Dancing in the Dark (3 page)

Difficult, however, in a store, where he was impatient, did not care for careful choosing, wanting to be done and on to the next thing. While I, humming to the piped music, dazzled by fluorescent lights and people, crowds, could happily drift among the aisles picking, comparing, discarding, watching.

Harry used to say, “Christ, do we really spend all this on food?” Well yes, we spent a great deal on food. It’s neither inexpensive nor simple to buy for meals that don’t just taste good in the ordinary way, but are also beautiful to look at. Broccoli must be a certain green, and firm, and roasts must have a particular amount of fat marbled through. You have to examine closely to make sure there are no grey edges. You have to squeeze lettuce and hold fruits, heft them, close your eyes to feel the texture of their interior, and even smell them. Some cheeses are for sauces, others for snacks, and for each purpose age, consistency, and colour must be considered. This is a skill, judging the quality of food and its beauty, making plans that foresee its end, how its parts will contrast and blend on the plate and lead properly to dessert. No conflicting colours or tastes. Against all this, price was no consideration. We were not poor, there was no necessity to pick and choose that way. And, in any case, on these shopping days Harry would be off down another aisle, feet tapping, amusing himself by examining content lists on cereals and cookies, always ready to be moving on. I worked my way along with care and what speed was possible. Aware of his impatience. If I was so alert to his impatience, why not to other things? In twenty years, in even a single year, I thought I could feel each of his moods and irritations. And yet missed the vital one. How could that have been?

Home again, on a weekend afternoon, unloading the car, doors hanging open while we did so, waiting while he journeyed
up the stone walk edged with borders of chrysanthemums and shrubs, into our pale yellow house, our pale yellow kitchen, where I put away the things we bought as Harry carried them in.

In daylight, I think, we were both restless, active. But he from an excess of energy, a twitching in the fingers, eager to be doing; I because accustomed to things having to be done, completed, by the time dark came. Difficult to break the compulsions of the week when the week was finished.

But in darkness both of us more placid, more satisfied, things finished, so that we could settle with wine and dinner, an evening reading, watching television, curled together on the couch, which was best, or settled separately to our own amusements, which was not my choice. I did know things, however: from magazines learned that some privacy must be granted, one must not cling. Hard to follow that advice. I would have liked to curl my arms around his neck and hang from it, but did not dare; instead sat watching him; myself reading, or watching television, but still glancing at him often. How were we together? How did he find me and why did he choose me? Oh, I owed him everything. My life, I owed to Harry.

Did he owe me anything? Whatever, he paid.

How remote those days seem now. How wonderful and cherishable eventlessness is. It is most precious, living without drama, with certainty. I remember and it is so far away, detached and foreign, that it is like watching another person’s life, and I am filled with wonder at all that was once possible. I wish I had known and appreciated. I did appreciate, but not enough and not in the proper ways. I would give much, now, for a day, a week, a month, a year, a life, in which nothing of great importance happens. I would know how to relish its safety properly.

What would I do with Harry, if I could have all that again?

No, I did not sew any of our curtains. When we bought that house, I wanted everything to be just right, and so ordered drapes and curtains, men coming to measure and install, hanging them precisely, the exact shades and nuances for each room, bright cheerful yellow for the kitchen, golden for the living room, heavy material shielding rooms from watchers, sheers beneath for filtering out bright light; upstairs in the bedrooms, more matching—blue in the bedroom of Harry and myself, same as the carpet, the walls, a perfect womb. White-shaded lamps on dark wood bedside tables, dark wood bed, dark wood dresser, and all the rest blue. I can see Harry, propped up on the pillows, gold-rimmed glasses slipping on his nose (this in the later years, eyes a little weakened, bifocals required and his anxiety about that, the concern behind the joke: “Oh Edna, you’re married to an old man now”), reading reports from the office, books. He was not one for novels, although I was. He said, “I haven’t time. There’s too much going on that’s real.” He liked biographies of successful men, and business reports. I preferred the gentler fiction. I thought, “I’m sure there’s as much truth, as much that’s real,” but had nothing to compare it with, no way to say if that was accurate. Maybe he was right and my books were false and fairy tales. They did seem hopeful, showed possibilities of happy endings, and maybe it was wrong of me to believe in them.

I am sad and puzzled by things misinterpreted, misunderstood, unseen, and missed.

Because I was so sure. How could I have been so sure, and so wrong? Was I so very wrong? Is it not possible that most of it was true and only one thing not? But if so, could that one thing ever have existed? I do not understand.

Magazines, and I have read so many, plucked from supermarket shelves in check-out lines, insist on the complexity of men. They counsel patience. I was a patient woman, I believe; but now see that that was largely my own nature and had little to do with Harry.

What good is it to know these things now?

I cannot say. But I keep busy, I write on.

Yes, Harry and I shared a bed, double-sized. The sheets were blue, the beautiful intricate quilted family gift, the only beautiful thing that ever came from my parents’ home, spread over them. I cannot think of that.

I feel here as if I do not really exist. The way it used to be on evenings when Harry could not get home (would not get home) and I was alone and watching, maybe, television. I liked my days alone, so much to do. But in the evenings, in the dark, it was different, lonely. It seemed to me abnormal, freakish, to be alone at night—unwanted. It brought back too many fears.

Television, that was some company. Not so much the programs, but the idea that these were people acting. And what was behind it? A strained comic, the father, maybe, of a crippled child? The husband of a faithless wife? These were the things that interested me.

But if I thought of hidden things on television, why not in my home? The drama less apparent. Not obvious at all that this also was not real, and that there were also hidden things.

Here, in this dry place that is not my home, the unreal is what there is. It makes me feel as if I’m floating off somewhere and might float off forever, without this anchor of my body to the chair, my ankles neatly crossed, the notebook precisely in my lap, the pen moving neatly across the pages, following the lines.

This cannot be what is happening. But it is.

I would give anything to go back. To undo and do again. I am blinded by knowing it is not possible. It should be possible. I would be so much better, knowing what I know. I would be perfect. If I were perfect (I thought I was, but now perceive the cracks), would he not be also? And then all of this unnecessary. Unreal, impossible.

I
see my face, my body in the mirror. In the morning, I need merely sit up straight in bed to see me staring back.

And other starings, too. This face is forty-three years old, and there are many more faces than just this one. There is a child, a young girl, an adolescent, and all the ages of the married woman. Each has contributed to the face I see now, much the way you see on TV shows, a police composite of a suspect added to with sheets of plastic, each lined with different features. It builds up that way, the face you get.

I have spent hours looking into mirrors; and yet I don’t know if I would recognize myself, if I met me in the hall or on a street. The way I now see Harry, maybe: fragmented, bits here and there. I know that my nose is slightly too large. My mouth, which I’m sure was once a little fuller, is now pulled somewhat tight. Blue eyes; nothing much to be said for or against them; they’re normal-sized and no extraordinary colour and a normal distance from each other. Nothing is grotesque about me, nothing is unusual, and I suppose that’s the effect I’ve tried for with all the time and money and effort I’ve invested. I wanted to stay young and firm,
I thought, for Harry; but maybe for myself as well? I cared for him the best ways I knew how, and I kept myself trim and attractive. Or not unattractive. Oh, I read the magazines, I knew what was required.

But did I not have my own fear of aging? Was it just to do with Harry? I peered into mirrors and saw the tense tracings of new lines around the eyes, the mouth, and had despairing visions of a loosening throat and saggings.

I fought with exercises every day, stretching muscles and flattening belly, tightening thighs; tap-tapping at my chin with the back of my hand a hundred times a day, fending off extra flesh. I had coffee for breakfast and a small salad for lunch, and shared the dinner I made for Harry. As if I were a race horse, I groomed and trained myself.

When I washed my face, or massaged it with creams and lotions, I did so with upward motions, never down, a consciousness and then a habit of encouraging skin to reach up, not down.

Nor have I done badly. There are those lines and a few grey hairs sprouting amid the brown. I have never weighed more than a hundred and fifteen pounds, and suspect I may be smaller now. I do not have spreading hips or drooping thighs. “Lovely ass,” Harry used to say, passing by and patting me. I could still wear shorts in the summer.

I found my first grey hair before I was thirty, and was a little stunned to see the change beginning. But really, it hasn’t gotten much worse.

My breasts are still quite firm, despite a few small tension marks up where they begin. My belly is a little fleshy, no longer quite flat, but then, I would think that might even be a bit attractive: warm, a small pillow which might seem a place to rest.

There are freckles, but not unsightly, on my arms. On the back of my left arm, above the elbow, there’s a small and harmless mole. If I were found dead on a street with no papers in my purse, they would have trouble, I think, identifying me by marks on the body. They would have to look for dental records, and even there, only some anonymous fillings.

I can see creases in my skin, around my waist, behind my knees, and despite all my efforts, little flesh-drawings around my throat. If I look closely I can examine the pores of my calves from which hairs sprout. They do not, of course, give me the use of a razor, but an aide comes along to shave the hair occasionally. She does it quickly, but doesn’t tear the skin. “My, Mrs. Cormick, you have shapely legs,” she says. She is quite young; no doubt that’s why she sounds surprised.

How old was she? I paid so little attention. Maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven? Not even beautiful. If she were beautiful, or important, I might have noticed, might have seen that she had gifts that I did not. But there seemed nothing remarkable about her.

Was that his taste, then?

I can see a strain about the body and the face in the mirror, but that is understandable.

But shouldn’t there be something more in a face that’s almost forty-four? Should I not at least be able to see it clearly? Where are its powers? I don’t mean lines, anyone can have lines. I mean a sharpness, clarity. There should be something that says, “I have lived forty-three years, I have existed.” The mirror should have something to say.

Instead I feel small and obscure, like a vase, or a photograph on the wall, and my face seems white and infirm, too soft, unnatural, like a kind of cool putty.

There are three lines crossing my forehead, fairly deep ones, no way to ever massage them away; and there are two other deep ones alongside my mouth, one on each side. Around my eyes there’s a little darkness, a brown-grey tinge that makes me look like one of those Arab women who seek that shade for emphasis, or mystery. I feel, peering, like an old watercolour and expect to see cracks like dried paint break across my face.

W
hen I was a little girl, I had a full-length mirror in my bedroom. Evenings, when I was supposed to be in bed, I posed before it; practised walking, prancing, standing hand on hip, tilted backward, mimicking advertisements in my mother’s magazines, those models selling dresses and cosmetics.

“Am I pretty?” I wondered. “How pretty am I?” I couldn’t tell. Even then, I failed to quite see myself.

Strange, because I could certainly tell about others. People on the street, one knew at a glance whether they were pretty or not. My little sister Stella, born three years after me, anyone could see that she was. People said to my parents, “What lovely little girls,” but perhaps they were taking an average? Balancing beautiful Stella against plain Edna and coming up with a comprehensive lovely? How could I tell if this was what was happening?

My hair grew long, my mother cut it short, it grew again, it fluffed and bristled with childhood permanents or hung lank. I had bangs, let them grow out, and had them recut—and at each change I peered into the mirror, wondering at the differences, wondering if they made enough difference. “Am I pretty?”

I suppose not. Surely anyone who is can tell. They can look and see perfect features and know, it must be as obvious as seeing that one is ugly. I was sure that if I were ugly, I would know that, also, at a glance. Therefore, somewhere in the middle: disappointed to be not lovely, but relieved also to be not ugly.

Anything striking about me, then, would have to be manufactured. But that risks garishness and foolishness.

Even now I would like to think these things don’t matter. It would be nice to think that one is assessed for virtues only. But not even the teachers liked the fat boys, and no one wanted to be seen with the girl with the glasses, poor clothes, the dark and greasy cast of skin. Certainly I did not want to be seen with her; one would be afraid of being viewed as her reflection.