In the Language of Love Read online

  “But if I kill it,” Clarence teased, holding a Kleenex ready six inches above the spider, “it will rain.”

  “I don’t care if it rains,” Esther hissed through clenched teeth. “Just kill the damn thing!”

  “It’s just a little spider,” Henry said. “It won’t hurt you.” “Kill it, kill it!” Joanna cried.

  “I don’t want to kill it,” Lewis said. “Live and let live.” He guided the fat hairy spider onto a piece of paper and carefully carried it outside and released it into the long grass. “What do you do when I’m not here?” he asked Joanna.

  “I kill them with my shoe,” she said grimly.

  “I hate spiders with all my heart,” Samuel says. “Why?” Joanna asks. “Because they’re ugly,” he says.

  She was just tucking him into bed when he spotted a small spider nestled in the farthest corner of the ceiling. “Kill it, kill it!” he cried.

  Joanna is perched precariously on a stool with a Kleenex in her hand. She could have called Gordon to come and do it but she doesn’t want to pass her fear of spiders on to her son. It may, however, already be too late.

  The spider is pale grey, almost white, almost transparent. She shudders when she squeezes it into the Kleenex. It crunches a bit.

  “Let’s see! Let’s see the guts!” Samuel cries.

  She sits down on the side of his bed and unfolds the Kleenex to reveal a grey smear, two or three legs still intact. Samuel is disappointed. “There’s no blood,” he says and curls back into his blankets with his snuggly bear.

  At 3:00 A.M. he wakes up crying, having dreams, naturallyenough, about spiders, all kinds of them he says, dangling from the ceiling, crawling up his legs, banging on the window with their little spider fists. They were coming out of his ears, chewing on his eyebrows, spinning webs out of his hair. There was one, he says, as big as a cat, a big grey cat, wearing a hat and carrying a pencil that turned into a gun. She lies down beside him in his skinny bed. By way of consolation she would like to say she was dreaming about spiders too. But in fact she was not. In fact she was dreaming that she had moved back to her old basement apartment. In the dream she had Samuel with her but Gordon was no longer around. In the dream this did not seem to present a problem.

  She tells Samuel that spiders won’t hurt him, spiders are nothing to be scared of. She tells him to think about nice things instead: sailboats, sunshine, cookies, flowers, popcorn, puppies, cheese. She falls asleep beside him and for the remaining hours of the night neither one of them dreams about spiders. Waking in the morning snuggled warm against her back, Samuel says he dreamed that she was sleeping beside him all night long and, sure enough, here she is. He says, “You make all my dreams come true,” and Joanna would like to believe, even briefly, that he is right.

  35. NEEDLE

  ESTHER SAID HER MOTHER HAD DIED from blood poisoning contracted when she stuck her hand into a mending basket full of her father’s socks. A dirty darning needle went right into the palm of her hand. In those days there were no antibiotics and the infection was fatal. Although Esther did not talk much about her childhood, Joanna knew that she had loved her mother and hated her father. This anecdote was offered as proof of what a bastard he had been—for certainly, if it had not been for his holey socks, her mother would have lived. Perhaps forever.

  Her father had died a year later of cirrhosis of the liver. Esther, the youngest child, was thus orphaned at the age of fourteen. But she had three older sisters who finished raising her. Most of this task hadfallen to Frances, the oldest, who was twenty-four at the time. Frances now lived in Vancouver and she and Esther kept in touch by letters and phone calls, although they did not visit owing to the distance and the expense involved to bridge it.

  The two other sisters, Florence and Joan, lived in other cities too, Florence in Toronto (that evil city) and Joan with her American husband in Phoenix, Arizona. Florence and Joan were just Christmas cards now, theirs the first to arrive each year early in December, often without even a note inside, just their names signed at the bottom, along with the names of their husbands and children, cousins Joanna had never met. One of the aunts (Joanna cannot remember now which one) favoured Christmas cards illustrated by people who had no arms and so they painted with their mouths or their feet. Every year Esther made veiled comments about these cards, implying that although they were admirable they were also odd and somehow inappropriate.

  There were other veiled comments about Florence and Joan. Florence was always referred to as “Poor Florence” for reasons which remained unspecified. Perhaps she was to be pitied because she lived in Toronto. Joan was always called “snooty” because her American husband owned a large hotel in Phoenix and they were quite wealthy.

  This lack of familial connection was not caused by an actual feud or rift or anything like that. It seemed due merely to lack of interest and effort on everyone’s part. “We’ve never been a close family,” Esther often said proudly, the way another person would say just the opposite.

  Clarence’s family was not close either. His father had died of stomach cancer before Joanna was born and his mother had been hit by a car and killed when Joanna was eighteen months old. She had been waiting for a bus in the winter when a car coming round the corner had spun out of control on the icy road and crushed her against a metal hydro pole.

  Clarence had one brother, Evan, who was two years older and who lived with his wife and three children in Halifax. Clarence had fond memories of Evan from when they were growing up and from when they were both soldiers in the Second World War. But therewas nothing, it seemed, between childhood and the war, and little after that. They too were not good at keeping in touch much beyond Christmas cards and the occasional long-distance phone call which made Clarence nervous so that he hunched over the phone and yelled into the receiver to be sure of making himself heard across all those miles. Evan died when Joanna was seven. He had suffered a heart attack while shovelling his driveway. Clarence flew alone to Halifax for the funeral. It was the first time he had been on an airplane since flying back to Canada with Evan at the end of the war. Evan’s wife, Angela, remarried a few years later, and after this Clarence completely lost touch with her and the children—more relatives Joanna did not know.

  As an only child, she was often lonely, especially at Christmas, when she longed for a large noisy energetic family gathered round the table, passing turkey and mashed potatoes, laughing, arguing about who was the best carver, who made the best pies, whose turn it was to say grace. She imagined a dozen people at least, of all shapes and sizes, something like the Waltons on TV. She fantasized that she would some day be reunited with all her long-lost relatives whom she would recognize instantly from her parents’ old photographs. The fantasy did not extend much beyond this meal because Joanna could not imagine what else that many people would do all together in a house at once.

  Growing up, Joanna always had a sense of herself as a solitary child, a potential orphan. She worried about what would happen to her if her parents died. Much as she liked to fantasize about these unknown relatives, they were total strangers and she did not really want to live with them. She imagined all kinds of fatal calamities which might befall either or both Esther or Clarence. She especially worried whenever Clarence went out to shovel snow for fear of finding him facedown in a snowbank an hour later, stone-cold dead with the shovel frozen to his hands. She was immediately alarmed every time Esther hauled out the mending basket and stationed herself in front of the TV with a darning needle three inches long and a burned-out light bulb which she inserted into the foot of Clarence’s work socks so she could mend the holes neatly with thick grey wool. Sometimes Joanna secretly checked the contents of the mendingbasket just to be sure there were no dirty needles imbedded in her father’s socks.

  Eventually Esther abandoned mending socks altogether because, for all the time it took and the price of socks these days, it was not worth it. Later when Joanna was working part-time at SimpsonsSears, Clare
nce bought a snowblower. In fact Joanna bought it in her name so she could get her staff discount. By this time, however, she knew there were more dangerous things to worry about than needles and snow.

  36. RED

  THE COLOUR OF THE BLOOD which fills your mouth when you get your tongue stuck to the car door handle in the winter and your father yanks you off, then rushes you inside the house to your mother who laughs and makes you drink warm milk which does nothing but turn your blood pink and this is the first you have known of a wound which a kiss or a Band-Aid cannot fix.

  The colour behind your eyelids when you close them in a well-lit room, a small sunny kitchen perhaps, where you are listening to your lover tell you that his wife will die if he leaves her, you understanding for once and for all that there will be no easy way out, and the red behind your eyelids is a colour only you will ever see.

  The colour of your son’s cheeks after a long walk in the winter, you pulling him gently over snowbanks on the wooden sled behind you, the sled which was yours when you were little and now your father has fixed it up, repainted all the red parts, for this new child who doesn’t care of course where the sled came from, cares only that it slides silently and sometimes throws snow up into his face and by the time you get home he is all rosy and laughing, and when you see your own face in the mirror you are surprised to discover that you too are all rosy and laughing, every bit as happy and handsome as he is, and maybe this is what you have been hoping for all along.

  37. SLEEP

  WHENEVER JOANNA HAS INSOMNIA, she can just picture a mouth in her brain. Not a whole mouth exactly, more like a full set of false teeth: pearly whites set into perfectly pink gums, disembodied but very energetic, clacking and chattering away with a miserable tormenting mind of their own. They are like the plastic toy she saw once in a novelty shop: a set of teeth atop a pair of tiny yellow sneakers with black laces like sutures, and when you wound the key at the back the sneakers tapped blindly across the tabletop while the teeth clacked cheerfully. Obviously this contraption was meant to be amusing but it gave Joanna the creeps, reminding her of a black-and-white horror movie she’d seen years ago called The Brain that Wouldn’t Die.

  Two or three nights a week usually, and Sunday night always, these intrepid teeth start up their chattering inside her brain. In addition to the clacking teeth, there is also sometimes, but not always, a buzzing as of flies, the big ones, bluebottles. The teeth and/or the flies usually begin somewhere between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M. They persist until half an hour before it is time to get up at which point Joanna finally falls into a deep sleep and then the alarm clock rings, just when she is sure she could have slept forever.

  Having long ago discovered that there is a helpful book for every conceivable occasion, Joanna has taken to reading up on the subject, borrowing library books with promising titles like The Five Types of Sleeplessness and How to Overcome Them and Natural Sleep (How To Get Your Share). She has become casually conversant with all the scientific research on alpha waves, delta waves, and REM sleep. She knows the specific names of the five forms insomnia may take. She has had all of them, sometimes all in the same night. She is interested to learn that Sunday night insomnia is a common syndrome among people who like to sleep late Sunday mornings and then, presumably, spend the day lolling around on the couch watching Sunday afternoon football or pay TV, pigging out on pretzels and guzzling beer. This must mean that religious people who get up early Sunday, trundle off to the morning service, and then spend the rest of the day vigorously atoning for their sins will be spared not only eternal damnation but also the devilish torment of sleeplessness.

  Long ago she gave up on the time-honoured solutions of drinking warm milk and counting sheep. Warm milk only makes her tongue feel furry. And sheep—well, who cares about sheep anyway? Who bestowed those magical sleep-inducing powers upon them in the first place? Some dumb shepherd, no doubt, who was bored and kept falling asleep on the job and had to blame it on someone.

  For a while she put aside her skepticism and tried some of the remedies and suggestions outlined in the books. They recommended mental alphabetical games as an instrument for focusing your thoughts and so inducing sleep.

  Make an alphabetical list of fruit. A: Apple. B: Banana. C: Cantaloupe. D: Dates. E: Eggplant. Is the eggplant a fruit or a vegetable? What was the name of that Greek restaurant where they had the great moussaka? And what was that wonderful dessert called? Baklava, that’s it. Should eggplant more properly be referred to by its French name, aubergine? In which case, it should have come under A. Buzz. Clack. Her mind is wandering again.

  Instead she ends up making an unalphabetized list of all the things she thinks, worries, and fusses about when she should be sleeping.

  If it gets too hot, will the propane tank for the new gas barbecue explode…the kitchen floor hasn’t been washed for two months…Samuel still cannot recognize the letter W…the furnace sounds funny…the roof needs patching…she doesn’t write to Clarence often enough…her new collage is probably a meaningless waste of time and glue…the fuel bill is past due, also the phone bill and the property taxes…she was impatient and crabby with Samuel all day…she still hasn’t made a will…what will she do with all of Clarence’s stuff when he dies…a year ago she started stripping the back door for repainting and it’s still not done…she wants to paint it green…what if Samuel can’t find a job when he grows up…she hasn’t filed her income tax yet…Gordon is breathing funny…what if Samuel becomes a drug addict and ends up in a crack house in Toronto (that evil city) …the car needs a new muffler, has in fact needed a new muffler for nearly six months…what is Lewis’s middle name…the windows are filthy…the driveway needs resurfacing…there’s no milk forbreakfast…that mole on her left thigh looks bigger and darker…trying to remember Lewis’s middle name, she has forgotten the colour of Henry’s eyes…Samuel watches too much TV…some day every single person who is alive at this very moment will be dead…she drinks too much coffee, must switch to herbal tea instead…trying to remember the colour of Henry’s eyes, she has forgotten the name of that man she dated later who refused to eat in restaurants for fear his notoriously noisy stomach would gurgle and embarrass him to death…she has a pain in her right kidney…Samuel wants to know where they will go when they die…Clarence is alone alone all alone…Samuel wants to know where he was before he was born…she forgot to clean the toilet…so many questions lately to which she must answer “I don’t know” or else fall back on that ever-useful parental “Because” …she hasn’t sold a collage in six months…something to fall back on, she should have learned shorthand…what’s that sound, a squirrel, the wind, a marauding psychokiller…do secretaries still take shorthand or is it all done magically now with machines like a trick done with mirrors…why is Samuel afraid of swings…the man with the gurgling stomach was named Kevin…another four-year-old has disappeared in Toronto (that evil city) and what if it happens here…Samuel eats too much candy…did she ever tell Gordon about Kevin or had she kept it a secret…what did it matter anyway…secrets are like lies…you have to remember who you told what…you have to keep your stories straight…would Gordon mind about her sleeping with Kevin ten years ago…or would he mind more that she’d never mentioned it…did the fact that she might never have mentioned it mean that sleeping with Kevin had been too important or too irrelevant or just too embarrassing…she’s always believed that honesty is the best policy…what if it isn’t…why is she such a lousy liar…what will she say when Samuel discovers the truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny…what will she do when Samuel realizes she doesn’t know everything…what are his chances of living to be old, let alone happily ever after…what’s that smell, smoke, is it smoke?…if it gets too hot, will the propane tank for the new gas barbecue explode and kill us all or will it explode in the other direction and kill the new baby of the couple across the back lane?

  The books recommended getting out of bed and doing something boring if you have been a
wake for more than thirty minutes. Joanna sits at the kitchen table, flipping through the newspaper, gets started on the crossword puzzle, and is wide awake again. She goes into the living room and clicks through all the channels. There is the perky blonde woman on the weather channel who is fairly hysterical with enthusiastic promises of sunshine in Miami for the rest of the week. There are black-and-white reruns of “Hazel” and “Leave It to Beaver.” There are frenetic smoky rock videos which she watches with the sound turned off because the music is bound to stir her up too much and set her to wondering when was the last time she went to a party…a real party with loud music, flagrant substance abuse, and dancing so wild the floorboards were jumping…not the kind of party people have nowadays with elaborate hors d’oeuvres, a choice of mineral waters, and The Phantom of the Opera or the soothing sounds of whales on the CD player…when was the last time she even went to one of those so-called parties…how come nobody has parties any more…when did she stop wanting to go to parties…when was the last time she had a party herself…what was the name of that guy who came to her and Henry’s Christmas party, and when the police came to the door because the neighbours had called about the music again, this guy invited them in for a beer and then threw up in the dieffenbachia?

  Now she does nothing but suffer through the sleepless hours, wondering why they are referred to as “the wee small hours” when clearly they are the largest hours in the world.

  Gordon sleeps well but tries to be sympathetic. He asks, “What are you worrying about?”

  She says, “Everything.”

  He asks, “What can I do?”

  She says, “Nothing.”

  He asks, “What are you afraid of?”