In the Language of Love Read online

  Simple words like: house, bread, salt, spider, red, cheese, green, window, white, table, black, chair.

  Complex words like: trouble, dream, wish, I, me, you, he, she, it, they, them, the.

  Gentie words like: comfort, sweet, summer, woman, child, sleep, pray, play, peace, truly, surely, purely.

  Fierce words like: pain, power, passion.

  “Your wish,” said Lewis, “is my command,” and then he rubbed her back, neck, shoulders, and bum with slippery sweet oil until she slid into a gentle stupor.

  She thought about wishes and commands and how he was just being funny, how he was also lying, because of course her wish was not for a massage. Her wish was that he would leave Wanda, arrive on her doorstep with all his worldly belongings, move right in, and then they could proceed to live happily ever after. This possibility was beginning to look more and more unlikely, and in her more realistic (that is, completely depressed) moments Joanna had to consider her growing suspicion that if he ever did leave Wanda, he would then be so guilt-ridden and morally tormented that he would never allow himself to be happy again.

  Joanna thought about the commands she’d really like to give him. Commands, orders, ultimatums: Tell her. Leave her. Be mine.

  In elementary school she’d learned all about commands in English class: Make the bed. Do the dishes. Eat your spinach. Walk the dog. Do your homework. Brush your teeth. Be a good girl.

  She’d learned how, although such sentences might at first glance appear to be grammatically incorrect, incomplete fragments, because they seem to have no subject, in truth the subject is there, implied, unspoken. Remember that the subject of all commands is you, the invisible but omnipresent second person.

  In high school, everything, including English Grammar, became more complicated: connecting words became conjunctions, questions became interrogative sentences, wishes (“if only…”) became conditional phrases, and commands became imperatives. In her French Grammar textbook it said: ”L’IMPERATIF: Entrez! Come in! Buvons! Let’s drink! Sortez! Get out! The imperative is not a tense. It is a mood.”

  THE IMPERATIVE: Love me. Leave her. Marry me. Make me happy. Do the right thing.

  She’d also learned how, in certain cases of the imperative, a singleverb could stand alone and function as a complete English sentence. According to Mrs. Crocker, her teacher, this provided ample proof for the suggestion that verbs are the most vital words in the English language. “A thorough understanding of verbs,” Mrs. Crocker said, “will serve you well in any situation.”

  For instance: Help!

  In this case, both the subject (you) and the object (me) are implied. It is the verb that is urgent, active, and full of both danger and promise.

  Later she will learn that in the language of love there are no nouns, only verbs and pronouns: to love, to have loved, to be loved, to have been loved, I love, you love, she loves, he loves, they love, we love, we did love, we had love, we will love, we would love, if only.

  There are also, occasionally, adverbs: truly, madly, deeply, eternally, endlessly, desperately, sweetly, softly, sadly, stupidly.

  Later still she will learn that of course this is not true. Later she will learn that in the language of love all words are equal.

  20. CHAIR

  EVER SINCE SHE’D MOVED away from home and got a place of her own, Joanna had wanted a wicker chair. When she finally went out and bought one four years later, bearing it home like a trophy in her little car with the hatchback up and tied with a bungie cord to the bumper, she wondered why she’d waited so long.

  Her basement apartment had come partially furnished: bed, dresser, couch and chair, scarred coffee table, and an unsteady metal TV stand. Whatever else she needed, she had picked up cheap at garage sales and flea markets or scrounged from friends who were replacing their old stuff. There was something daunting about home furnishings, a fear not of the objects themselves but of their purchase. She could not imagine herself walking into a major department store and then walking out again with something so cumbersome and intimidating, something so final, as a love seat, a dining-room table, or a self-defrosting refrigerator. Such purchases, such commitments,were more properly made, it seemed, by people who were really grown up, who were settled, self-satisfied, and married to some other practical, patient adult who would quite happily debate the pros and cons of Scotch-guarding, cubic footage, energy-saving devices, six chairs or four, should the fridge door open right or left—all of these details discussed lovingly while holding hands in front of an aggressive well-dressed salesman on commission. Joanna, who still did not know what she wanted out of life, could not imagine acquiring by herself these accoutrements of adulthood, attractive though they might be, and then having to drag them around with her for the rest of her life, the way travellers drag those gigantic suitcases on wheels behind them through airports and train stations.

  Alternately, Joanna took her inability to commit to furniture and major appliances as an indication of her free-spirited independence and thriftiness or as a sign of arrested development. She’d read a magazine article once which revealed that many single women have similar problems: buying a couch or a fridge of your own when you are single seems to be an admission that you will never have a husband and a permanent home that requires real furniture.

  She set up the white wicker chair in the corner of her studio space. Because her apartment was small, her working area was half of the long narrow living room. When she finished working for the evening, she would curl up in the wicker chair below the west window. She read or wrote letters, sipped a cup of hot chocolate or a glass of white wine, all the while admiring the chair and the picture of herself sitting in it. She hated to admit how much pure pleasure she took in a mere material possession. Loving that chair was undoubtedly shallow and conspicuously consumeristic. She would have been hardly surprised to find herself dreaming about it.

  When she did in fact see a chair in her dreams, it was not the white wicker chair. It was an electric chair which she’d seen on TV once when she was little and her parents had accidentally let her watch “Naked City,” the city under scrutiny being New York or Chicago or some other of those evil American metropolises. In the dream she couldn’t see who was in the electric chair, but there weresizzling sparks, much jerking and twitching and screaming while the audience applauded and cheered. At the end of the dream, as at the end of the program, a coda in white block letters appeared on the screen: THE INCIDENTS PORTRAYED IN THE PRECEDING PROGRAM ARE TRUE. ONLY THE NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT.

  By the time she and Gordon have moved into their house on Laverty Street, the wicker chair is warped and worn and Joanna is finally able to admit that much as she once loved the chair, it has never been very comfortable.

  For the first year in the new house the chair sits in the basement, gathering dust and spiderwebs, a little mildew on the burgundy corduroy cushion. They pile things on it: a box of scratched LPs, a bag of newborn baby sleepers which Samuel seems to grow out of every two weeks, a torn lampshade, a pair of Clarence’s plaid felt slippers left behind at Christmas.

  The next summer they bring the chair up, clean it off, buy a new flowered cushion, and put it outside on the front porch. For a week Joanna sits in it every evening after supper, reading the newspaper and once again admiring the chair and the picture of herself sitting in it. Gordon plays with Samuel underneath the evergreens. She admires them too and also the smell of the mock orange bushes all around the porch. But after a week she has to admit that the chair is no more comfortable now than it ever was. They leave it on the porch though because it looks nice there, homey and faithful.

  Two weeks later, pulling into the driveway after a trip downtown for groceries, Joanna suddenly realizes that the chair is gone. For half an hour, she searches the yard foolishly, thinking that somebody is playing a practical joke on her, having hidden the chair in the shed, behind the forsythia, under the front porch. For five whole minutes she stares at
the empty backyard as if the missing chair will materialize at any moment. She examines the place where it sat, looking for clues, footprints, fingerprints, a note. Finally she has to admit that it is not a joke, she is not a detective, and the chair has been stolen.

  For weeks afterwards she is nervous to think that somebodywalked onto the front porch and stole that chair right out from under their sleeping little noses. For weeks afterwards, pushing Samuel in his stroller around the quiet neighbourhood, she is peering into backyards and open garages, watching for her chair.

  Then she forgets about it altogether. Until some people in a house on Duncan Street two blocks over put a whole set of white wicker furniture out on their front porch, a love seat, two chairs, and a matching round table. She thinks about warning them. They’re all sitting out there, playing Monopoly, drinking pink lemonade, and laughing. She keeps walking. Every time she passes the house, she thinks she really should go in and warn them. But she never does and their wicker furniture stays put, untouched and intact. She envies them, not so much for their furniture as for their luck and their charmed lives which, she imagines, will be played out smoothly and happily, immune as they seem to be to theft, danger, and random despair.

  21. SWEET

  JOANNA WAS NEVER FOND of sweet things. As a child, given the choice of a treat, she would always rather have a bag of chips than a chocolate bar. Except for the Cherry Blossoms which Clarence sometimes bought her on his way home from working overtime. She also liked chocolate milk shakes and hot-fudge sundaes from the Dairy Queen. These too were most often brought home by her father and so she ate them happily. But afterwards she felt sick to her stomach.

  As an adolescent, it seemed to be an advantage because, unlike Penny and Pamela, she was not having to constantly fight off chocolate cravings for fear of getting pimples. Their theory was that chocolate raised the temperature of your blood to the boiling point and then your skin erupted under the pressure. In the end Joanna got pimples anyway. Sometimes the three of them got together and squeezed each other’s pimples even though Esther said squeezing them would leave you scarred for life.

  Esther said maybe Joanna didn’t like sweet things because she was sweet enough already. At first Joanna thought this was a complimentbut eventually she realized it was not. It was just like the way Esther always said, whenever Joanna had a new outfit, “Anything looks good on a model.” There was that time in university when Joanna was waiting at the corner for the bus on a winter afternoon all bundled up in her new blue parka with white rabbit fur around the hood. In the wind her dark curly hair was tangled in the white fur and her cheeks were rosy red. Her mother’s friend Agnes passed by but Joanna did not notice her. When Agnes called Esther that evening she told her she’d seen such a pretty girl at the bus stop, such a very pretty girl, that she had stopped to take a second look. Lo and behold it was Joanna. Esther thought this was hilarious. “Imagine that,” she said several times. “Imagine that! You should be flattered.” As if Joanna had somehow tricked Agnes, had fooled her into thinking that she was somebody else, somebody pretty.

  After Joanna moved away from home, she met a lot of women who bragged about their obsession with chocolate. They liked to call themselves “chocoholics.” They said there should be a self-help group. They sat together in various kitchens and restaurants, giggling and confiding the extent of their addictions. They traded recipes and waxed nostalgic, drooling slightly, over a piece of Black Forest cake they’d had six years before. These women were well past the age of pimples so they worried about their weight instead. They said they gained ten pounds just thinking about it. They said every bite of chocolate went straight to their hips.

  Chocolate, in spite of its perils, was something you were supposed to like. Joanna discovered it increasingly difficult to admit, even to close friends, that she didn’t. Upon hearing such a shameful confession, these women’s usually friendly faces would contort into grimaces of distrust, disbelief, and sympathy. You would think their lips were double-jointed. You would think they’d just heard her confess that she didn’t like babies, flowers, or sex.

  They said, “But wouldn’t you just die for a piece of double chocolate cheesecake?”

  She said, “No.”

  They flinched. They faltered. They looked her over long and hard as if she’d suddenly sprouted an extra head or a beehive hairdo. Theystruggled to make sense of her. They felt betrayed. They tried to convert her.

  They said, “But wouldn’t you just love to sink your teeth into something dark and sweet and sinful?”

  She said, “No. I don’t like sweet things. Three bites of chocolate and I feel like throwing up.” They clucked their tongues in disbelief.

  Revenge is sweet, so they say. After Lewis dumped her she thought about revenge. Maybe the chocolate-licking women thought about it too, while digging in with guilty gusto, sucking up every last shred of sugary evidence. Revenge must be sweet because Joanna found that whenever she tried to plot her revenge against Lewis and Wanda or both, she felt nauseous and feverish afterwards. Maybe indulging in revenge, like indulging in chocolate, brought your blood to the boiling point. Maybe indulging in revenge would cause your whole face to break out into juicy pustules, the kind that squirt all over the mirror when you squeeze them. Or maybe your hips would blow up like balloons. Maybe indulging in revenge would leave you scarred for life.

  22. WHISTLE

  ON THE WAY HOME from school, Joanna was whistled at by a dirty half-dressed man in a yellow hard hat. He was leaning against a blue dump truck with three other men, also half-dressed, dirty, in yellow hard hats. It was nearly the end of June and Joanna would be starting high school in September. These four men were working on the street a block away from her house. They had been there all week. Usually when she passed them, they were down inside a large hole with just the tops of their hard hats showing, bobbing like yellow bubbles just below street level. She would have liked to look down the hole but she was shy and didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Plus she figured she was too old to be impressed by such things. Often there were three or four children jiggling around the hole, inching as close to the edge as they dared, peering down, oohing and aahing. Adults, on the other hand, walked past without looking ateither the men or the hole. Forced to manoeuvre their cars around the hole or idle in the heat till the flagman waved them through, these adults looked merely irritated, hot, and bored.

  Today the workmen were leaning against the blue dump truck, drinking coffee out of long silver thermoses like giant bullets. One man was drinking orange juice out of a jug. The juice dribbled down his chin and onto his bare hairy chest. They had all taken off their shirts in the heat. The man who whistled at Joanna was wiping the sweat off his face with his balled-up T-shirt.

  Joanna looked reflexively in his direction and saw that he was young, handsome, and very brown. When she looked away in confusion and tripped over an uneven sidewalk crack, he hooted and the four men began laughing and talking in a foreign language.

  She walked the last block home as fast as she could. In the kitchen she slammed her schoolbooks down on the table. When Esther asked her what was wrong, she told her what had happened. “It was disgusting,” Joanna cried, “just disgusting!”

  Her mother chuckled knowingly. “Oh, you’ll change your mind about that when you’re a little older.”

  “I will not,” Joanna said.

  “Yes, you will,” Esther said. “They think you’re pretty cute.”

  “I don’t care what they think.”

  “You will.”

  “I won’t.”

  The next night after supper Joanna took a walk down the street and had a good look in that hole. It was deserted, unguarded except by yellow wooden barricades and an orange-and-black striped metal sign with a flashing light on top. The workmen were long gone, home to their suppers, their children, their girlfriends, their wives. The blue dump truck was gone too. Draped over one of the yellow barricades was a dirty sweat-sta
ined T-shirt, flapping like a flag in the breeze. Down inside the hole were pipes of varying sizes and colours, a mysterious network of appendages to which every house on the street was connected. Joanna thought of a doctor show she’d seen on TV where the dying man in the neat white bed had tubes coming out of his nose, mouth, and arms.

  She took the T-shirt off the barricade and carried it home where she hid it under the back step. The next morning when Esther had gone out shopping, Joanna fished out the shirt and smelled it. She put it on and admired herself, naked beneath, in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door.

  Two days later, the same men, one of them anyway, maybe the same one, whistled at Esther on her way home from the bus stop. She’d been downtown all afternoon shopping again. She burst into the kitchen flushed and flirtatious, laden with packages. “Well, they whistled at me too,” she announced. “I guess I’ve still got it after all.” Joanna rolled her eyes scornfully.

  Esther was cheerful and coy all evening long. Clarence teased her mercilessly, whistling at her every time she walked across the room. Esther loved it and wiggled her hips in response. Joanna was embarrassed by their pathetic foolishness. She was also angry. If those men would whistle at her mother, they would whistle at anyone. She had never thought of her mother as pretty and she did not want to. If anyone had asked her to describe her mother (why would they?), she would have said short with dark curly hair and glasses. This described most of the mothers she knew. She could not have said whether they were pretty or ugly or what.