In the Language of Love Read online

  Lewis was proud of his flat hard stomach. Also of his long muscular legs, his tight trim buttocks, and his well-formed biceps which he did not, fortunately, go so far as to flex in front of her. He worked out twice a week and jogged the other days, two miles from his house to the congested polluted streets of downtown and back. Joanna often wondered why he didn’t run through the park, by the waterfront, or even just through the quiet neighbourhood. Wouldn’t that be safer, wouldn’t that be healthier? Eventually he admitted that he rather liked the look of himself in his black tank top and thigh-length spandex shorts. No baggy grey sweats for him. He preferred to run where he could be seen and see himself too, reflected in the storefront windows as he cantered by. He confessed that a woman had once said he ran like a fine young stallion.

  “What woman?” Joanna said. They were making love on a Wednesday afternoon. Why did he always make such incendiary remarks when they were right in the middle of it?

  “Oh, just some woman.”

  “Not Wanda.”

  “No, not Wanda. Just some woman I used to know.”

  “How well did you know her?”

  “Not in the biblical sense. I never slept with her, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was married.”

  “Was she in love with you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Forget I ever mentioned her. She just liked to look at my muscles.”

  “I’ll show you muscles,” Joanna said and clutched his softening penis as hard as she could with the muscles of her vagina. He was astounded and aroused.

  “How on earth do you do that? I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “There are lots of things you don’t know about me. I practise.”

  “When?”

  “Walking around downtown, waiting in line at the bank, when I’m bored and buying lettuce at the A&P.”

  Lewis is laughing and coming at the same time. Afterwards they curl up together in Joanna’s big bed and she rests her head on his stomach. She cannot begrudge him his vanity for long. It is flat. It is hard. She does not have the heart to tell him that sometimes she wishes it were softer, flabby even, more like a pillow instead of a table upon which to lay her head. She does not have the heart to tell him that sometimes when she sees a fat man on the street, she has to fight off the urge to run and bury her head in his bulk, which she imagines would be plush and furry, docile, yeastily fragrant and unassailably safe.

  The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

  It is Christmas Eve. Clarence has been here for three days. Samuel is fairly crazed with anticipation. He thinks his grandpa and Santa Claus are pals because whenever Grandpa comes to visit, Santa isn’t far behind. He knows he will be allowed to open one present after supper. The rest must wait until morning. After supper they will also bake cookies for Santa and they will leave eight equal pieces of carrot in the driveway for the reindeer. Samuel is in the living room headfirst under the Christmas tree, shaking and pinching and sniffing his gifts. His little behind is stuck up in the air, wiggling. Gordon says he looks like a puppy. Samuel barks and shakes a present in his teeth.

  Joanna is in the kitchen making chili and corn bread. She is making the chili very mild so that Samuel will be able to eat it and also because Clarence has mentioned that he’s had some trouble with his stomach lately. Also his bowels. Joanna doesn’t like to ask for details. Inquiring after the state of her father’s digestive system would seem to be an irrevocable unconscionable invasion of privacy. She goes easy on the chili powder. She asks him if he’s hungry. He says yes. Very.

  She is still at the point in the visit where she is trying to impress him with her culinary skills. She is still at the point in her life where she is trying to please him. She’s read the self-help books, she knows that this need adult children have to win parental approval can be destructive. It is yet another form of unrequited love. She knows she should just be getting on with letting go. She knows that her family was not nearly as dysfunctional as some. Certainly she was never physically or sexually abused. Sometimes she feels guilty for feeling so damaged. What right does she have to complain? What right does she have to be scarred for life?

  She does not always trust her own memory but then again it is all she has. What if she did have a happy childhood and just can’t remember it? Sometimes she thinks, with no offence to those who have actually suffered through one, that unhappy childhoods are in style now. Perhaps she just wants to be like everybody else. But the truth is that her parents did not get divorced, her father did not beat her or her mother, he was never unemployed or (as far as she knows) unfaithful, she seldom ever even heard them arguing out loud. They were probably just an ordinary family. They had probably done the best they could. So why does she feel so bad?

  Perhaps in those days parents were blissfully ignorant of the indelible damage they were doing, the scars to the bone they were leaving, the lifelong havoc they were creating. Now the word parent has been elevated to verb status. In Joanna’s twenty-year-old dictionary it is credited only with being a noun. There is a passing reference to its adjectival use in reference to corporations and their subsidiaries.

  Now that they must parent positively, mothers and fathers everywhere (but especially mothers) have become diabolically self-conscious, forever calculating the irremediable ramifications of their every move, every mood, every admonition. They read books, they watch videos, they take courses on how to parent. In none of these avenues of instruction are they ever told to trust their own instincts. It would appear that instincts, maternal or otherwise, may well be fraudulent, misguided, or downright dangerous. Doing what comes naturally will no doubt turn out to be wrong. They are told they must develop complex psychologically correct strategies for dealing with their children. They are supposed to give them messages (not rules), reminders (not orders), frozen yogurt (not ice cream). They must always reward good behaviour. They must never react to bad. There is no such thing as bad. They must not criticize. They must scrupulously avoid the use of such negative, authoritarian, ego-eroding, self-esteem-destroying epithets as: “Don’t!” “Stop it!” and “No!” They must explain every little thing. They must negotiate. They must not expect too much. They must not expect too little. Nobody knows how much is too much or how little is too little.

  The children are powerful. The parents are paralysed, held hostage by a heightened awareness of their children’s fragility, by the spectre of their own childhood unhappiness, and by the certainty that if they do the wrong thing, their children will become drug addicts, car thieves, or psychokillers.

  And here is Joanna, thirty-five years old and still desperate for her father’s acknowledgement, encouragement, respect. Still she just wants to hear him say, “Good for you, honey. Good for you.” She wants to hear him say it over and over and mean it. She wants him to make up for all the other times he never said it. He did say once, at her wedding, that he was proud of her. She is still waiting for him to say it again.

  He says, “I just can’t eat this johnnycake. You call it corn bread. I call it johnnycake and I had too much of it in the war.” He puts a piece with one bite out of it back on the serving plate. He goes on totell (once again) the story of how his stomach shrank in the war. Joanna has noticed that the older he gets, the more he talks about the war. As if it were the most important thing that ever happened to him. Maybe it was. He tells how when he finally landed back on Canadian soil, all he could think of was a big juicy steak with baked potato and all the trimmings, but when he had the plate in front of him, all he could eat was three or four bites and then he felt sick. Joanna thinks of how it is his life now that is shrinking, dwindling down year after year to a matter of maintenance and passing the time, with intermittent obsessive respect paid to the weather and the unreliability of aging internal organs (both of which are natural phenomena, inevitable, irrevocable, and out of his control).

  Samuel, having bolted his chili and
two pieces of corn bread, leaps up from the table and sticks out his tummy as far as he can. “Mommy, Mommy, I’m full, feel how full I am.”

  Joanna, Gordon, and Clarence take turns patting his stomach. Clarence says, “You look like Santa Claus, with a big fat belly like a bowl full of jelly.”

  Samuel says, “I’m not Santa Claus. I’m having a baby.” He runs off to the stash of presents under the tree.

  Clarence is visibly shocked. Joanna knows that in his day, a five-year-old child had no business knowing where babies come from.

  She says, “Times have changed, Dad.”

  He says, “That’s the problem.”

  She assures him that although Samuel knows babies grow inside their mothers’ stomachs, he has as yet expressed no curiosity as to how they get in there in the first place. Thanks to a variety of prime-time TV programs about wolves, whales, and a woman giving birth in the back of a taxi, he does know how they get out and how much it hurts.

  He is in fact fascinated by the whole idea. He loves to haul out the photo album and pore over the pictures of Joanna when she was pregnant. His favourite is one taken at a summer barbecue, two weeks before he was born, and there is Joanna sitting on a tree stump with her shirt pulled up to show herself off to the camera. A little boy about two years old whose name she cannot now remember has one eye pressed to her belly button, trying to get a look at the baby inside.

  Behind them are tall dark fir trees, a glint of water, the lake, and a smoking barbecue.

  Samuel would like to know what she had to eat that day. Hamburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, or what? Joanna can hardly remember the occasion, the location, let alone the menu. She was, is still, mesmerized by the sight of her own blooming belly in the center of the frame. The skin is so tight it shines. Samuel supposes that with that big baby (him!) in there, there was no room for food anyway. As if pregnant women probably don’t need to eat, are nourished instead by some kind of osmosis, feeding intravenously off the fledgling child within.

  Samuel would like to know if there are pictures of her before she was born, pictures of his grandma with his mommy still growing in her tummy. Now that would be something to see. No, there are not. Esther hated having her picture taken (she said she was not photogenic) and would certainly not have allowed it when she was pregnant.

  Now Samuel runs back into the kitchen ripping open the present he has chosen. It turns out to be a beautiful blue hand-knit sweater from the neighbours across the street. Samuel’s eyes well up with disappointment. It is not a toy. He is whining to open another one, a better one. Joanna is annoyed and chides him for being greedy and ungrateful. Gordon and Clarence, in true manly fashion, look silently down at their empty chili bowls. Joanna is tired of having to be the big bad mommy. She relents. Samuel goes again to the Christmas tree and this time opens a gift from Clarence which turns out to be a Batman figure he has been hoping for. This is much better. He roars around the house happily flapping his arms, rescuing the innocents, killing off the bad guys, and revving up the Batmobile while the adults have coffee and dessert.

  Clarence tells a Christmas story. One year when Joanna was little (he does not remember how old exactly) she set her alarm clock on Christmas Eve so she wouldn’t sleep too late in the morning. After he and Esther got into bed that night, Esther said she had changed Joanna’s clock so they wouldn’t have to get up at such an ungodly hour. Clarence said, “How mean can you be? It’s only one morning out of the whole year. What difference does it make?” To his surprise, Esther got up and changed the alarm clock back again.

  Joanna has never heard this story before. She is touched and grateful. Clarence says, “You were lucky you had me to protect you.”

  After the dishes are cleared away, Joanna begins making cookies, her own favourite, Thimble Cookies, one of her mother’s favourites too. She mixes the dough and shapes it into one-inch balls as the recipe, in Esther’s handwriting, directs. Her father, her husband, and her son are in the living room watching TV. This does not strike her as a suitable Christmas Eve activity. She calls them into the kitchen to help. She is determined that this year she will not make Christmas happen all by herself. Gordon and Samuel are happy to help. Clarence is reluctant. She tells him he has to help because she wants to take pictures. She sets them all up around the table where the cookies are laid out on sheets. She has Gordon dip the balls in egg whites and then chopped walnuts. Clarence wields the thimble, pressing it into the center of each ball to make a hole which Samuel then fills up with strawberry jam. She takes pictures.

  After the cookies have gone into the oven, Clarence says, “I hope your mother wasn’t looking down on that.”

  Joanna laughs. “Why not?”

  “Because,” Clarence says, “I would never help her with the cookies.” Joanna has always assumed that the reason he never helped was because Esther wouldn’t let him. Now she sees that she knows nothing about them at all. For all these years she has blamed her mother for everything. Now she sees that this cannot possibly be true.

  After the cookies are done, everyone has a sample. Samuel has three. Clarence declares them delicious. But they are not. They are crumbly and burnt on the bottom. They are not nearly as good as the ones Esther used to make.

  After the pictures have been developed, Clarence goes through them slowly. When he comes to the ones of the cookie-making, he says, pointing to himself, “Who’s that?”

  “It’s you!” Joanna exclaims.

  “Oh, oh, yes, I see,” Clarence says, embarrassed. “I just didn’t recognize myself for a minute there.”

  After Christmas, after New Year’s, after Clarence has gone backhome, Joanna will realize that she has once again asked him all the wrong questions.

  She has asked him: Are you hungry? Are you full? Will you help me with the cookies?

  She has not asked him: Why was she always so mean? When did you stop protecting me? Why wouldn’t you help her with the cookies?

  51. STEM

  ESTHER GREW BEGONIAS IN POTS on the front porch, one at each end of the four steps. They were new pots, white plastic to replace the old brown clay ones. They were also new steps, concrete to replace the old green wooden ones. The concrete steps were hollow and they rang when Joanna jumped up and down them, holding on to the black cast-iron railing on either side. The begonias were yellow, pink, white, and red. Their leaves were dark green and waxy, run through with big red veins. Their stems were hairy and nearly transparent. Sometimes in her exuberance, Joanna knocked one off, flower, leaves, stem and all. Sometimes Esther had a fit. Other times she just sighed, picked up the broken stem, and put it in a glass of water on the kitchen windowsill. The stem where it had been severed leaked a clear thin liquid which Joanna figured must be plant blood. Left in water long enough, the stem would sprout roots like little white hairs. Esther said if you planted the broken stem, it would grow into a whole new plant. But she never did this. When the water got smelly, she threw them away.

  In the book about sex which Esther gave Joanna when she was twelve, there was a drawing of a woman’s Fallopian tubes which reminded her of the broken begonia stems. The diagram was printed in black and white, but if it had been coloured she imagined the tubes would be pale green, the eggs iridescent mother-of-pearl, and the waiting uterus a voluptuous resplendent red.

  In Miss Berglund’s Health class the following year she saw the female reproductive system in full colour, life-size, on a poster. Of course the Fallopian tubes were not green and the eggs were toosmall to be visible to the naked eye. But yes, the uterus and its contents, regularly emptied and flushed away, were red, dark red, viscous, mutinous, imminent red.

  When she was eighteen and Thomas Hunt’s penis (which had been long and wide, intimidating, if not downright majestic, at first) went soft in her cold tentative hand, she found herself thinking again about begonias, broken stems, the way they would reroot if you left them alone on the windowsill. They were both embarrassed. Thomas tucked himself back into
his pants and Joanna babbled on foolishly about plants, gardens, her mother’s green thumb, all the while imagining his little penis nestled there in the humid darkness of his underwear, more like a mushroom than the adroit sturdy stem they had both been anticipating.

  Lewis’s penis, when she finally got her hands on it, did not go soft. Instead it unfurled and grew slowly but steadily hard, filling up with blood and desire and other fragrant fluids, like a flower blossoming in one of those TV nature programs where the transformation from bud to full bloom is telescoped by the camera into a two-minute action sequence so that what appears to the viewer to be slow motion is in fact fast motion, a result of the clever convenient manipulation of time in the pursuit of clarity, knowledge, and power. What if, Joanna wondered, we each possessed individual power over the passage of time? What if we could slow down those moments that slip by too quickly, those moments like this one, Lewis putting his penis inside her, slowly, sighing, wet? What if we could speed up those hours that seem to drag on forever, hours like the ones to come, all those hours after they had made love and Lewis had gone back home to his wife and Joanna would be alone again, sore between the legs, perhaps still sighing, perhaps still wet?

  52. LAMP

  THE ONLY ANTIQUE ESTHER OWNED was a lamp which had sat in her parents’ parlour when she was a little girl. Both the globe and the base were made of frosted pink glass with a pattern of white wildroses. It was actually a coal-oil lamp, now just an ornament which Esther dusted grudgingly. The oil, the wick, the smoke, the smell—it was all too much trouble, Esther said. As for antiques in general, she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. A bunch of old junk, she said, which stupid people paid exorbitant prices for. If ever she’d had any other antiques, they were long gone by the time Joanna was old enough to appreciate furniture. They had all gone to the dump, replaced by modern fifties stuff.