Home, I think. But it's nowhere I can go back to.
It's worse than I thought it would be, and also better.
Some days I think I'm crazy to have done this; other times that it's the sanest move I've made in years.
It's cheaper in Vancouver. After a short spell in a Holiday Inn, I find a house I can rent, on the rise behind Kitsilano Beach, one of those toytown houses that are bigger inside than they look. It has a view of the bay, and the mountains across it, and, in the summer, endless light. I find a co-op preschool for Sarah. For a time I live on grant money. I freelance a little, then get a part-time job refinishing furniture for an antique dealer. I like this, because it's mindless and the furniture can't talk. I am thirsty for silence.
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
I think maybe I should go to see a shrink, because that is the accepted thing, now, for people who are not in balance, and I am not. Finally I do go. The shrink is a man, a nice man. He wants me to talk about everything that happened to me before I was six, nothing after. Once you are six, he implies, you are cast in bronze. What comes after is not important.
I have a good memory. I tell him about the war.
I tell him about the Exacto knife and the wrist, but not about the voice. I don't want him to think I'm a loony. I want him to think well of me.
I tell him about nothing.
He asks if I have orgasms. I say that isn't the problem.
He thinks I am hiding things.
After a while I stop going.
Gradually I grow back, into my hands. I take to getting up early in the morning, before Sarah is awake, to paint. I find I have a minor, ambiguous reputation, from the show in Toronto, and I am invited to parties. At first there is a resentful edge, because I am from what is known as back east, which is supposed to confer unfair advantages; but after a time I've been here long enough so I can pass, and after that I can do the resentful act myself, to easterners, and get away with it.
I'm also invited to take part in several group showings, mostly by women: they've heard about the ink throwing, read the snotty reviews, all of which render me legitimate, although from the east. Women artists of many kinds, women of many kinds are in ferment here, they are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply.
Confession is popular, not of your flaws but of your sufferings, at the hands of men. Pain is important, but only certain kinds of it: the pain of women, but not the pain of men. Telling about your pain is called sharing. I don't want to share in this way; also I am insufficient in scars. I have lived a privileged life, I've never been beaten up, raped, gone hungry. There is the issue of money, of course, but Jon was as poor as me.
There is Jon. But I don't feel overmatched by him. Whatever he did to me, I did back, and maybe worse. He's twisting now, because he misses Sarah. He calls long distance, his voice on the phone fading in and out like a wartime broadcast, plaintive with defeat, with an archaic sadness that seems, more and more, to be that of men in general.
No mercy for him, the women would say. I am not merciful, but I am sorry.
A number of these women are lesbians, newly declared or changing over. This is at the same time courageous and demanded. According to some, it's the only equal relationship possible, for women. You are not genuine otherwise.
I am ashamed of my own reluctance, my lack of desire; but the truth is that I would be terrified to get into bed with a woman. Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as they are frequently accused of being.
At parties they start to ask leading questions that have the ring of inquisition; they are interested in my positions, my dogmas. I am guilty about having so few of these: I know I am unorthodox, hopelessly heterosexual, a mother, quisling and secret wimp. My heart is a dubious object at best, blotchy and treacherous. I still shave my legs.
I avoid gatherings of these women, walking as I do in fear of being sanctified, or else burned at the stake. I think they are talking about me, behind my back. They make me more nervous than ever, because they have a certain way they want me to be, and I am not that way. They want to improve me. At times I feel defiant: what right have they to tell me what to think? I am not Woman, and I'm damned if I'll be shoved into it. Bitch, I think silently. Don't boss me around.
But also I envy their conviction, their optimism, their carelessness, their fearlessness about men, their camaraderie. I am like someone watching from the sidelines, waving a cowardly handkerchief, as the troops go boyishly off to war, singing brave songs.
I have several women friends, not very close ones. Single mothers, as I am. I meet them at preschool. We trade kids for nights out and grumble harmlessly together. We avoid each other's deeper wounds. We're like Babs and Marjorie from my old Life Drawing class, with the same sense of rueful comedy. It's ah older pattern, for women; but by now we are older.
Jon comes to visit, a tentative move toward reconciliation, which I think I want as well. It doesn't work, and we divorce, finally, by long distance.
My parents come as well. They miss Sarah, I think, more than they miss me. I have made excuses not to go east for Christmas. Against the backdrop of the mountains, they seem out of place, a little shrunken. They are more themselves in their letters. They are saddened by me and what they probably think of as my broken home, and don't know what to say about it. "Well, dear," says my mother, talking about Jon, "I always thought he was very intense." A bad word that spells trouble.
I take them to Stanley Park, where there are big trees. I show them the ocean, sloshing around in seaweed. I show them a giant slug.
My brother Stephen sends postcards. He sends a stuffed dinosaur for Sarah. He sends a water pistol. He sends a counting book, about an ant and a bee. He sends the solar system, in the form of a plastic mobile, and stars you can stick on the ceiling that light up at night.
After a time I find that, in the tiny world of art (tiny, because who knows about it really? It's not on television), swirls, squares, and giant hamburgers are out and other things are in, and I am suddenly at the front of a smallish wave. There's a flurry, as such things go. More of my pictures sell, for higher prices. I'm represented by two regular galleries now, one east, one west. I go to New York, briefly, leaving Sarah with one of my single mother friends, for a group show organized by the Canadian government which is attended by many people who work with the Trade Commission. I wear black. I walk on the streets, feeling sane in comparison with the other people there, who all seem to be talking to themselves. I come back.
I have men, at long intervals in some desperation. These affairs are rushed and unsatisfactory: I don't have time for the finer points. Even these brief interludes are almost too strenuous for me.
None of these men rejects me. I don't give them the chance. I know what is dangerous for me, and keep away from the edges of things. From anything too bright, too sharp. From lack of sleep. When I start feeling shaky I lie down, expecting nothing, and it arrives, washing over me in a wave of black vacancy. I know I can wait it out.
After more time I meet Ben, who picks me up in the most ordinary way, in the supermarket. Actually he asks if he can carry my shopping bags, which look heavy and are, and I let him, feeling silly and archaic and looking first to make sure no women I know are watching.
Years before, I would have considered him too obvious, too dull, practically simple-minded. And for years after that, a chauvinist of the more amiable sort. He is all
these things; but he is also like an apple, after a prolonged and gluttonous binge.
He comes over and fixes my back porch with his own saw and hammer, as in the women's magazines of long ago, and has a beer afterward, on the lawn, as in ads. He tells me jokes I haven't heard since high school. My gratitude for these mundane enjoyments amazes me. But I don't require him, he's no transfusion. Instead he pleases me. It's a happiness, to be so simply pleased.
He takes me to Mexico, as in drugstore romances. He's just bought his small travel business, more as a hobby than anything: he made his money earlier, in real estate. But he likes to take photographs and sit in the sun. To do what he likes and make money at the same time is what he's wanted all his life.
He is shy in bed, easily surprised, quickly delighted.
We combine households, in a third, larger house. After a while we get married. There is nothing dramatic about it. To him it seems appropriate, to me eccentric: it's a defiance of convention, but of a convention he's never heard of. He doesn't know how outlandish I think I'm being.
He's ten years older than I am. He has a divorce of his own, and a grown son. My daughter Sarah becomes the daughter he wanted, and soon we have Anne. I think of her as a second chance. She is less pensive than Sarah, more stubborn. Sarah knows, already, that you can't always have everything you want.
Ben considers me good, and I don't disturb this faith: he doesn't need my more unsavory truths. He considers me also a little fragile, because artistic: I need to be cared for, like a potted plant. A little pruning, a little watering, a little weeding and straightening up, to bring out the best in me. He makes up a set of books, for the business end of my painting: what has sold, and for how much. He tells me what I can deduct on my income tax return. He fills out the return. He arranges the spices in alphabetical order, on a special shelf in the kitchen. He builds the shelf.
I could live without this. I have before. But I like it all the same.
My paintings themselves he regards with wonder, and also apprehension, like a small child looking at a candle. What he focuses on is how well I do hands. He knows these are hard. He once wanted to take up something like that himself, he says, but never got around to it because of having to earn a living. This is a lot like the kinds of things people have said to me at gallery openings, but in him I forgive it.
He goes away at judicious intervals, on business, giving me a chance to miss him.
I sit in front of the fireplace, with his arm around me solid as the back of a chair. I walk along the breakwater in the soothing Vancouver drizzle, the halftones of the seashore, the stroking of the small waves. In front of me is the Pacific, which sends up sunset after sunset, for nothing; at my back are the improbable mountains, and beyond them an enormous barricade of land.
Toronto lies behind it, at a great distance, burning in thought like Gomorrah. At which I dare not look.
PART
THIRTEEN
PICOSECONDS
67
I wake late. I eat an orange, some toast, an egg, mushing it up in a teacup. The hole poked in the bottom of the eggshell was not to keep the witches from going to sea, as Cordelia said. It's to break the vacuum between shell and egg cup, so the shell can be extracted. Why did it take me forty years to figure that out?
I put on my other jogging suit, the cerise one, and do some desultory stretching exercises on Jon's floor. It's Jon's floor again, not mine. I feel I've returned it to him, along with whatever fragments of his own life, or of our life together, I've been keeping back till now. I remember all those mediaeval paintings, the hand raised, open to show there is no weapon: Go in peace. Dismissal, and blessing. My way of doing this was not exactly the way of the saints, but seems to have worked just as well. The peace was for the bestower of it, also.
I go down to get the morning paper. I leaf through it, without reading much. I know I'm killing time. I've almost forgotten what I'm supposed to be doing here, and I'm impatient to be gone, back to the west coast, back to the time zone where I live my life now. But I can't do that yet. I'm suspended, as in airports or dentists' waiting rooms, expecting yet another interlude that will be textureless and without desire, like a painkiller or the interiors of planes. This is how I think of the coming evening, the opening of the show: something to get through without disaster.
I should go to the gallery, check to see that everything's in order. I should perform at least that minimal courtesy. But instead I take the subway, get off near the main gate of the cemetery, wander south and east, scuffing through the fallen leaves, scanning the gutters; looking down at the sidewalk, for silver paper, nickels, windfalls. I still believe such things exist, and that I could find them.
With a slight push, a slip over some ill-defined edge, I could turn into a bag lady. It's the same instinct: rummaging in junk heaps, pawing through discards. Looking for something that's been thrown away as useless, but could still be dredged up and reclaimed. The collection of shreds, of space in her case, time in mine.
This is my old route home from school. I used to walk along this sidewalk, behind or in front of the others. Between these lampposts my shadow on the winter snow would stretch ahead of me, double, shrink again and disappear, the lamps casting their haloes around them like the moon in fog. Here is the lawn where Cordelia fell down backward, making a snow angel. Here is where she ran.
The houses are the same houses, though no longer trimmed in peeling white winter-grayed paint, no longer down-at-heels, postwar. The sandblasters have been here, the skylight people; inside, the benjamina trees and tropical climbers have taken over, ousting the mangy African violets once nurtured on kitchen windowsills. I can see through these houses, to what they used to be; I can see the colors that used to cover the walls, dusty rose, muddy green, mushroom, and the chintz curtains no longer there. What time do they really belong in, their own or mine?
I walk along the street, slightly uphill, against a scattered traffic of small children going home for lunch. Although the girls wear jeans, denoting freedom, they aren't as noisy as they used to be; there are no chants, no catcalls. They trudge along doggedly, or so it seems to me. Maybe that's because I'm not at their level any more: I'm higher, so the sound comes up to me filtered. Or maybe it's me, the presence among them of someone they think is an adult, and has power.
A few of them stare, many don't. What's to see? A middle-aged woman, hands in her coat pockets, the legs of her jogging suit bunching above her boot tops, no more bizarre than most and easily forgotten.
Some of the porches have pumpkins on them, carved with faces, happy or sad or threatening, waiting for tonight. All Souls' Eve, when the spirits of the dead will come back to the living, dressed as ballerinas and Coke bottles and spacemen and Mickey Mice, and the living will give them candy to keep them from turning vicious. I can still taste that festival: the tart air, caramel in the mouth, the hope at the door, the belief in something for nothing all children take for granted. They won't get homemade popcorn balls any more, though, or apples: rumors of razor blades abound, and the possibility of poison. Even by the time of my own children, we worried about the apples. There's too much loose malice blowing around.
In Mexico they do this festival the right way, with no disguises. Bright candy skulls, family picnics on the graves, a plate set for each individual guest, a candle for the soul. Everyone goes away happy, including the dead. We've rejected that easy flow between dimensions: we want the dead unmentionable, we refuse to name them, we refuse to feed them. Our dead as a result are thinner, grayer, harder to hear, and hungrier.
68
My brother Stephen died five years ago. I shouldn't say died: was killed. I try not to think of it as murder, although it was, but as some kind of accident, like an exploding train. Or else a natural catastrophe, like a landslide. What they call for insurance purposes an act of God.
He died of an eye for an eye, or someone's idea of it. He died of too much justice.
He was sitting on a plan
e. He had a window seat. This much is known.
In the nylon webbing pocket in front of him was an in-flight magazine with an article in it about camels, which he'd read, and another about upgrading your business wardrobe, which he hadn't. There was also a set of earphones and a vomit; bag.
Under the seat in front, beyond his bare feet--he's taken off his shoes and socks--is his briefcase, with a paper in it written by himself, on the subject of the probable composition of the universe. The universe, he once thought, may well be made up of infinitesimal pieces of string, in thirty-two different colors. The pieces of string are so small that "colors" is only a manner of speaking. But he is having doubts: there are other theoretical possibilities, two of which he has outlined in his paper. The universe is hard to pin down; it changes when you look at it, as if it resists being known.
He was supposed to deliver his paper the day before yesterday, in Frankfurt. He would have heard other papers. He would have learned.
Stuffed under the seat along with the briefcase is his suit jacket, one of the three he now owns. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, which doesn't solve much: the air-conditioning is on the fritz and the air on the plane is overheated. Also it smells bad: at least one washroom toilet is out of order, and people fart more on planes, as my brother has had occasion to observe before, having taken a lot of plane trips. This is now compounded by panic, which is bad for the digestion. Two seats over, a fat bald-headed man is snoring with his mouth open, releasing an invisible cloud of halitosis.
The shades on the windows are pulled down. My brother knows that if he were to raise his he would see a runway, shimmering with heat, and beyond that a dun landscape alien as the moon, with a blinding sea in the background; and some oblong brown buildings with flat roofs, from which reprieve will come, or not. He saw all this before the shades came down. He doesn't know what country the buildings are in.
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