In the Language of Love Read online

  IN THE LANGUAGE

  OF LOVE

  A NOVEL IN 100 CHAPTERS

  DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN

  For Carla Douglas, my friend

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  1. TABLE

  2. DARK

  3. MUSIC

  4. SICKNESS

  5. MAN

  6. DEEP

  7. SOFT

  8. EATING

  9. MOUNTAIN

  10. HOUSE

  11. BLACK

  12. MUTTON

  13. COMFORT

  14. HAND

  15. SHORT

  16. FRUIT

  17. BUTTERFLY

  18. SMOOTH

  19. COMMAND

  20. CHAIR

  21. SWEET

  22. WHISTLE

  23. WOMAN

  24. COLD

  25. SLOW

  26. WISH

  27. RIVER

  28. WHITE

  29. BEAUTIFUL

  30. WINDOW

  31. ROUGH

  32. CITIZEN

  33. FOOT

  34. SPIDER

  35. NEEDLE

  36. RED

  37. SLEEP

  38. ANGER

  39. CARPET

  40. GIRL

  41. HIGH

  42. WORKING

  43. SOUR

  44. EARTH

  45. TROUBLE

  46. SOLDIER

  47. CABBAGE

  48. HARD

  49. EAGLE

  50. STOMACH

  51. STEM

  52. LAMP

  53. DREAM

  54. YELLOW

  55. BREAD

  56. JUSTICE

  57. BOY

  58. LIGHT

  59. HEALTH

  60. BIBLE

  61. MEMORY

  62. SHEEP

  63. BATH

  64. COTTAGE

  65. SWIFT

  66. BLUE

  67. HUNGRY

  68. PRIEST

  69. OCEAN

  70. HEAD

  71. STOVE

  72. LONG

  73. RELIGION

  74. WHISKY

  75. CHILD

  76. BITTER

  77. HAMMER

  78. THIRSTY

  79. CITY

  80. SQUARE

  81. BUTTER

  82. DOCTOR

  83. LOUD

  84. THIEF

  85. LION

  86. JOY

  87. BED

  88. HEAVY

  89. TOBACCO

  90. BABY

  91. MOON

  92. SCISSORS

  93. QUIET

  94. GREEN

  95. SALT

  96. STREET

  97. KING

  98. CHEESE

  99. BLOSSOM

  100. AFRAID

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  More Praise for The Language of Love

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1. TABLE

  THE MOTHER SLAPPED the plates down on the table in that way all angry mothers do. The father, folding up his newspaper, pretended not to notice. Or maybe he didn’t notice. Maybe he was too busy thinking about other things. About a story he’d just read in the paper about a man who’d murdered his wife and her lover in Toronto (that evil city), and in the photograph the man was being led from the courtroom with a black coat over his head. About the pretty woman in the corner store who had flirted with him when he stopped to buy a treat for his daughter on the way home from work. Maybe he was thinking about fixing himself another whisky and Coke.

  Or maybe he did notice and just thought all women were like that: furious. Maybe his friends’ wives were like that too. Maybe that was what the men talked about in the lunchroom at the paper mill while eating the sandwiches their wives had slapped together the night before. Maybe that was what they laughed about while carefully smoothing and refolding the sheets of wax paper and the little brown bags, returning them to their black lunch pails because if they didn’t, there’d be hell to pay at home.

  The daughter picked at the foam rubber backing on the yellow plastic placemat and studied the plate plopped in front of her. It was plaid, of all things, brown-and-white plaid. The daughter was mortified. She thought she would die, just die, if she had to eat one more meal off these plates at this table with these people.

  The table was blue arborite, speckled with white-and-gold flecks, and it had splayed chrome tubular legs and ridged silver edges. Crumbs and grease had collected between the arborite and the silver rim. The table pulled apart in the middle where an extension could be inserted for special occasions.

  The father, Clarence, dished out the potatoes and the peas. The mother, Esther, slapped a pork chop on each plaid plate. The daughter, Joanna, clenched her teeth and looked at the pork chop on the plaid plate on the yellow placemat on the blue table and thought, as do all people past the age of twelve, how much happier she’d been when she was younger. It was 1967 and she had just turned thirteen three weeks before.

  She remembered a rainy Saturday when she was six or seven and had spent the whole afternoon beneath this kitchen table, drawing on its underside with her new crayons. Her mother was cooking pork hocks in the big silver pot and she let Joanna colour to her heart’s content and she wasn’t even mad. Her father was building bookshelves in her bedroom and the circular saw was singing. The whole house was filled with the humid fragrances of boiling meat and cut wood. When Clarence came into the kitchen, there were curls of blond wood tangled in his dark hair like ringlets.

  Before that she was even happier. There was the story her mother loved to tell of how Joanna would haul the cookbook drawer out from under her bed (no one ever questioned the rationale of keeping the cookbooks in an old dresser drawer under the little girl’s bed) and make up wild and fantastic stories from them. She could not remember but could clearly imagine herself sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor with a cookbook open in her lap and her mother at the table rolling sweet dough and stamping out cookies with the special silver cutters, and Joanna saying, “Once upon a time, there was a beautiful mommy,” and Esther laughing and laughing with flour on her nose and white sugar in her wavy black hair. When she sat down on the floor and kissed the little girl’s cheek, her hair fell around them like a fragrant curtain.

  Joanna’s favourite cookbook had been the one with the line drawings of different animals. They said: BEEF, VEAL, PORK. They didnot say: COW, CALF, PIG. Only the LAMB was called by its real name. She knew about Mary and her little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow. She knew about March, which if it came in like a lion, would then go out like a lamb. She did not know yet about sacrifice.

  Each drawing was carefully divided into sections labelled in capital letters: CHUCK, RIB, RUMP, LOIN, BRISKET, FATBACK, PICNIC SHOULDER. Only the PORK still had its head, tail, and feet on. The others had stumps instead.

  Joanna carefully coloured these diagrams in startling Crayola colours: yellow, red, blue, purple, the LAMB with a turquoise leg, the BEEF with a kelly green rump. It never occurred to her that this was how the animals were butchered. She was so innocent, no wonder she was happier then.

  This was like last summer when her father took her to the rodeo. The Nystrom twins, Penny and Pamela, from across the street came too. Penny and Pamela were a year older than Joanna but they walked to school (it was only three blocks) and played with her anyway. They all sat high up on the wooden bleachers, and when the broncos came out bucking Joanna leapt up and cheered, waving her pink cotton candy in the air. One after another, the wild horses flung the riders off their backs as if they were flicking off flies. Joanna c
heered them on hysterically. She wanted the horses to win, to be free, to run right out of that dirty corral and be gone forever back to their sweet green fields far off in the hills.

  “They’re wonderful!” she cried. “Strong, brave, beautiful!” She was sure their spirits would never be broken by these silly men in cowboy hats and fringed pants. The rodeo cowboys looked no more dangerous than Penny and Pamela’s little brother, Billy, dressed up last year for Hallowe’en in red-and-black chaps with a white vinyl fringe, a red bandanna over his mouth, and two silver pop guns jammed in his father’s belt wrapped twice around his skinny waist.

  Penny and Pamela hooted and slapped their scabby knees. Their cousin, Louvaine, was married to a real rodeo cowboy, so they knew better. They couldn’t wait to set Joanna straight. They couldn’t wait to tell her that the only reason the broncos bucked like that was because they were tied up.

  “Their bums,” Penny said. “Their bums are tied up.”

  “Not their bums, silly,” Pamela said scornfully. “Their balls. Their balls are tied up with a leather strap. It’s their balls. That’s why they buck.”

  When they got home, Joanna threw away all the pictures of horses she’d been saving that summer in a scrapbook the size of the Eaton’s Catalogue. She ripped them out and shoved them in the kitchen garbage pail where soggy lettuce, greasy bones and cold wet coffee grounds would get all over them and serve them right.

  She spent the rest of the weekend filling up the scrapbook again. She went through every single catalogue and magazine in the foot-high pile in the bottom of her father’s closet. She chose pictures of fine ladies in fancy clothes and sparkling jewellery, of elaborate rose gardens with fountains and fish ponds. To these gardens she added even more flowers, clipped from old seed catalogues. She did two whole pages of flowers, especially the blue ones because blue was her favourite colour.

  She cut out pictures of elegant parlours filled with massive mahogany furniture and plush Persian carpets, glittering dinner tables set with acres of crystal, bone china, and pristine linen. These table settings fascinated her with their inexplicable silverware (what did these people eat that they needed so many forks?), fragile fluted glasses, linen napkins held in silver rings or folded into miraculous shapes like origami birds. Above these tables there were always chandeliers shedding splintered light from miniature prisms all around the room.

  Penny and Pamela had scrapbooks too but theirs were all full of the Queen waving with white gloves from open black cars, sitting around in rooms like museums, looking bored or superior, patting her Corgi dogs. The twins were fascinated by all aspects of royalty and gossiped about them as if they were people they really knew, just the way Esther talked about the characters in her favourite soap opera.

  Now Esther and Clarence were stuffing their mouths, making meaningless dinnertime talk, and Joanna was miserably chewing on a piece of pork chop, chewing and chewing until it was a pulpy chunk of dead white flesh in her throat.

  Perhaps she had never been happy. Maybe she was no happier when she was younger than she was now, no happier than she would ever be. She thought of how her mother always made her rip up the bread for the turkey dressing on Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. Esther would cover the kitchen table with yesterday’s newspaper and bring out the huge silver mixing bowl and bags half-full of stale white bread. Then Joanna would perch on the edge of the table and shred the bread into the bowl while Esther complained the whole time that the chunks were too big, the chunks were too small, she was getting crumbs all over the floor, she wasn’t making enough, she was making too much, how big did she think that bird was anyway? Then Esther would whisk the full bowl away, sprinkle it with lukewarm water and poultry seasoning, shove whole handfuls into the naked white bird so that her arm disappeared into its bum nearly up to the elbow. By the time the turkey was cooked, Esther was slapping down those plaid plates again, Clarence was asleep or half-drunk, and Joanna thought she would die, just die, if she had to eat one more Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving dinner off these plates at this table with these people.

  After the turkey there would be pumpkin pie for dessert, a frozen pie crust with canned filling, and Clarence never learned not to say that his mother’s pumpkin pie was better than this. Esther, despite the cookbooks under the bed, was not much of a cook.

  Tonight there would be vanilla ice cream and canned pears for dessert. Joanna remembered how she used to be allowed to pour a little hot tea over her ice cream and then muck around with it until her bowl was filled with a luscious sweet goop which she spooned carefully into her mouth, and sometimes they would even let her have a second bowl. Of course she was too old for such foolishness now.

  Tonight her mother admitted that the pork chops were dry, the mashed potatoes were lumpy, the peas were mushy, and the cucumbers in vinegar and salt were already giving her gas. Clarence agreed with everything she said. He nodded and burped.

  Esther leapt up and began slamming the dirty dishes into the sink while Clarence ambled towards the living room. (Esther and Clarence called the living room “the front room.” They also said “chesterfield” instead of “couch.” Joanna was embarrassed. Theysounded like farmers or foreigners.) Clarence would sit in there all evening, doing the newspaper crossword puzzle and the cryptogram. Or else he would work on his paint-by-number sets. He did horse heads, seascapes, forest scenes, and gulls in flight. Once he did a pair of nudes: two brown-haired women with nipples the same colour as their hair, smiling lips the same colour as their toenails, each of them holding a blue towel draped carefully to cover their private parts. Esther made Clarence hang the nudes in the garage.

  In the kitchen, Joanna dried the dishes and convinced herself that if she had to eat one more meal in this house at this table with these people, she would never grow up and get free. It never occurred to her to ask Esther what she was always so mad about.

  After a while, of course, Joanna did grow up. She finished high school, went to university, and then moved to a larger city when she was twenty-two. This was not a common thing to do in their town, at least not in their neighbourhood. Even Penny and Pamela, who had always seemed likely to become renegades, had stayed, marrying young, having babies, coming to their parents’ house for Sunday dinner every week with their arms full of diapers, baby bottles, and stuffed toys. Their husbands stood around in the driveway smoking and talking to their father-in-law, all of the men shuffling their feet in the gravel and pushing their baseball caps back in the sun. Penny and Pamela went to Tupperware parties, sold Avon, did their Christmas shopping early, and always saved the used wrapping paper from one year to the next. They named their children alliteratively.

  In her house across the street, Joanna sat reading her university textbooks, envying or pitying them.

  When she did move away from home, her reasons for leaving were flimsy enough, something about there being more opportunities for artists elsewhere. Joanna did not know this for sure, but she could not imagine being an artist in her hometown. She had expected indignant opposition, especially from her mother, but Esther only said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” Joanna did not. Clarence said, “You can always come home again if it doesn’t work out.” Joanna agreed but knew she would not.

  Once settled in her new apartment, Joanna worked at a variety of jobs to support her artistic habit. She worked briefly (always briefly) as a secretary, a convenience store clerk, a bank teller, a chambermaid, and assistant manager of a small art gallery which promptly went bankrupt. She also applied for grants and sometimes got them.

  When she could afford it, she ate in restaurants and cafés. Mostly she ate alone, admiring the heavy white plates, the pastel linen napkins folded to fit inside the long-stemmed wineglasses, the freshly cut daisies or the flickering candle in the center of the table, the music, the waitress, the menu, the delicious unusual meals that appeared before her as if by magic, without effort, anxiety, or anger. Sipping her dry white wine slowly, she read or watch
ed the other patrons eat, chat, hold hands, or argue. She lapped up the soup and the sounds around her which appeased her loneliness without intruding upon her life. Lingering over her coffee and Grand Marnier she dreamed of a perfect future life in which she would never have to cook or wash dishes again.

  Later she learned to cook and loved it. She bought pots and pans, wire whisks and wooden spoons, many cookbooks and a special shelf to put them on. She bought a kitchen table at a garage sale just like the one they had at home except it was white and the extension was missing. She covered it with a peacock blue Indian cotton tablecloth and learned to ignore its tubular legs. She bought a copy of Larousse Gastronomique, which cost more than the table and cloth combined.

  None of them liked to travel much so visits were infrequent. They were all still in Ontario, Esther and Clarence in the northwest corner of the province, Joanna now in the southeast, but they were fifteen hundred kilometres apart. Every couple of years her parents came down for two weeks in the summer or at Christmas. Joanna never went there and nobody ever suggested it. They stayed, the three of them, in Joanna’s small basement apartment and worked hard at being pleasant and polite. But there was always something, and Esther always ended up angry and Clarence, watching TV half-asleep in the darkened living room, never seemed to notice until Esther went slamming out of the apartment and sat crying in the car in thedriveway in the rain. Then Clarence would blink his bleary eyes and say, “Now what’s the matter with her, do you think?” But it was a rhetorical question and still nobody ever asked Esther why she was always so mad. Maybe all mothers were like that—furious.

  The summer Joanna first started seeing Henry, Esther hated him on sight and landed crying in the car on the second day of the visit. This despite the fact that Henry had put all his stuff in two green garbage bags and gone to stay at a friend’s place to delay having to break the news that he and Joanna were living together. Esther and Clarence were supposed to be staying for two weeks but Esther insisted they leave after one. That morning, while Esther repacked their suitcases, Clarence held his hands out in the kitchen, helpless, and said, “I’m sorry, honey. I like him all right but what can I do? You know your mother when she gets mad.”