by Amina Cain
If I were another kind of woman, maybe I wouldn’t have let him out of my sight, but I let him out of my sight often. I was naturally out of his sight, as women usually are with their husbands. It gave me great freedom.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked after I had untied him. The pleasant room was made for the tropics, with windows that lined every wall. So different from the rooms in our city; here we were always exposed to the outside, to the plants and the ocean. Or perhaps they were always exposed to us. Either way, they were part of the room.
“I’ve never felt so well.”
“I want you to feel well.”
“Do you?” I nuzzled into his arm. Some people always feel well. I suppose he is one of them.
“You’re almost like an animal,” he said. “I never know what you will do.”
“I know.”
A red squirrel climbing a tree.
“But in reality you’re a woman.”
I laughed. “What does that mean?”
“It isn’t nice to call your wife an animal, is it?”
“I think it’s interesting.”
But then my husband was annoyed with me, for I had taken the conversation too far, even though I had hardly taken it far at all. “You try to make yourself abnormal on purpose,” he said. “You think it makes you better than the other people around you.”
“I do no such thing, and still I am better.”
I knew how that sounded, but I couldn’t help saying it, and I suppose I did think I was better than him. If I’m being honest. If I’m being shallow.
WITH HER SISTERS, Dana left before we did to begin her rehearsals. It would be her first performance and she was nervous. On the last day of her vacation, she stopped to look at a gray cat in an apartment window when we walked by it. Her hair was twisted into an elegant shape, pulled away from her brown neck, and I saw how striking she was as she looked at the cat.
The cat was striking too, the way it looked at us both in turn.
“Dana, it wants to communicate. It watches us as we watch it.”
We got fancy doughnuts and ate them at a wooden table. I wasn’t used to doughnuts and later felt sick to my stomach. Even at night I was nauseous, and while my husband went to a place where poker was played, I lay in bed feeling sorry for myself, the ocean again close to me, darkly crashing into the bright sand.
The next day I ate carefully. I didn’t eat bread. I was careful about everything, even swimming. I didn’t want to get sick again. Instead, I read a novel I had brought with me that I had barely touched since first arriving. I was able to enjoy myself in that way.
Soon we would leave too, back to the city. At least it would still be hot. I could still go to the botanical gardens, walk through the park in the evenings. I could go to the lake.
THE FUTURE CAME, as it always does, with its changes and its things that stay the same. Dana in Giselle, a small role. In her room, Solange was as quiet as always, though occasionally it sounded as if she was talking to someone, sometimes in a soothing way, yet I had never seen her be soothing. It seemed so out of character. To whom was she talking? My husband? No matter. I went to the library to look at books of botanical illustrations. There I found the plants I had seen at the ocean, their strange leaves, and flowers that were also sometimes strange, with a heavy presence, but not weighed down. Different from plants that died every winter.
To my husband it made sense that I would look at botanical illustrations. He didn’t understand my relationship to the plants; he thought I was only interested in their flowers, that I might ask to plant some in our garden. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he understood more than I imagined.
I wanted to write about the plants, but that seemed even harder than writing about paintings. When I tried, I barely captured them. But every day I walked for a half hour to the library to look at the illustrations, then I went to the botanical gardens on my way home.
One Sunday I went to an afternoon performance of Giselle and watched Dana onstage. She danced as one of the dead women who have been betrayed by their lovers and will kill any man who crosses their path. All of these dead women were graceful, but in Dana was something mournful, perhaps without her knowing it was there. Is it bad to say she was better than those other dancers?
WHEN I ARRIVED AT HOME, my husband was still out and Solange was closing the curtains in the front room. I sat down in a chair; I rarely sat in the front room, as it was formal. I had worn a simple, pretty dress.
“Shall I turn on the lights?” Solange asked. “It’ll be dark soon.”
“I won’t be long.”
“Can I bring you something to eat or drink?”
“May I have some water?”
I drank my water. In my head I heard the music I’d heard that afternoon. I saw the country. I even saw it in that room.
“Did you have a nice time, madame?”
“Yes, it was lovely. Did you have a good day?”
“I prepared tomorrow’s breakfast.”
“Solange, do you like breakfast?”
“That’s an odd question, madame.”
“I like dinner. It’s by candlelight and the food tastes better. Is that odd too?”
Why did I say these things? If I wasn’t polite, I was awkward. Was I myself an odd person? I looked at Solange’s heart-shaped face to try to find something there. She had been nice to me for the first time, and I had ruined it.
Did Solange have friends? Good friends? I imagined her and another young woman cleaning together, whispering, doing whatever they wanted when the owner of the house wasn’t home.
In another life I owned a farm; I saw this clearly. I spent my time trying to tell my life’s story to a man who had recently killed his wife, only I didn’t know he had killed her, and he was bored hearing my story. I let him stay on the farm for many months, working the land.
I saw Antoinette lounging in a tropical place like the one I myself had just been to. I saw her sitting in a chair among plants, having her portrait painted.
I saw Dana walking in a city with desertlike mountains next to it and then in a lush green field.
I DIDN’T WRITE FOR A MONTH; my mind was somewhere else. But I was writing a book; I knew that now. I had been writing it for two years. The problem was that it would make little sense to most people, and how would that work out? Everyone always wants sense.
Writing is endless, what it allows you to consider. What is in paintings is endless too. I picture one I used to look at often in the museum. A white peacock is about to attack another that is colorful.
But even without sense in my writing, and with this endlessness, I was starting to become calm; outwardly, at least. Now it was not unusual for me to be in some interaction with another and in control of it. This had never been my experience, and I watched it happen with some pleasure, but I never let this pleasure show. Even in mundane interactions I had something interesting to say, or I made the interaction better. Dullness was still everywhere. But there was fascination too.
It began to get cold again. Now when I took my walks, the air was different. Clearer. Soon I’d be walking in the near dark before supper, all of the lights coming on in the shops. The tables in front of the restaurants carried indoors until spring, the sidewalks again empty. All of the fascination inside, where the diners sat and talked and waited for their meals.
WHEN THE COLD SETTLED IN, I took a train to another city to visit a museum where a glass chandelier hung from the ceiling of each room. I hadn’t been on a train—or to another city—for quite some time, and I looked out at the land racing by or I read the novel I had brought with me. Trees and rivers. Three or four times, a farm. I wondered what it would be like to live on one of them.
The city was smaller than the one I lived in, but it too was situated along the same lake my city was, and that is where I found its museum. When I stepped off the train, I spotted it right away, more modern than I had expected, a bright white next to the turquoise water. It f
elt nice to be somewhere new, to be there alone.
With only a few people walking through it, the museum was quiet. I could hear my footsteps on the hardwood floors and people talking quietly as they looked at the paintings. The museum in my city was loud. In the galleries here the paintings were large, but in a corridor were several small ones, two I felt especially drawn to, for they were flat in their style, and I had always been drawn to paintings like this. They appeared to be doubles, but when I looked closely, I noticed that they were different.
Four figures are in the first painting: Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and two others, perhaps a priest and a nun. These figures look as though they are made of white clay; they’re ugly. The Virgin Mary’s face is the same color as her clothing. Jesus too, the same color as his loincloth. But the hills behind are green; they look as if they were flowing toward something, as an ocean does, and the roof of the cathedral in the distance is bright blue. In this painting the shapes that are not meant to depict living things are much brighter than the ones meant to look alive. The figures of the living look just as dead as the man who is meant to have been killed.
The second painting was done one hundred years after the first, and though it closely follows the original, it adds to the scene a new figure and softens the features of those who are present. Jesus is still dead, but the others finally look alive, and even Jesus has been given some color. The hills this time are brown and they are not flowing. In the first painting, it is the landscape that comforts, but in the second it is the people. The aliveness of the scene has been given back to the living.
I focused on the paintings for a long while, until another museumgoer cleared his throat. I had been in front of the doubles for quite some time, and I suppose he wanted to look at them too. But these days I rarely conceded anything. This was when I learned selfishness, right after I had learned control. It’s not that I became a selfish person, but I knew selfishness now and it would always be a part of me. If I walked by a shop window, I thought not only that I wanted what was inside, but that I deserved it. I felt I would look nice, that gold became me, that nice fabric became me. They become everyone, of course.
But I moved aside, went on to the next gallery. I looked at the lake through one of the windows of the museum, imagining Antoinette going to her own window, becoming visible to the people walking down the street. Visible to me. In her long, unfashionable skirt, her shirtsleeves rolled up to her elbows. She’s carrying with her that other time. We all carry our lives in us, not just our problems or nightmares, but something of what we were before.
One by one we become visible, Antoinette. On the farm or in the city. In the museum or out on the street. I’m just as visible in my bedroom as I am anywhere else.
NOW THAT I HAVE so much time to myself, I wonder at my times of happiness, why I’ve been allowed them, even now when I am lonely. Why I can walk and how even walking, at the right hour, in this temperature or that one, the lights just coming on, or the sky lightening, I am able to love it. How much I am a person.
At home I would watch my husband pour himself a glass of water. When he went up the stairs, I could hear the rain falling all along the rooftop, along the windows. It rushed along the street.
Did I join with him, at least in certain moments? Did it mean something for us to live so close to each other, even if I am now gone? All around us the buildings facing out at their corners, as though a person were always coming toward them. That is what the city seemed like then.
At first I thought I knew myself well.
Yet, what part of me is false?
IN DECEMBER, Dana turned twenty-one and her family threw her a birthday party. I went shopping for a new dress and I also looked at jewelry. I didn’t need jewelry, it wasn’t my birthday after all, but I wanted to look at it just the same. In a department store I saw earrings that looked like drops of blood and I wanted to wear them. I felt the earrings would make the rich people at the party kind to me, and that if I kept them my whole life, they would guard me against becoming poor again, against becoming a future hag, that all my nice things would guard me, even if it wasn’t true.
Regardless, I wanted something and I could have it. It had been this way for a while.
So I bought a dress, a fitted dark-green-and-black one, and I bought the earrings, and I wore them to Dana’s party with my husband on my arm. The house was decorated with globes of light and an excess of flowers. Conversationally it was less striking, as it almost always was. As for me, what I said out loud to the people at the party was completely different from what I was thinking. This is how it usually was. Still, I was able to be calm.
I had always thought I would be forced to marry an older man, but my husband was young, and his clothes fit as well as mine did. So some of the women disliked me, as they always did. But I also disliked them.
Dancers were at the party and to watch them eat was interesting. They did so differently from everyone else, more gracefully. I was not a graceful eater; there was still something piglike about me. They didn’t drink goblets of wine, they had to stay composed, they had to give everything to their performances, and in the same way I wanted to give everything to my writing. I wanted people to see it in the way I ate things and acted. That eating was more than just eating, or that writing was. That friendship was, my friendship with Dana. A part of me wished I could announce our friendship at the party.
But I didn’t. I did my socializing, my version of it, and when I did, I saw scenes of winter, I saw myself writing in the winter. I saw the frozen river running alongside our city. Always so distracted. Eventually, I excused myself to fill my plate again.
“Are you having a good time?” Dana asked as I was spooning mashed potatoes next to a clump of spinach. I hadn’t known she was near.
“Yes,” I answered, surprised by my answer. In my own way I suppose I was. “Are you?”
“My mother is trying to introduce me to someone.”
“Who?”
“Him.” She pointed to a man.
“No.”
Dana laughed and looked toward another guest. That guest was snorting something off a small plate. She looked pretty doing it and we watched her for a few moments.
In a sitting room outside the bathroom, another woman sat in front of a mirror and brushed her hair roughly, so roughly a real drop of blood was beginning to appear on her scalp.
I DIDN’T HIDE MY WRITING from my husband anymore, or even my study. I called it “my study” even if he called it my sitting room, even if he glanced at but said nothing about the pages on my desk, the books crowded around them. Even Solange ignored my papers, but then she rarely asked me anything. I don’t think she ever dusted off my desk, and she too insisted on using the words sitting room. It is true I sat when I wrote, when I read. And when Dana came over, we sat there too.
“Would you like to travel again?” my husband asked one morning while I was dressing. He liked to watch me do this, dress and undress. At such moments he always seemed to appear.
“I want to go to Jamaica,” I said.
I was putting on a burgundy dress, preparing for writing and the walk I would take just after breakfast. Preparing for my own mind. Why did I get so dressed up when no one would see me? It is better that way, to give fancy things to my writing and my own mind and my ramblings, better than wasting them on people I don’t like, and their formal, grand rooms, while it snows outside. All of the fascination out there, away from where we are sitting.
But I felt then that I could also dress for the future, for when I would be in Jamaica. That I had become a worldly person and that everyone would be able to see this in how I dressed. That I was someone who traveled.
Finally my husband left for work; now I would have some space. I finished my morning routine and went down to the kitchen for breakfast. The animals followed me, the dog’s nails clicking along the floor, the cat’s silent walking.
“Sit down, madame,” Solange said when I arrived in the kitchen
.
On the table my oatmeal was waiting for me. My egg.
While Solange busied herself around me, I ate in silence. To eat something warm and without having to talk to anyone was nice.
I began writing in my mind. Gazing out the window but not seeing what was there.
I took my walk in much the same way, then in my study I wrote well into the afternoon without stopping, which was so rarely the case; I usually stopped quite often. When I had finished, the lights were starting to come on in the buildings opposite and I looked at them lovingly, seeing things this time. Life was happening everywhere; our bit of it was only a small contribution. Still, our lights joined the darkening of the sky, those other lights. I wanted this feeling to enter into what I was writing, but without saying it directly it was difficult to do.
That night I had a concert to go to. Finally I had gone to so many concerts I stopped taking note of them. A perfect end to a long day of writing, I thought, though the room in which the concert took place was cold and, in that way, annoying. I sat in the audience with the other concertgoers in a semicircle surrounding the musicians, we were close, and the entire time I cried. I hadn’t expected it; this hadn’t happened at any of the other concerts I had gone to. Focus yourself, I thought. Stop crying. But it was no use. Imagine being too close to the musicians in a moment like that. I didn’t want my crying to disrupt them, but there was no way to stop it. Again, the music rose up to the ceiling and went out into the rest of the room. The violin was much more precise than I was or would ever be. Compared to it, I would always be dull and general. Still, it seemed to cut through something inside me and then soothe what it had cut.