Dear Life: Stories (28 page)

I could eat hardly any food when it did come. It was not the food’s fault. Just the oddity of sitting alone, eating alone, the gaping solitude, the unreality.

I had thought to bring sleeping pills, though I hardly ever used them. In fact I’d had them for so long that I wondered if they would work. But they did—I fell asleep and did not waken once, not until nearly six o’clock in the morning.

Some big trucks were already pulling out of their berths at the motel.

I knew where I was, I knew what I had done. And I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. I got dressed and, as soon as I could, got out of the motel. I could barely tolerate the friendly chat of the woman behind the desk. She said that there was snow coming later on. Take care, she told me.

The traffic was already getting heavy on the highway. And then there was an accident which slowed things down further.

I thought of Franklin maybe out looking for me. An accident could happen to him too. We might never see each other again.

I did not think of Gwen except as a person who had got in the way and created absurd problems. Her little stout legs, her foolish hair, her nest of wrinkles. A caricature you might say, somebody you could not blame and should never have taken seriously either.

Then I was home. Our house had not changed. I turned up the drive, and I saw his car. Thank God he was there.

I did notice that the car was not parked in its usual place.

The reason being that another car, Gwen’s car, was in that spot.

I couldn’t take it in. All this way I had thought of her, when I thought of her at all, as a person who would already be set aside, who after the first disturbance could not maintain herself as a character in our lives. I was still full of the relief of being home and his being home, safe. Assurance had spread all over me so that my body was ready, still, to spring out of the car and run to the house. I had even been feeling for my house key, having forgotten what I had done with it.

I wouldn’t have needed it, anyway. Franklin was opening
the door of our house. He did not call out in surprise or relief, not even when I had left the car and was out and going towards him. He just came down the house steps in a measured way, and his words held me off as I reached him. He said, “Wait.”

Wait. Of course. She was there.

“Get back in the car,” he said. “We can’t talk out here, it’s too cold.”

When we were in the car he said, “Life is totally unpredictable.”

His voice was unusually gentle and sad. He didn’t look at me but stared straight ahead at the windshield, at our house.

“No use saying I’m sorry,” he told me.

“You know,” he went on, “it’s not even the person. It’s like a sort of aura. It’s a spell. Well of course it is really the person but it surrounds them and embodies them. Or they embody—I don’t know. Do you understand? It just strikes like an eclipse or something.”

He shook his bent head. All dismay.

He was longing to talk about her, you could see that. But this spiel was surely something that would have made him sick, normally. That was what made me lose hope.

I felt myself getting bitterly cold. I was going to ask him if he had alerted the other party to this transformation. Then I thought that of course he had and she was with us, in the kitchen with the things she polished.

His enchantment was so dreary. It was like anybody else’s. Dreary.

“Don’t talk any more,” I said. “Just don’t talk.”

He turned and looked at me for the first time and spoke without any of that special wondering hush in his voice.

“Christ, I’m kidding,” he said. “I thought you’d catch on. All right. All right. Oh for God’s sake, shut up. Listen.”

For I was howling now with anger and relief.

“All right, I was a little mad at you. I felt like giving you a hard time. What was I supposed to think when I came home and you were just gone? All right, I’m an asshole. Stop. Stop.”

I didn’t want to stop. I knew it was all right now, but it was such a comfort to howl. And I found a fresh grievance.

“What is her car doing here, then?”

“They can’t do anything with it, it’s junk.”

“But why is it here?”

He said it was here because the non-junk parts of it, and that wasn’t much, now belonged to him. Us.

Because he had bought her a car.

“A car? New?”

New enough to run better than what she had.

“The thing is she wants to go to North Bay. She has relatives or something there and that’s where she wants to go when she can get a car fit to take her.”

“She has relatives here. Wherever she lives here. She has three-year-old kids to look after.”

“Well apparently the ones in North Bay would suit her better. I don’t know about any three-year-olds. Maybe she’ll take them along.”

“Did she ask you to buy her a car?”

“She wouldn’t ask for anything.”

“So now,” I said. “Now she’s in our life.”

“She’s in North Bay. Let’s go in the house. I haven’t even got a jacket on.”

On our way I asked if he had told her about his poem. Or maybe read it to her.

He said, “Oh God no, why would I do that?”

The first thing I saw in the kitchen was the sparkle of glass jars. I yanked a chair out and climbed up on it and began putting them away on top of the cupboard.

“Can you help me?” I said, and he handed them up to me.

I wondered—could he have been lying about the poem? Could she have heard it read to her? Or been left to read it by herself?

If so, her response had not been satisfactory. Whose ever could be?

Suppose she said that it was lovely? He would have hated that.

Or she might have wondered out loud how he could get away with what he had got away with. The smut, she might have said. That would have been better, but not as much better as you might think.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry? And not too much or not too little, just enough.

He put his arms around me, lifted me down from the chair.

“We can’t afford rows,” he said.

No indeed. I had forgotten how old we were, forgotten everything. Thinking there was all the time in the world to suffer and complain.

I could see the key now, the one I had put through the slot. It was in a crack between the hairy brown mat and the doorsill.

I would have to be on the lookout for that letter I had written as well.

Supposing I should die before it came? You can think yourself in reasonable shape and then die, just like that. Ought I to leave a note for Franklin to find, just in case?

If a letter comes addressed to you from me, tear it up.

The thing was, he would do what I asked. I wouldn’t, in his place. I would rip it open, no matter what promises had been made.

He’d obey.

What a mix of rage and admiration I could feel, at his being willing to do that. It went back through our whole life together.

The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life
.

W
HEN
I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.

Then a year later a baby girl appeared, and there was another fuss but more subdued than with the first one.

Up until the time of the first baby I had not been aware of ever feeling different from the way my mother said I felt. And up until that time the whole house was full of my mother, of her footsteps her voice her powdery yet ominous smell that inhabited all the rooms even when she wasn’t in them.

Why do I say ominous? I didn’t feel frightened. It wasn’t
that my mother actually told me what I was to feel about things. She was an authority on that without having to question a thing. Not just in the case of a baby brother but in the matter of Red River cereal which was good for me and so I must be fond of it. And in my interpretation of the picture that hung at the foot of my bed, showing Jesus suffering the little children to come unto him. Suffering meant something different in those days, but that was not what we concentrated on. My mother pointed out the little girl half hiding round a corner because she wanted to come to Jesus but was too shy. That was me, my mother said, and I supposed it was though I wouldn’t have figured it out without her telling me and I rather wished it wasn’t so.

The thing I really felt miserable about was Alice in Wonderland huge and trapped in the rabbit hole, but I laughed because my mother seemed delighted.

It was with my brother’s coming, though, and the endless carryings-on about how he was some sort of present for me, that I began to accept how largely my mother’s notions about me might differ from my own.

I suppose all this was making me ready for Sadie when she came to work for us. My mother had shrunk to whatever territory she had with the babies. With her not around so much, I could think about what was true and what wasn’t. I knew enough not to speak about this to anybody.

The most unusual thing about Sadie—though it was not a thing stressed in our house—was that she was a celebrity. Our town had a radio station where she played her guitar and sang the opening welcome song which was her own composition.

“Hello, hello, hello, everybody—”

And half an hour later it was, “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, everybody.” In between she sang songs that were requested, as well as some she picked out herself. The more sophisticated people in town tended to joke about her songs and about the whole station which was said to be the smallest one in Canada. Those people listened to a Toronto station that broadcast popular songs of the day—three little fishes and a momma fishy too—and Jim Hunter hollering out the desperate war news. But people on the farms liked the local station and the kind of songs Sadie sang. Her voice was strong and sad and she sang about loneliness and grief.

Most of the farms in our part of the country had been cleared and settled around a hundred and fifty years ago, and you could look out from almost any farmhouse and see another farmhouse only a few fields away. Yet the songs the farmers wanted were all about lone cowhands, the lure and disappointment of far-off places, the bitter crimes that led to criminals dying with their mothers’ names on their lips, or God’s.

This was what Sadie sang with such sorrow in a full-throated alto, but in her job with us she was full of energy and confidence, happy to talk and mostly to talk about herself. There was usually nobody to talk to but me. Her jobs and my mother’s kept them divided most of the time and somehow I don’t think they would have enjoyed talking
together anyway. My mother was a serious person as I have indicated, one who used to teach school before she taught me. She maybe would have liked Sadie to be somebody she could help, teaching her not to say “youse.” But Sadie did not give much indication that she wanted the help anybody could offer, or to speak in any way that was different from how she had always spoken.

After dinner, which was the noon meal, Sadie and I were alone in the kitchen. My mother took time off for a nap and if she was lucky the babies napped too. When she got up she put on a different sort of dress as if she expected a leisurely afternoon, even though there would certainly be more diapers to change and also some of that unseemly business that I tried never to catch sight of, when the littlest one guzzled at a breast.

My father took a nap too—maybe fifteen minutes on the porch with the
Saturday Evening Post
over his face, before he went back to the barn.

Sadie heated water on the stove and washed the dishes with me helping and the blinds down to keep out the heat. When we were finished she mopped the floor and I dried it, by a method I had invented—skating around and around it on rags. Then we took down the coils of sticky yellow flypaper that had been put up after breakfast and were already heavy with dead or buzzing nearly dead black flies, and hung up the fresh coils which would be full of newly dead ones by suppertime. All this while Sadie was telling me about her life.

I didn’t make easy judgments about ages then. People were either children or grown-ups and I thought her a grown-up. Maybe she was sixteen, maybe eighteen or twenty. Whatever
her age, she announced more than once that she was not in any hurry to get married.

She went to dances every weekend but she went by herself. By herself and for herself, she said.

She told me about the dance halls. There was one in town, off the main street, where the curling rink was in the winter. You paid a dime for a dance, then went up and danced on a platform with people gawking all around, not that she cared. She always liked to pay her own dime, not to be beholden. But sometimes a fellow got to her first. He asked if she wanted to dance and the first thing she said was, Can you? Can you dance? she asked him bluntly. Then he would look at her funny and say yes, meaning why else would he be here? And it would turn out usually that what he meant by dance was shuffling around on two feet with his sweaty big meats of hands grabbing at her. Sometimes she just broke off and left him stranded, danced by herself—which was what she liked to do anyway. She finished up the dance that had been paid for, and if the money-taker objected and tried to make her pay for two when it was only one, she told him that was enough out of him. They could all laugh at her dancing by herself if they liked.

The other dance hall was just out of town on the highway. You paid at the door there and it wasn’t for one dance but the whole night. The place was called the Royal-T. She paid her own way there too. There was generally a better class of dancer, but she did try to get an idea of how they managed before she let them take her out on the floor. They were usually town fellows while the ones at the other place were country. Better on their feet—the town ones—but it was not always the feet you had to look out for. It was where
they wanted to get hold of you. Sometimes she had to read them the riot act and tell them what she would do to them if they didn’t quit it. She let them know she’d come there to dance and paid her own way to do it. Furthermore she knew where to jab them. That would straighten them out. Sometimes they were good dancers and she got to enjoy herself. Then when they played the last dance she bolted for home.