First Things First, page 12
“Doing very well,” Emily said. “She was sorry she couldn’t make it tonight but she thought it was too soon.”
Carol Kozak was Emily’s best friend. When she left Ben three weeks ago, Carol had moved in with Emily temporarily. Whenever Jack and Ben talked about being left (which was seldom), they were both always looking for someone else to blame. Usually Ben blamed Emily and Jack blamed Carol, but sometimes they switched it around.
Emily finally turned to face Jack. She was eating a banana.
“You’re eating a banana.”
She looked down at it.
“Emily, I just don’t understand you.”
She was still looking at it.
“You never ate bananas when you were with me. Emily, you hate bananas.” This was some kind of accusation. They were always accusing each other of something.
“Oh, Jack. People change, you know.”
“Well, I haven’t.” He was proud of this, proud to think that his life was just the same without her. He saw no reason to change. He thought this proved something but he hadn’t figured out what yet.
Emily was angry now. She said, “Jack, this is ridiculous,” and threw the banana peel in the sink. But then she was already smiling at him again.
Her moods were changing too quickly, shifting like sand so Jack couldn’t keep track of them. Jack had no patience with moods, his own or other people’s. He admired consistency, not eccentricity, which made him uncomfortable because he could never be sure what would happen next. This was something new about Emily too. He used to know exactly how she’d react to anything he might choose to say. He liked to think he’d never intentionally used this to hurt her. Jack thought of himself as a noble man and he wondered why they couldn’t have a casual conversation anymore. He thought of the last few months they’d been together and how every day there’d been something else, another emotional complication, one more layer to add to the pile. Now there were more things they couldn’t talk about than things they could.
He stepped towards her, reaching awkwardly across and behind her, feeling for the light switch. This was the closest together they’d been since she left him and he regretted it instantly. He was afraid she’d touch him. Emily had always been the one to touch first, kiss first, touch again, rubbing the same spot on his back until it went numb. Jack was afraid that if she touched him now, even accidentally, he would pull away and she would be hurt. He thought he didn’t want to hurt her. But she didn’t touch him.
Jack flipped on the overhead light and retreated back to the stove. They’d been talking in the dark and suddenly it had reminded him of being in bed with Emily and she always wanted to talk before they went to sleep and he would be too tired and she would tease him, saying she’d had a deprived childhood because she was an only child and she had no sisters to talk to in the dark. Sometimes she was laughing and petting him while she talked. But he would fall asleep anyway, sometimes right in the middle of a sentence, and then she would be mad and go sit in the living room and smoke cigarettes for an hour or two. Once, she went out for a walk at three in the morning even though she was afraid of the dark, but Jack was sleeping and he never knew until she told him and then she never did it again.
The fluorescent light was comforting. Jack looked at Emily more closely. She was sipping her beer and concentrating on the music or something else. She would never again, Jack realized, make things easy for him. She was wearing a baggy cream-coloured blouse and a long billowing skirt, dark blue patterned with intricate flowers and leaves, made of that puckered cotton that always made Jack think of incense and wheat germ. She used to wear plaid shirts and jeans. Whenever Jack thought of Emily, she was wearing a red plaid shirt and faded jeans.
Sometimes he used to tell her how much he admired women who looked like real women. Emily never seemed to know what he was talking about so then he would point out certain women on the street as examples. These women were always wearing summer dresses, gold earrings, sheer nylons, and high-heeled sandals that made their calf muscles stand out like plums. Sometimes Jack imagined how it would feel to have a woman like that walking beside him, her perfume coming to him in subtle waves, her nylons rustling as her high-heels clicked on the concrete. But really Jack thought these women were too good for him. He thought of them as “queens.” Emily and most women were what he called “utility grade.” This second group was much larger than the first. Queens were women he wanted but was afraid of. Utility grades were women he didn’t want very badly but they were, he thought, friendly, manageable, and grateful.
Jack used to say, “Emily, I want a real woman, a feminine woman. You could be one if you tried.” He didn’t understand why this made her so mad.
He meant it as encouragement, not insult. Emily seemed so unsure of herself, of how she wanted to be—he figured she was just waiting to be shown. He thought of Emily as the kind of person who was always being given advice just because she always looked like she was asking for it, whether she was or not. This still felt true.
Now it seemed like Emily was still wanting him to have an opinion of her. The long skirt clung to her thighs, her arms and neck were naked. Maybe now she wanted him to admire her from afar.
It had only been two months but Emily’s hair looked much longer, falling loose and tangled down her back like dark vines. Jack had always liked it long (it had been that way when they first met) so he said, “I like your hair. New clothes too?”
“Yes, and I made the skirt myself.” Emily turned half around to make the skirt spin out and then drape around her legs.
Jack fished around in the fridge and came up with two more cold beer. He opened them and handed one to Emily, resisting the urge to point out the fact that she’d never sewed when they were together. He pictured her hunched over the sewing machine, pins in her mouth and yellow threads in her hair, teeth clenching and unclenching as she jammed the fabric through. This, he remembered, had something to do with her childhood too. Emily and her mother, Fern, who could sew everything perfectly, were always fighting about it. There was some long, involved, and emotional story about a brown jumper that he couldn’t remember anymore.
Jack didn’t know what to make of Emily’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lipton. The summer they came from Ontario to visit Emily, it was hot every day for two weeks and Mrs. Lipton sat out in the back yard with her feet in a bucket of cold water because her ankles were swelling with the heat. Arthur Lipton was just quiet and nervous all the time. Emily was always telling Jack how wonderful her parents were, but when they were all together, they never seemed to get along. Jack couldn’t understand any of this.
He thought his own parents were perfect. They lived in Edmonton and were quite well off. Mr. Marsh was a lawyer and owned three large apartment buildings. Jack couldn’t understand why Mr. and Mrs. Lipton, who certainly weren’t rich, were always spoiling Emily even though she’d been away from home, living in Alberta, for five years. They kept sending her money and big boxes filled with fancy towels, canned lobster, and electrical appliances. Jack’s parents never gave him money or presents anymore, except at Christmas. They’d brought him up to be an independent man. Whenever he had to work up in Edmonton, he stayed at their house but he paid daily room and board and did his own ironing. Mr. and Mrs. Marsh didn’t like Emily and their opinion was important to Jack.
Now he said, “It’s a pretty skirt, yes, very nice,” but he thought it didn’t suit her.
A round woman in black satin pants walked between them. People kept coming into the kitchen like this, getting more beer, more pretzels, or just passing through on their way to the bathroom. It was, Jack thought, like being on a train and he and Emily were talking only because they’d happened to get on at the same stop.
It wasn’t that Jack wanted Emily back. It was just that he didn’t want her to change. He wanted her to be always the way she had been when they were together. He didn’t want to think of her going out and buying bananas, yards of blue cotton, a sewing machine, all these things that had nothing to do with him. The changes in Emily made him think the woman he’d known somehow wasn’t true anymore, never had been. He couldn’t decide which Emily was the real one and he still needed to know. Sometimes he thought she’d been putting on an act for three years but other times he thought she was putting on an act now. There was no way of knowing her anymore.
“How does Carol like her new job?” Jack asked. Carol was always starting a new job. This one was with a travel agent. The last one had been with a firm of lawyers and the one before that with a real estate agency. Carol’s jobs never lasted more than six months. She always quit. Jack thought she was irresponsible, not exactly shiftless, but sadly careless in shaping her life. He and Emily used to argue about Carol. He would say Carol was a bad influence and then Emily would defend her fiercely, ending lamely with, “Well, she’s my best friend, you know.” To which Jack would reply, “But that doesn’t make her a good person.” He thought this was obvious but sometimes it made Emily cry.
Jack’s opinion of Carol, however, didn’t stop him from confiding in her now and pumping her for information about Emily. He would inspect and analyze his feelings out loud for Carol, knowing full well that she would, in turn, relay them on to Emily. Once he said to Carol, “If she’d given me half a chance, I might have married her.” Later Carol said that Emily, when she heard this, said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Emily was looking out the window again. It irritated Jack that she wasn’t paying attention to him, even though what he was saying wasn’t really important at all. He wondered if she’d always had this habit of drifting in and out of conversation with him.
“How does Carol like her new job?” he asked again.
Ben came into the kitchen for another beer. He was rumpled and damp from the dancing. “Does Carol have a new job?” he asked.
“She’s working for a travel agent now,” Jack said.
“She thinks this job will take her somewhere,” Emily said.
“She always thinks that,” Ben said gloomily. “What she can’t understand is that no job and nobody will take her anywhere. She just has to get there all by herself like the rest of us.”
Jack hated this new philosophical tone of Ben’s. He was seeing a psychologist once a week and sounding more and more profound after each visit, more serenely sad, more proud of being so hurt. Jack believed that there are some things that should never be said out loud because they give too much away.
Ben had his back to them as he rummaged in the fridge. Emily raised her eyebrows at Jack who instantly resented her attempt at conspiracy. She was always doing this, drawing people to her with promises of intimacy and secrets. She did this to everyone, especially other women. Jack thought she had no sense of discrimination.
When they used to go grocery shopping together on Saturday mornings, Emily was always stopping to say, “Hello, how are you?” to somebody. These other shoppers were mostly women, Emily’s own age or older. They almost always had something attached to them: shopping carts, strollers, shy husbands, assorted children. One woman, her name was Betty Champagne, kept her little boy on a leash. She said he was hyperactive. Another woman, Laurie Dorion, was pregnant with her fourth child. She always said, loudly, “I’ll sure be glad to drop this thing. Never trust an IUD or a man either.” Laurie had red hair and was always wearing a green sunsuit. She looked like an olive. Jack would wait beside the cart, sighing and folding and unfolding his arms, while Emily conducted these capsule conversations between the Corn Flakes and the Kotex, whispering and gossiping and making lunch dates.
Now Jack, by way of refusing Emily’s invitation to take a side, said, “Oh, you know Carol.”
“Where is she tonight?” Ben asked, emerging from the fridge.
“I don’t know.”
Jack could see that Emily was still a lousy liar and he thought it served her right to be uncomfortable. She’d changed everything for all of them. Once they’d all been friends together, he and Emily, Carol and Ben. But now they were all sleeping in different camps. He was sleeping alone, Ben was sleeping around, Carol was sleeping on Emily’s couch, and Emily was sleeping with Tom. Carol said Tom had a waterbed.
A sharp-breasted girl in a pink sweater came into the kitchen and jiggled all around Ben until he went back into the living room to dance with her some more. As he disappeared again into the music, Ben winked back at Jack who raised an eyebrow at Emily who smiled harmlessly at the fridge and said, “Her name’s Marlene.”
Somebody turned up the music and Jack could see more dancers galloping around the living room. Everybody seemed to be wearing fewer clothes.
Jack turned back to Emily and looked out the window with her. Tom’s house was all in darkness.
“He’s not there,” Jack said.
“I know.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Emily had been seeing Tom for just over a month. Carol kept Jack informed. Carol thought Emily and Tom were perfect for each other.
Emily and Jack had never talked about Tom but Emily had a clever way of slipping in his name at random moments of conversation. Jack never knew if she did this to hurt him or to assure him that she was all right. He also never knew which way it made him feel.
Jack knew Tom to see him but that was all. Tom was an accountant and that meant he was always wearing a suit—brown, grey, blue, a black one once, with colour-coordinated ties, shirts, and shoes. Although Jack expected that women should just naturally spend all their money on clothes, he was suspicious of men who might be doing the same thing. But Tom drove an old yellow pickup truck and Jack liked the truck.
“How are things with you and Tom?” It seemed all right to ask this question but Emily looked surprised.
Carol said Tom was good to Emily. There was some suggestion of a drinking problem but Tom was trying to get on top of it. Carol said one time Tom was in a car accident while he was out with an older woman named Joan. Tom was drunk and he drove off the road and into a tree. They walked six miles home on the highway because Tom was afraid the police would find him. Joan was only wearing summer sandals and Tom took off his mitts and put them on her feet. Carol said, “Some women are just never prepared for anything.” Carol said Emily went back with Tom the next day to help pull the truck out of the ditch. And then she went with him to the police station and told them he’d hit a patch of glare ice and missed the corner.
“Good, we’re really good,” Emily said now. “We’re talking about taking a trip to Mexico. I applied for my passport already. Tom’s been there twice before, he has friends there now, and he says I’ll just love it.”
That wasn’t what Jack was asking.
Emily went on. “He’s colour-blind, you know. And when we go shopping for things for the trip, he’s always hollering across the store at me to come and tell him the colours of everything. He laughs about it but I always think that even when I do tell him a shirt is brown, he still doesn’t know what I mean. He’ll never be able to see what we see.”
Jack said, “I can see your car at his house from my back window.” Jack lived just around the corner, half a block down. “Sometimes I drive by that way just to see if you’re there. And then I’m disappointed if you are and if you’re not.”
Afterwards, Jack would try and remember how many beer he’d had because he would think that he had to be at least half drunk to admit such a thing.
Emily said, “One night at Tom’s I couldn’t sleep, I don’t like waterbeds, and I was just lying there watching car lights on the ceiling. I sat up to look out and it was your car going by.”
In a while, when Emily went to the closet for her coat, Jack went too.
She said, “You don’t have to do this anymore.”
“What?”
“Leave when I do.”
“But I want to.”
“All right then.”
Jack realized that they’d missed the whole party. They’d always been this way at parties. Emily used to accuse him of never having figured out how to have a good time.
He waited outside on the porch while Emily put on her boots and scarf. Tom’s house was still dark. The snow was so heavy it made the darkness look white.
When Emily came out, Jack said, “He’s still not there.”
Emily said, “I thought he’d be home by now.”
Jack was watching the snow fall on her dark hair. He would have given her a ride home but she didn’t ask. There had been something earlier about her car getting a new muffler. He knew she was afraid of the dark but there she was, smiling and waving and walking away from him anyway, and he was already feeling better. In the morning he would go skiing.
HISTORIES
(1980)
Anne and Peter Dickson used to live in southern Ontario. Then they went west to Alberta, just like a lot of other people. They settled in Lairdmore, a small town in the Rockies. Peter said Lairdmore was a boom town where there would always be work and they would always be happy.
Peter, who was a carpenter, built them a house in the new subdivision at the south end of town. In this part of Lairdmore, all the streets were named after indigenous birds and animals: Porcupine Place, Fox Avenue, Sparrow Street, Marmot Boulevard.
Anne and Peter lived on Cougar Crescent where all the houses were new. The street usually smelled of fresh paint and of wood burning in all the new stone fireplaces. Most of the houses were either white aluminum siding or white stucco and had a sled, a stroller or a German shepherd parked in the front yard. In the winter, each yard was bisected by a precisely shovelled sidewalk. Often there were small children playing on the snowbanks and the snow would fall back onto the sidewalk in chunks. The families in these houses were all young and they all knew each other. They compared their mortgage payments, their children’s report cards, and their grocery bills. One or another of the wives was always having a dinner party, an affair, or a minor operation. They all appeared to be more or less content.
