In the Language of Love Read online

  As a baby, Samuel is particularly fond of the Rolling Stones. When Joanna says, “Why don’t we listen to Uncle Mick?” he grips the sides of his playpen in his blue bunny sleepers, swaying to the music, grinning and crowing and clapping his hands. But when he gets older he does not like the loud music any more. He cries and covers his ears. He will not clap or dance. He knows already, Joanna thinks, that it is dangerous somehow, that this mother dancing and singing all afternoon is out of control and up to no good.

  Now she only listens to the old albums when he is at day care. She also listens alone to Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Chapman, Joan Armatrading, Patti Smith, Michelle Shocked: a new crop of female vocalists, strong, serious, loving, and wise like the others from an earlier time. But also more seductive, more political, not afraid to be straightforward, unhappy, and angry. Joanna no longer dances. Now she sits on the floor beside the stereo and listens carefully. This is the music she can understand and appreciate. She sings along softly and sometimes she cries. After a while she doesn’t play these songs any more. Of course nobody knows that she has stopped because nobody knew she was listening to them in the first place. After a while she listens only to classical music. After a while she understands and appreciates it.

  4. SICKNESS

  JOANNA HAD ALL the important childhood illnesses when she was in kindergarten. Esther said this was because she picked up germs from all those other unhealthy kids whose parents did not care enough to keep them home when they were sick.

  In the fall there was chicken pox which drove Joanna repeatedly tohysteria with itchiness and left three permanent scars on her stomach, like the marks she imagined a bullet would leave on you: puckered, bloodless, white.

  Just before Christmas there was German measles, which she thought had something to do with the war. She had nightmares about being hauled away to a prison camp by the Nazis because she had ugly red spots all over her face.

  In February there was mumps, both sides of her neck hideously swollen and sore. She was still in bed for Valentine’s Day. Esther made her put on her red flannelette nightie, propped her up with extra pillows, arranged all her stuffed animals around her, and handed her a pink heart-shaped box of chocolates. Then she took her picture, bulging glands, messy hair, puffy face and all. For some reason Esther especially liked this unattractive embarrassing picture. She kept it for years in a little silver frame on top of the TV.

  At Easter there was red measles which was much more serious and scary than the others. Joanna had to stay in bed for a whole week in the dark because, Esther said, the disease made your eyes sensitive to strong light. “You don’t want to go blind, do you?” Esther warned when Joanna whined.

  Joanna did not go blind but she did get delirious with a fever of 104°F. Esther was afraid she would go into convulsions. This was in the days when doctors still made house calls. When Dr. Graham arrived in the middle of a sunny afternoon, Joanna couldn’t remember who he was. It was Easter. In her delirium she’d been dreaming about Jesus risen from the grave in a halo of light. She knew about this from Sunday school. When Dr. Graham appeared in the doorway of her darkened room with the sunlight glowing in the kitchen behind him, Joanna thought he was the Son of God. She screamed hysterically because, as Esther liked to put it when she told and retold this story, she thought she was sent for. When Dr. Graham tried to calm her by reminding her that he was the one who had brought her into this world in the first place, Joanna screamed even louder and tried to crawl under the bed. Because, as she tried to explain to Esther later, if he’d been the one to bring her into this world, maybe he had come now to take her back out of it.

  Joanna recovered, but a year later Dr. Graham died and, although she was old enough then to know about the difference between doctors and God, still she was relieved, as if Dr. Graham’s demise might somehow increase her chances of immortality.

  Joanna remained basically healthy through the rest of public school and Esther often said it was a good thing they’d got it all over with in one year.

  When Joanna was well (which was most of the time) but didn’t want to go to school, she fantasized about being sick for a long time, like the boy Colin in The Secret Garden which she had read four times. She imagined that such a life would be romantic and glamorous, poignantly tragic, and very cosy. She too, like Colin, would pass the days in a large darkened room filled with richly coloured rugs and handsome furniture. She too would read lavishly illustrated books about foreign lands, exotic creatures, formal gardens, and snake-charmers, while wrapped in a velvet dressing gown and propped against a dozen large pillows in a carved four-poster bed draped with brocade. She would ring a little silver bell and a nurse would magically appear with lemonade, ice cream, doughnuts, or a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies. Her blankets would always be smooth and warm around her thin, weak, possibly crippled legs. Her pillows would always be cool. In this fantasy she had no parents and no friends.

  When she was sick (which was seldom), it was nothing at all like The Secret Garden. Esther saw sickness as a shameful sign of weakness, probably moral weakness at that. It was all a case of mind over matter. If you were sick, you were probably just too lazy to get up and get busy. She also seemed to think that the best way to cure a sick person was to ignore her. If you were too sick to go to school, you were also too sick to read, talk, draw, drink lemonade, and eat cookies.

  When Joanna was sick she had to spend the whole day flat on her back doing nothing. She got bored. She got hot. Her pillows got sweaty and wrinkled. She threw off the blankets. She got cold. She pulled the blankets back up. They got tangled in her legs, bunched in a lump under her back. She got hungry. Esther brought her flat,warm ginger ale and a bowl of tomato soup. She felt sick again. Esther brought her a bucket to throw up in and went to have a bath. When Clarence got home from work, Joanna was still too sick to get up for supper. By the time the dishes were done, she thought she might be well enough to watch a little TV. Esther said if she was too sick to come into the kitchen for supper, she was also too sick to come into the living room for TV.

  By the next morning Joanna was all better. Esther said, “See?”

  Although Joanna had never been seriously ill in her life, as she got older she began to worry more and more about her own good health. How long, realistically, could it be expected to last? It seemed too good to be true, considering that she had never done anything much to maintain it. She knew she didn’t eat right often enough. A nutritious vegetarian meal one night was likely to be followed by a double cheeseburger, fries and gravy, and a chocolate milk shake the next. She hated any form of organized exercise and wouldn’t be caught dead in a spandex suit flopping around with a bunch of overweight and overzealous women to an instrumental version of Abba. She drank too much coffee and not enough fruit juice. The only time she drank the suggested eight glasses of water a day was when she was hung over from drinking too much wine the night before.

  When she felt well (which was most of the time) but tired of trying, coping, doing, she sometimes fantasized about having a terminal illness. Nothing messy, painful, or malodorous. Certainly not anything that involved vomiting, diarrhea, disfigurement, or a skin disorder. Rather, she imagined being inflicted with a mysterious painless disease which forced her to spend the rest of her sadly numbered days in bed wasting prettily away, growing paler and weaker, daily more delicate and rarefied, until she was hardly more than a vapour. Finally she would just dissolve altogether and evaporate up to heaven. In this fantasy she was frequently visited by many quietly sorrowful friends who could not imagine how they were going to live without her, and so they sat for hours by her bedside weeping and holding her limp, dry, nearly transparent little hands.

  When she felt sick (which was seldom) she always assumed theworst, letting her imagination run away with her symptoms. Esther had often told her she had an overactive imagination. This made her think of Jeremy Hines, a boy in her Grade Four class who was called by the teacher “hyperactive.” She ima
gined her own imagination to be like Jeremy: rambunctious and uncoordinated, like a large yellow dog just leaving puppyhood, racing through rooms, knocking things over with its wildly wagging tail, licking people and chewing shoes. Maybe her imagination had a mean streak too, like Jeremy Hines, whose anger and frustration erupted unpredictably in fits of yelling, crying, banging on desks and walls, tearing up books and papers, tormenting the smaller children, and threatening to jump out the window and run away. Jeremy Hines was gone the next year, to a special school, the other boys said, for retards and troublemakers. Which was what Joanna imagined would happen to her if she didn’t smarten up and teach her imagination to behave.

  Now her imagination cruelly tormented her with the idea that almost any minor ailment could actually be cancer sneaking up on her. A sore throat, an upset stomach, an aching back, swelling anywhere, a disconcerting numbness in the toes of her right foot, a clump of broken discoloured veins on her right calf, even an abscessed tooth was probably not a simple dental problem but a cancerous growth in her mouth.

  A recurring pain in her right breast offered three terminal possibilities to obsess about: breast cancer, lung cancer, or an impending myocardial infarction. When she finally summoned up her courage and went to see Dr. Millan, fully expecting to receive her death sentence, he said it was a pulled muscle. She had not thought of her breasts as having muscles. Rather, she had thought of them only as passive fleshy objects to be admired and caressed by men, sucked on by babies, and examined periodically for lumps.

  Lewis, like Joanna, was a basically healthy person. The only illnesses he ever had were, he liked to say, self-inflicted, by which he meant hangovers. Not that he was a heavy drinker, but rather he seemed to be overly sensitive to alcohol’s unpleasant after-effects and so paid a high price for even minor indulgences.

  Coming over one morning after he and Wanda had been out drinking and dancing late the night before (while Joanna sat home alone watching TV in her housecoat, eating filberts and feeling sorry for herself), he flung himself melodramatically down on Joanna’s bed and moaned, “Aspirin, bring me aspirin, I’m sick as a dog! I think I might throw up.”

  Joanna was not feeling sympathetic. In fact she was mentally playing the Other-Woman version of What’s Wrong with This Picture?: the childhood game in which you had to pick out the chicken with one foot, the car with three tires, or the woman with her nose on upside-down. In this case, was it not supposed to be the lover who enjoyed the glamour, the romance, the dancing, and, possibly, many expensive gifts purchased in guilt and paid for in cash so as to be untraceable? Was it not supposed to be the wife who provided the comfort, the aspirin, the clean clothes, the meals? Was it not supposed to be the wife who held his head while he puked up last night’s dinner marinated with red wine?

  She laughed at him. He was hurt. “Just feel my forehead,” he begged pathetically. “I think I have a temperature.”

  Joanna laughed again and walked away.

  “Oh, you can be so hard-hearted sometimes,” Lewis whined.

  Yes, Joanna thought as she rummaged in the medicine chest. Hard-hearted, yes, but never when it would do her any good.

  Since Esther’s death it seems that the people Clarence knows have been dropping like flies. He has become skilled at deciphering the code used in newspaper obituaries. Suddenly means a heart attack. After a long illness means cancer. He was stumped once by an obituary which said Suddenly after a short illness. For every bit of good news Joanna has to offer him in their weekly Sunday phone calls, Clarence counters with a story of disease and/or death.

  All week long Joanna stores up cheerful things to tell him. She worries because he often sounds depressed. She wants to cheer him up. She wants to please him. She still wants to make him happy. She wants him to be as happy as she is so she doesn’t have to feel guilty. Sometimes she even makes a list so she doesn’t forget anything.

  When there’s no important news, she concentrates on telling him things she thinks he can relate to: I weeded and watered the garden. I did five loads of laundry. I waxed the living room floor. I’m just getting over a bad cold. Gordon mowed the lawn. We had a thunderstorm last night. Samuel had a nightmare.

  Talking to Clarence can be like talking to a child, although it is much more charming in children. She cannot very well explain the principles of conversation to him the way she does to Samuel, telling him that generally a conversation means first one person talks, then the other person talks, then the first person talks some more, and usually both people are talking about the same thing.

  Maybe her father makes a list beforehand too, a list of all the people he knows who are sick and dying this week. Mostly Joanna has never heard of these people before. Sometimes though they are his neighbours, people Joanna saw every single day when she was growing up, and now when he says their names she cannot remember their faces.

  When Joanna says, “Samuel went to a birthday party,” her father says, “Great, I’ll bet he had fun. Mrs. Bodnarchuk from down the street died on Thursday. The ambulance came in the middle of the night and took her away. She hadn’t been good for a long time. It was her heart. Or was it her lungs? I forget. I never did get back to sleep.”

  Sometimes the sick and dying are people she can’t recall at all, much to Clarence’s consternation. Joanna says, “Gordon got a raise.”

  Clarence says, “Remember the woman at the corner store who used to sell me Cherry Blossoms?”

  Joanna says, “No, I don’t.”

  “She was pretty,” Clarence prods, “and always smiling.”

  Joanna says, “Sort of, maybe I sort of remember.”

  “Well, anyway,” Clarence says huffily, “she was so pretty and she killed herself last week. They say she shot herself in the head. You’d wonder where she got the gun.”

  Sometimes Joanna thinks that if she said she’d won the Nobel Prize, her father would say, “Oh, that’s nice. Mr. James from Simpson Street just had brain surgery.” She knows she is being uncharitable. She knows he can’t help it. She knows he is frightened. But she alsoknows there is nothing she can do. She would like to reassure him. Instead she keeps committing crimes against him: the crimes of being young, healthy, happy, and hopeful. Secretly, neither of them can deny the fact that he is old, lonely, bored, and he will not live forever.

  Another Sunday morning phone call. Clarence speaks briefly to Gordon, who answered the phone, and then at some length to Samuel. When Joanna gets on, Gordon and Samuel go out to play in the backyard.

  She says, although Samuel has already told him this, “We had a terrible thunderstorm last night. I was scared. I’ve always been afraid of storms and I still am.”

  Clarence says, “I don’t remember that, you being scared of storms.” Joanna can hear Gordon and Samuel hooting and hollering through the open screens.

  She says, “I planted the window boxes yesterday. With pale pink impatiens and Crystal Palace lobelia. They’re a deep blue-purple, the lobelia. When the sun hits them, they almost seem to glow.”

  Clarence says, “Your mother had those, the lobelia.” Gordon and Samuel are tossing the soccer ball into the air, leaping and darting around the bushes like birds in their green and yellow T-shirts.

  She says, “Oh, I don’t remember.” In five minutes she will be outside with Gordon and Samuel and she will try to bounce the soccer ball off her head the way they do on TV and Samuel will fall into the fragrant grass, clutching himself with laughter.

  Clarence says, “Well, she did. She loved them. Remember the butcher at Safeway? You went to school with his son. He was killed in a car accident last Monday night.”

  In five more minutes she will be able to hang up gracefully and go back to her young, healthy, happy, hopeful family. In five more minutes she will hang up feeling guilty, depressed, and afraid. How is it that her father cannot remember her fear of thunderstorms, the way the first low rumble in the west put a bubble of anxiety in her throat and a knot of tension in her stomach? How
is it that she cannot remember her mother’s lobelia glowing in the gentle evening light? How is it that she and Clarence lived in the same house for twenty-two years and nowthey don’t remember any of the same things? How is it that all their respective memories are things the other has forgotten?

  It is as if she and her father are remembering altogether different lives. Which, of course, they are.

  5. MAN

  man n. 1. a human being, specif., a) a primate (Homo sapiens) characterized by an erect stance, an opposable thumb, the ability to make and use specialized tools, articulate speech, and a well-developed brain capable of abstract thought, b) a member of any extinct species of this family [Neanderthal man]. 2. mankind; the human race. 3. an adult male person. 4. a) a male servant, subordinate, or employee, b) a member of the military, esp. a rank-and-file soldier or sailor. 5. a) a husband, b) a lover or suitor. 6. a person possessing qualities generally regarded as manly, such as strength, courage, etc. See also MAN ABOUT TOWN, MAN-AT-ARMS, MAN-EATER, MAN FRIDAY, MANHANDLE, MANHOOD, MAN-HOUR, MANHUNT, MAN IN THE STREET, MAN-MADE, MAN OF GOD, MAN OF LETTERS, MAN OF STRAW, MAN OF THE WORLD, MAN-OF-WAR, MANPOWER.

  6. DEEP

  “STILL WATERS RUN DEEP,” Clarence often said, usually in Joanna’s defence when Esther was chastising her for sulking again. Any prolonged period of silence on Joanna’s part (except when she was sleeping) was interpreted by her mother as another episode of adolescent angst: unnecessary, unhealthy, and calculated largely to annoy her. It did not seem to occur to Esther that maybe Joanna was just thinking—and not about her. If, in her own defence, Joanna said, “I’m just thinking,” Esther said, “Quit your mooning around. You think too much for your own good.”

  She also said, at various times, “You’re too honest for your owngood. You’re too trusting for your own good. You’re too smart for your own good.” As if even the virtues must be measured out in titrated doses, for fear perhaps of using your goodness up too soon, as if it were a fixed quantity which must be meted out over the course of your lifetime. Esther believed in avoidance of excess in all things. She often warned Joanna (and Clarence too) about indulging in “too much of a good thing.” Too much turkey would give you a stomachache, too much cheese would make you constipated, too much ice cream would rot your teeth, too much sunshine would give you heat stroke, too much trust would break your heart, and too much thinking would…would what? Rot your brain? Too much honesty and they (whoever they were) would get the better of you. Somehow you would be victimized by truth in the end. To find yourself a victim was, according to Esther, no less shameful than being a villain. Both fates were somehow connected to excess. Victims, villains, and excess. Be careful. Be quiet. Be good.