Real Life (7 page)

“Can’t sleep?” she asked.

“I’m having trouble these days,” Janice admitted. Beth could see the dark smudges under her daughter’s eyes and a tight sheen to her cheeks that made her suspect she had been crying. “You’re not sleeping either?” Janice asked Beth.

“I think it was
American Beauty,”
Beth answered ruefully. In the late afternoon they’d passed the mall’s movie theatres and, their feet and legs aching, and in unspoken agreement of their disinclination to return to Janice’s desolate apartment, they’d bought tickets and gone in. “What an ending.”

“I think in real life he’d have been more likely to shoot himself,” Janice said in a thoughtful tone.

“I hated the way the Annette Bening character was treated,” Beth said. “Like all the ills of Amercan society are the fault of women. She was the only character you never got to empathize with.” Beth had sat down on the chintz-covered armchair next to the bed. At its foot she could see the square indentation in the rug of a missing bedtable. Janice set her book down on the white eyelet quilt and pushed her pillows up against the headboard, pulling herself to a sitting position. She was wearing a blue T-shirt with a faded, unreadable message across her small breasts and Beth’s heart gave a little lurch, so that she looked away, quickly, before Janice noticed.

“I think I’ll make myself a cup of tea. Want one?” Janice asked.

“I’ll do it,” Beth said, but neither of them moved. They sat on in drowsy silence, each thinking her own thoughts. Outside, in the city, there was only a deep, lulling hush, as if in all the world only they two were awake.

“When I was married to Duncan,” Beth said, conscious of the way that Janice was suddenly perfectly still, listening with her whole body, “I used to do the public health flu shots in some of the rural communities around the farm. One time I had to go to the farthest-away, most-isolated hamlet in the whole area. The nurse who usually did that community was sick, so they sent me. I was supposed to be finished by five and home by seven, but it was winter and a storm came up and I couldn’t leave.” She was staring at the rug and, without noticing she was doing it, she pulled her dressing gown more tightly across her chest. “So an older woman who’d been helping me—she wasn’t a nurse, she was making coffee for the people who came in for shots, and showing them where to sit, and if
they were really old, making sure they were okay before she let them leave—she said I’d better stay overnight at her house.” She turned her head to Janice, explaining, “The village was so small there wasn’t a hotel or a motel and the blizzard was blowing so hard you couldn’t see across the street. And there were snowbanks everywhere, it was getting dark—” She stopped and drew in a long breath through her nostrils, mouth closed, and went back to fingering her dressing gown, her eyes returning to the rug.

“Mom—” Janice began.

“And so I went to her house. It was a small, old frame house, but very neat and well kept. We went into the living room. It was an ordinary room, hand-crocheted afghans covering the sofa and chairs, lace doilies on the coffee table. A little worn, maybe, but very clean. Her husband was reading a book in an easy chair, in the lamplight. She introduced me to him. He was a nice-looking man, maybe in his sixties, he said hello, but he didn’t get up. We two women cooked supper together and the three of us ate. Then we all went back to the living room and sat down. I remember we didn’t put the television on until it was time for the news. We just sat there and tried to make conversation. As soon as the news was over I went to bed. I didn’t sleep much. In the morning the storm was over and I went home …” In the pause she could feel the intensity of Janice’s listening. “A couple of weeks later Duncan and I were eating breakfast and the radio was on and the announcer said that there’d been a murder-suicide in—in that little village where I’d stayed overnight. And Duncan said, teasing me, ‘You were there a whole day. Who was it?’ And I said—I named that couple I’d stayed with. I was just half joking, you know?” She turned to Janice. “But staying there had been—awful—just awful, the woman was so afraid of the man, she hardly dared
to speak to him, and when she did he wouldn’t look at her, but he’d cut her off. And she’d get this little rim of sweat around her hairline—”

“Mom—” Janice began again.

“Just these little beads of sweat,” Beth said, touching her own temple. “And it turned out it was them. He’d shot her and then, I guess when he realized what he’d done, he killed himself.” Janice gasped.

“How horrible!” She hesitated. “But how weird that you should have been there.”

“I can’t explain that,” Beth said in a serious voice, as if Janice had expected an explanation. “I often think of it, although I’ve never been back to that village. Not once.” Tears had crept into her eyes and now they spilled down her cheeks. “I never told Hugh that—I mean, that I was there—or anybody else that I can remember,” she said. “I don’t know why not.”

Janice spoke carefully, as if she were afraid that this was a question her mother might not like. “How long was it after that before you and Duncan split up?”

“What? Oh—” Beth thought. “It was the same year. That was in the late fall and I left the farm this time of year, after Christmas.” Realizing why Janice had asked this, Beth turned quickly to her. “I was never in danger of being shot by Duncan. I certainly never thought that I was.”

“Still,” Janice said, “he did you serious damage, I think.”

“It wasn’t all his fault,” Beth said. “I thought when we got married that I didn’t have to be a person any more, or else that he’d show me how, or something. He had such … charisma, such fearlessness. Things I didn’t have myself and didn’t know how to get. I mean, I gave myself over to him. I gave him my whole life, I kept nothing back. And that was stupid and wrong. It took me a long time to figure that out.”

“If he mistreated you, how can it be your fault?” Janice
asked, the hint of exasperation returning to her voice, so that Beth knew that Janice hadn’t understood, or didn’t want to understand what Beth had just told her. “You weren’t cheating on him or mistreating him in any way, I’m sure. I know you, Mom. You’d never do anything like that. So if he mistreated you, it wasn’t your fault.” But then, Beth thought, if after so many years of struggling, I finally understand that myself, I also know that understanding isn’t enough, that there has to be more for me to figure out about how I was then. And the dark forest of her dream returned to her, so that she put her hand against her eyes and then put it down again.

“He
was
often very cruel,” she said calmly, as if they were still discussing the movie. “He would berate me, and I would apologize—for things I hadn’t done, that I knew I hadn’t done, or that I knew he’d done, not me—just to get peace. Just to get us back together again. I’d say to myself, How important is this quarrel, anyway? Did I want to end up divorced? To have to be without him,” she said, turning to Janice, seeing the wonder in her eyes as she stared back at her mother, “was unthinkable to me. Beyond unthinkable. And so I’d abase myself for what I thought was the sake of our marriage.” She laughed. “And wound up divorced anyway.”

“My God,” Janice said.

“I was—foolish?” Beth said, frowning, leaning forward in her chair as if she meant to rise. “Or—something,” she said finally It seemed to her that she’d said too much, gone too far with her own daughter, that this kind of thing was better said to priests or psychiatrists. Not that she ever had.

Janice said, “I’ve got an empty spot where Gerry was”—she touched her chest with clasped hands—”and it’s very painful. But it sounds to me like he hollowed you right out. No wonder you can’t get over it.”

Beth wanted to protest that she was over it, had been over it
for years; her life was what it was and she would continue to carry her own history quietly, as she had been doing all this time. But when she looked over to her small, dark-haired daughter, appearing now so much like a sleepy child in the toolarge, rumpled bed, she felt only shame that she was so little comfort to her. Surely she knew something; surely she had something to tell her. A truck moaned by, on a street far off from their building, and Beth stirred and sat forward again, conscious of the passage of time, that she had to hurry. The words were coming to her now.

“Soon you will begin to fill that emptiness with friendships,” she said. She’d begun thoughtfully, but her voice began to take on clarity, grew a little louder and more firm. “In a couple of years you’ll be married again, time will pass and you’ll remember Gerry only once in a long while, if you do at all, because you’ll have small children to look after, and a house you and your new husband are filling with things you like, that you choose together. Maybe you’ll be back at work, part-time at least, and your life will be full and rich. Gerry will become merely a tiny part of all that richness. There will be no emptiness at all any more.”

Janice said nothing, her dark eyes fixed on her mother, filled with wonder, perhaps with a tinge of hope. Beth’s voice hung on, scintillating on the thick and still air as if she had spoken from some other world than this small bedroom in this half-emptied apartment in the middle of a city Beth had long ago, for a few lonely years, called home.

On the long bus ride back in the rapidly descending winter twilight Beth remembered her dream about the forest and the man following her. She thought about Duncan and a longing to put away that part of her life forever overcame her and she almost wept, not just for herself, but for Janice and for what
seemed to her now the sadness of human life. The bus carried only a few passengers and as the twilight turned to darkness everyone seemed to be drowsing, their heads and shoulders swaying with the bus’s hypnotic motion.

Beth’s dream began to seem real, perhaps by now she was asleep, and she was back in the forest, the thick-trunked, heavy-limbed black trees towering over her, enclosing her, as she moved slowly, searching for a way out. Ahead, glimpsed between foliage-covered branches, she saw a glimmer that she felt sure was a flicker of sunlight shining on a grassy meadow.

She hurried forward, but as she drew nearer to the patch of light, she began to see that instead of a ray reflected from a green, flower-dotted meadow, it came from a wall: tall, solid, impenetrable, extending both directions in the shadowed depths of the forest. She saw that she could not climb over it, that there was no door through it, nor could she go around. For a long time she crouched, trembling, below it, sweat dampening her body, her heart full of terror and longing. Finally, she looked back the way she had come, and beyond that, into the darkest part of the forest, into the trackless wilderness where she had never been. She saw it was a place she had no choice but at last, alone and resolutely, to go.

        This is perhaps not a story to tell, she thinks. Then, no, this is perhaps the
only
story to tell. It’s the story of how she was raped, when she was maybe thirty-one or thirty-two, and how all the bad things that ran wordlessly through her culture about herself and about women as a species flooded over her and she blamed herself and was ashamed and never told anybody till she felt securely beyond her youth.

Not that it helped. By then she had gone too far for rage, too far for thoughts of beatings, castration, murder, or a life lived without men. What she thinks, increasingly, glumly, since that first telling of it, is there was nothing she could have done about it then, and there’s still nothing she can do about it. In fact, she’s just grateful he didn’t break any bones, subduing her easily with his weight and implacability, so that she acquiesced as the only way to avoid being hurt. Nor did he force her to any act of extreme perversion that would have haunted her dreams for the rest of her life. Even her children weren’t in the house, but away, visiting their grandparents. Yes, she thinks, I was very lucky.

Not that she doesn’t see the irony of her conclusion. As far as she knows, she was the only one he followed home that night,
she was the only one he raped. But for years she didn’t even call it rape. She didn’t call it anything, she didn’t even think about it. One night she was sitting talking about a mutual friend with a man she’d just met that day, when she heard herself say calmly, conversationally, “That was the night I was raped.”

Since then she’s been thinking about it a lot, going over all the details one by one, as far as she can remember, since it happened twenty-five years before. Stop that, she tells herself. If you doubt each detail as you remember it, you’ll soon doubt that you were raped at all. And she remembers the ugly muscles of his upper arms and the way he pushed her, relentlessly, inexorably, till he was inside the house, then in the bedroom, then lying on the bed on top of her.

She doesn’t understand why she didn’t feel like the woman she’d seen in a television movie who’d been raped and who went a little crazy afterward, took a dozen baths and was afraid to go out at all and then set up a trap for the man, inviting him over, planning to say, “Come in,” when he knocked on her door, and then to blast him with a shotgun. And there were other stories too, in magazines and on radio and television, about women reacting to rape. She’d found them all excessive and self-aggrandizing, reactions of women who couldn’t have been too stable to begin with, who clearly harboured some very bad notions about themselves as sexual beings. For years that was what she thought.

But the older she gets, clutching her secret to herself, the less sure she is that those women were wrong, and that her reaction—to keep silent, not to think about it, to count herself lucky among those who’d been raped—is perhaps the less rational approach after all, and that maybe
she
is the one who values herself too little, who suffers from an absence of self-esteem and a badly developed sexuality. They’d been outraged at their violation; she hadn’t even been surprised. She’d resisted
till she saw resistance was useless, then she’d gone limp till he was done. All those years, whenever it popped into her mind, she’d quickly thought of how she was lucky compared to being a concubine or being forced to commit suttee or being a tribal slave. Even now, when she’s learned to value herself quite a lot, she’s still not outraged and isn’t sure why not.