and forty-year-old face appearing abruptly, irreversibly aged? Someday nothing, not all the exercises or all the creams and lotions and care, would make a difference. I knew, although he may not have noticed, that there were already little lines, tiny baggings at the base of my throat. I bought scarves, which I never had before, to
hide them. This was just the beginning; the force of earth would work its way down my breasts, my stomach, and my thighs.

Maybe it shouldn’t make a difference. But it does. To slide into age without ever having seen yourself, and after so much effort. All the time is gone.

Forty years gone. Into an even division of fear and safety, twenty years of this, another twenty of that. And another twenty, forty years? Oh God, the weariness, the weight, of all those years of endless little tasks. Was Harry big enough?

Ah, but there was a dangerous, betraying thought. Question that and anything might happen; I might shatter into pieces just sitting in my chair.

“Really, Edna,” and I shook myself. “Whatever is the matter? Pull yourself together,” and I tried, made an effort to haul back the wandering, desolate, betraying, destroying thoughts.

It certainly wasn’t any longing for change. The very thought of change would terrify me. So what was it I wanted?

Just a little while to get used to the idea. Of being forty, in my forties, of catching up to it. Just a little time.