First Things First, page 17
But now Andrea was fine, Mary said she was fine.
Ruth lay awake in the dark for a long time, wondering how Andrea could ever be fine, how she could possibly have come through all that and still end up just like everyone else. Ruth imagined that her skin must still be the same even now, the humid colour of sliced mushrooms, vanilla-scented. What was the point then of going through and surviving such pain if it did not leave a mark on you?
The next morning Ruth got up late after lying there for nearly an hour, mostly awake but sometimes dozing in and out. She listened to Mary in the kitchen, opening all the cupboards in search of the coffee, boiling some water, opening the fridge for the milk, turning the pages of a magazine. It was comforting.
When Ruth came out of the bedroom, Mary was sitting at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, reading a magazine Ruth has shown her the night before, the one with her new article in it.
“Good morning.”
“Morn.” Ruth had always been inarticulate in the morning.
Mary kept reading and then said, “You’re so lucky, Ruth,” with a broad gentle gesture that took in everything—the bright yellow cupboards, the blue countertop, the magazine, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the living room, the oak desk, the filing cabinet, all the other books piled on every flat surface, and Ruth in her nightgown, too.
Ruth didn’t know Mary well enough anymore to tell whether she meant it or not. She didn’t think so though. Afterwards Ruth would wonder why she found it easier to believe that Mary pitied, rather than admired, her.
She couldn’t make out Mary’s mood but she gave her stock reply anyway, trying to make her laugh. “It wasn’t luck at all, just good birth control.” Ruth thought she wanted to hear what was on Mary’s mind so she added, “You’re not doing so badly yourself, are you?”
Mary brightened up and started talking about Lee-Ann and the good daycare centre she’d just discovered.
Then she started talking vaguely about a girl named Lisa whom, Ruth remembered, she’d mentioned several times the night before. Ruth had assumed she was someone Mary worked with but now it seemed that Lisa was David’s friend, not Mary’s, a fellow student in the Psychology course. Lisa, as it turned out, was in love with David and they were having an affair.
Mary did not suggest a reason for the affair, but seemed to take it for granted, speaking of it in the same way she spoke of marriage: as a foregone conclusion.
Mary knew all about it because David told her everything just the way he always had. Mary said, “He knows I understand him. If he couldn’t talk to me about it, then I’d be worried.” She was very calm and Ruth didn’t have to say anything.
Mary knew all about Lisa, she’d even met her once at a student party although she wasn’t sure if they were already having the affair then or not. Mary said Lisa had long black hair and lived in a single room not far from the university. She rode a motorcycle in the summer so David bought her a new bell helmet for her twentieth birthday which was in March. Every Thursday Lisa and David went for pizza after their night class and then they went back to her room. He never spent the whole night with her though. Mary said, “Poor kid, she thinks he’ll leave me for her. But I’m not worried, things like that don’t happen anymore. I know he doesn’t love her, he can’t live without me.”
She was talking quickly now, with her head down, eyes focusing on the edge of the table, her feet, on the floor. Her elegant hands, fluttering up to her throat and then flopping back, palms up, into her lap, were like pigeons.
With a ballooning sense of horror, Ruth imagined the two of them, Mary and David, sitting at the dining room table after supper, having their coffee or maybe a cozy liqueur, discussing “the problem.” Lee-Ann, in pigtails and miniature denim overalls, was shovelling an artichoke from one side of her plate to the other. Mary and David were making fun of little Lisa. David might mimic her walk or her silly snorting laugh. Mary would laugh then too and pat his hand across the thousand-dollar oval teak table. They would sabotage the girl’s thin hopes with their generous conjugal maturity. Ruth didn’t feel sorry for Mary because Mary was making sure it was clear there was no reason to.
Ruth went into the bedroom to get dressed. Mary followed her, still talking, coffee cup in hand, and sat down on the unmade bed. She admired the sheets, which were brown with orange flowers and green leaves.
Ruth rummaged around in the dresser for a clean t-shirt. She felt uneasy undressing in front of another woman. It reminded her of being in the girls’ locker room after Grade Nine gym class and they were all wearing baggy blue gym suits with their first names embroidered across the back and Ruth was silently suffering her lack of noticeable breasts and the smell of her own sweat, while the other girls, and Mary too, bounded around the steamy room, snapping each other’s bra straps and admiring themselves. She thought now of turning her back to Mary but decided it would be childish.
Mary was saying, “Do you remember how we always agreed that if our husbands were ever unfaithful, even just once, we would leave them and go live together in a nice apartment with our kids and some cats?”
Ruth remembered how often this prospect had sounded more appealing to her than what they would have to do if their husbands were true-blue.
Mary said cheerfully, “It was a relief to find out that’s not what you have to do after all. It really hasn’t made that much difference to me, I know it’s only a physical thing.” Ruth wondered why married women liked to dismiss sexual attraction as trivia, forgetting how it could make everything in the world that you’d ever took pleasure in—books, music, mountains, lobster—seem pale and foolish, merely a series of distractions to help pass the time until you could lie down beside him again.
“I’m not afraid of Lisa,” Mary said. “I’m not afraid of anything anymore . . . It’s David who’s afraid now, he’s afraid she might kill herself if he stops seeing her. I try to reassure him though, I tell him it’s not likely that anybody would love him that much. I tell him real life isn’t like that.”
Just around noon, Ruth walked Mary to the bus stop which was actually the drugstore on Main Street. The upper storey of the building was being renovated and raw planks stuck out through the window holes like severed limbs. Someone dropped a hammer from the upper scaffold; there was much imaginative cursing from down below but no injuries.
All the businesses in Aurora were assembled on three blocks of Main Street, which was crowded now with cars, dogs, and people all busy with the intricacies of summer. Ruth imagined people all over town tanning, bicycling, sweating, buying briquets, and wishing for convertibles and cold beer. Their children by now were probably pickled in pink lemonade.
The heat was already building. There would be a thunderstorm when the sun went down. The mountains ringing the river valley in which Aurora sat were hazy and blue, flat with no shadows, no shape.
“It’s like a cradle,” Mary said enthusiastically. Which was true enough, but not something anyone who lived there would ever have said out loud.
A group of people stood in a knot outside the post office, gesturing at each other with postcards and phone bills, paying no attention to the mountains. They all, Ruth knew, kept their private counsel with the mountains, took from them what they needed, did not presume to discuss them beyond admiring them when they went pink with the sunrise in summer or avalanched and killed tourists in the winter. The mountains, they knew, were not merely surfaces, were rock all the way through. Parts of them, stratified intestines, had nothing to do with seeing at all.
The bus to Calgary was late so Ruth suggested they wait in the Aurora Café across the street. On the sidewalk in front, a German shepherd lay stretched out on its side, sleeping or dead. Two women with baby strollers and bags full of groceries sidestepped the dog without looking down.
Inside, the café booths (obligatory orange vinyl patched with black electrical tape) were all filled with workmen on their lunch hour, wearing hard hats, dusty denim shorts, and yellow steel-toed boots. Ruth and Mary found two stools at the counter. Doreen, the waitress, cook, and dishwasher, stood behind the counter filling salt shakers and humming a modified version of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Her white uniform was splattered in odd places with mustard and ketchup.
Mary was once again wearing her blue sundress and two or three of the workmen stared at her, not being rude, just curious. Ruth knew some of them and smiled. Tomorrow they would ask her, teasing, “Where’s your friend?”
Over coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches, Mary asked Ruth, “Do you think you’ll get married?”
Ruth misunderstood, thinking it first a rhetorical, then an irrelevant, and finally a nosy question.
She thought of her cousin, Denise, back in Hastings whom she had always been told had married late in life. For years, the whole family had treated Denise with a hopeful sympathy, as though there were little else she could be expected to do at such an advanced age besides marry a widower or keep working forever at the Bank of Montreal. Ruth had recently figured out that Denise actually got married at twenty-eight. Her husband, Howard Machuk, was a gynecologist who’d never been married and he gave her everything she could possibly want, including a dishwasher for her thirty-first birthday. So the family had finally relaxed, except for the fact that Denise kept working when she didn’t have to anymore, and they would never have a family now because it was too late.
Mary simplified the question. “You and Steve, I mean.” She picked through her sandwich and pulled out two dill pickle slices.
Steve Schroeder, who was thirteen years older than Ruth although he didn’t look it, had been married twice already and had two complete families living in British Columbia, a son and a daughter in each, both with new fathers now. Ruth had never looked at Steve as someone to marry. Mary said she could see her point.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Mary said. “You’ll get married some day, everyone does. It’s so nice to get all that high romance stuff over and done with, to have everything settled for once and for all, to know you don’t have to be alone ever again.”
After all that Mary had told her, Ruth wished she was joking, but she wasn’t.
The bus arrived and Mary got on, calling back promises to say hello to everybody back in Hastings for Ruth.
The next night was Friday so Ruth walked over to the bar. She put on a skirt, pale green with pink wild roses, and a white halter top because it was too hot. Being the only bar in town, the Aurora Hotel, decorated with barn wood and antique sepia photographs, was where everyone went to meet everyone else on Friday night.
Ruth sat with some friends and drank beer and then Scotch, which was her favourite. Mostly she talked to a man named Martin MacDougall whom she’d met at a barbecue the weekend before. He was an ex-high school teacher from Prince Edward Island who was now a divorced carpenter living in Aurora. Picking up where they’d left off at the barbecue, he told Ruth the rest of his life story and bought her a couple of drinks.
When Martin got up to leave just after midnight, Ruth went with him. They walked to his house which was just two blocks from hers. He took off his shirt in the kitchen and got out more beer. He wasn’t talking, and he didn’t seem to notice or, if he did notice, he didn’t find it strange that Ruth was silently crying.
When they went into the bedroom there were no curtains on the window and no sheets on the bed. He said he’d just done the laundry.
After a few minutes, Ruth sat up and retied her halter top. At first Martin wouldn’t let go of her hand and then he got angry and started swearing and shaking his fist at her. At first she felt sorry for him but then she laughed to herself at how foolish he looked lying there on the bare mattress with his pants down around his ankles and his skin showing white in the darkness. Her own bare feet looked like wax on the tile.
She didn’t give much thought to Steve who hadn’t called her for two weeks anyway. It was something of a relief to discover that she didn’t care whether either one of them liked her or not. She’d often wondered why women spend so much time doing things to make men fall or stay in love with them, while the men all expect to be loved just the way they are. There was a certain freedom in not wanting to fall or be in love. Ruth figured she could probably do just about anything now.
Putting on her sandals in Martin’s back porch, she thought maybe she hadn’t really gone there planning to have sex anyway. But she quickly gave up trying to convince herself. There was, she supposed, some tacit agreement between two people who left the bar together after midnight on Friday night. She knew this was true in Aurora anyway. She didn’t know what rules other people in other places might have made for themselves.
There were no lights on Martin’s street. The night sky was so densely black that Ruth would never have guessed there were mountains inside it if she hadn’t known better. She started walking home, then turned back and cut across Martin’s yard to the next street which was the long way home but well-lit. She was glad to think there was no one at home that she would have to tell the whole story to, complete with insightful suggestions as to what this might or might not have to do with Mary, and humorous remarks about still being afraid of the dark at her age.
WHAT WE WANT
(1982)
We could be anything.
We could be wives.
We could be terrorists.
We could be artists.
We could be wizards.
We could be women but we’re still dressing like boys.
What we want is a change in style.
* * *
Penny and pat are secretaries. There’s nothing wrong with that. All week long they’re typing and talking on the phone for hours, mostly to other secretaries, sometimes to each other. Evenings they’re watching the sitcoms, rinsing out their pantyhose, ironing a skirt for tomorrow. Penny and Pat have been friends for years.
One wants kids, the other one doesn’t.
One’s been married, the other one hasn’t.
One wants to get married, the other one doesn’t.
Guess which one?
They both live in the mobile-home park. They’re paying for their trailers, adding on a spare bedroom, a sundeck, what about a greenhouse, trying to make them look like real houses instead of like trains.
Saturday afternoons they get together for pots of drip coffee and a piece of pie at one trailer or the other. All morning they’ve been grocery-shopping, washing clothes, vacuuming, polishing, and dusting, and they’re sure ready for a break. They deserve it.
They’re over at Penny’s admiring her new blue linoleum and figuring out how much it’ll cost to repaint yellow in the spring. Then they’re talking about the summertime, next year, last year, they’ll be having barbecues, playing baseball, working on a tan. Winter is no fun. They might take a night course: Chinese cooking, volleyball, or beginners’ photography. They’re tired of rug-hooking. But some of the things that get planned will just never get done. They’re like dreams that way, plans, potent at the time but quickly shed.
The men that Penny and Pat live with are truck drivers. They’ve gone downtown in the 4 x 4 for a beer with the boys. They’ll be talking about gravel and unions by now, smelling like diesel fuel. Men.
It’s cold and the trailer cracks. White smoke streams straight up from all the other trailers, drawn in together like covered wagons. Penny and Pat assume they’re filled too with warm women in clean kitchens, drinking black coffee and spilling their guts, saying, How true, how true, it’s all true.
They make perfect sense to each other.
Last week I was ready to throw him out.
Me too.
But things are better now. We have our ups and downs.
Us too. Ups and downs, well yes, how true.
You won’t believe what he did.
Never mind, listen to this.
Well, he came home drunk again last night.
Him too?
I’ve never seen him so drunk.
Me neither.
He passed out at the supper table. Put his head right down on his plate. Chicken pot pie all over his face.
Do they ever laugh. Some things are bearable only because you know you’ve got someone to tell them to later and laugh.
More coffee and the conversation goes like booster cables between them. Sometimes they’re saying the same things over and over again, three times, four, just to be sure they’re getting through.
He’s a good man though.
Yes.
A good man, yes.
Yes.
He’s so good to me.
Yes.
He treats me like a queen.
A good man, yes.
When the boys come home with a pizza, the girls are still sitting there putting a little rum in their coffee and laughing their fool heads off. The cat goes smugly from lap to lap.
* * *
Sometimes we want what they tell us to want.
We want a gas barbecue and a patio to put it on.
We want younger-looking hairless skin and a mystery man to rub it against.
We want a Hawaiian holiday, sun-drenched, and a terrific tan that lasts all year round.
We want fur and a dishwasher too but we don’t expect to ever really get them. This gives us something to dream about, something harmless to hope for.
Promise us anything but give us an American Express card.
We’re not as bad as you think.
What we want is original as sin.
* * *
Evelyn is a photographer. She’s also divorced. So which came first, the chicken or the egg? She wants to be famous and fairly rich. She may be already famous, already rich (fairly), but artists are just never satisfied. She wants to be all the rage in Paris. After dabbling desultorily in landscapes, living rooms, and freaks, Evelyn does mostly portraits now, self-portraits, vegetable portraits, some fruit too.
