First Things First, page 15
James, I suppose, was one of those guys that afterwards you can’t imagine what you ever saw in him and you feel like a damn fool. And your friends all tell you they never liked him anyway but they didn’t say anything before because they didn’t want to hurt your feelings. And you wonder why nobody ever tells you the truth until it’s too late to save you.
QUESTION TWO:
Do you sleep on the couch every night after supper?
When I lived at home, the same thing happened every night. While my mother and I were still sitting at the table having our second cup of tea, my father would head into the living room aimed at the couch. He snored while we cleared up the supper dishes. Some nights he slept there right through till the eleven o’clock news. We were all in the living room and I was reading something for school and my mother was sewing or working on her stamp collection and watching TV at the same time. My father slept on the couch in his white t-shirt and green work pants, snoring with his mouth open, bubbling a bit, and heaving around. I couldn’t even look at him.
My mother often said she hadn’t slept in the daytime for years. From that I figured women were just naturally better than men because they didn’t need to sleep so much.
Last August I met this guy Dean at a party. I remember thinking he looked a little tired but I didn’t see that as a serious problem at the time. He fell asleep at the party but then we’d all had quite a bit to drink and he wasn’t the only one. He looked like a child when he was asleep. It wasn’t until later that I discovered this is true of many people and is not an accurate measure of one’s character.
Dean came over for supper twice the first week. He arrived right after work, armed with a bottle of good red wine and a new shirt. He seemed so hurt if I didn’t kiss him passionately at the door and then rush right off to open the wine. I thought this was substantial proof of how much he loved me already. I served the wine in my good crystal glasses. Long-stemmed, they made me think of roses.
After supper then he wanted me to lie down with him but it wasn’t for sleeping yet. I liked that (he called it “dessert”) but it wasn’t always so much fun on a full stomach.
Once, at exactly the wrong moment, he said, “Don’t make so much noise.”
After that I couldn’t work up as much enthusiasm anymore.
Dean talked a lot about moving back to Ontario where he owned sixty acres and building a house together. He said it could be done for $5000. I thought he was being overly optimistic but it wasn’t until later that I felt compelled to point this out to him. He said we would have chickens, a cow, a big garden, and some babies.
I began to indulge myself in sunny fantasies. It was always summer on our farm but if winter ever did come, we would spend the evenings reading by the fireplace, making popcorn, and touching each other every now and then. I imagined working in the big garden, pregnant in a long flowered dress weeding the potatoes with a smiling little round person (male or female, it didn’t matter which) crawling down the row behind me. Someone I know now would arrive for an unexpected visit and go away in a week quite miserable with envy.
By the third week, Dean was coming over every day at five-thirty on the dot, wondering what was for supper. He still got a passionate kiss at the door but he didn’t bring me the wine anymore. (I can see now that I wasn’t paying enough attention to detail at the time.) I didn’t mind the cooking every night. I must admit I like to cook. Dean’s favourite food was spaghetti. Somehow all that chopping and spicing and tasting convinced me that I loved him as much as he loved me.
By the fourth week, he still wanted my spaghetti but now every night after supper he would flop down on the couch and say, “I just need to relax for a few minutes.” Sometimes he even asked for a blanket. Then he slept for three or four hours. I can’t say as how I found this very entertaining.
One day he went to sleep on the couch before supper and I realized he’d been lying to me all along—he slept so much that he’d never have time to do anything, let alone build a house and help me in the big garden too. I also remembered that I didn’t like farms.
I kept stirring and tasting the spaghetti sauce until I could hear Dean snoring. Then I switched everything off, left the pasta to congeal, and walked over to the ballpark. There was no game that night. I sat at the very top of the bleachers and spit sunflower seeds all over the bottom seats. The base lines had been freshly chalked, the infield raked, and the backboard repainted. There was a district tournament coming up on the weekend. The mosquitoes were bad but I sat there until it got dark and then I took my own sweet time strolling back to the house.
Dean was still sleeping, the cat was outside, and the whole house reeked of garlic.
It was something of an anti-climax. I was looking for a fight.
QUESTION THREE:
Do you still talk about your mother and/or your ex-wife all the time?
Some people have heard all about my mother too. Back in high school, I went out for a while with a guy named Ted. He was the first boyfriend I had who owned a car. On Friday nights, after an hour or two at Country Style Donuts, he’d drive me out to the airport parking lot, our industrialized version of the old lover’s lane. While he kissed me and tried to put his tongue in my ear, I gabbed on about my mother. Instinctively I knew that even by proxy, her image could protect me from doing something I didn’t want to, something which it was no longer necessary or feasible to refuse on strictly moral grounds. Winter was coming and we had to leave the car running. I knew this was dangerous too. One night, after a few weeks of this, Ted suggested we go over to his house and take all our clothes off. He said we would sit around in the nude and drink hot rum toddies. I had no idea what I would talk about while sitting in the nude—certainly not my mother. Maybe we would compare scars. I never went.
Just after Christmas last year, I went out with this guy Larry who, as it turned out, was always talking about his wonderful mother and his awful ex-wife.
I first met Larry when he was singing in the Landmark Lounge here in town. That very first night he struck me as being kind of soft and sad, nervous but pretending not to be. I must admit that sometimes I go for that type. I have occasional spells of wanting to be somebody’s mother.
Larry was wearing blue velvet pants and a silk shirt embroidered with blue fish. He was very thin. His hair was pale red, long at the sides and thinning on top. Under the bright stage lights, his face and hair were all one colour. He was attractive though, with a gravelly voice and acrobat fingers on his electric guitar. All the other women in the bar were obviously admiring him so I did too. Pretty soon he was looking right back at me and I imagined he was singing those sweet songs to me. I sent him up a rum and Coke and he came right over to my table when he finished singing.
Pretty soon Larry was staying at my place whenever he was singing in town, and phoning me every other night when he was out on the road.
Sometimes I drove out to spend the weekend with Larry wherever he happened to be playing. Usually we could have a free room in the hotel. These rooms were all the same, the sheets were always yellow, and the toilet was always running.
On the Saturday we would go out in the afternoon and wander through these strange towns, shopping and taking pictures of old buildings. Larry took pictures of everything, especially me. On the Saturday night I’d go down to the bar where Larry was singing and sit all alone, nursing my Scotch and concentrating on looking cold and mysterious. I liked to watch the young girls all admiring him up there on the stage. I smiled serenely while they sent him up drinks and little notes scribbled on paper napkins and empty cigarette packages. He saved the notes and read them to me later in bed. They were so in awe of him and offered phone numbers, drinks, kisses, true love. We made fun of their fantasies. Only I knew he was wearing his white Stanfields under his velvet pants. He collected the notes in an old spiral scrapbook but I never doubted him. Usually we spent Sunday lying around the hotel room, admiring ourselves and feeling safe and smug.
Beside Larry, I became tough and large. I wanted to look after him, save him from suffering anything ever again. This included colds, TV dinners, and another broken heart. He adored me. Once he said, “Joyce, there’s not one thing about you that I don’t like.” With a rush of recognition, I understood that I’d been waiting to hear that from someone for years.
He told me first thing that he’d been married before. His divorce had become final a month before he met me. For a long time he didn’t call her by name, only “my ex-wife” or “that bitch.” She’d left him without warning, taken the kids and moved back in with her parents who were rich and lived in a monstrous mansion in North Vancouver. Larry said it was all their fault, they’d never liked him and they turned her against him. They wouldn’t let him see his own kids. He made it sound like a conspiracy.
He often said, “I gave her everything she asked for and then she left me anyway.”
This was supposed to make me feel sorry for him and sometimes it did.
But he thought his mother was perfect. Her name was Irene. In various anecdotes, Irene was wise, beautiful, patient, understanding, strong, and she made the world’s best scalloped potatoes. I just knew I was never going to turn out to be that good. I was doomed.
Of all the things I ever cooked for him, the only thing Larry ever paid attention to was the scalloped potatoes. I vaguely recall some passing remark about a big pot of meatless minestrone (we were dabbling in vegetarianism then, exploring the secret world of lentils, eggplant, and crunchy granola) but I can’t remember now whether he did or didn’t like it. Larry was the most timid eater I’ve ever met. He picked through each meal like he was looking for little bugs or hairs. He chewed like a rabbit, only with his front teeth because his back teeth were rotten.
This was because, when he was a kid, his mother didn’t have enough money to take him to the dentist. She raised Larry all by herself because her husband had turned out to be a rat and a petty thief who left them when Larry was just a baby. Larry made their poverty sound splendid. About his father, he said, “We never needed him anyway, we were better off without him.” And I could see that he hated him.
Larry’s ex-wife’s name was Janet and pretty soon she was getting blamed for everything that went wrong. Whenever I criticized Larry, he said, “It’s all Janet’s fault, she made me that way.”
Whenever, in a rush of guilty affection, I told him he was the best man in the whole world, he said, “You’ll have to thank my mother for that, she made me that way.”
Between Janet and Irene, I couldn’t figure out who I was supposed to be. He already had one woman to hate and another to love. What did he need me for anyway? Perhaps he thought of me as a captive audience.
Over the years, he’d built himself up a whole bank of debits and credits. On the one hand, he would stroke lovingly for me the acute memory of his mother waiting at the comer to walk him home from school every day. They couldn’t afford to move to a safer section of town. On the other hand, he would relive vividly for me the time he came home from two weeks on the road and found Janet in bed with his best friend. “In my bed,” he wept. In the final analysis, this trespass seemed the worst part of it.
Once, feeling a little drunk and perversely intimate, I attempted to reciprocate and confessed to him my entire love life thus far. He never forgave me.
One night when Larry was out on the road, I went to the lounge and got drunk and spent the night with a guy named Sam. The next morning, changing the sheets, I realized I could be just as unlovable as the next (or the last) person. I’d always felt obligated to be a good person. The realization that I didn’t have to be was maybe not something you’d especially want to know, but it was a relief just the same. I gave up trying to feel guilty and went to the laundromat.
Larry came home a week later and I told him about Sam. I knew that, as far as Larry was concerned, I’d already done the worst thing possible and there was no turning back now.
He punched the wall and cried while I flew at him like a bird against a picture window. Finally I said, “Now I can see why your wife left you.” I guess I’d always known I’d be able to use that on him one day—just because he was always using it on me. He’d always acted as though that was the only interesting thing about him—the fact that Janet had left him and so, naturally, he was scarred for life.
THE FOURTH AND FINAL QUESTION:
If you’re not looking for love, then what are you looking for anyway?
It seems that nobody wants to believe in love anymore. Certainly nobody wants to admit that’s what they’d really like to find out of all this rushing around. I wonder how everybody got to be so afraid.
I used to think it would all get easier as I got older. But I can see now that it only gets harder. And so many of the things you discover about people just by wanting or trying to love them turn out to be things you were happier not knowing. Too much water under the bridge. I used to think I would die without love. Now I know that’s not true. Usually this knowledge reassures me but sometimes even now I catch myself wishing I still believed it. Wishing my heart would stay broken just once. Broken and bleeding, a stain to scare strangers away.
But I know now that love can’t keep you alive.
I was still in high school, cultivating a crush on a boy named Don who was three grades older than me. I knew he had a girlfriend who went to a school across town but I figured I could work around that. One day Don skipped school to go fishing with two friends at Indian Lake. They were drunk in the boat and when it went over, Don drowned. The other two lived. One moved away to Winnipeg with his family and I heard that the other one rushed right out and married a girl I never liked.
There was something shameful about dying when you were skipping school and drunk too. None of us talked about it much. Death by drowning was no distinction. It only meant that I could never dream about Don anymore without having silver gills appear somewhere around his ears. And it also meant there could never be a reason to stop loving him.
Anyway, I guess you might think from what I’ve told you that I’m not very good at this sort of thing. I don’t think it’s my fault though. It just seems that all the men I meet start out one way and end up another. Next time, if I get the chance, I’ll ask more questions first.
THE LONG WAY HOME
(1981)
Mary phoned Ruth one Saturday early in June. It was two in the morning Ruth’s time in Alberta, four o’clock Mary’s time in Ontario.
Once Ruth came awake and determined that no one had died, Mary said she had two weeks’ holiday starting next Monday and would be taking the train to Calgary to be matron of honour at her cousin’s wedding. She wanted to get a bus out from Calgary and spend one night in Aurora with Ruth. So they made arrangements for a week from Wednesday.
Then they talked about their parents, other relatives, mutual friends, anybody they could think of. According to Mary, everyone back in Hastings was fine, just fine, or at least the same, still the same. The dramatic crises which had fuelled their high school years had, it seemed, mysteriously dried up as they all grew older. Ruth figured this must be either because they were all too busy now and weren’t paying attention, or because those destined for early death, suicide attempts, and botched abortions had already fulfilled their fates, leaving the rest of them to muddle along unspectacularly. They didn’t talk much about themselves because they hadn’t seen each other for five years, not since Ruth left Hastings and moved away to Alberta.
Ruth described her apartment in Aurora and Mary described their new house on Elmwood Crescent so they could picture each other while they talked. Ruth was in the big corner chair in the dark living room, curled up naked inside the afghan her mother had just sent her for her twenty-seventh birthday. The chair was brown and the afghan was every possible shade of blue. Mary said she was sitting at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, smoking low-tar cigarettes and drinking cocoa because she couldn’t sleep. The bathrobe was green and the major appliances were harvest gold.
Ruth’s new lover, Steve Schroeder, came out of the bedroom and splashed around in the kitchen getting a glass of ice water. The fridge light came on, milky blue on the ceiling. Mary said David was upstairs asleep, had been for hours, Lee-Ann too. David Barnes, Mary’s husband, used to work at the grain elevator in Hastings but he’d quit last September to go to university. Now he was in first-year Psychology. Mary was supporting the family now, working for a real estate firm where she was always getting promotions, bonuses, and complimentary steak dinners for two because she sold so many houses.
Ruth had only met David once and then just long enough to discover that he was a chronic and vicious Monopoly player. She imagined him now, dreaming of Boardwalk and Park Place, twitching. She’d never seen Lee-Ann, their three-year-old daughter, and tended to picture her as a pink-coloured pupa with no teeth. Being an only child, Ruth never had much contact with babies. Her mother assured her that a shortage of maternal instinct was hereditary on her side of the family.
Then Mary asked, “Are you still writing?” People always asked Ruth this even though, as far as she was concerned, there had never been any possibility of her stopping.
Ruth gave her stock answer. “I have to keep writing, I don’t know how to do anything else.” Which was probably true and usually good for a laugh at dinner parties.
When Ruth went back to bed, Steve was asleep. He left for Edmonton first thing Sunday morning. His band was playing at the Macdonald Hotel for two weeks. In the familiar confusion of his packing and promising and kissing goodbye, Ruth never did get around to telling him about Mary.
