Dancing in the Dark (21 page)

I could stop it all now. There must be so many ways here: poisons and hanging and razors in the night. Pills, perhaps. They are careful, but no care is enough. I know that better than they ever can.

I didn’t mean to be entirely alone; and I never intended for people to stare.

Harry promised I might live to eighty? Oh, surely not.

Could I not make it end right now? Would that be cowardice or courage? Where there’s a will there’s a way. My mother used to say that. She would not have blundered about like this, she would say, “Really, Edna, you’ll have to learn how to work these things out. You have to do some things for yourself. You have to make your own decisions.” But when did I pay attention to my mother, except as a poor example?

Tough woman, though. I wonder if she was lonely. I wonder if she is lonely now.

Stella might say, “Just take a run at it from a new direction. If it didn’t work, leave it behind you.”

It hurts to move though. I might like to dance, but it hurts to move.

Oh Harry, why aren’t you here to tell me things I need so badly to be told?

Poor Harry, to have been loved with such a grip. To have carried my small weight upon his back for so many years. No wonder he began to stoop.

Maybe he would have preferred it if he hadn’t been able to find a clean shirt, or if all his meals hadn’t been as pretty
as a painting, a still life. Two white vegetables in the same meal might have suited him just fine. He might not have cared a bit. He was maybe tired.

It’s even possible he did not find by chance a hole in the great wall I built so carefully around us, our shining wall, but instead deliberately made one, tunnelling through with his long, slender, talented fingers.

I built so carefully and for so long. The two of us, we both made something, it wasn’t only me. And it can all be destroyed in a phone call, a sentence, a moment.

Or, on his part a whim, a desire, a selfishness, a lie.

At least the pain is cleaner here than there.

But it’s much colder here. I am so cold.

I used to be warm, so well-covered and safe. I thought all that padding, all the layers of soft warmth behind the wall, would keep me safe.

Maybe I should have left some part of me exposed. Because I failed to hear voices or see signs. I missed so many things.

Real passion—how would that have been? What would it have been like to really feel Harry’s skin, and my own, instead of turning it into something tougher, harder—protection? How would it have felt if there had been nothing between us? What if I had understood those hands, the body, all the words he spoke, were someone else, another person, a life?

I took the face he gave me and transformed it into something else.

I wiped myself off like a child at the blackboard and then both of us must have gone about writing on it something wrong.

Is it something like being in a convent? To be a nun, with rules and times and faith, no questions? Is God like Harry?
When they spend their lives for God, in the end do they go before Him thinking they’re paid up, and does He turn away? Does He say, “That wasn’t what I wanted at all, you made a mistake”? What a thing, to go for judgment and love, for reward at last for all the work and sacrifices, and have Him reject the gift. And then turn around and accept a sinner who has never made a payment. Would there be anger in the saintly hearts? Would they reach for knives and kill God?

Where is the gratitude? Who pays? Who rewards those nuns if they go before God and He says it wasn’t necessary?

Maybe He says, “But you shouldn’t have believed, that was a mistake. Faith made it too easy for you, it’s not supposed to be so simple. You took too much for granted, you assumed all I wanted was for you to follow rules.”

Would He offer second chances? Might He say, “Now lose your faith and see what happens, there’s your test. Try again and see what you can do without it.”

Is it possible to hope if there is no faith?

Somebody should know, somebody ought to be able to tell me what I was supposed to do, what the real rules were. It isn’t fair that no one told me. Everyone kept these secrets from me, and they must have known. It would be like seeing somebody starting off across the country thinking they were on a main highway and not telling them they would wind up on a dirt track ending nowhere.

This mistake, this crucial misperception—a deformity, like being born with two heads or one arm. I am missing something that should be there.

Maybe God would say, “If I take away your rules, if it’s not simple any more, you’ll find out what you can do yourself. You have to muddle around until you find out what your own rules are.”

What would my own rules have been?

I can’t imagine. It doesn’t seem to have been my life at all; although it must have seemed like my life at the time.

Where did I learn what I did? My mother used to say, with her usual impatience, “For goodness’ sake, stand on your own two feet, Edna,” so obviously not from her. My father, poor man, gave no advice. I did not want what they were, but the opposite. A queer backwardness of rules.

What would my own rules have been? If I were free, what would I be?

Oh, I might dance and dance, my body might tell tales, it might move like water. I might fling my arms wide and lift my body, spring up from my legs and my hair would fly around my face. I would shout and laugh out loud, I would feel blood pouring through my body, and I would stretch my earthbound fingers up as high as they could go.

In my life I might have shouted and laughed out loud and cried my tears. I might have said certain things to Harry, or thrown a glass at him. At parties I might have smiled and joked and flirted. I might have been all teeth and glitter.

Now I might carry placards up and down in front of the offices of magazines and shout out how they lie. That if they say that if one does this one gets that, it’s only what is easy, not what is true. I might warn others not to believe truths handed out on pages.

I might rage out loud.

I am a forty-three-year-old woman who has not danced or often laughed out loud. I am a forty-three-year-old woman who has drudged like a nun for salvation. My glitter has been a smile or a pat on the shoulder or being held in the night. My joy has been gleaming glasses and waking to the sound of a snore.

My reaching up has been a leaning down to vacuum or pack trash. My flinging arms have only touched Harry, and barely myself.

Who taught me, and when? Who said, “Be still, Edna, don’t move, don’t make a sound and you’ll be safe”?

It wasn’t in me to be a dancing girl; I did not have the gift, and I could not help what I was.

Could I help what I did? Harry pointed out so long ago that being and doing might be different things.

Now I am tiny here in this tiny room, whirling in diminishing circles to the absolute moment, the world grows smaller and smaller and my life is a pinpoint of a moment. All my thoughts within twelve hours and my life within an instant.

The notebooks have filled the bottom bureau drawer and have begun to make their way into the middle one. My underwear and toiletries are crammed into small spaces now, making room.

All the blue covers, grey lines, pink margins, and even holes, filled with all the meticulous writing. All the vital letters of my life. And the paper no longer binds the wounds. Blood seeps between the pages, and oozes out the covers.

A
lifetime of thoughts in those twelve hours. All of it was clear, if not comprehensible.

“I’m sorry, Edna,” said the woman’s voice. “But I thought you ought to know.” Explaining everything. “They were kissing. What other explanation could there be?”

My glossy living room. The couch on which I was sitting, the couch on which Harry and I sat together. Where I held his hands and traced his fingers and believed they could do anything. (And they could.)

The chair from which I’d sometimes watched him, still amazed that he was in this room and that I was in this room with him.

All the other rooms now out of sight, my perfect home; except that the vacuum cleaner was still sprawled upstairs waiting, work unfinished. That nagged a little. But not right now. To go back upstairs and flick the switch, restart the motor, look beneath the beds for dust, push carefully into corners, not right now.

Downstairs was finished. After all the years, it was truly finished, the cleanness frozen. No more holding the toaster
over the garbage, dislodging crumbs, and wiping the counter beneath it. Or drawing a cloth across the windowsills, or picking up a cushion to punch it fresh. No more dirty dishes or smudged windows or bits of dust in the corners of shelves. It had not seemed possible to ever finish; but here it was, done now.

The new gold-flecked white wallpaper had my full attention.

The house was airless. Once, Harry shouted at me because we were out of lemonade. He was angry because it was so hot, a heavy, stifling day, and maybe for other reasons, too. He went out and bought an air conditioner. We did not quarrel again because of heat, but the windows had to be kept shut. It disconnected the house from the world, and one might be startled, struck, by walking out the door into a different atmosphere. This was not a different atmosphere, however, but no atmosphere at all; the air sucked out leaving me holding my breath.

Pain, yes, of course. Odd, though: I could tell the pain was there, but could not quite feel it. It left a hole instead of a presence of pain. Quite a different sort of pain from skinning a knee in a fall, or from cutting a finger on paper. A gap of pain. Shocks like lightning behind the eyes, and weightlessness, a whipping away of solidity like a tablecloth from beneath a setting of dishes, so that I might rise and float into the air, away, or crash.

Time like a stop watch: the action halted at the finish. Forty-three years. So busy, time filled or put in, time in which to do things or time by which to have things done, time for home-comings and different little tasks and leavings, time for coffee or for waking up, time passing, time running out, time gone.

Time suspended like the air. Only the gold-flecked white wallpaper timeless and airless to hold onto. If I fixed on it firmly, I might not vanish.

No need to go through it year by year, moment by moment, like a photograph, it could be taken in at a glance. But cruel, a staring into the sun, a blazing on the eyeballs, after keeping the head down for so long. The eyes, unprotected and naked, were easily scorched.

Two phone calls in a day. The second the familiar trusted voice, but tinny, like a poor recording, down the line. No need to move, the arm reaches out on its own accord, no need for the eyes to wander, the arm lifts, flexes, and the ears hear the warm voice that is no part of this. Like those queer moments of seeing from the corner the two of us in bed; or stories I have read of people dying, a watching part moving away, shifting off, looking back with distant disinterest at the heavy shell of body now unrelated. His voice wholly a mystery now, if not the words.

“I’m sorry, Edna,” he is saying from so far away, another life, some other level altogether. “But I’ll make it home at some point.”

“Yes.”

“Is something wrong? You sound funny.”

“No.”

Did he use the pause to tell himself it was all right to be free? That there was no need to pay attention? He must have needed many times to reassure himself, or how could he have kept on with what he did?

“Okay then, if you’re sure. I’m sorry. Tomorrow I’ll definitely make it home for dinner. Listen, you’re sure everything’s all right?”

“Yes.”

Even to me, my voice sounded odd; as if it were coming from outside, no internal resonances.

“I’ll be as early as I can. It’s this damned job.”

“Yes.”

The remote muscles of the arm on their own again, replacing the receiver without a fumble, no need to look. So many things can be done without a glance, it seems; so what need is there for twenty-odd years of vigilance?

The important thing to watch was the gold flecks on that white wallpaper, the light changing on it, afternoon moving into evening, sun from a new direction and fading. If the light went out entirely, there would be no seeing those gold flecks; and if I could not see them I would lose my balance, topple, slide, dissolve. There would be no holding me.

In the grey dimness of late evening, my arm reached out again, thumb moving for the switch on the table lamp and finding it, the light flaring on. It was possible, if still dim, to see the golden flecks; the main outpouring of the light on me now, but enough reflecting across the room to where I needed it.

There was a certain warmth, I could feel, from the light.

I wanted to keep very still, apart from that necessary move. I needed to be careful, because I was precious and fragile like a piece of transparent china, and could easily be tilted out of place and broken.

Sounds changed like the light. They, too, were far away and outside, like my voice. There were bird songs, until it got very dark, and cars on the street. Sedate here in this proper neighbourhood, no peeling rubber or screeching brakes. Lights flashing, reflected from cars or the houses near by. In those other houses people moved from room to room, came home, went to the bathroom, watched television, or trudged
upstairs to bed. Even with the windows closed, I could smell steaks barbecuing in the early evening. All those people doing all those familiar things. Things I might have been doing yesterday. Everything now so changed that each move they might be making, each move I had once made, just yesterday, all of it so ordinary, normal, was now unimaginably exotic. A different world I was in now, and I could see only the reflections of their lights.

Not lonely; remote. This was so far away that to have been lonely would not have been so distant. It would have been a connection of some sort.

All of it gone as if I read or watched it.

I learned to walk, standing only to my mother’s thighs, looking up, up at the lines beneath her chin, the hard setting of the jaw, a throbbing in the neck; a smell about her of clean laundry and hard work. And my father’s sad eyes, and their voices over and across me. Tiny Stella, bland baby eyes closed: my mother and father united once, staring down at her. I was beside them, looking up at them. Had they stood over me that way, together and wondering?