More in Anger (27 page)

Coming in from the garage, Chas had stepped around the stacks of boxes on his way to the fridge. He had cracked a beer, and paused to pat Goldie, lying beside her, and then he had headed back out. The door didn't close properly behind him and it swung open, and she could hear Randy Travis on the portable stereo. “Diggin' Up Bones.” Goldie got up from beside her, stretched, glanced at her, and followed Chas out.

For their last supper she cooked the turkey from the freezer downstairs. She bought cheese buns from the Glamorgan bakery. She steamed green beans, made a Caesar salad with lots of garlic. Got out the one specially labelled bottle of wine left over from their wedding: he might as well drink it. She lit long purple tapers left over from Easter, she put on the Steve Miller Band and called Chas to the table, set with their white wedding china, cloth serviettes and two of their four crystal glasses, water for her, wine for Chas.

The salad was good. The cheese buns were good. But she had overcooked the beans while she was making the gravy, which was lumpy and had to be strained. The turkey had been in the freezer too long and the flavour was odd and the meat such a strange texture neither of them wanted to eat it. Chas opened
the wine, tasted it, grimaced. “Skunky,” he said, and their eyes met. Before he dumped it down the toilet, he proposed a toast. “To the future,” he said.

You're making a mistake,
her mother typed onto plain white paper.
You were lucky to get him and mark my words you'll regret this.

Viv looked out the back door at their garden, at the tomato plants, the bank of sweet peas, the bird bath. At the rows of lettuce and carrots, at the hills of potatoes. So much in a small space. She looked up at the inchworms dangling from the tree, at the spiderweb beside the gate. At Frank's gardening shoes side by side, and at her clogs, askew. Frank. With him she had finally recognized herself; with him she had finally become who she truly was. She had shivered with joy. Her guts had been snakes. Because of him, because of her move eastward, she had been born, finally; she was fully, completely alive. Farther from home than she had ever been, she had found home. She had never realized she had the
capacity
to feel like this.

They were the same height, the same build, the same colouring; their hands and feet were the same size. When they lay together, when they twined and arched, they fit. On long walks by the South Saskatchewan River he talked, they talked, she talked, their thoughts and voices tumbling together. Art. Music. Ideas. Books. Each other. They sat on the couch listening to the CBC. Home. She was home. This was her chance, she knew; her
chance, quite probably her last, to get it right, her last chance to make someone happy instead of miserable. Herself included. Finally, finally she had found the right man, and she became the right woman.

But. How wrong, how terribly wrong, she had been. And how quickly it was revealed. Less than a year. Less than six months before the truth surfaced and did not submerge again. All her faults and flaws had not taken flight. Trouble had not fallen away. No. No. Beneath her delusions of rebirth she was forced to see that she was the same as she had been. As she had always been.

“I don't know how much more of this I can take,” Frank had said again, loudly and firmly.

“Neither do I,” she had retorted hotly. “The problem is perfectly obvious to me, if not you: you just don't love me.”

“How can you believe that? If I didn't love you, why would I put up with all this? Why would I even be
talking
about having a baby with you?”

“I'm sorry. Frank, I'm really sorry.”

“You know what, Viv? You wouldn't know love if it came in wearing a sign.”

And he left the room. Now he wouldn't speak to her for days. He would pass her silently. Wouldn't touch her. Was cold as a ghost if she touched him. As though he didn't feel her at all. As though for him, and therefore the world, she didn't exist. That's how he fought. And she would lie next to him at night sobbing, and he would do nothing. His heart would not soften. “I have to get some sleep,” he said.

This time had been one of the worst, and he probably hated her now and it served her right. He had thrown a cantaloupe; little seeds and fragments of its flesh were stuck to the kitchen wall. She felt sick with self-loathing. What a bitch she was, how wrong she was, when two hours ago she would have wagered her life she was right. How was she supposed to tell? How could she trust herself? Ever? Surely sometimes she was right, wasn't she? Ever? She couldn't tell. Couldn't stand back from herself and see. Why was she like this? She had to live alone, she had sobbed, she had to keep away, she would be better dead than harming if she couldn't stop herself.

She lay down on the living room floor, on the worn maple hardwood beside the empty fireplace. She saw again the hurt and frustration in Frank's face. She saw again Chas's kind face, full of pain and sadness, shaking her hand goodbye. Saw Barry as she kissed him on the cheek and got out of his car for the last time. Cruelty and love, cruelty and love. What was at the heart of it? How sorry she was, how completely sorry for how badly she had treated them yet at the same time she had loved them, each with all her heart. Nothing had been their fault. No. It was her, her and her anger, her very own goddam anger, sliding into and out of her like ugly, strong eels. Wrapped around her ankles, twined round her body. The truth was that she was unchanged. The same cruel words flew from her lips and found their mark.

How wrong she had been. Angry, hateful, hurtful, her goddam mother was there, living, curled up inside her like a snake. Oh God. Was she doomed? Would she
never
be shed of her?

Viv rolled over on her side, felt the hardwood floor unyielding against her hip. How utterly, utterly ridiculous she was. She
had spent her life defending herself, protecting herself, fighting against her mother with everything she had, determined not to become like her. What a fool. She had not inherited black hair or blue eyes the way Ruby and Amy had; she had not inherited a lilting, musical voice like Laurel's. Instead, she had this anger. There was no denying it, no avoiding it, no turning a blinded eye or blaming anyone else. She, she was the source.

April a year later. The garden was still dead, the icy paving stones cold under her bare feet as she ran out to the compost and back. Broken stalks poking through the remaining snow. Spring seemed a long way off. Still plenty of cold and dark to get through first.

Over the winter, a glacier-like moving forward. Not meaning cold, or even slow—but solid, wide, affecting the entire wide terrain of her. A growing awareness that what Frank said was often not what she heard, that she twisted it, warped it, saw only the negative potential in the meaning. That people were generally kind, their intentions good, not suspect.

She had never been more determined to change. She had to change: her life depended on it. And her baby's life. She
had
to change so that she would never do to the child now growing inside her what had been done to her, and the strength of this desire forced her irrevocably forward, grinding earth and sharp stones of regret deep into her.

That September, as labour began, and she and Frank looked out the huge hospital windows at the perfect autumn day, at the
blue sky and blue river, the golds and browns along the banks, the physical memory of that first birth resurfaced in her body and sucked her back in time. This birth. That birth. The red and black pain. Back again. Identical. The fear, too. That baby, this baby. That young woman, the girl she had been; the much different woman she was now. If she could just have five minutes, she remembered thinking. If this possession, this blinding, over-whelming pain could just stop for five minutes so that she could get a grip. But it was like trying to stop swimming in a swift-moving river, and the to her chaotic rhythms of birthing did not stop until she saw the baby emerging from her body, saw the black hair, saw the umbilical cord joining them together.

The doctor wrapped the baby and placed her on her chest. Viv held the baby close, close. She hummed to her as she learned to nurse, kissed her sweet face, her head, her hands, any part of her she could. And felt this joy, this overwhelming joy over the gift of this particular life. She—she!—was a mother. This baby, this girl, her Messiah. A mother, and this baby, Stella, would get the best she could give her.

“You have to take her to see her grandparents,” Frank said. “You can't wait until she's in university.”

“I don't want her to see Mum. I don't want Mum to touch her, contaminate her. I don't want her anywhere near her, I want to keep her safe.”

“She'll have to see her eventually.”

“I don't want her to.”

Through the lighted window, Viv could see her mother sitting in profile at her kitchen table. She reminded her of Miss Emily Grierson in the Faulkner story, though her mother was certainly no icon. Pearl was staring into space, and she was wearing her camel hair coat, and was clearly ready to go out. Viv stood in the shadow of the house and watched through the window for a few moments. Pearl didn't move, and Viv wondered how long she had been sitting there. She wasn't reading; she was just staring at the surface of the table, at the cover of a closed book. She was ossified, perhaps. Or dead. But when Viv knocked on the window, Pearl readily rose to unlock the back door. Viv forced a smile and commented that her hair looked very nice. Pearl said it had been done the day before. Viv then asked her where she was getting her hair done these days. “You don't need to know everything,” Pearl said. “Especially when you are so late. Where's the baby? Where is Stella Louise?”

“I left her at home. Frank is looking after her.”

“I expressly wanted you to bring her!”

“I'm sorry. She couldn't come. She has a cold. Next time. Next time, I'll bring her.”

“What do men know about babies? I won't be able to give her her Christmas present.”

“I'll take her the present for you. And I'll send you a picture. I'm sorry.”

Viv poured them each a Coke, spiked her mother's with rum and carried them into the living room, which seemed particularly dark and empty in spite of the poinsettia Ruby had left on the coffee table. Viv asked where the TV and the console stereo had gone. Pearl, still wearing her coat, took the drink and said that
she didn't require those pieces of furniture anymore, and had sold them. She sat down and gestured that Viv should do the same. “Reading is now my primary extracurricular activity,” Pearl said, sipping her drink, “though perhaps the right phrase is simply ‘curricular.'” Then she asked Viv to put up her outdoor Christmas lights, adding, “I had thought I could mind the baby while you did it, but that clearly isn't about to happen now.” Viv said that she couldn't put up the lights in the dark in heels and a dress. Pearl wasn't pleased with this news, and said, “Surely someone with character could overcome such obstacles if he really wanted to. Where there's a will, there's a way, et cetera. But apparently not in this case.”