Dancing in the Dark (9 page)

Maybe they think it doesn’t matter, because it all has to be done again.

I could tell them. I would say, “Look, I kept a house for years and it was spotless.” (But then, obviously it was not quite spotless: some corner missed.) But I could tell them anyway that it doesn’t matter that the dishes will have to be done again and the floors and windows washed again. It doesn’t matter. It must all be done properly, exactly, each and every time. Some pollution, a taint, will get a grip otherwise.

You have to take some care. And you need pride, too, some pride in your work.

I know it doesn’t
look
important. I know there are people who might say I wasted time (twenty years?) and that my work was menial, unskilled, unpaid, excessive.

The jobs themselves were, this is true enough. But the people who might say my work was small, they wouldn’t be seeing beyond to what it added up to: all those little jobs, they were my payment and my expression of my duty and my care. They added up to safety and escape, love and gratitude spoken in a different language, words in shining floors and tidy beds. There is nothing menial or unskilled about that.

And if Harry might not always notice all that was done, he would certainly have noticed if it hadn’t been. Sometimes if we’d been out to dinner at the home of some man he worked with, he’d say things that demonstrated that. “I’ve never seen fresh flowers in that house,” he said. Or “Christ, frozen cake for dessert, that’s really shitty.” Or “Jesus, crap piled all over the place in that house, how can Dave put up with it? Magazines and toys, it would take her two minutes to pick that stuff up. And the glasses weren’t even really clean.”

And then he might say, “Oh, I know she works, she probably gets too tired. I’m glad you don’t have to. I’m glad you’re free.”

Free? Did he say that? A curious kind of freedom, to clean and cook. I don’t suppose he thought it easy, but did he really think it free? But what would I have done with freedom anyway?

I had strict rules, things I did not permit myself. I didn’t let myself say, “I’m tired, let’s just stay home.” I never said, “I think I’ll just let the dishes go tonight,” or “You’ll have to wear the blue shirt, all the rest are in the wash.” I kept on top
of things and was agreeable to suggestions. When he came home he found ease and choices. I did not mean to open up so many choices, though. If he thought me free, did he think he should be also?

That leaf I was watching, it’s just one of a thousand now. Much good it did it, putting up a fight.

One thing to watch; another, the next step in the pursuit of detail, to touch and examine closely. I am not allowed to go outside. So I ask a nurse, “Will you bring me a leaf? Next time you’re coming in, could you pick one up for me?” She is startled, because I hardly ever speak.

I am amazed and touched that she remembers.

If I had chosen, it would have been a vivid leaf, still orange or yellow. This one is already mainly brown and beginning to crinkle. I see that the nurse’s caring, like everything else, is imperfect. It would have taken such a small effort, an extra step, to find a beauty for me.

Still, it’s something. This is not my own life any more, and I don’t get to choose.

Ah, but it falls apart so quickly. I stroke its veins and crumbling bits fall off. I touch its dryness and it disintegrates. Small pieces, turning into dust. The cleaning woman vacuums but does not get all the dust, and it digs more deeply into the floor, grinding in.

If a leaf, perhaps a flower? (Is it necessary to want more and more, to go further and further?) I ask the nurse and she’s a bit annoyed, I see a quick frown and I can hear her think, “What next?” Again a care with limits, imperfections.

I would like to see colour and grace. She brings two late roses, thorns snipped off (to prevent accidental pain, or because she thinks I might deliberately hurt myself?). They are full and pale and pink and wilting at the edges. “I’m sorry
they’re past their best,” she says. “But I thought you might as well have them. They’re from the border around the front.” There are flowers here? I must have passed them coming in, but I didn’t see. It must be a long time ago.

The leaves on the rose stems are bright harsh green, the petals soft and smooth and slinky. The stems themselves are tough and wounded, scarred where the thorns have been snipped away. The flowers are dying.

One by one the petals drop off and the water in the glass in which the nurse has put the roses turns musky. Each petal is velvet. Each drops to the floor.

In the end there are just ragged brown stumps on limp stems. The cleaning woman says, “Look, these are dead now,” and puts them in the garbage, pouring the dregs of the water down the sink. I hear a tap turned on and water running, flushing it all away. “Such a mess, all these bits and pieces,” she complains, stooping to retrieve the dead petals and leaves from the floor.

Was I ever impatient with my work? Sometimes, it’s true, I didn’t feel like doing it. But I always did it. Putting it off might well become a degenerating process; like having a solitary drink in the afternoon, it might turn into something huge. Alcoholism; or sloth. It only takes one slip.

“Doesn’t anything make you angry?” Harry asked me sometimes. Puzzled because his own temper was quick. It was also, though, swift to finish.

“Why be angry?” I asked him. “What’s there to be angry at?”

His anger came and flared and was gone. Mine, I think, if I had felt it, would have been quite real and deep. And maybe like the drink in the afternoon or the job deferred. I chose, instead, floors and windows.

I could say to Harry again now, “What is there to be angry at? What is worth anger?”

I can’t even summon anger that so many things, leaves and flowers, are disappearing, and that there’s nothing I can do to stop or change it. I would like to, but I am not angry at the impossibility. I am, however, a little sad.

F
or weeks after we were married, I woke in the mornings and turned to watch Harry sleeping and, remembering with wonder, thought, “I’m married.” It remained a miracle, and a mystery how I could have landed safely here in this soft bed.

It was not only a miracle, but a conclusion. I’d longed for the normal, the ordinary, and now here was my life, normal and ordinary. No more freakish standing aside, watching the others with their secret. I’d found the man, or been found, which was how things ought to be; and we were married, which was how things ought to be; and now I could go about performing this life the way it was supposed to be performed. It was like having the pattern of a dress to sew, merely a matter of taking something already laid out and cutting and stitching it properly, following the lines.

Being here is something like that, although it lacks the joy. It is also mainly a matter of certain things having to be done. There is a time for this, another time for that, they come and tell me just which time it is, and I do the thing, no need for decision. It has its virtues, being here.

But then there is missing, of course, the purpose. No one coming home to be the point of it.

Odd, not to weep for the loss of joy and purpose. I’ve cried at the oddest, most remote things and yet for Harry I haven’t yet managed a proper tear.

Buckets of them in the movies of my tender-hearted childhood: for a mistreated horse, or the reunion of a boy and his lost dog. Later, a tug of moisture for a tender story in a magazine; and television shows have a way of twisting little wrinkles into the ending of even a comedy. I have found, in my evenings alone before the television set, a tear springing to the eye, trailing down a cheek.

Now is when I should be weeping. And now the ducts are dry, frozen, blocked.

“I can see you as a mother,” he said to me once. “You’d be a good one.” And that’s another thing I’ve never wept for.

Because other things as well are dry, frozen, blocked.

We were married a couple of years, Harry was doing well, and we were settled in our house. I felt suited to this life in which certain things were done; I liked the view from the inside looking out.

“I think,” he said one night, “it might be time to throw away the safes.” Looked at me questioningly. “What do you think?”

Well yes, it might be time to move on to the next thing. This was part of it, of course.

“A boy, I think,” he was grinning. “I’d like to order a boy first, if you don’t mind.”

A baby is what I would have liked. Just a baby. We would walk out in the sunshine, up the street and back, baby in carriage, stroller, bundled up. People would say, “Isn’t he sweet?” or she, and I would smile.

To have Harry and a baby, that would be everything.

Oh, diapers too, and strange smells in the house and waking in the night. Harder, more demanding work. But to hold a baby. To be depended on for life. To actually make something out of myself.

A baby I could hold for hours; as long as I wanted, we could be close. I really hadn’t seen it clearly and perfectly before, but now that it could be true, there was a great longing to hold. My arms, which had seemed full of Harry, suddenly felt too light and empty, missing a weight like an amputation.

Is it odd to be so capable of instant longings?

“First thing,” and he grinned again, “we’ll go out this weekend and buy a rocking chair.”

Then “No, the first thing to do is throw out the safes.” He took my hand and we walked, laughing, upstairs and he took the little package from the drawer of the bedside table, looked inside. “Two left. Too bad to waste them.” He pulled one out, unrolled it, handed it to me. “Here, blow it up. Like a balloon.” He kept the other one himself.

They were like balloons; except a different, heavier, slipperier texture. Almost obscene; like the night after a party when Harry’d had too much to drink and when we came home, he wanted me to put my mouth on him. “Just kiss it,” he urged, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. This was something like that, but at least it was possible. And Harry thought it was fun, was gleefully blowing up his safe and knotting it, pinging it heavily into the air and taking mine and knotting it so that there were two of the overweight greased balloons tossing around our bedroom like fat nasty imps. Still, it was funny. We poked them, mid-air, at each other. We laughed and poked them down the stairs and into the kitchen. We
laughed and Harry went to a drawer and picked out a safety pin, and then he grabbed both balloon-safes from the air and handed one, mock-solemn now, to me.

“To the freedom of the sperm,” he said, and pricked a hole in the safe I held. “Long live all our babies,” and pricked a hole in his.

“We should give them,” he said, “a suitable burial,” and dropped the limp deflated things into the trash.

And now indeed the sperm were free to float around my body, searching its crannies for the missing part, my contribution to all this. In bed there was an extra straining, a willing for the meeting of the parts. Our minds were not wholly on each other.

As if our child, already existing, was present and waiting for us to be done, to see if he could step out from behind the curtains and announce himself.

But always the result was blood.

We were disappointed every month. “Well?” Harry would ask. We marked the dates on the kitchen calendar, but cryptically, so no one else would know, should anyone, wandering through the kitchen, have noticed. “I’m sorry,” I always had to say.

Harry, the impatient one, would only wait six months. “Something should have happened by now,” he said. “I’m going to the doctor.”

He was so brave, I thought, willing to confront some failure of his body.

Or maybe he could not really imagine that the failure might be his body.

I was not brave when it was my turn. “The doctor says my sperm count’s fine. You don’t have to go, Edna, it’s up to you. But maybe something can be done.”

But nothing. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cormick,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry, Harry,” I said.

Not fair, to have the blood but not the babies.

“It’s all right, Edna,” Harry said, but he couldn’t help that flash of mourning when I told him. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault, for God’s sake. We can always adopt if we want to. Let’s wait and see.

“It’s not a tragedy, really. We still have us.”

There are no small white darts of stretch marks on my firm body. I look at it, and it’s all one piece; has never split, like a cell or an amoeba, into more than itself. And I wonder what is flawed beneath the smooth flesh, where is the piece that is cramped, distorted, and unlinked?

“At least we know,” he said.

At least in bed there were just the two of us again, no one else waiting to appear. Something was lost, the extra effort, but something gained as well, knowing there was just us. It was even more important than before to pay attention.

Maybe if I’d had a child and then it had not lived, I could have wept. It’s different, not having something you’ve never had. I just felt—chilly—for a little while. A bit disconnected. When I met women on the street pushing their babies in carriages and strollers I looked and said, “How sweet,” but I didn’t really want to touch or hold them. With my own, it would have been different. But my own were locked away.

I see them playing and bouncing around together somewhere inside me, or venturing to whatever the obstacle is and peering beyond and wondering how it would be on the other side. A little longing among them. But like Harry now, they are not whole. They are missing parts of themselves.

Mainly I thought of Harry and his disappointment. His disappointment would be not only for not having a child, but with me as well. For all my efforts, all my work and watching, all my listening hours—I could not be perfect.

We rarely mentioned it, and never again spoke about adoption. I think Harry wanted his own reproduction, not someone else’s.

Once he said, “Well, it probably turned out for the best. It would have been quite different with children.” (He saw children; I a child.) “We wouldn’t have been able to have what we have.” By this I do not think he meant a colour television or an expensive stereo or a brand-new car. I think he meant he would not have had my full attention. He got used to that, and mainly liked it. He would not have liked, I think, to have had to share my attention very often.