In the Language of Love Read online

When Clarence comes to visit, she bakes him half a dozen loaves of whole-wheat bread one snowy December afternoon. He devours a whole warm loaf with lots of butter. “Remember,” he asks, “when they used to deliver bread, milk too, in the morning to our house? Remember? Now that was good bread.”

  56. JUSTICE

  “IT’S JUST NOT FAIR,” Joanna said.

  “No, it’s not,” Lewis said. “There’s no excuse for the way life is.”

  “But justice,” Joanna said. “What about justice?”

  “What about it?” Lewis did not say, but held her instead. They were in her bed and there was the sound of a soft rain on the window. It was midnight, one of the few times they were able to be together after dark, Wanda having gone out for the evening with friends. Lewis did not say which friends, where, and Joanna did not ask. But now he had to go home soon, now he couldn’t stay much longer, now he held Joanna in his arms until she fell asleep and then he got up and fished around on the floor for his clothes.

  But Joanna was only pretending to be asleep. She listened to him padding to the bathroom, turning on the shower for a quick rinse, brushing his teeth, then putting on his jacket and boots in the back porch, patting his pockets till his keys jingled, sighing and shutting the door softly behind him. Wanda would be none the wiser. And neither, thought Joanna, would he. When he called the next morning she would tell him that yes, she’d been sound asleep, no, she hadn’t heard a thing. He’d told her once that he couldn’t bear to think of her lying there awake, alone, while he went home and climbed into bed with his wife. He said he couldn’t bear it. He said it wasn’t fair. He also said there was no such thing as justice, poetic or otherwise.

  All’s fair in love and war. That’s what Esther had told her often enough. Which was, Joanna realized now, a good enough excuse when you were the one in the wrong. It provided a handy general justification for your own bad behaviour and any subsequent pangs of guilt which might crop up. She suspected it was of little consolation when you were the one who’d been wronged. Certainly, when Wanda finally discovered the truth about Lewis’s infidelity, she was unlikely to sit back and say, “Oh well, you know what they say: All’s fair in love and war!”

  Joanna did not know nearly as much about war as she did about love. But she did know there was a lot more to it than what she’d seen in her father’s photographs of statues, churches, and children. She knew there were also battlefields. She knew that by participating in either of these past-times, being in love or at war, you were placing yourself in mortal danger. No matter what happened, you had to take sides.

  57. BOY

  boy n. 1. a male child to the age of physical maturity; youth; lad. 2. a man regarded as common, lowly, immature, or callow. 3. a young man; fellow; a familiar form of address. 4. a male servant; an underling; a patronizing term used esp. by Caucasians to non-whites. 5. a messenger; a helper. 6. a son. See also BOYFRIEND, BOYHOOD, BOYISH, BOY SCOUT, OH BOY.

  58. LIGHT

  ON SEPTEMBER 21, 1986, at exactly 12:36 P.M., Samuel says his first word. (His first word, that is, after “Mama” and “Dada” which he has been saying since he was seven months old. His first real word you might say, as if “Mama” and “Dada” didn’t really count for much.) On September 21, 1986, at exactly 12:36 P.M., Samuel says, “Light.”

  light n. 1. the form of electromagnetic radiation having a wavelength between about 400 and 750 nanometers which acts upon the eye, making sight possible: this energy is transmitted at a velocity of about 300,000 km per second.

  Joanna has just changed his diaper. Having outgrown the change table, he is lying on her bed with a plastic change pad under him. Above the bed is a hanging lamp with a white wicker shade. It is a cloudy day and the lamp is on, slightly swinging. He points to it and says, “Light.”

  light n. 2. the rate of flow of light radiation with respect to the sense of sight: it is measured in lumens. 3. a source of illumination. 4. the natural agent which emanates from the sun; daylight.

  He says it again. By way of encouragement, Joanna repeats it too. Out of sheer delight, she claps her hands. Samuel claps his hands too and says it again. Clapping their hands and laughing, they bat theword back and forth between them as if it were an illuminated ball.

  Let other children, Joanna thinks, take the linguistic plunge with simple primary words: duck milk dog juice bunny baby kitty hat fish foot. Of course there is nothing intrinsically wrong with these words or the charming average children who say them. She does not mean to be judgemental. It’s just that she has always known Samuel was special. She realizes that all new parents think their children are special. But this is different. She is right. He is special. Now she has the proof.

  And God said, “Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.

  Samuel is no doubt destined for greatness.

  light n. 5. mental illumination; knowledge; elucidation; enlightenment. 6. religious or spiritual illumination. 7. one whose brilliant record makes him a shining example for others. See also LIGHT-FOOTED, LIGHT-HEARTED, LIGHTSOME, LIGHT-YEAR.

  What if, she wonders briefly, your child’s first word was: shit fuck asshole hate damn die? She doesn’t know what her own first word was. Is it that she asked her mother and Esther couldn’t remember? Or is it (more likely) that she never thought to ask until now? Now that she is a mother herself, now that it is too late.

  She gets the camera and takes several shots of Samuel flat on his back on the change pad. He is not saying “light” any more but it is as if the word were still hanging in the air above him, a cartoon word floating in a bubble near his head.

  This photograph will go into the album along with all the other firsts she has faithfully recorded in the past fourteen months. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now when she hauls out the album, people will assume that this is just another cute picture of Samuel smiling and waving his arms around. She will have to explain. How can you photograph language anyway? Perhaps the word will appear after all: a slight blur above his left ear, like a fingerprint on the negative or a revealing smudge on an X-ray which only she, like a trained doctor, will be able to interpret.

  She has forgotten for now the warning another mother once gave her: “Don’t be in a hurry for him to do things. Once he starts talking, he’ll never shut up. Once he starts walking, you’ll never catch him.”

  They are a long way yet from the day when Samuel has talked non-stop about nothing for an hour and Joanna says, “Boy, you talk a lot sometimes. You’re just saying the same things over and over again. I think you’re in love with the sound of your own voice.”

  Samuel thinks about this for a minute. Then he says, “Yes, I am.”

  They are a long way yet from the day when Samuel (frustrated with Clarence whose hearing is failing so he cannot catch half of what Samuel is saying but he will not admit he needs a hearing aid) says, “What’s the matter with you, Grandpa? Are you death?” Joanna tries to explain the difference between death and deaf. Unconvinced, Samuel says, “It sounds the same to me.”

  For now Joanna does not have to contemplate the fact that this first word is just the beginning. Just the beginning of all the history ahead of him as he grows up and away from her, forward, ever forward, flowing or hurtling past her and beyond, out of reach and still running, still shining bright.

  light-year n. Astronomy, the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one year, approximately 9,460,500,000,000 km.

  59. HEALTH

  IN THOSE DAYS, at the end of elementary school, Health was a euphemism for Sex Education. They had this class once a week, on Friday afternoons. They gathered in a small classroom in the basement, boys and girls together but ignoring each other. Often they watched films with the floor-to-ceiling drapes drawn like blackout curtains. They sat in the dark giggling and jiggling with the sense of momentous secrets about to be revealed. The boys in the back made kissing and slurping sounds until the teacher came in.

  She was a y
oung woman named Miss Berglund who wore suedeminiskirts, knee-high leather boots, and gauzy embroidered cotton blouses. She also taught Art to the younger children. She was a hippie and the frequent subject of school-yard gossip. She was said to be living in sin. She was said to be braless under those blouses. Or she was said to be a drug addict, which was the real reason why she always wore long sleeves—so the needle marks wouldn’t show. She was several times said to be pregnant. When she once missed a full week of school she was said to be having a nervous breakdown, an overdose, an abortion. (A girl with a wild older sister contributed this last suggestion, and although most of the other girls had little idea what an abortion might actually be, they readily spread the rumour around.)

  Some of the things they knew about Miss Berglund were actually true. Her first name was Deborah, hardly an unusual or incriminating name save for the fact that teachers were not really supposed to have first names like other people. She smoked cigarettes in the staff room during lunch and recess. They could smell it in her long brown hair, the smoke mixed with the smell of shampoo, as she brushed close to their desks on the way to the front of the room.

  Almost everything they learned in Health class had to do with the respective reproductive systems. As if there were no other parts of the human body that were likely to go wrong or give you trouble. The posters which Miss Berglund frequently tapped with her pointer were life-size drawings of the male and female body. Only the genitalia and the internal reproductive organs were shown in full-colour detail inside these silhouettes. On the female the breasts were also filled in, the mammary glands behind the nipples like small pieces of broccoli. All other parts of these bodies were blank, including the heads. Miss Berglund carefully pointed out the various sexual organs which she called “genitals.” This word made Joanna nervous, mixing up in her mind with other similar words: “genial,” “gentle,” “gentile.” Miss Berglund said the names aloud, simply, quietly, as if they were just ordinary commonplace words. As if “penis,” “scrotum,” and “testicle,” “vulva,” “vagina,” and “uterus” were household names, like “refrigerator,” “elbow,” or “spatula.”

  Despite her unconventional appearance and possibly immoral life-style, Miss Berglund taught Health very much in the conventionalmanner. To explain how a woman became pregnant, she said, “The man’s sperm is introduced into the woman’s vagina.” What kind of an introduction was this? Hello. Hello. Pleased to meet you. Likewise, I’m sure.

  Miss Berglund did not explain how this feat was specifically accomplished. She did not say, “The man sticks his penis inside the woman and wiggles it around until it explodes.” What little information they were given was spotty and euphemistic, as if they were supposed to guess the rest. Which, of course, some of them did: the girls who got pregnant and left school, the boys who got crabs or worse and bragged about it. She did say that you should only have sex with a person you truly loved. She implied that there would only be one such person in a lifetime, one of a kind, one in a million. She did not say how you could tell if it was really love or what would happen if, whether by accident or on purpose, you had sex with a person you did not love. Perhaps you would be punished. Perhaps you would get pregnant or crabs or worse. Worse meant a venereal disease.

  venereal adj. 1. having to do with sexual desire or intercourse. 2. of a disease transmitted by sexual intercourse [syphilis and gonorrhea are venereal diseases], 3. Astrology, born under or influenced by the planet Venus.

  Joanna remembered Reverend Doak at church trying to explain the difference between venial and mortal sins.

  venial adj. 1. that may be forgiven or pardoned. 2. that may be overlooked; excusable. 3. Theology, a sin committed without full consent or knowledge of its seriousness and hence not totally depriving the soul of sanctifying grace; distinguished from MORTAL.

  Although the tone of Miss Berglund’s voice would imply that contracting a venereal disease was a shameful fate worse than death, perhaps she was mistaken. Perhaps it was nobody’s fault, perhaps it was excusable, merely a venial sin.

  “Finally,” Miss Berglund said, with satisfaction in her voice, “after its long journey, the sperm is united with the egg.” This reminded Joanna of those front-page newspaper stories where long-lost siblings, who had been separated by unfortunate circumstances at birth or in early childhood and had then lived the next sixty years entirely oblivious to each other on separate continents, were reunited now after an arduous transoceanic flight. In the newspaper photographs they were wizened and stooped, weeping into each other’s arms at the airport, or they were seated side by side sipping tea in one or the other’s living room, having just discovered that they had given their respective children the same names and they both enjoyed gardening. Sometimes the reunited pair was not long-lost siblings but childhood sweethearts who had lost track of each other after high school. Although they never stopped loving each other in the backs of their minds, they had both been happily married to other people for the past forty years. Now both their partners had died and they were back together, about to live happily ever after what little time they had left.

  After elementary school, Joanna never saw Miss Berglund again. It was said that she had left the city. The likely reasons for this defection ran rampant for a while. It was said that she had been fired and was now a prostitute in Toronto (that evil city). Or she had run away with a rock-and-roll band. Or she was in jail, a home for unwed mothers, or a hippie commune run by an evil charismatic psycho-killer. By the time the truth filtered through (Miss Berglund had not left town at all but had quit teaching to marry a dentist and they now lived in suburbia where they were putting up a picket fence, planting a garden, and expecting their first child who would be born a respectable time after the wedding, which had taken place not in a field of daisies but in a regular church with a white gown, four bridesmaids, and a flower girl), Joanna and the other girls had lost interest. Not in sex, but in Miss Berglund anyway.

  Over the years, Joanna had an average number of ailments involving the reproductive system. Most of them were minor. Her periods were painful. She had a prolapsed ovary. One year she suffered from a spate of yeast infections. She treated her condition with a variety ofprescription medications in both tablet and suppository form. She douched with plain yogurt. Finally she replaced all her nylon underwear with cotton and was cured. Once she had a terrifying lump in her left breast which turned out to be a false alarm. Most of her health worries had to do with birth control. The pill was unhealthy and dangerous. The IUD hurt. Men did not like condoms. Foam was too messy. She settled on a diaphragm which she practised placing properly. She had a well-thumbed copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves. As the book suggested, she looked at her own genitalia with a hand mirror. She reached up her vagina and located her cervix which did indeed feel like the end of somebody’s nose.

  Sometimes she enjoyed the mystery of the female reproductive system, a labyrinth of ligaments, tubes, and pouches, pockets of power tucked up inside her. They were private, invisible, self-contained, and could not betray or embarrass a woman the way the male organ could. Even the word organ struck her as peculiarly male: a flamboyant instrument for public performance, large, loud, and unpredictable.

  Other times, when she had a vague pain in her abdomen or a mysterious discharge, she resented this arrangement. Men, she thought then, had it easy, with their parts all hanging out in front. They could always see if something was wrong. For a woman, there could be something festering away inside for years and she would never even know until it began to leak. Like her mother who had not suspected she had cancer until she went to the doctor and he said she needed a hysterectomy.

  Joanna genuinely enjoys being pregnant with Samuel. She can honestly say that she has never felt healthier in her life. She does not suffer from morning sickness, heartburn, hemorrhoids, or backache. Although she gains nearly forty pounds, she does not feel encumbered. Although two months before her due date she already looks like she is about to give
birth any minute and strangers on the street ask if she’s having twins, she does not feel grotesque.

  Occasionally she thinks about Health class. She feels just like that poster of the female body Miss Berglund used to point to: as if only her breasts and the marvellous contents of her abdomen are filled in,in full-colour detail while all other parts of her anatomy are blank white space, smooth and shiny, including her head. Now she knows all the pieces of the puzzle Miss Berglund neglected to mention.

  In prenatal class too they seem to be doling out bits of information and she must guess the rest. They say that labour pain is not like other pain. They say that afterwards she will forget all about it. She thinks this is highly unlikely. They concentrate on the actual event of giving birth. They do not say much about being a mother. This reminds Joanna of hopeful eager young brides who focus all their attention on the wedding day itself and never seem to spare much thought for all that may come after.

  Two months before Samuel is born, Joanna has a dream about Miss Berglund, in which her former teacher is now a gynecologist. Her office is set up outdoors in a large field of daisies. She performs examinations beneath a large blue tarpaulin. Joanna, the pregnant patient, is lying on the metal table with her feet in the stirrups. The mound of her belly is so big she can barely see around it. Miss Berglund is wearing yellow rubber gloves. She says she has twelve children of her own now. Joanna says, “Wow! You must be very fertile!”

  “Yes,” Miss Berglund says proudly. “Yes, I am. Look.” She lifts up her white doctor coat. Underneath she is naked and there is grass growing out of her thighs.

  60. BIBLE

  WHEN JOANNA WAS NINE YEARS OLD, she received a Bible for perfect attendance at the Moseby United Church Sunday School. It was black of course, the tissue-thin paper edged with red, and the words HOLY BIBLE WITH HELPS: REVISED STANDARD VERSION embossed on the spine in gold. Inside there were a dozen or more full-colour pictures of significant religious figures and events: Jesus and the Children, Lot’s Choice, Ecce Homo (Behold the Man). At the back were thirty pages of Bible Study Helps, including maps such as Israel and Judah in the Time of Ahab and Jehoshaphat, The Missionary Journeys of Paul, and Egypt, Sinai, Canaan: The Exodusfrom Egypt. On this last map the suggested route of the Hebrews was drawn in a red line with little arrows all along it. Inside the front cover there was a gold bookplate with Joanna’s name on it, signed Reverend Charles Doak, Minister. Esther had carefully written in the date below: September 1963.