First Things First, page 11
As we approach, one of the women backs away from the group and exclaims, “Why, Natalie, I didn’t see you in church. And is this your little Sylvia? My goodness, how she’s grown! Dorothy, come and look at little Sylvia,” she calls to one of the other women, as if I’m not really there or can’t hear what she’s saying. The other women draw more closely around my mother, delighted with her blue city suit and dyed-to-match peau de soie pumps. I feel proud of her.
I can see Betty and Colleen alone on the steps now, the minister circulating through the yard. Betty is gazing around vacantly while Colleen peers up at the bleached sky as if watching for rain or geese. Her black sateen dress is gathered in tight at the waist under a glossy red sash and a white paper rose. Her yellow hair is piled in uneven bunches at the back of her head. My own dark hair is curly and short because my mother doesn’t believe in long hair on children. I feel clean and neat.
Colleen sees me watching her as they come single-file down the steps.
My mother moves away from the women and says, “There’s poor Betty. We must go and give our condolences, Sylvia.” Betty and Colleen stop, as if they’re waiting for us.
“Oh, poor Betty dear, I’m so sorry,” my mother croons, pressing one cheek up against Betty’s. I wonder how long it will be before she dares take out her handkerchief and wipe the dirt away. “Your father was such a good man, Betty, so kind, we all loved him. His death is a blow to us all.” No matter what happens, my mother always knows what to say.
“But Betty dear, we really must be going now,” my mother says cheerfully. “Roy’s waiting in the car. We’ll drop by the farm before we head home. Will that be all right? I’ve brought you some things, a carrot cake and some bread-and-butter pickles. I’ll see you then, dear.” Betty sniffs and nods vaguely. Colleen ignores us both.
Before my mother can get to the gate, another group of women—younger relatives this time, some holding prune-faced babies and all of them smiling—has surrounded her.
“Natalie, how are you?”
“Natalie, what a lovely suit!”
“Natalie, your hair, I love the colour! I wish George would let me . . .”
I start back to the car alone.
“Hi, Sylvia.” It’s Colleen, and her voice is an unmistakable challenge. She never did like me. I just knew it.
She stands on the gravel walkway and puts both hands on her hips. Her hair is coming loose, hanging down her back in loops.
I am very polite. “Hello, Colleen. How are you?” My mother would have been proud of me.
“How’s yourself?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Well, I’m here for the funeral—just like everybody else.” But I know that’s not quite what she means.
“He was my grandfather, you know,” she says, jutting out her chin. This is some kind of accusation or dare.
Before I can think of an answer, she tells me, “He lived with us for years and years, you know, all my life. Every morning he sat across the table from me, eating porridge ’cause he had no teeth, just gums. They were always bleeding. He said he didn’t need teeth. I have pictures of him when he was young—lots—in my collection. I always knew he would die.”
Frightened by her outburst, I have no idea why she’s telling me all this—she doesn’t even like me. I suddenly hate my pink dress. It should have been black. Why didn’t my mother tell me funerals only come in black?
“Did you cry in there?”
I shake my head. No, I didn’t cry. I wasn’t even listening.
My mother calls to me from the car. “Come on, Sylvia. Hurry up or we’ll lose our place in line.”
I start towards her but then I stop to dig for a nickel I think I see half-buried in the sand below the gate. I sift my fingers through dust, dead grass, and little stones. My mother calls again and I reach up to brush off the dirt. There was no nickel anyway. In circles I rub the sand in. The dust drifts brown down the front of my dress.
When I get to the car, I can see Colleen behind me, swinging on the gate.
NOTES FOR
A TRAVELOGUE
(1978)
It’s raining the morning we pull out of town. We stop at the grocery store to buy juice and fruit for the first day of our trip. The usual Saturday shoppers haven’t been put off by the weather. Husbands shrug their jackets up over their heads and run recklessly towards their cars, aiming themselves with keys held outstretched in one hand. Mothers scoop up their babies like footballs and jog across the street to the cars which are now ready for them, doors open, motors running.
We drive all day, passing through the rain and out into the sunshine. Actually, my husband Grant does the driving and I do the passengering. At first I feel guilty about not even offering to take a turn at the wheel, but what’s the point? It’s his car and he never lets me drive it far anyway. Just as well. Whenever I’m behind the wheel and he’s there beside me, the car sputters ominously, convulses, jerks, stalls. My feet get tangled in the floor mat. Grant just sighs and sweats.
We’ve never had a holiday together before, even though we’ve been married for nearly two years now. Grant usually goes off alone while I stay behind, patient, understanding, watching for postcards and drawing red and blue felt-pen lines on the map he leaves me. He once admitted that he likes to think of me alone in the house with nothing to do but wait for him to come back home. I didn’t contradict him. We have no children.
Some people have a baby to try and keep their marriage together. Other people buy a new house, build a rumpus room in the basement, put blue wallpaper up in the bathroom, buy a pair of his and hers snowmobiles. We’re going on a week’s holiday together.
The landscape we pass through is all new to me and I discover that cactus and rattlesnakes do grow in this country after all. Some teacher years ago in public school told me it could never happen here. My husband smiles at me in smug congratulation—I’ve finally figured out what he, of course, has known for years.
Once it gets dark, we pull into the first campground we come to, breaking away from the hypnotic bracelet of bright tourist towns strung up and down both sides of the highway. The place feels large and vacant as we pitch our tiny tent in the dark. Waving the flashlight around and shivering, I know I’m not being much help, but if Grant is annoyed, at least he doesn’t say anything. Maybe I’m being too hard on him.
Morning reveals a white Winnebago squatting just down the way, fat with sleeping strangers. There seems to be ten or twelve of them, with interchangeable heads, emerging one by one in various states of half-dress. The children race down to the lake in a pack while the adults put the coffee on. Then they holler blindly back and forth at each other through the tree cover—warnings, discoveries, the breakfast menu. While I’m waiting my turn in the fibreglass outhouse, a white poodle licks amiably at my ankles. Grant pumps up the Coleman stove and breaks eggs seriously into a metal bowl.
We continue driving west. Fruit stands sprout up lopsided on both sides of the highway. The lakes here are slender and smooth, like legs, and the hills are lumpy, in multiple shades of burnt-out brown.
Grant would drive all day without stopping, I think, even though we began this trip determined to take our time, dispense with schedules (I didn’t even bring my wristwatch) and dabble in the countryside as we went along. When I ask though, we can stop for photographs, lunch, a Coke, a toilet. While he waits for me, Grant kicks all four tires to check the pressure and picks dead bugs off the headlights.
For the last fifty miles there are cars on all sides of us, gathering us up, willing or not, into their desperate push onward, forward, ever forward, lemmings to the sea. The line of cars, four abreast in the rain, is like a train, unable to travel anywhere but on this track on which it’s been set down.
We take the early evening ferry across the strait. The vibrating drone of the engines overpowers the motion of the water below us. I, who have never been on a ferry before, marvel at the seasoned sea commuters who space themselves courteously along the olive green benches, sip coffee, read the paper, play solitaire and hearts as if nothing is happening. Their kids and their cars are all waiting faithfully on the far shore. The boat pulls its way through the black water and I stand out on the deck till I’m soaked. This amuses Grant who hugs me pleasantly and leads me back inside.
We set up our camp that night in the middle of a twilight cedar forest. Grant scrounges around for dry wood and manages to build a respectable fire. We drag two stumps up as close to the flames as we can bear. Through the smell of smoking cedar, Grant with shining eyes says, “I don’t know what it is about campfires, but they sure are hard to take sometimes.”
No matter what happens next, we will always have this. No matter what I do, my husband, it seems, won’t quite assume the villain’s role the way I think he should.
We spend the next day exploring the forest, after discovering that all the edges of the ocean are owned now, and cannot be reached by the uninitiated. We cannot get down to the sea and content ourselves instead with admiring the rotund trees, moss dangling like green sleeves from their branches. The trees at home are skinny and vicious—they creak and come down in the wind, smashing windows, high wires and car roofs.
It’s October and there’s nobody else around. The spongy ground is quilted with maple leaves. It’s hard to tell when the rain has stopped because the trees still spit down water like bird droppings when we brush accidentally up against them. We hold hands without thinking.
I’ve never spent seven straight days and nights with my husband before and I’m not sure yet that I like it much. Here there aren’t the normal spaces furnished by his going off to work every day, by my going out to the grocery store or for a Sunday afternoon stroll with my friends and their babies, by my getting into the bathtub before bed and lolling around till I’m all wrinkled, all relaxed. Here there’s no routine, here we have nothing to go on.
I don’t think Grant wants to get rid of me exactly, but I sense him expecting something from me, a suggestion, a decision, a show of independence.
I guess I’m supposed to say,
“Come back for me in an hour or two, I’m just going to jaunt up this little mountain here.”
Or,
“Come back for me in a year or two, I’m just going to fly up to Baffin Island and find myself.”
But even when we go into town (Blue Hills, it’s called) to pick up more eggs, some back bacon, milk, a green pepper, I trail around the grocery store behind him, afraid somehow of letting him out of my sight. Afraid for him or afraid for me? I don’t know. If I told him this fear, he would say,
“Sharon, you’re neurotic.”
And I would say,
“No, I’m not, I’m not, I am not neurotic.”
And he would say,
“Now you’re getting hysterical.”
My husband thinks I’m always on the verge of something—hysteria, neurosis, tears, breaking down. He calls me “the wife” when he thinks I’m not listening.
Late the next evening, we take a drive through the town of Blue Hills, sucking on the ice cream cones we waited in line to get and speculating about the lives of the strangers we see framed by their yellow-lit windows, caught in suspended animation with the curtains still open as we cruise through the rain like spies.
The main street of Blue Hills has all the shops and businesses down the west side, the strait on the east. Ragged wooden docks poke into the water like tongues. There are lights further out, another island. I think I see two people on the very end of the longest dock, dangling their feet in the water, but then again they may be only shadows.
I’m convinced that our extended silence is the comfortable kind common to marriage until Grant says,
“This isn’t working out. Let’s head for home in the morning.”
This is something I already know, but not something I want to hear. I have to agree with him though.
We decide to spend our last night in the only motel in Blue Hills—it is, in fact, named “The Only Motel” in blue and white neon. Grant will not admit that he enjoys the idea—maybe he doesn’t, who knows? He goes through the whole procedure of checking in, unlocking the room, dragging our wet packs and tent inside, as if it were some final, shameful concession to weakness, as if being in the motel instead of the tent proves we just aren’t strong enough to suffer enough after all. I, for one, am glad to be here. I think my socks were starting to mildew.
I’ve stayed in a motel with my husband once before and already know there is nothing intrinsically erotic about motel rooms. We go to bed early and watch coloured TV. Grant keeps jumping up to fiddle with the fine tuning and then falls asleep while the news is on. The sheets and pillowcases are yellowed and smell reassuringly of industrial-strength laundry soap.
In the miniature bathroom there are many little bars of odourless soap, glasses in white paper bags, enough gold towels for ten people, and a strip of paper across the toilet seat that reads, “For Your Protection.” In the morning I shower first and the water runs cold on Grant. He is an unlucky person.
I suppose we will stay together a while yet, my husband and I. But the end is inevitable, if only because he thinks so. He wants the end to be graceful and friendly, generous. He has his fantasies too—I can see that now. I suspect though, that we will hang onto each other until the alternatives have all been tried and the complications have set in. For now though it is simple. But Grant will never let me walk away feeling broken, self-righteous and sad. He will not let me sacrifice myself or anything else for this love, he wants me to be strong. He wants me to walk away from him silently, with a faraway but pleasant philosophical look in my eye.
Driving home will take longer than leaving. Anxious to arrive, I will pass the hours wondering how much mail is waiting for us, conjuring the sheets, tablecloth, drapes, new carpet, cat purring deep back in her throat like a pigeon, everything occurring and recurring in safe clean patterns. Grant will drive on steadily through the rain.
When we finally get there and the door is unlocked and we are inside, I will say,
“Why did we come home so soon? There’s nothing for us here.”
Wanting only for my husband to tell me that there is. But he, being a clumsy liar, will say,
“I hate to see you disappointed, but I knew you would be, Sharon.”
I cannot find the energy to unpack, will rummage uselessly around in my pack while the cat winds herself around me in an excess of emotion. Without water for a week, the plants have all gone dead and brown on the ends.
This is not unpleasant because I’m already starting to know what I’m going to do.
CRIMES OF PASSION
(1979)
Jack marsh didn’t like parties much but he went to this one anyway because he’d been out of town, working up in Edmonton, for two weeks and because Benjamin Kozak was his best friend. When he got to Ben’s, late, everyone was in the living room dancing, drinks in hands, in front of the picture window. Most of the dancers were women. Leaping and bright-coloured, their reflections were like flames in the glass. Beyond them, outside, it was snowing thickly. The snowflakes were like moths around the streetlights.
Ben’s new house wasn’t finished yet and, without curtains, baseboards, or carpet, the room looked raw. Jack thought Ben would never get the place finished now that his wife, Carol, had left him. Jack thought of Ben as a soft, slow-moving man whom Carol, with her loud voice, plush body, and gourmet cooking, had quite consciously spoiled, mastered, and then abandoned. Now Ben was always giving parties, filling up the unfinished house with young women and beer.
Ben, who seemed to be dancing with all the women at once, caught sight of Jack and wiggled his beer bottle at him, gesturing towards the kitchen.
Jack found Emily Lipton in the kitchen.
He supposed it was inevitable that they would keep meeting like this, at parties, on the street, in the grocery store, for years to come. They’d been together, in one form or another, for three years and he assumed their lives would always be connected somehow, if only by coincidence. Even when they’d first split up two months ago, he didn’t think, Now I’ll never see her again. Aurora was a small town and they had all the same friends and it never occurred to him that one or the other of them might move away someday. Jack thought they’d be good friends when they were old.
Emily stood with her back to him, looking out the window. Jack couldn’t tell if she was trying to see out or was merely admiring her face in the glass. He knew that her new lover, Tom, lived right across the back lane. Carol had told him.
He said, “Carol told me you’d be here.”
Without turning, Emily said, “She told me you’d be here too.”
Jack helped himself to a handful of pretzels and a slippery cocktail wiener. On the counter, there were also ripple chips, a bag of Oreo cookies, and a green tin of dill chip dip. He couldn’t help thinking that if Carol was still around, they’d all be having yogurt dip with chilled fresh vegetables, camembert and brie, liverwurst and lox. Carol used to give great parties. People just naturally gravitated around her and she thrived on it. If Carol was still around, the party would be in the kitchen. She was always cooking something that smelled good and would feed everybody. Along with the food, Carol dispensed advice, recipes, backrubs, and the perfect wine. She was always the centre of everything. The house organized itself around her whether she was there or not. And when she wasn’t there, Jack thought, everyone seemed to be expecting her to arrive any minute now.
“How is Carol these days?” he asked. He and Emily always talked about Carol. She was the buffer zone between them. Jack leaned against the stove.
