In the Language of Love Page 19

  This is the real question. Joanna knows the answer will come to her eventually. This is akin to those annoying questions that come up in casual conversation: who wrote that book about the dancing bear, who sang that song about onions, who starred in that movie about Vietnam? Then everybody racks their brains but no one can come upwith the answer though it’s on the tips of all their tongues. Joanna thinks of this as “The Rita Coolidge Syndrome” because of the time she and Henry tried for three weeks to remember the name of the woman who’d made that album with Kris Kristofferson in 1973, the one called Full Moon. Sure enough, the answer came to her at three in the morning and she sat bolt upright in bed, crowing, “Rita Coolidge! Rita Coolidge!”

  Now the question is, what are you afraid of? She knows it will come to her some day and she knows it won’t be Rita Coolidge.

  Much as she longs to be one of them, Joanna holds an abiding mistrust of all people who sleep soundly. With all the reasons in the world to worry, how could they? They must be kidding themselves, missing the point, or just plain shallow. Henry, despite his many other charming attributes, was one of them, a sound sleeper who said with irritating self-righteousness every morning at breakfast, “Wow, I slept like a log!” Until Joanna, flopping and fussing around beside him night after night, came to picture him that way: a solid immovable object flat on his back in the bed, his legs stretched straight out, arms folded corpse-like across his chest, his long hair spread all over the pillow (both pillows) like branches, his eyes and nostrils like knot-holes, his wide-open snoring mouth like one of those tree cavities in which woodpeckers nest and small children hide things.

  On calmer, less resentful nights when she wasn’t actively hating him for his peaceful slumber, she was reminded of the Sleeping Giant, a rocky peninsula in Lake Superior at the mouth of Thunder Bay. Viewed from the shore or the air, the rock formation takes on the shape of a giant sleeping on his back, arms folded across his chest. According to Ojibwa legend, this is the warrior Nanna Bijou at rest, turned to stone by the wrath of Gitche Manitou, the great spirit who created the world. As a child she had treasured a postcard picture of the cape with the sleeping body of an Ojibwa warrior superimposed upon the rock in headdress, moccasins, war paint and all.

  Samuel, naturally enough, in the first year of his life, sleeps like a baby: that is to say, lightly, unreliably, and never long enough. Sometimes the three of them are up half the night. This is generally infuriating but occasionally it takes on a festive atmosphere, the three of them puttering around in the bright kitchen in the middle of the dark night, Gordon making popcorn and hot chocolate, Joanna singing into Samuel’s sleepy ears. One night when Samuel has gas, they all go out to the car and drive around the block a dozen times in their pyjamas singing “Rockabye Baby.”

  Before long Samuel is sleeping through the night. Gordon is too. But Joanna is often still stuck in the quagmire of sleeplessness.

  Samuel at four wants to know where he goes when he’s asleep. Joanna remembers asking Esther the same question and Esther replied by reciting the traditional children’s bedtime prayer: Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep./If I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take. Joanna had never considered the possibility of dying in her sleep. The prospect terrified her every night for weeks afterwards. Perhaps this had been the start of her insomnia in the first place.

  Now, in answer to Samuel’s question, she says, “I don’t know.”

  He says, “But where do my eyes go? Where does my voice go? They have to go somewhere, don’t they?” She does not tell him about the children’s prayer.

  She too has come to see sleep as a place, a pure and simple place, probably white, which she will get to some day. She is still optimistic that such a place can be found. She does not know if she must go forward or backward to reach it.

  Must she go back to those nights when she lay tucked up safe in her little bed, the kitchen light coming in a crack softly, Esther and Clarence in the front room talking quietly, the open window admitting the comforting sound of Mr. Nystrom mowing his lawn, and June bugs bounced off the screen? She had a ritual in those days which, like all rituals, made her feel safe enough to sleep. Check under the bed, close the closet door tight, then jump into bed and pull the tightly tucked-in sheets out at the bottom so they wrapped all around her feet. This was necessary ever since Penny and Pamela had told her the story of a little boy in Toronto (that evil city) whoslept with his feet hanging out and a rat chewed his toes off. Unfortunately Joanna is less able now to believe in the magic of rituals, although she does still shut the closet door tight just in case.

  Must she go even further back to that night she doesn’t remember, but there it is in the photo album: herself a toddler, sprawled sound asleep in her crib with her Davy Crockett coonskin cap on her head resting on the big panda bear Clarence won at the Ex, her arms around her yellow stuffed dog Wyatt Earp, and the bunny rabbit decal is smiling on the wooden headboard?

  Or does she have to go forward to some future time when everything will be clear, all memories will be meaningful, and yes, she will be living a long and happy life?

  38. ANGER

  EVERY MORNING JOANNA AWAKENS to the seven o’clock news on the radio. Although this daily deluge of international information is often a depressing way to start the day, still she prefers it to the rock-and-roll station where the music is frenetic and the deejays are all pumped up with perkiness. Just the sound of their relentlessly jovial voices makes her want to stay in bed.

  This morning she awakens just in time to catch the tail end of the lead story: another uprising in another country which is of course distressing to hear about but distant enough to be an intellectual exercise in political empathy—how terrible, how horrible, those poor people, it couldn’t happen here. Joanna cannot always hold on to this reassuring delusion of immunity. She hears these days (every day, it seems) about murder, rape, torture, child abduction and molestation in this, her very own country. Sometimes these atrocities occur in this, her very own city which she has always wanted to think of as safe, sane, solid, and good.

  Even here a five-year-old child has been abducted from his very own neighbourhood. They cannot find him, they are still looking, afraid of what they may discover in the forest, in the river, in the basement of his apartment building, in the dumpster behind Mac’s Milk. Even here a woman has been raped and then bludgeoned to death with a hammer in her very own home at three in the afternoon. Even here women and children have been advised to take extra safety measures for their own protection. Even here they have all been infected with fear.

  Joanna hears people still trying desperately to convince themselves that they are safe. She overhears them in the bank, in the grocery store, in the underground parking lot while looking over their shoulders. They say, “It was a bad neighbourhood…I heard she was a drug addict…I heard the child was unsupervised.” For although they must now admit that yes, it can happen here, still they cling furiously to the belief that it cannot happen to them. Still they erect their totems of safety. Still they will not admit that they are afraid.

  This morning the carefully modulated non-committal voice of the news announcer says, “Police are now patrolling city streets to prevent outbursts of anger.”

  Still half-asleep, Joanna thinks, Yes, this is how it should be. She imagines policemen in pairs walking the streets on the keen lookout for anger. They are on special assignment to stop the slaughter. They have dogs specially trained to sniff out and track down the smell of anger, a smell, she imagines, like hot metal or burning rubber.

  All over the city there are pockets of anger like boils about to burst.

  There are anxious frustrated motorists stuck in traffic, leaning on their horns and giving each other the finger. There is a man beating his dog, his daughter, his wife. There is a man beating his head against the wall, a perfectly perpendicular suburban wall covered with aluminum siding, red brick, white stucco. All over the city th
ere are furious mothers slapping down the dinner plates, slapping their children’s chubby hands for picking their noses or playing with themselves, for grabbing a chocolate bar in the grocery store, for swearing, spitting, or hitting. Slapping them for crying, saying, “I’ll give you something to cry about!”

  There is a heartbroken wife who has just discovered her husband’s infidelity. She has lost her head and is standing even now over his sated sleeping body, ready to plunge a knife straight into his unfaithful handsome heart. At this moment the policemen fling open the door withtheir guns drawn. But they are smiling, they say politely, “Excuse me, ma’am, but you’re under arrest. You’re under arrest for anger.”

  The wife gives herself over gratefully into their sensible qualified hands. The husband sleeps on. The wife is weeping. The policemen are patting her shoulders, her hair. The tracking dog is licking her trembling hands. She says, “I was just so angry, I was just so afraid.” The policemen say, “Don’t worry, it will be all right, pull yourself together, we’re here to help you, no one would blame you, we’re here, we’re here, we’re here in the nick of time.”

  Joanna gets up and puts the coffee on. Gordon is already in the shower. She can hear him singing. Samuel is awake and talking to his teddy bear. For the moment not one of them is angry or afraid.

  Given the choice Joanna knows she would rather be angry than afraid. She also knows that she has never been one without the other. Like most women, she is afraid of being angry and she is angry at having to be afraid. More and more often now, she finds herself furious with fear. Now she understands why no one ever asked Esther what she was so mad about.

  39. CARPET

  JOANNA BOUGHT A FAKE PERSIAN CARPET for the living room of her basement apartment. When she and Gordon move into their house on Laverty Street eight years later there is no real place for the carpet which is worn now and badly stained, so they put it in the basement which is unfinished yet but they hope to build a ree room some day and the carpet will come in handy then.

  It is six months or more before Joanna goes into that part of the basement again. The necessities (laundry, storage, furnace, hot-water tank) are all at the other end. The carpet, by this time, is covered with mildew, black and grey in some places, yellow, like pollen, in others. Luckily it is time for the twice-a-year city-wide pick-up of junk so they roll up the rotten carpet, tie it with twine, and place it at the end of the driveway with their other junk: two rusted toasters, two broken vacuum cleaners, and a twisted iron bed-frame whichthey found in the basement when they moved in.

  The next morning at breakfast they see that the carpet is gone. The rest of the junk is still there. The city truck won’t be around till later in the day, maybe not until the next day or the next. Lots of people are cruising the streets in pick-up trucks and vans, scavenging other people’s junk, shaking their heads, no doubt, and clucking their practical tongues at the perfectly good stuff some dissipated people throw away. Whoever carted off their carpet is in for a big surprise.

  The next morning they look out the window at breakfast and there is their carpet, carefully tied and leaning up against the junk (stove with no door and no elements, TV set with no glass and no guts) of the house across the street.

  Joanna sits at the kitchen table all morning planning a new collage and just before lunch she sees the city workers in overalls and black gloves heaving the carpet and everything else into the back of an overflowing truck.

  40. GIRL

  girl n. 1. a female child. 2. a young, or relatively young, unmarried woman. 3. a female servant or employee. 4. a woman of any age, married or single. 5. a sweetheart; also, one’s wife. See also GIRL FRIDAY, GIRLFRIEND, GIRL GUIDE, GIRLHOOD, GIRLIE, GIRLISH, GIRL SCOUT.

  41. HIGH

  SCHOOL. WOODBINE HIGH SCHOOL. Also known as Woodbine Collegiate and Vocational Institute, WCVI.

  Although she did not think she had minded it that much at the time, Joanna still has dreams about high school twenty years later. They are nightmares really, personal, athletic, and academic in nature, nerve-racking dreams of disgrace and forgetting. She dreams at various times that she has arrived for classes at WCVI only to dis-cover that she has forgotten her homework, her room number, her blue gym suit with her name embroidered on the back, her shoes, her bra, her panties, her teacher’s name, her own name. Or parts of her body have gone missing: her right hand, her eyebrows, her nose, her breasts, her left leg from the knee down. Occasionally she arrives stark naked and nobody notices. Or she arrives stark naked and everybody laughs so she rips all the pages out of her math notebook and tries to stick them to her body.

  Sometimes the school itself has gone missing and she arrives to find an empty lot, a lake, or a shopping mall in its place. Or else the school is there but all the doors have been locked, moved, or covered over with red bricks. Sometimes she gets inside the building all right but then her classroom is gone or the stairs are missing or moving like a down escalator gone berserk, so that no matter how long she climbs them she can never reach the top. Then she gets sent to the principal’s office and is suspended for a week for being late.

  Gordon assures Joanna that such dreams are very common. “Everybody has high school dreams,” he says. “We were all traumatized by high school whether we knew it or not. People who don’t dream about high school missed the point.” By way of consolation, Gordon says he has high school dreams too, same dreams, different school. Sometimes he too dreams that the school building has disappeared and in its place there is a used-car lot. Sometimes he dreams that he is undressing in the locker room after a basketball game with all the other exuberant sweaty boys, and when he removes his gym shorts he finds that his penis has fallen off. Or else his penis is still there but the other boys start snapping at him with their wet towels and then it falls off and somebody steps on it or throws it down the toilet.

  Joanna does not find it particularly consoling to think that her nightmares are run of the mill. That night she has an even worse nightmare in which she is trapped inside someone else’s high school dream.

  In the beginning of this dream, she is flying effortlessly above the rooftops of an unidentified city. It is night and the windows of the houses are warm yellow squares singing into the unquiet dark, into the unbridled night where anything might happen. But she is not afraid. She is flying, she is above all danger. She is airborne andimmune. Then she is inside the bedroom of one house and in the bed is a boy named Robert Malone with whom she went to high school. He was the boy that every girl dreamed of. He was not very smart but he was a skier. Every day in the winter he came to school in a different ski sweater with matching turtleneck. He was always tanned. He looked like Jean-Claude Killy. His parents were well-off and every year Robert got a whole new set of ski equipment, always the best make, top of the line. He dated cheerleaders and volleyball players.

  In the dream Joanna slips into Robert Malone’s bed. He is, she sees, not a boy any more. He is a slightly balding middle-aged man in cotton striped pyjamas. He had a nice wife and three kids but she divorced him and he only sees the kids on weekends. He is an insurance salesman. His ex-wife Barbie was a cheerleader but now she is a cashier at the A&P on the corner of Brock and Niagara. They are, Joanna realizes in the dream, the kind of people whose lives peaked in high school and it’s been downhill ever since.

  Robert Malone is dreaming too. He is dreaming about high school. He is dreaming that he is skiing down the front staircase of WCVI which is covered in three feet of fresh powder snow. He is having a wonderful time and there are girls everywhere, girls who at first appear to be angels with red-and-white wings but who, on second thought, are cheerleaders with red-and-white pompoms. Joanna is somehow trapped inside Robert Malone’s body and she is terrified. She does not know how to ski. The snow is flying everywhere and her mouth is full of it. She knows this is not even her own dream but still she cannot wake up. As you might expect, Robert Malone suddenly takes off and then they are flying so high they cannot
see the ground. They are flying to the moon. Robert Malone has turned back into a handsome teenager and Joanna is aging rapidly.

  42. WORKING

  IN THE LAST YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL Joanna worked in Ladies Wear at Simpsons-Sears, two nights a week and all day Saturday. She also worked there during the summer. She had been wanting to work forthree years, pestering Esther to let her apply for a job at the old folks’ home where Penny and Pamela worked part-time serving supper and doing dishes. Esther said she was too young to work. “What’s your rush?” Esther said. “You’ll be working for the rest of your life.”

  working adj. 1. that works. 2. used in or taken up by work. 3. on which further work may be based. 4. of an animal used for work, not kept as a pet. 5. twitching or jerking convulsively with emotion: said of the face.

  Once Joanna had the job in Ladies Wear, Esther thought it was wonderful. She bragged about it to her friends. Not only did Joanna get a staff discount on everything in the store now, but she was doing so well that she was probably going to be promoted to head of the department by the end of the summer. This of course was not true. Joanna was not a particularly good salesperson. She could not bring herself to tell overweight middle-aged women trying on dresses ten years too young and three sizes too small that they looked marvellous. Instead she smiled sweetly, nodded gently, and thought about other things while these women bought whatever they wanted anyway. She could take neither credit nor blame for their sartorial decisions. She occasionally worried that she would lose control and tell one of these women that she was fat, ugly, and stupid. She did not enjoy working at Simpsons-Sears but her mother enjoyed it immensely. Because, Joanna suspected, this job was the most hopeful indication yet that she was going to turn out normal.