When Things Get Back to Normal (9 page)

I'm not up to going anywhere for dinner, so I will sit home and eat my boil-and-serve dinner with the six o'clock news for company.

I took a shower a few minutes ago, and when I tried to turn off the water, the faucet just kept turning uselessly. Panic! Where would I get a plumber close to midnight?

With much chagrin I remembered the times you had told me where the water shut-off valve is located, and
how I had let the information go in one ear and out the other. When would I have need for such knowledge? You would always be on hand to look after things. Ignorance notwithstanding, though, I ran to the basement, and after turning off everything in sight, including the furnace and the electricity, I did luck upon the water valve. It is the last straw! The house goes.

The house is sold! Long live an apartment. I have to be out by the last of November. If I sound glib, it's because it's the only way I can survive. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in a filing cabinet
cum
apartment. I want space to breathe. I want a yard.

I'm angry at you all over again. Why couldn't I have been the one to die? I believe you got the best of the deal.

I dreamed about you last night – a strange dream. We were sitting in the living room of a house you had rented for us. It was a shabby house, and I was angry at you for renting it. As we threw sharp words back and forth across the room, I noticed a hatch in the middle of the floor. My instinct was to run out of the house, but you said we
had to find out what was beneath the hatch. You kicked the boards in, and to our amazement a startled young woman was looking up at us. She looked like Andrew Wyeth's Helga. She didn't appear to be either frightened or delighted – just startled. I stared back at her, equally startled. I had the feeling the woman was me – an earlier me. The dream still disturbs me, yet I can't put my finger on why it should.

I went to a pot luck supper tonight at E. and I.'s house. I had refused several invitations from them during the past months. E. assured me the social would not be couple-oriented, and she convinced me I needed a break from packing our lives into cardboard boxes. After the initial awkwardness of entering the house, I actually forgot I was carrying around a rooted sorrow. I laughed and talked and drank two glasses of wine. Probably I should say, I drank two glasses of wine, then I laughed and talked and forgot I was carrying around a rooted sorrow. It was difficult returning home alone, but I no longer return to a dark house. Now that I am ready to move, I have learned to leave on the lights when I go out.

Dreamed about you again last night. You were going to lift something heavy, and I screamed at you not to do so because it would hurt your heart. I woke up elated. You were
alive. I had prevented you from having a heart attack. I was euphoric. I had hauled you back from the jaws of death. I was given a second chance, and this time I would show you how much you were appreciated. Then reality set in. The low that followed lasted the rest of the night and most of today.

This evening when I was getting my thaw-and-serve supper ready, I heard the squeal of your brakes on the concrete driveway. You had a way of stopping suddenly, as if the garage was always nearer than you thought. I haven't heard your phantom comings and goings for months. Why are they recurring now? Is it on account of selling the house?

Remember that clock radio on your night table? I always said it had no respect for me because it knew I was a technopeasant. Well, today, after about two hours of hit-and-miss setting and resetting of both the time and alarm, and of finally resorting to a thorough reading of the directions, I made it submit to me. I had to find out how to operate it because I'll have to unplug it to move it to my apartment, and then, as per usual, it will go into its blinking act. I feel as buoyant as if I had just exorcised a devil.

I'm putting on a dinner party. I don't know where the energy to do this is going to come from, but I want to (actually,
I feel driven to) have one more gathering before I let the house go. The dinner will be for those special people who helped me so much during the past year. I have tried for many months to muster the courage to do this. Before November 22 of last year, I could have put on a party dinner almost on the spur of the moment; now it is a major undertaking. I have concerns that have nothing to do with preparation of the food, or even with my chronic tiredness. They have to do with seating: who sits in your place at the head of the table? And with mixing the drinks: who will do your job? And most crucial of all, how will I be able to keep the guests from knowing that my wounds will be wide open and bleeding? In a way, this dinner will be a farewell to the house.

The party went well – surprisingly well. I solved the table problem by having fourteen guests, and each end of the table was shared by two people. Besides, we were all so crowded, I don't think anyone was aware of what I had done to accommodate the empty saddle.

I had a bad moment when I was certain I was going to come unravelled. About a half-hour before the guests arrived, when I had everything in readiness, I went upstairs to get dressed. It was a time when you always shunted me out of the kitchen and announced that you would take
over. I got out the dress I was going to wear, but I couldn't manage to pull it over my head. I sat on the edge of the bed and cried desperately lonely tears. Just as panic was settling in around me, the doorbell rang, and there was S. coming to give me a hand. She knows what loss is all about and realized those last moments would be difficult. She made us a pre-party drink, and together we pretended that for me this was any old time and any old party and not a quantum leap into the future.

The guests were a motley group as far as marital status was concerned: a wife whose husband had gone hunting, a husband whose wife was away on university business, a husband and wife, some clergy, single male, single female, etc. Everyone blended and the conversation flowed.

The head of my department served the drinks. Many of the guests offered to help with the clean-up. I refused all offers, but the next time I won't be so apt to turn down such help. It had to be one of the loneliest acts I have ever done – cleaning up by myself at two a.m. No one around to hold post mortems with. No one to say the grasshopper pie was delicious or the molded salad I forgot in the fridge wasn't missed.

The movers are coming tomorrow. Tonight I put the finishing touches on the packing. I feel battered and buffeted.
At this time, more than any other time in my life, I need the shelter of your wing.

Yesterday I took up residence in my new quarters, a.k.a. the filing cabinet. You know what the apartment building reminds me of? That chicken concentration camp we used to pass en route to your mother's house. Hundreds of little square openings for windows, and all those sad little chicken faces poking out through each opening trying to get a breath of air. You used to laugh at me because, every time that building came in sight, I would threaten to let the chickens loose so they could scratch in the earth and do all the things a hen creature has the right to do before ending up baked or broiled.

The kids, plus Ken, your graduate student, were on hand to help with the moving. After the movers left, the children and I wandered through the rooms on the pretence of a final check for left-behind belongings, but actually we were saying goodbye to our port in a storm for eighteen years and to nooks and crannies filled with memories.

Later that evening, when the children went back to their own lives, I sat in my new living room and surveyed my cramped quarters. It was obvious at first glance that my past life was bigger than my present one. I saw the
rug that had to be rolled up on one end to make it fit. I saw the overstuffed chairs lined up side by side as if I were getting ready for a concert. And I saw the mahogany dining room table, pretentious and bulky, squeezed into the area the brochure had called “a dining nook.”

When I had everything in order – perhaps I should say in place, because there is no room for order – I made myself a cup of tea.

I was just about to take my first sup when the tenant in the upstairs apartment turned on his stereo. Full blast! Even my jaws began to vibrate. I remembered the day we took my mother to the nursing home. “So this is it!” she said resignedly. “So this is what it has come to!” I swallowed a mouthful of tea, looked at the trembling light fixture in my make-do dining room and mumbled out loud, “So this is it! So this is what it has come to!”

When darkness fell I began to feel sorry for the house. Did it feel abandoned? Was it wondering why we had left? Where we had gone? What it had done to bring about such desertion? Before I realized the stupidity of what I was doing, I was in the car heading back home.

I never turned on the lights because I didn't want the neighbours to get concerned. I sat on the stairs in the dark, and the house and I tried to comfort each other. We recounted the living that had gone on within its walls over the past eighteen years. We recalled the happy times and the sad times. The times of tribulation. The times of jubilation. The times of tears. The times of laughter.
The times of anger and the times of peace. It took almost an hour to cover the years, but when we were finished we both were ready to call it a night.

I learned a terrible truth while I was sitting on the stairs. A human being is capable of feeling complete sadness but not complete happiness. Happiness is always tinged with sorrow, with if onlys, with awareness that this moment is transient. But sadness is not generous enough to allow in other emotions. Sadness enfolds you like a shroud.

It is one year ago tonight. But last night – Friday – was the more meaningful date.

Ben stayed with me last night, and after he went to bed I turned on
Dallas
, just as I had done last year, but this time I paid scant attention to what was on the screen. My mind was waiting for the knock on the door that would tell me you had been rushed to the hospital. When ten o'clock came and went and there was no knock, I turned off the television and climbed into bed. I wanted to say something to you in this journal to mark the occasion, but the words wouldn't form. I wished I could have wiped out the past year just as the writers of
Dallas
had done. I wished I could have turned all of the happenings into a dream and changed the ending of the
story. I cried long into the night. I cried because I am too young to be a widow and too old to be a lover and too tired to give a damn one way or another.

I visited your grave today and left a rose in the snow. Two recent widows who remembered the date took me to a quiet restaurant for supper. Both women had been through the first anniversary, and each agreed that the first year had lessened their horror and deepened their sorrow and that, according to all reports, it takes two years to get on top of the grief. We talked about you. I admitted that I'm shaping you from the perspective of distance and loss and that, like a painter, I'm selecting my landscape with care, choosing to put on paper only what I find appealing. Maybe later I won't be so selective, and I'll grumble about your penchant for having to be early – and I do mean early, not just on time – for all occasions, and I might even recall how you had to be coaxed to take vacations because you found your work to be more enjoyable than traipsing around Europe. I'll probably also remember the disagreements we had on account of your focus on the present, which conflicted so fiercely with my focus on the future. And I'll recall that you weren't good at handling the household accounts. If I really put my mind to it, I may be able to come up with other shortcomings that were lesser or greater than those just mentioned. But for the time being, I'll remember you the way that suits me best.

Tonight, because I'm in a reflective mood, I reread the
jottings in this journal. I was reminded of my mother's letters – the ones she used to write from the loneliness of her empty house, her children having left the nest and her husband having taken up residence in that mansion of many rooms. You called her letters, “woeful tales from a Newfoundland village.” And I would laugh. Now I feel guilty for us both. She would tell us her days were long but her nights were longer, that her ulcer wouldn't lead nor drive no matter how much baking soda she swallowed, that if the rain didn't soon let up, her vegetable garden would go to stalk, that the wind was so bad the spruce logs left the stove and went up the chimney whole, untouched by flame, and that the sun hadn't shone since the caplin rolled in on the beach in mid-June. But no matter how long she went on in the hens-won't-lay vein, she always felt compelled to end on an upbeat note, and she would write a few last sentences, stowing in the good things that had happened. She had a winning streak at bingo. A neighbour brought her a piece of fresh salmon. Mrs. Bridie's Bride didn't have the cancer after all, it was only a tumour filled with harmless water.

Now, like her, I'm going to stow in a few sentences to let you know that there have been a few streaks of silver in that jet black lining. I want you to know I couldn't have trudged the path without the constancy of friends. Without the help of your friend and colleague, F., who took charge when I was unable to, you wouldn't have had such a graceful and dignified burial. Without the efforts of my
friends, M.L. and A., and the profuse contributions of food from various other friends, there would have been no reception at the house afterwards. And without the many who stayed faithful over the next months, the journey would have been ever so much more difficult.