In the Language of Love Read online

  What she often thought about while watching her customers try on clothes was a childhood fantasy she’d had about this store. Unlike many children she had never seriously considered running away from home. In retrospect she wondered at her own lack of initiative. Perhaps even then she had felt ashamed of herself for being unhappy. Even then she knew she had much to be grateful for. And if ever she was in danger of forgetting this when she was younger, Esther was quick to remind her. There were many many children worse off than she was. Of course there were those starving children she saw in TV commercials, their naked brown bellies distended, flies crawling intotheir noses and eyes, hungry dehydrated children too weak to cry. There were also, Joanna had observed, unfortunate children much closer to home, children she knew who came to school unfed, unwashed, possibly unloved. These children got in trouble. These children got blamed for everything. These children got lice. These were children on welfare, Esther said, whose fathers drank and beat them and ran around with bad women, children whose mothers never cooked or cleaned but lay around all day in their underwear watching soap operas and eating chocolates till their teeth fell out. “You’re lucky and don’t you forget it!” Esther warned. Joanna alternated between feeling guilty for being lucky and feeling guilty for being ungrateful for being lucky.

  When she did fantasize about running away from home as a child, it was always to the Simpsons-Sears store that she imagined she would go. She figured she could live there undetected for years as long as she was tidy and quiet. During the day she would just roam around and blend in with the regular shoppers. On Sundays and at night she would have the run of the place. She would wear pretty dresses off the racks, with an endless supply of pink leotards and black patent leather shoes. She would take food from the cafeteria upstairs—she didn’t eat much anyway, they’d never miss a cheese sandwich here, a hamburger there. She would watch ten or twelve televisions at once, all on different channels. She would sleep in one of the display beds with matching frilly spread and sham. Of course there were bathrooms and once a week she would bathe in one of the tubs in the plumbing department, probably the pink one. And the toys—of course, there were the toys.

  In the Simpsons-Sears store, she was sure, she could quite easily live happily ever after.

  Working there, she quickly discovered, was another matter altogether. Now she knew they had a night watchman who patrolled the premises and the bathtubs weren’t hooked up anyway. The job itself was dull. Every day she worried that working at a dull, trivial, ordinary job would turn her into a dull, trivial, ordinary person.

  working n. 1. the action of work. 2. twitching or agitated movement,as of the face. 3. slow or gradual progress involving great effort. 4. the functioning processes of the mind. 5. [pl.] the part of a mine or quarry where work is done.

  When she occasionally complained after work that she was bored and her feet hurt, Esther again reminded her that she was lucky. “You’re lucky to have a job,” she said, “and a clean easy job at that. You could be in a factory. Or a coal mine. Then you’d know what work is! Don’t be so lazy! Working isn’t supposed to be fun.” Since neither Esther nor Joanna had ever set foot in a factory or a coal mine, this argument struck Joanna as more relevant to the sixteenth century than to 1972. “Look at your father,” Esther lectured on. “He’s worked at the paper mill for twenty-two years. Soon he’ll be getting his gold watch. He’s a smart man, he could have have been anything. He could have been an accountant! But no. He has worked hard all his life and look where it’s got him.” Yes, indeed. Look. Where?

  43. SOUR

  JOANNA HATED SOUR CREAM, the thought of it, the name of it, the look of it. She hated the whole concept of sour cream. She had to turn her head when her parents smeared it all over their baked potatoes at supper. She had accidentally drunk sour milk once. And she had seen Esther emptying a carton of milk left out too long in the summer, the foul-smelling stuff neither solid nor liquid slopping down the drain. She did not see why sour cream should be much different. She could not imagine why anyone in their right mind would eat such a thing on purpose. At least it didn’t smell.

  “Don’t be such a sourpuss,” Esther often said, so often in fact that Joanna began to imagine her whole face gone white and curdled, neither liquid nor quite solid, but like a pussycat too, like a fat blob of sour cream with whiskers and a small pink nose.

  Once in the bakery department of the grocery store she had seen a loaf of bread called sourdough which she supposed must be anasty surprise for unsuspecting buyers. Imagine taking a big bite of fresh bread only to find a huge clot of sour cream hidden in the middle, the way they hide red jelly inside of doughnuts and when you bite into them the jelly gushes out the sides like thick sweet blood. Esther said sourdough bread had nothing to do with sour cream but Joanna was not convinced. Fortunately Esther never bought the stuff anyway.

  Joanna also hated the sweet-and-sour spareribs which Esther made by pouring a whole bottle of sweet-and-sour sauce over a pile of spareribs and then baking them in the oven for an hour. In this case it was not just the sourness she hated. It was also the sweetness, the chunks in the sauce, and the ribs themselves which, by the time Esther was finished with them, were just bones with a few mouthfuls of stringy meat stuck on them.

  After both Esther and Clarence got false teeth, they did not have the spareribs very often any more. By this time Joanna had discovered Chinese restaurants and realized that it was only her mother’s version of sweet and sour that she disliked.

  Much later she will also acquire a taste for sour cream, just as Esther predicted. This eventuality, like most of the future, is not something she could ever have imagined beforehand.

  44. EARTH

  LEWIS SAID, “I would go to the ends of the earth for you.” They were in Joanna’s bed in the middle of a hot August afternoon. They had just made love and were lying naked side by side flat on their backs, feeling sweaty and weak. Joanna was reflecting that, because of the illicit nature of their relationship, they seemed to be always doing one of three things: getting ready to make love, making love, or resting up after having made love.

  She smiled and sighed when he said this about the ends of the earth. Although she loved him truly (there was no longer any doubt about that—they had often examined themselves in exact detail to be sure they were not just driven by lust, loneliness, or the excitement of living dangerously), she was occasionally taken aback by the romantic clichéswhich had taken to falling from his heretofore witty and original lips. Although Joanna was charmed by these sentiments, she was still sane enough to be skeptical too. Saying he would go to the ends of the earth was all well and good. Be that as it may, he would still nevertheless not go downtown with her for dinner. He had to go home and cook dinner for Wanda who would be home from work in fourteen minutes.

  Joanna went downtown for Mexican food. Over her enchiladas and refried beans, she thought about the ends of the earth, which of course did not exist. She imagined the earth like a ball of taffy pulled out between two enormous celestial hands until the ends were nearly transparent, sticky and stringy, that familiar reliable orb pulled to the outer limits, too thin to support life or love as we know it. She imagined these sticky insubstantial strands crowded with intrepid true lovers determined to prove themselves, having actually gone to the ends of the earth just like they always said they would. Only to find there nothing to hang on to. Only to find themselves suspended above the abyss, clinging by their toenails to translucent gummy threads from which they were plummeting one by one like dead birds dropping out of a nuclear sky.

  45. TROUBLE

  JOANNA DOES NOT BELIEVE in secrets, which is probably why she can never keep them. Even Esther used to tell her that she was too honest for her own good, that she’d better learn how to lie (but not to her, of course) if she wanted to survive, let alone get anywhere, in this crazy world. Even then, Joanna knew that Esther was wrong. It was not the truth, but secrets, that would get you in trouble.
/>   trouble n. 1. a state of mental distress; worry; perplexity; difficulty; bother. 2. a) a misfortune; mishap; calamity, b) a distressing, vexatious, or embarrassing experience or circumstance, c) a condition of being out of order, needing repair [tire trouble.]

  Certainly a secret, any secret, was exciting. The exquisite tension ofkeeping it, of walking around for days bearing the secret inside you like a treasure or a pearl. Then the mouth-watering pleasure of telling it, of watching the eyes of the person you’d told bug out and shine with shock.

  But Joanna knew that every time she’d kept a secret she’d been promptly punished. This cause-and-effect relationship, she assumed, was one of those immutable laws of the universe which would continue to be true forever. (She was too young yet to know that truth, like all other natural and mental phenomena, was subject to change, interpretation, revision, and error.)

  There was the time she cheated on her Geography test and copied the name Lake Nipissing from the boy at the next desk and a week later somebody drowned in that very lake.

  The time she slept over at Penny and Pamela’s and she never told her mother how they spent the whole night with a flashlight reading True Story, True Romance, True Confessions, and one week later Daisy the cat got run over by a car right in front of their house.

  Not long after that, Joanna’s art teacher, Miss March, gathered the whole class together with paper, sharp pencils, and masonite boards and they all dribbled over to Branding Park where they each chose a spot and sat down cross-legged on the grass. Joanna drew the biggest climbing tree. She remembered to draw with her whole arm, not just her wrist, the way Miss March had said, and there were pencil smudges on her elbow and the palms of both hands. It was the best drawing she’d ever done and Miss March pinned it up in the art room where it stayed all year long.

  That very weekend the climbing tree was split in two by lightning in the middle of the night. It fell across the road, its insides the colour of peaches or banana skins. In the morning city workers swarmed all over it like termites. A truck hauled the pieces away and by lunchtime it was all gone and they’d painted the big stump green.

  In Joanna’s mind, this was akin to the consequences of secrets. The tense excitement she’d felt while drawing the perfect tree was not unlike the feeling she had while reading those dirty magazines. The only difference was that with the magazines that feeling was mostly between her legs and with the drawing it was somewhere else, higher up, and bigger, just below her ribs and some in her chest too. Both ofthese incidents had something to do with power and punishment, she knew that, but she couldn’t yet figure out the connection.

  The worst time was when she stole a pair of black silk panties from Woolworth’s (not doll clothes, a puzzle, or a pack of gum, but panties; not pink or white or lacy, but black, big and brazen enough to fit a full-grown fancy woman, not a skinny twelve-year-old girl with no bum). Nobody ever found out. But two weeks later Esther had to go into the hospital for something called a hysterectomy. She had a disease; she was going to have an operation and they were going to take the diseased part out. “Woman’s trouble,” Clarence called it, shyly but with a hint of dismissal in his voice too, as if it were nothing really, as if it were all in Esther’s head.

  Esther afterwards was supposed to spend six weeks getting her strength back. Joanna had never seen her mother sleeping in the daytime before and it was frightening, the sight of Esther bundled on the chesterfield all day long, with her hair uncombed, no makeup on, dozing with her mouth half-open and wet. This experience of illness was a terrible blow to Esther’s self-image and she did not suffer such humiliation gladly. Although she had been told to lie around and recuperate for six full weeks, she was up and back to normal again in less than one. Joanna would have liked to see the scar but she knew better than to ask.

  She’d given up early pumping her mother for information. Trying to get the truth out of Esther was more like pulling taffy than teeth. She’d give a little and then she’d pull back so Joanna was left with these long thin loops of knowledge, sweet because so tantalizing, sticky because she could not let go of them. Joanna never had been fond of sweets.

  She knew, for instance, that her mother had had other boyfriends before Clarence came along, but she didn’t know their names, what they looked like, what had happened to them in the end. She knew that Esther had worked as a waitress once, but she didn’t know where, when, or what it was like. She knew that Esther had had a baby before her, a long time ago, a blue baby born dead, but she didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl and she couldn’t figure out how you could be born and dead at the same time. She knew that Esther had been thirty-five when she was born, an age at which, as Esther often said, having a baby was dangerous and/or downright embarrassing.

  But she never said why. When Shirley Hutchinson down the street got pregnant at nearly fifty years of age, Esther was appalled and discreedy averted her eyes whenever Shirley and her belly lumbered proudly past. When she did talk to Shirley, Esther stared straight over her shoulder and scrupulously avoided noticing that her stomach was sticking out a foot in front of her.

  When it came to sex, Esther gave Joanna a book to read, a book she’d ordered from a women’s magazine. Esther handed Joanna the book out of the blue and told her to read and remember it. “I don’t want you getting in trouble,” she said angrily. It was clear that she would not entertain questions or confusion.

  Put out by the company that made Kotex or Tampax (why did all these things end with x, just like sex?), it was a thin pink-covered volume filled with drawings of happy hugging families and dimpled big-eyed babies. There was also a diagram of a woman’s insides which seemed to be filled up at the bottom with something shaped like a set of bagpipes. Joanna knew this was the part her mother had had taken out. There were arrows with words pointing to the various parts. One arrow said Fallopian tube but what it pointed to looked more like a flower than a tube, a fernlike blossom on a curvy stem, something you’d expect to find growing underwater, its pale green fronds waving and nodding at the fish.

  Although the book talked a lot about penises, there was no corresponding diagram of the man and so Joanna figured the look of a penis must be a secret or something too ugly to be closely examined. She knew that the penis was on the outside of the man’s body while all the woman’s organs were neatly tucked up inside, out of sight, out of mind. She thought women were lucky this way, to have everything so cleanly contained. Just think, Esther was now missing whole parts of her insides and nobody could tell by looking at her that there was just a space where those bagpipes had been.

  trouble n. 3. a person, event, or thing that causes affliction, annoyance, distress, etc. 4. public disturbance; civil disorder or unrest; agitation. 5. effort or exertion. 6. an illness; ailment; disease.

  Joanna grew up to become the kind of person other people will tell absolutely anything to. She often wonders what it is about her that causes people to confide in her. Why can’t they see that she is just a blabbermouth?

  There was the time at a party with Henry and his friend Derek’s girlfriend Wendy told Joanna that she’d had a baby, a girl, when she was sixteen. She’d given the baby up for adoption but not before she’d had a look at her, even though you weren’t supposed to do that. Now every year in the spring at the time of her daughter’s birthday, she walked around peering into the faces of small children, not wanting her back really, but just wondering what she looked like, what her name was.

  There was the time Joanna and Lewis were at the secret bar they went to where nobody knew he was married and the waitress sat down to have a beer with them after her shift and she told Joanna how she’d had an abortion last summer and never told her husband. He thought she’d gone in to have an ovarian cyst removed, or something like that, you know—one of those woman things.

  There was the time Phoebe Patterson, a woman Joanna had worked with briefly, was committed to the psychiatric hospital. She’d had a nervous breakdown. She was suffering
from psychotic delusions of grandeur: she thought she was Mother Theresa, Madame Curie, or Marilyn Monroe. Joanna wondered for a long time about nervous breakdowns: what were the symptoms, how did it feel? How would she know if she was having one? Sometimes she wished she would have one, just to get it over with, to be able to fall apart and be put away where she could rest for a while and be waited on, pampered, where a nice nurse would do her hair, cut her toenails, and maybe even feed her. But how could she ever have one if nobody would tell her what it was really like?

  It is, Joanna figures, the things nobody told you that you will most want or need to know in the end. It is the secrets you’ve hung on to that will keep you awake at night eventually.

  secret n. 1. something unknown or known only to a certain person or persons and purposely kept from others. 2. something not revealed or explained; a mystery. 3. the true cause or explanation for something which is not obvious [the secret of one’s success.]“You,” Henry said after the first time they made love, “you, Joanna, are an exquisite fuck.”

  “Thank you,” Joanna said quietly, as if Henry had said, “My, what a lovely dress!”

  “Thank you,” Joanna said simply, having learned that when someone gives you a compliment it is no longer considered charming to say, “What, this old thing?” Now, whenever someone gave her a sartorial compliment, she countered by saying, “Thank you, I got it at Second Fiddle for five ninety-nine.”

  In this case, she said, “Thank you,” and left it at that.

  Much as it was gratifying to think of herself as an exquisite fuck, she couldn’t help but wonder if this was really something she could take credit for. After all, when it came right down to it, she really had nothing to compare herself to. It was not as if she and her female friends, close though they might be, sat around saying, Well…how do you do it? How do you move your hips? Do you whisper dirty words in his ear? Which words? When? Do you like it from behind?