In the Language of Love Read online

  Tomorrow she would start. It had to do with maps, road maps like she’d collected as a child, sending away for them with coupons clipped from Esther’s magazines: maps of the Yukon, Switzerland, Alberta and British Columbia, the Amazon River System, South Africa, Venezuela, all of them equally exotic and unlikely. Some of the maps came to her with courteous letters attached: Have a wonderful trip, ma’am. Enjoy yourself with our very best wishes. Keep our country beautiful. We’re happy to be at your service. As if they thought she would really go, as if they thought she was a real person with real plans, a grown-up.

  When each new map arrived, she would spread it out on her bed, memorizing mileage counts and place-names, peering at red highways, black railroads, twisty blue rivers both skinny and fat. She was always careful to remember how she’d unfolded each map so she could refold it properly when she was done.

  The maps ended up in a box in her closet eventually, but still she kept sending for more, asking at gas stations and the Tourist Information Bureau until Esther said she was driving her crazy. Joanna became an expert at folding maps, if nothing else.

  Clarence gave her a world atlas for her twelfth birthday and she studied it for hours, especially the pretty coloured ones shaded to show Vegetation, Topography, Agriculture, Industry and Resources, Average Temperature and Rainfall. There were lists too, which she copied into a special spiral notebook: Area, Population, Capital City, Highest Point, Monetary Unit, Major Languages, Major Religions. She knew off by heart the largest islands, the highest mountains, and the longest rivers of the world. But nobody ever asked her aboutthese things and gradually she forgot them. When she grew up, she discovered that she had absolutely no desire to travel, an aversion she had probably inherited from Esther and Clarence, along with her dislike of cabbage, blue cheese, and Brussels sprouts, along with her mistrust of rich people, big cities, and horses.

  This collage would begin with the old atlas. She was going to cut out bits and pieces of all her favourite countries and make a new one. She was going to call it Journey to the Center of the Earth, or maybe Transport. Either way, there was going to be a circle in the center, a black circle with fleshy pink edges, the way mouths had looked to her these past six months, men’s mouths especially: opening, closing, talking, laughing, promising, eating like pigs, gurgling back beer: damp black holes in the yellow sunshine. A black circle in the center, yes, with fleshy pink edges like a mouth or the way she pictured her own vagina now that Lewis had left her.

  transport vt. 1. to carry or move from one place to another. 2. to carry away with strong emotion; to cause ecstasy or exaltation; enrapture; entrance. 3. to convey to a penal colony; banish; deport.

  After the art store, she’d go down to the market for a basket of peaches, a dozen farm-fresh eggs, some zucchini, green onions, and mushrooms. She’d try that new Hearty Frittata recipe for supper. She’d buy herself a bouquet of flowers. She would admire the food, the blossoms, and her own independence while indulging in a glass of white wine with classical music on the stereo and maybe even a candle or two.

  The market, as always, was crowded. There were clusters of people at every stall, bouncing apples and tomatoes from hand to hand to judge their weighty ripeness, pulling back hairy green corn husks to peek at the sweet plump kernels inside. Farther over at the handicrafts stalls, women were pressing handmade cotton pants and vests against themselves and pirouetting. Babies in strollers were gooing and reaching chubby hands out to fluffy stuffed sheep and hand-painted wooden trains. Men were smelling loaves of fresh bread while munching on oatmeal cookies the size of plates. The canvastarps of the stalls flapped in the wind and somebody somewhere was playing a fiddle and singing. Everybody was smiling and talking to total strangers about the gorgeous weather, the superior produce, and the stupid government.

  Joanna concentrated on her purchases, determined not to let the rest of the world’s flamboyant coupled happiness make her depressed.

  At a stall in the middle row she was contemplating buying a pair of silver earrings in the shape of paintbrushes. She didn’t really need them but she thought she deserved a present.

  She spotted Lewis and Wanda at the end of the row, bending over a display of hand-turned wooden salad bowls. They were holding hands and also a pink balloon. They were looking happy: they hadn’t seen her yet. Her heart buckled. Afterwards she would think that one of the main things she’d learned from having an affair with a married man was how to spot them before they spotted her.

  As she put the earrings down and started to walk away, Lewis turned and saw her. He grinned and automatically began to raise his hand but then Wanda turned too and he stopped himself and brushed away an invisible wasp instead. He shrugged as if to say, What can I do? and Joanna hated him for having once loved her.

  Back on the street, she passed a construction site where many muscular dirty men in yellow hard hats stood around eating doughnuts and drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. She had to walk around a brand-new shiny red dump truck which straddled the sidewalk, engine running. She patted its black bumper, thought of Henry and his smell of diesel fuel, his big dirty gentle hands. She laid her head for one moment on the hot red hood and then she walked away. One of the workers nodded and waved.

  She passed a young woman, with long curly hair and gold granny glasses, perched on the stone fence of St. Paul’s Cathedral, playing her guitar and singing in her bare feet. Before her in a wheelchair sat a bearded young man with tattoos and no legs. He was dropping dollar bills into the open guitar case and asking for another song.

  Joanna went to Woolworth’s, to the toy department in the basement. She bought a set of paint-by-number oil paintings: Artist Touch, Series Four, New England Coast. Two 12”? 16” paintings, 21colours, artist’s brush and complete instructions for $9.99. The instructions read: Apply paint to all numbered areas until you have completed your picture. Allow about ten days for your painting to dry before framing. Your friends won’t believe you painted it yourself!

  The pictures were just like the ones Clarence had done twenty years ago. In one, there was a tiny man fishing from a seawall in front of a tall red wooden building with a sea gull and sailboats in the background. In the other, three red rowboats were moored on the rocky shore of a blue-and-green lake, more sea gulls, some fir trees, and fog on the horizon.

  At home, Joanna put on her nightgown at five o’clock. When she was young, home after school, sometimes she asked Esther if she could put on her slippers and her flannelette pyjamas, curl up in the big swivel chair and watch TV till supper. Mostly Esther wouldn’t let her. Mostly Esther would say, “What if somebody comes over? What will they think?” This was around the time Esther made skinny long-legged Joanna wear two crinolines to school so the teacher wouldn’t think her mother didn’t feed her.

  Now Joanna could do whatever she wanted. Now she could sit at the kitchen table in her nightgown and do paint-by-numbers till midnight if she wanted to. Though the oil paints were in plastic fliptop containers now instead of those tiny glass jars with gold screw-on lids, they still smelled exactly the same.

  14. HAND

  IT IS THE WAY MEN hold their hands, Joanna figures, that gives them away. It is the way they hold their hands in unguarded moments that exposes their tenderness, their vulnerability, and gives you a glimpse of all the fragility they’ve been trying so hard to hide.

  The last year of high school there was a rumour going around that you could tell the size of a guy’s thing by the size of his fingers. There was, so the theory went, a direct correlation between these appendages: short stubby fingers meant a short stubby thing, long skinny fingers meant a long skinny thing, and so on. You just had todecide what you liked the most: length or width. But how could you decide, Joanna wondered, when you’d never even touched one, let alone tried it on for size?

  This theory, handy though it might have been, was soon (and then repeatedly) disproved. The first penis Joanna ever touched belonged to a boy named Thomas Hunt. Tho
mas was a short thin boy with short thin fingers. But when he unzipped his fly and his hard penis sprang out at her, it was long and wide. She didn’t like to stare so she closed her hand around it, her fingers, it seemed, barely able to encircle it.

  They were with another couple at the cottage of the other boy’s parents. They were supposed to be at a basketball game, but this other boy, Stanley Evans, was wild and bossy in a charming way. He had his mother’s car, a bottle of his father’s whisky, and the keys to their cottage slipped secretly into his jacket pocket. Stanley was the kind of boy who could convince you to do things you wouldn’t normally do, and so off they went.

  At the cottage on Buck Lake, they drank all the rye and then Stanley led the other girl, Louisa, into the bedroom. Joanna didn’t know Louisa very well but she did know (everybody knew) that Louisa and Stanley had been doing it for at least two months.

  Joanna and Thomas necked on the couch and she let him put his hands up her blouse and down her shorts. Then she put her hand around his penis and held it carefully. She didn’t know what would happen next: would it get even harder, even bigger, would it explode? Slowly, slowly, like a flower folding up for the night, it went soft and Thomas sighed. “Your hands are very cold,” he said, but she knew he wasn’t blaming her.

  He tucked his penis, little and shy-looking now, back into his jeans. He was grinning and shrugging as if it didn’t matter, but his hands held palms up before him, those short thin fingers spread, looked frightened and embarrassed.

  They turned on the lights and played cribbage, scrupulously ignoring the sounds from the bedroom, till Stanley and Louisa were done and came back into the main room, rumpled and red-faced, holding hands proudly.

  Joanna and Thomas went out several more times after that, tobasketball games and movies, walking downtown sometimes on Friday night for chips and gravy, milk shakes or sundaes. They held hands, but that was all. High school ended, Stanley and Louisa got married, Thomas went away to university, and they were all relieved to be changing their lives, finding their way to the future.

  Joanna, as Thomas had so politely pointed out, always had cold hands.

  “Cold hands, warm heart,” Clarence used to tease her, Joanna having just come inside for supper after building a snow fort in the front yard with Penny and Pamela, rosy-cheeked but disappointed because what she really wanted was a snow fort big enough to crawl right inside of, but the roof and the walls were always collapsing around her. Clarence would kneel before her on the braided porch rug and help her take off her snow boots and mittens. Then he would rub her tingling hands, one by one, between his two big dry palms, blowing on them too. His hands smelled like paper, his warm breath like whisky, and he said, “Cold hands, warm heart.”

  Joanna would flex her warming fingers and stare at them, looking for clues to the condition of her own heart. She knew that if you crossed your fingers behind your back when you were telling a little white lie, then somehow the lie didn’t count. She also knew that if you kept your fingers crossed when you were hoping and praying for something, you were bound to have good luck. Esther said an itchy palm meant money was coming your way. Clearly there was magic in the hands.

  An itchy nose was also significant. Esther at the stove making supper would scratch her nose and say, “Oh oh, I’m going to kiss a fool,” and sometimes Clarence would sneak up behind her, put a hand on each shoulder, whirl her around, and kiss her right on the mouth. Sometimes Esther laughed and kissed him back. Sometimes she shrugged him off and pushed him away and then Clarence would make a face at Joanna, rolling his eyes and holding his hands out and open, helpless.

  It is the way men hold their hands, Joanna figures, that gives their secrets away. Henry putting his fist through the drywall in the bedroom when Joanna said she didn’t want to live with him any more. Then he spread both hands on the wall above the ragged hole and rested his forehead on them. By bedtime his right hand was swollen and purple across the knuckles. Joanna put peroxide on the scrapes and wrapped it for him in a tensor bandage.

  Lewis not washing his hands when he left Joanna’s bed to go home to Wanda because he said he liked the smell of her on his fingers. Lewis at the market with Wanda reaching his hand up to wave and then brushing at the air instead.

  It is the way men hold their hands, Joanna figures, that can leave you stricken with love.

  Gordon holding Samuel after his bath, the moist naked baby curled into his bare shoulder like a kitten. Gordon’s big brown hand spread across Samuel’s neck and shoulders, holding up his wobbly head. Gordon nuzzling Samuel’s neck, pressing his ear to Samuel’s, which looks like a seashell, Gordon hoping perhaps to hear the ocean inside. Samuel tucking his feet up and falling asleep in his father’s hands.

  With children, it is not in the hands, Joanna has discovered, but the feet: those chubby feet so small she wonders how Samuel will ever learn to walk, those baby toes so pink and round like flower buds she is afraid for months to trim his nails for fear of cutting a toe right off.

  Even now, the mere sight of Samuel’s white-and-yellow plastic thongs abandoned in the doorway of her studio at five o’clock on an early September afternoon can bring her heart to her throat, can rip it right out nearly. It is Labour Day, the end of another summer, and Samuel will start school in the morning.

  Joanna leaves the thongs where they are and goes back to the kitchen where Gordon and Samuel are playing Old Maid. Suddenly there is the roar of jet engines overhead, louder and louder, coming lower and lower as if they will crash right into the house. For a moment Joanna thinks, This is it, this is the end, we are all going to die. But Gordon says, happily, “It’s the Snowbirds.” From the kitchenwindow they can see front doors opening all up and down the street, their neighbours on their front steps craning their necks, the women in their aprons holding wooden spoons, a bunch of broccoli, a half-peeled potato, or a big silver pot lid like a shield, the men bare-chested with newspapers or beer in their hands, pointing.

  Gordon, Joanna, and Samuel go out and stand at the end of their driveway, waiting for the planes to come round again. The lady next door waves and calls, “Thank God they’re friendly!” The elderly couple at the end of the block are rolling their adult son out in his wheelchair, down the wooden ramp, pointing his droopy head in the right direction and holding it there.

  They can hear the planes coming up behind the houses and the elm trees, but the sound seems to be coming from all directions at once and Samuel spins around on his bare feet, not knowing which way to look.

  They come from behind, right over their house, nine silver planes in perfect formation, swooping with red-and-white smoke dissolving behind them. Samuel puts his hands over his ears and leaps up and down on the spot, crowing.

  Joanna watched the Snowbirds with Clarence and Esther from their front yard thirty years ago. She was Samuel’s age then and just as excited. Had she too run outside in her bare feet? Had she too clapped her hands and hollered and spun? Had she too thought the noise and the danger and the fear were half the fun? Did she really remember that day so clearly or was she making it up as she went along?

  Gordon hoists Samuel onto his shoulders and they are both waving. Joanna has an unmanageable lump in her throat and wonders why it’s always the happy memories that make her cry. Gordon notices her wet shiny eyes and pats her back gently, grinning.

  She gets like this at parades too, especially at the Christmas parade. She can’t help herself. The floats, the marching bands, the high-stepping horses, the clowns tossing candy at the children, the Shriners in their funny tasselled hats in their miniature tooting cars, the local car salesmen and the mayor waving from white convertibles, their breath white too in the November morning air.

  Last year, by the time Santa Claus came round the corner, Joannawas ready to burst into tears. Santa was laughing and grinning and ho-ho-ho-ing while green elves and brown reindeer danced and tinkled all around his big red chair. It was the way he waved, she tried to explain to Gordo
n later, back home over hot chocolate and marshmallows. The way he waved, so innocent and yet imaginary, as if he really believed in himself and in the children too, none of them the least bit troubled by the fact that there was a Santa on every corner, in every shopping mall, in every old-time movie. Santa could do anything. Santa could be everywhere at once and all those reindeer too.

  It was the way Samuel stood there waving back, stamping his cold little feet in his big blue snow boots on the sidewalk, insisting they stay till Santa was well out of sight. Joanna cried and Samuel said, “Don’t cry, Mommy. Everything will be all right. Santa will bring you a nice present too,” and Joanna cried even more with Gordon’s arm around her, his left hand tucked into her parka pocket because he’d forgotten his gloves and Samuel, age four, was so sure of everything that it broke her fearful motherly heart.

  With men it is the hands; with children, the feet. What then, she wonders as they troop back inside, the Snowbirds safely landed, the sky gone silent again, what then is it with women that gives their secrets away? It is not in their hands or their feet. Women, it seems, are more likely to be aware of these extremities, self-consciously waving and pointing them, fondly pampering and painting them.

  Except for Joanna who has bitten her fingernails since she was five, bitten them incorrigibly right down, as they say, to the quick. For a time the state of Joanna’s fingernails was the bane of her mother’s existence. Esther shaking her head and saying, “You’d bite your toenails if you could get them up to your mouth!” Joanna not mentioning that she had tried it once but couldn’t manage it. Esther painting Joanna’s nails every morning with a foul-tasting brown liquid which made her fingers look as if they were stained with nicotine. Joanna not mentioning that after the first couple of bites you got used to the taste. Esther making Joanna wear a pair of white cotton gloves to bed every night. Joanna not mentioning that the only time she didn’t bite her nails was when she was asleep.