Dancing in the Dark (2 page)

All these tiny things. Is it necessary, then, to live with the head down, watching?

So it would seem. And if I’d realized, I would have been quite happy to comply. I wanted badly to do the right thing. I wanted so badly to be good.

His hands did much broader jobs than mine. In his office, I imagine, they moved swiftly and competently over sheets of paper, his strong, dark, large, powerful handwriting scratching out his commands. So assured, those hands; knowing what must be done, doing it.

Hands gripped at home to the handles of the lawn mower; holding firm the vibrations of the roto-tiller as he prepared for flowers; wrapped sternly around the slippery green of plastic garbage bags; turning the pages of newspapers with a crackle, quick and precise, so that they folded as they ought, no fumbling or shuffling. Hands deftly manipulating corkscrews, opening wine bottles swiftly, cleanly, all these things done naturally, without great effort or concentration, part of his hands’ skills.

Graceful hands that rolled paint in broad strokes and did not tremble around window edges. Hands that applauded for special meals, a smiling mouth above, appreciating my work with generosity.

(But I do not want to see his mouth. Or his eyes. Nothing more than his hands, which should say everything. But do not, any more.)

The hands, they do not change in memory. The rest much altered.

Hands (this is hard) that held my shoulders so that I was straight; and that folded themselves around my back so that I was safe. Hands that touched freely places in me hidden to every other person, hands I trusted to do that.

Oh, the lying hands. That they could do so many things so well and never tell. “Let not your right hand know what your left hand is doing,” the Bible says, more or less. And I was Harry’s right hand. He even told me that. He said, “I don’t know what I’d do without you. I don’t know what I might have been. You are my right hand.” Also, at various times, his heart and his support. I could only show love; he could tell it, too, that was a power he had, dim lights and darkness, strong hands and whispered words. If I’d had words, what could I have said? Enough to hold his hands, to hold the circle closed and tight? But in my labour in the small things, surely my devotion spoke?

He said, “You take such good care of me.” I know he was busy; people told me how hard he worked, how efficiently, how well, they said he was spectacular and tough. His promotions were a sign. He came home tense and vivid, and we shared a drink before dinner, and he looked around our perfect living room, all shined and cleaned and plumped and neat, and said, “God, it’s good to be home.” He made a second drink and read his newspaper. We had dinner. I wanted perfect textures in the food, and perfect colours. He noticed and said, “It’s so pretty I hate to eat it.” I did more than cook and serve, much more. I arranged. I was an artist. I created his home. I sketched each moment of the day with care, so that the portrait of his desires was precise when he arrived.

And his hands went around me.

I thought there were no spaces through which any of our care could dart or seep away, but some hole must have come uncovered, there was a leak.

Oh, that is some lesson. Hands or walls, not to be given faith. A hole will develop somewhere in a wall, and a searching, tempted hand poke through. With mere curiosity? Whatever. Hands lie, words lie. A little lie is like a little silver pin, it too adds up and expands.

But I believed. My faith was real, no lie.

Harry, though—his hands did not move independently of him. Oh no, he knew what his hands were up to.

Did he look at them sometimes and wonder at what they were capable of? I look at mine that way sometimes. They seem so innocent and placid now; difficult to believe what they have done. Yes, I can see Harry looking at his and feeling that way sometimes too.

D
oes this mean I thought it out and knew what I was doing? I’d like to think so, but it’s past lies now. It turns out I spent twenty years unwittingly. Who taught me what to do, so that I thought it was my own idea?

And then I did a lifetime’s thinking in a mere twelve hours, almost precisely twelve hours. The time between the phone call from that woman—what was her name, Dottie something?—and Harry coming home. An abrupt change of gears, a wrenching out of order in my life.

And Harry coming home. And a single clarifying moment.

I was upstairs vacuuming; twice a week I did each room. I have read of ground-in dirt, deep in carpet fibres, causing rot. Heard the phone, shut off the vacuum to be sure, dropped it, ran down the stairs, fit, quite fit for running, work and exercise have kept the body firm, to catch the fourth, maybe the fifth ring.

“Edna?” Not an unfamiliar voice, but also not one that could be placed exactly. “It’s Dottie. Dottie Franklin.” Yes, that’s her name. What kind of person can she be?

“Are you busy? Have I called at a bad time?” She was just
the wife, known casually, socially, of a man with whom Harry worked, whom Harry had beaten for the most recent promotion. She never called. Drinking? Perhaps; some lonely women did. Not I. I had no reason.

“Edna, this is difficult.” Not drunk; tension, not liquor, in the voice.

“It’s something Jack saw this morning on his way to work. Just by accident because our car wouldn’t go and he had to get a ride with some man at the garage and the guy took a different route.”

So?

I saw my knuckles, holding the receiver, turn white. I felt my body tighten and my mind turn cold. Ice in my warm and perfect home.

“It was only eight o’clock in the morning. There couldn’t be any other explanation. I’m sorry, Edna, but I thought you ought to know. It’s only fair.”

Fair? What the hell is fair? Is knowledge more fair than faith? More valuable? Oh, God would have done better to make me Eve than the Eve He made. I would not have chosen knowledge over peace.

I don’t think I would have.

Once knowing, there is no going back.

“What can I say, Edna? Forgive me, I had to let you know.”

The wallpaper in the living room was fairly new. Gold-flecked white. Elegant, I thought, for just one wall. I’d done it in a day, and when Harry came home he put an arm around me and said, “Lovely. Just right. I was afraid it would be too pale but you knew best, as usual.” He did not say that resentfully, but with pride in my judgment and taste. In my home I did not make mistakes, and he would have been surprised, no doubt, if the wallpaper had not been right.

So. The wallpaper before me, the carpet beneath my feet clean, the pillows around me on the couch all pure. The gold flecks danced in the wallpaper.

My house was always quiet. Any sounds in the day were only mine, and I liked that. But this was a different stillness, a different sort of waiting.

It seemed to me that I had never moved, could never have; that I had only ever waited. And that there was just this motionless instant, only this; the ends of my life snapped off, leaving this moment of waiting in the centre.

Broken again at one point by the telephone. Answered without taking my eyes from the gold-flecked whiteness of the wall, the point that rooted, the point without which I might topple, slide, lose balance irrevocably. Groped for the receiver.

“Edna?” Harry, of course. His dear, familiar voice, warm along the line. But so distant. Like going deaf, a faint tinkling of burning words. “Listen, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to work late again. This job is driving me crazy, there’s a lot more to it than I thought. Do you mind? I should make it by midnight anyway. I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

No, maybe not.

Twelve hours I had between that woman’s call and the moment Harry appeared. I heard his car, his key, his steps, running water in the bathroom, the flushing of the toilet, more footsteps from above, a calling, shouting, quick movement down the stairs; steps to the kitchen, then into the living room where I sat, holding on to my vision’s place in that wall of gold-flecked white. Saw his handsome, well-known, well-loved face before me, coming between me and the wall. And as I had thought, a toppling, dizziness, no balance.

Later I watched the clock on the kitchen wall, white, shaped like a daisy, with a yellow centre and yellow hands, and the
yellow hand that showed the seconds went around and around so slowly, slowly, time all finished in twelve hours and then an instant. Two-eighteen in the morning. Two-nineteen, two-twenty Over by then. The twelve hours and the moment, done.

I did not look. I never saw the result.

T
he man who comes sometimes to my room, to whose office I am sometimes led, the doctor, his hands are much like Harry’s. I find myself staring at them, and once he said, “You seem interested in my hands. Is there something about them?”

Yes, there is. But I do not tell him. I guard my thoughts. I am forty-three years old, and I have had, it appears, only twelve hours’ worth of thoughts, so I have to cherish them. I do not have so many that some can be given away.

Nor do I want any of them to slip my mind, which is one reason I take such care to write them down. The man, this doctor, says, “Edna, what do you write? Will you show me the notebook?” No, of course I will not do that. He tried, one day, to make me; reached out to stop my pen, so that a blue slash cut across all my careful neatness, but I put a stop to that: the pen turned in my hand, wrist as quick as a baton-twirler’s, and my hand went up, pen aimed at him like—some other thing—and he fell back, gave in, said, “Don’t be upset, go ahead, it’s all right.”

This notebook, it is a lot like that gold-flecked wallpaper:
it helps me keep my balance. It also keeps at a distance all the other things that are going on, that have already gone on. I desire that distance, appreciate the gaps between what all this is, what was, and me. I may have been blind, naïve, but I am not now.

The doctor, he talks on and on and I know he thinks he is going to reach me. This blue notebook is my weapon against that. Past pain and present pain are neatly filed in here, and that is what it’s for. I am coming to the end of the first notebook and soon will ask for a second. How many will there be? How many years can I live?

With the doctor I am a stenographer, noting carefully his words. But without shorthand, in my own neat script, hurrying to keep up and struggling still for tidiness. This is not easy, but it is easier than other things.

He tells me about his wife and his two children, and about his house. I see that he is trying to draw me out. He wants to make me share my life by sharing his. But his words fall into the well of my notebook like stones, and they just lie there, flat.

He asks me questions. “How are you feeling today? Are you comfortable? Is everybody treating you all right? Are you happy with the meals?”

I write down his questions.

He asks so many. Sometimes he tries to make me use the notebook for his purpose, and says, “Write me a story about your house. Or draw me a picture. Tell me what it looked like. Was it big? What colour was it? Show me how the rooms were laid out. Was there a garage? Did it hold one car or two? What colour was the kitchen? Did you make your own curtains? Was the basement finished? Did Harry do work in the basement? Where did you watch television? Did you watch
much television? What sort of programs did you like? How many phones did you have? Did you keep your cookbooks on the kitchen counter, or did you have a special shelf for them? How many bedrooms were there? Did you and Harry share one? Did you have twin beds or a big one? Did you and Harry sleep together in the same bed? Did you like to be in bed? What colour were your sheets?”

I tell him nothing. Not even the colour of the sheets. It’s not his business. I like the sound of my pen scratching across the page. Sometimes I hear it so clearly it almost drowns out his voice, with his endless questions.

Still, here they are, all written down.

Yes, our house was quite big; foolishly big for just the two of us, although it was early when we bought it, and we thought there might be more. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an enormous basement for laundry, storage, furnace, Harry’s hobbies, if he had had any—a gaping dark space beneath us. And on the main floor, brightness and big rooms, stairways to the up and down, a gleaming, a shining, and pastels on the walls. Lightness and solidity. A magazine could have come and taken photographs and would have called it typical, but it was more to me: the place, haven, where our lives were led, disregarding Harry’s life outside. Should I not have seen how much of his was beyond that small and narrow space? That for all its size, it in no way contained him? It contained me, and I could not imagine, although he told me so much, that truly he existed when he left the house. He went out in the morning and came back at night, and all that was a mystery, while I prepared for his return.

I might have known, for he talked about his days, of deals and negotiations, labyrinthine relationships of office politics and promotions. He said, “Damn, Edna, I love to win,” and he
would be flushed and trembling with his passion. And me, I thought (how stupidly) that that could not really be his passion; that truly it must be in our home. I could not imagine any other passion but my own.

I listened and encouraged, but I did not hear. There are two faults of mine: that protective deafness, that failure of imagination.

I ramble, and that’s dangerous.

Yes, there was a garage attached to our house. Room for a single car. I have not learned to drive. I walked to the convenience store nearby, took taxis downtown when I was to meet Harry for an evening out, and for the rest he drove me, in the evenings or on the weekends, when there were errands to be done. He did not seem to mind. I liked those times when we were together doing the small things that were necessary; so that our household was more firmly ours and he had something to do with it. I could sit beside him in the car and watch him, his profile alert to other drivers, other cars, watching for spaces in the plazas, handling so easily, as he did so many things, the steering wheel, casually one-handed, the other hooked to the chrome ledge above the window, flicking turn signals. My confident, capable husband. Saturday expeditions for food, paint, even merely lightbulbs, an outing, and I could sit beside him in our closed steel car and wonder at his ease, catch my breath at his daring, his risks with the body of the car and our own bodies as he nipped in and out of narrow spaces, cursing but not disliking the chores by any means: relishing the challenge of defeating another driver, racing, beating him to a small goal, the entrance to a mall, a parking spot in front of a store, his weekend challenges. A restless, pacing man; he wanted to be active, doing, and so I did not feel it was a burden that he had to drive me to these places.