In the Language of Love Page 7

  Now she sat down on the floor beside the wicker wastebasket which was half-full of balls of crumpled yellow paper. She was a little disgusted with herself when she began opening each one as if it were a gift, but then she convinced herself that anyone in such a circumstance would have done exactly the same thing, whether theycared to admit it or not. She carefully smoothed out each page on the floor between her outstretched legs, smiling fondly at the sight of his precise handwriting. They were mostly notes to himself: Don’t forget to plug the car in. Get skis tuned up. Pick up dry cleaning. Pay phone bill. Cancel newspaper. Buy condoms.

  She carefully crumpled the pieces of paper up again and dropped them one by one back into the basket.

  As she crossed the hall and entered the bedroom, the night-light, which was hooked to a timer, came on suddenly. She had never been in this room before.

  Their wedding picture sat on top of the bureau in a silver frame. Wanda had white flowers in her hair and Lewis had his arm around her slim shoulders. In the background there were mountains, rosy and protective, the same mountains as in the ski chalet brochure. Joanna realized that she’d never asked Lewis where they got married. This was just one of many questions she’d never asked him, for fear of having to face up to the answers which would be stuck then forever inside her brain. Now it made sense, this ritual annual trip to the mountains. They probably rented the very same room, the one advertised in the brochure, the one with a Jacuzzi, a heart-shaped bed, mirrors on the ceiling, and matching velour bathrobes provided free of charge. They probably thought of it as a renewal, a rejuvenation of their vows. To her it was a return to the scene of the crime.

  Beside the wedding picture was a leather-bound journal which she opened in the middle and found Wanda’s handwriting covering page after page and so she did not read it. There was also an envelope of photographs marked CHRISTMAS which she did not look at.

  In the top drawer of the bureau there was a tangle of socks, underwear, belts and scarves, an elegant lacy camisole. In the bottom drawer there were carefully folded shorts and T-shirts, a shiny red bathing suit smelling salty, waiting for summer which was bound to come upon them again just as it always did.

  On the bedside table there was a box of pink Kleenex, a pair of gold earrings, a small digital clock with insistent red numbers, two empty water glasses, and a miscellaneous jumble of coins and paper clips, matchbooks, and sugarless gum.

  The bed was small, a well-cared-for antique with carved head and footboards. It was covered with a colourful quilt, obviously handmade, probably by somebody’s grandmother. There were four fluffy pillows in pure white cotton cases. She could not imagine which side of the bed Lewis slept on.

  She turned off the night-light and lay down exactly in the center of the bed. She pulled the quilt around herself and looked at the ceiling, resting the brandy snifter in both hands on her chest. In a while she set the glass on the bedside table and then she fell asleep in the perfectly peaceful house.

  10. HOUSE

  ESTHER AND CLARENCE LIVED in what was known as “a wartime house.” Although Joanna knew this only meant it had been built during the war, sometimes it felt like a fortress, a haven of safety which occasionally appeared in her dreams, surrounded by barbed wire, minefields, and soldiers who could not see them, they were so well hidden, so cleverly barricaded behind its sturdy impenetrable walls.

  The little house on Mary Street was the middle one in a row of seven identical little houses. It was square, covered in white asphalt shingles (later replaced with immaculate aluminum siding) with green wooden steps front and back (later replaced at the front with wroughtiron railings and hollow concrete steps) and green shingles on the roof (later replaced with black shingles which sparkled in the sun). Over the years, all of the houses changed eventually as the owners worked hard, made money, and added porches, patios, picture windows, and carports. Some families had more babies and built on bedrooms or they got dogs and built little houses for them out back. Some families moved away and then their houses were filled up with new people who changed things yet again just to suit themselves. But for a time the seven little houses on Mary Street were all exactly the same and Joanna just naturally assumed that everybody everywhere lived the way they did. Eventually she came to hate the little house at 126 Mary Street, but for a long time she loved it and all the six others exactly the same.

  Originally the house consisted of five rooms: the living room, two small bedrooms, and the bathroom, all opening off the kitchen which was the biggest room in the house. There was an attic but no real basement, just a dugout which was intermittently inhabited by fertile families of grey mice so that Clarence had to go down and set traps with bits of bread and cheese. He always managed to dispose of the soft furry corpses when Joanna wasn’t around.

  After muttering about it for years, Clarence finally made Esther happy and took to renovating, knocking out a wall and doubling the size of the living room, putting in a picture window, and adding two rooms onto the back: a bigger bedroom for them and what they referred to as “the utility room,” which housed the washer and dryer and several white metal cabinets of varying sizes for storing canned goods, pots and pans, sheets and towels, and the vacuum cleaner.

  That summer Joanna got a dollhouse for her seventh birthday. It was the house she had been dreaming of: two storeys made of tin, four rooms on each floor, with all the necessary details printed right on: paintings, curtains, carpets, a red-brick fireplace with orange flames in the living room, books in floor-to-ceiling brown shelves in the den, blue towels in the bathroom, a blank TV screen in the family room, a clock in the kitchen set forever at 3:15. The outside of the house was done in Colonial style, with black shutters at every window and permanently pruned green bushes all around the bottom. There was a set of miniature plastic furniture for each of the eight rooms. Joanna spent hours rearranging, redecorating, moving the sleeping black cat from the bay window in the living room to the biggest bed upstairs, and wishing, always wishing, for a rocking chair, a new chesterfield, a real swinging cradle for the baby.

  The trouble was there was no baby. No baby, no mommy, no daddy, no nothing. The only living thing in the whole perfect house was Blackie the cat and he was asleep. Joanna fairly soon tired of trying to imagine a family into those orderly well-furnished rooms. She could never quite decide what their names were from one day to the next. They would not sit still, always changing, surprising, disappointing, or scaring her. Sometimes the daddy was tall, dark, and handsome, a teacher, smart, kind, and generous. Sometimes he wasbald and fat, a butcher whose white apron across his big belly was always splattered with blood so that even his own children were half-scared of him. Sometimes these children were clean and happy, safe and sound. Sometimes they got sick, had nightmares, hit each other, broke things and got sent to their rooms for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes the baby was rosy and sweet, a little angel who sucked her thumb and gurgled. Sometimes she cried all day and all night. Sometimes the mommy was cheerful and pretty, with her hair done up in beautiful black curls and her lipstick on while she baked chocolate chip cookies and hummed in the sunlit fragrant kitchen. Sometimes the mommy had bags under her eyes, her hair left in curlers all day as she sat in the bay window in her housecoat and cried. Sometimes she told the whole bunch of them to go away and leave her alone.

  Sometimes there were no children at all, just the mommy and the daddy alone in that big house with nothing to do.

  Soon enough the perfect dollhouse went the way of all exhausted toys: first to the top shelf of Joanna’s bedroom closet where it gathered dust and the odd spiderweb, reminding her of an abandoned house she’d seen once with empty black windows that had frightened her, the front door dangling open as if someone had just left in a hurry, a torn white curtain flapping through a broken upstairs window like a flag. She got all shivery trying to imagine a house with nobody living in it. It was like trying to imagine her own self dead.

  Then the perfect dollhouse went
up to the attic and she seldom thought of it again.

  When Joanna got to Grade Eight, she had to take Home Ec once a week. She, like all the other thirteen-year-old girls she knew, was glad. Enough of all that other useless stuff. Now they were going to learn something important. Now they were going to learn how to cook, clean, sew, and clip coupons. Now they were going to learn how to keep house.

  They began in September with cooking. The teacher, Miss Murchie, led them step-by-step through the mechanics of preparing a nutritious but inexpensive family meal. They spent one whole classgoing through recipes and planning the menu. Democratically they settled on salmon croquettes, peas and carrots, coleslaw, and Jubilee fruit salad for dessert. They spent the next class drawing up the grocery list with the aid of the local newspaper from which they determined which store had the best bargains on which items. Miss Murchie did not mention that this method of grocery shopping would involve driving all over town all afternoon just to save six cents on the cabbage, twelve cents on the grapes, and twenty-three whole cents on the salmon.

  Because each Home Ec class was only fifty minutes, they actually made these dishes one at a time. They learned that each recipe must be followed to the letter in the right order and that there was a specific time limit allotted for each consecutive step, which Miss Murchie clocked with her stopwatch. They learned that dry ingredients must not be measured in the same cup as liquid ingredients. They learned that a carrot must not be chopped with the same knife as an apple. They learned how to peel grapes. They learned the all-important difference between a pinch and a dash. Last but not least, they learned how to set the table so that even a simple meal looked like a veritable banquet.

  Four classes later they learned how to do the dishes. Joanna had been helping Esther with the dishes every night for years. Esther washed and Joanna dried and put away, the two of them gazing out the window, listening to the radio and humming along, or maybe Esther was talking about what happened on her soap opera that afternoon or wondering why the climbing roses on the trellis weren’t blooming yet, or maybe Joanna was telling her that Susie Arneson didn’t like Dennis Jackowski any more, now she liked Phillip Churchill instead, or hoping that tomorrow’s History test would be multiple choice and not true or false. Meanwhile the dishes always got done and it never occurred to Joanna that there might be a trick to any of it.

  Now she learned in Home Ec that they had been doing the dishes all wrong. What you were supposed to do was the cutlery first and then the cups and glasses because these were the items that went right into your mouth. Then you could do the plates, saucers, bowls, et cetera. Finally you finished up with the pots and pans, but notbefore you’d drained and then refilled the sink with fresh soapy water. Also, speaking of sinks, you were supposed to have two: one for washing and one for rinsing. You should wear rubber gloves to protect your skin and jewellery.

  Upon hearing all this, Esther just snorted and said she’d been doing the dishes for forty years (in one sink with her bare hands, no less—she considered rubber gloves a pretentious affectation of those who fancied themselves upper class) and she had no intention of changing now. If the old way had been good enough for the last forty years, it would be good enough for the next forty. She’d said as much about the new math too.

  Joanna had to admit her mother had a good point. She was suspicious too of the fact that, in total, it had taken a team of twenty girls six whole weeks to prepare one nutritious but inexpensive family meal. At this rate, Joanna suspected, the poor little family would have starved to death long before it was time to don the rubber gloves.

  Next the class went on to a more promising project called “Planning Your Dream Home.” First each girl selected a floor plan from a fat book, then enlarged and transcribed her plan onto a sheet of bristol board using the appropriate drafting symbols for windows, doors, electrical outlets, and plumbing fixtures. They were given little indication as to how these houses would actually be constructed. This work, it was assumed, would be done by men, men who knew, as if by magic, how to pour concrete, erect walls, run wires, lay pipes, and shingle roofs. The girls in Home Ec, who would become women and so did not need to concern themselves with such abstractions, were required to do the interior decorating. Much of this would also need to be realized by men, men who would apply paint and wallpaper, lay carpet and tile, and move the furniture around until they got it right. These men were not expected to have a say in choosing these items. Rather they had only to assemble and admire them as the women directed. The function of these men of the future, it seemed, was the execution of the women’s dreams. They would also provide the necessary financing without complaint.

  Miss Murchie gave the girls a dozen wallpaper books and a shoebox full of paint chips from which to select their colour schemes. They were to find the furnishings on their own.

  For weeks Joanna spent hours each evening combing through old magazines and catalogues. With her mother’s manicure scissors, she clipped beds, tables, cabinets, shelves, desks, couches, footstools, stoves, fridges, and chairs of all kinds. Then she arranged the pieces in the appropriate rooms. Of course the objects were not in proportion or perspective, so that in the living room the oak coffee table was three times the size of the flowered love seat, and in the kitchen the matching almond fridge and stove took up most of the floor space while the table and chairs were an inch square in the corner. In this way the dream home took on a seductive surreal quality, like a scene from Alice in Wonderland.

  Joanna dreamed about the project the night before she handed it in. In the dream she found herself inside her own dream home come to three-dimensional life. Moving from room to room, she changed size accordingly as the perspective lines dissolved and reformed around her. There were vanishing points everywhere, askew and awry, disappearing, as was their habit, into thin air. In Art class she had been learning about vanishing points. In real life she knew about perspective and putting things in it.

  perspective n. 1. the art of drawing objects or a scene on a flat surface so as to show them as they appear to the eye with reference to relative position, size, depth, or distance. 2.a) a mental point of view of the relative importance of things or events, b) the ability to see things in their true relationship. 3. a distant vista or view.

  In real life she already knew that you cannot ever see things as they really are. The farther away an object is, the smaller it appears. She knew that a four-storey building six blocks away looks smaller than a matchbox in the palm of your hand. She knew that past the vanishing point all objects are equal: invisible. She did not know yet if these apparent paradoxes were caprices of reality or vision or both.

  In the dream the floors of her house were spongy and her headbrushed the ceiling as she grew to fit the furniture in the living room. She shrank to the size of a peanut as she stretched out on the four-poster bed in the master bedroom. She would not have been surprised to find the Cheshire cat asleep at her tiny cold feet. She got an A+ on this project without ever having mentioned the dream.

  When Joanna first began sleeping with Henry, he was living in an unfinished house with two other men. It was a prefab house, what the men called “a package.” It had arrived originally on a huge flatbed truck, all the pieces precut and numbered like a giant wooden puzzle. It came with a thick manual of diagrams and directions on how to assemble the pieces in the correct order so they would turn themselves into a finished house.

  Luke, who owned the house (and the as-yet-unassembled pieces still stacked in the backyard), had begun building two years earlier when he was still married and planning to live happily ever after. But then his wife ran off with another man. After that Luke was laid off from his job at a local construction company and went on unemployment. He rented out the bedrooms to his friends to help pay the mortgage. He was a quiet man, filled now with love and pain in equally debilitating quantities. He was still building in fits and starts, when he felt like it, when he could afford it.

  When the men got mo
tivated, they put more parts of the house together: another wall, a door, a few sheets of drywall, tile on the bathroom walls, baseboards in the kitchen, a railing on the basement stairs. When Joanna went over, she might find the living room enclosed where there had only been open beams before. Or there was a full-fledged door on the bathroom where there had been only a curtain hung from nails, and she knew the men could hear her peeing and putting in her diaphragm before bed. Once she went over late at night and found Henry sleeping in a different room altogether because they were working on his. Waking in the middle of the night, she couldn’t find the bathroom.

  She never knew what to expect when she went there. The house was like a person whose mood you could never count on. One daythis person would hug you and laugh, the next day she would cut you in the street. It wore her down. Henry began by mutual agreement to sleep at her place instead, although she had only a single bed. Joanna said she felt better there, with the walls and floors complete and unchanging around her. Somehow she imagined that in a solid finished house their relationship would be solid too. During the next month most of Henry’s stuff ended up in her apartment, and it soon seemed silly to be paying rent on a room he didn’t live in so he gave Luke notice and then they were officially living together. They said they’d buy a bigger bed soon but they never did.

  Lewis had fantasies about the house he and Joanna would live in some day. It was modelled on a restored stone house on Pembroke Street near the waterfront. Their dream house too would have real red shutters, window boxes overflowing with purple lobelia and pale pink impatiens, dense vines growing up the sunny southern wall. They dreamed aloud about this house until it was perfect in every detail and they were living happily ever after in each beautifully appointed heritage room.