This Side of Sad

by Karen Smythe

  I flipped through the pages of the text recently, to see those pictures of professionally finished pieces again. Most images were black and white, but those of glazed pots were in colour, and in these I could see that the clay surfaces were not perfectly smooth. The clay had many blemishes that the sheer glaze covered, but did not hide.

  ***

  Josh gave me copies of every photograph he had taken for his portfolio, which were touched up to ensure not a single pore was visible. Whenever he came back to Toronto for a break from an assignment he’d finished somewhere in the world, I asked if he’d had any new headshots done. He pretended I’d said “hand jobs” and said, “No, but you can give me one if you like.” It was part of our shtick. Whenever we were in a theatre, waiting for the movie to start, he’d say, “You can play with it in the dark, if you want,” and I’d push on his arm in pretend disgust. The cerebral sidekick — that’s who I’d turned into, with Josh. And I didn’t know how to get out of character, once I’d become her.

  I’d learned how to beat off a boy before Josh and I became friends. Rob, like Josh, transferred to the alternative high school from Forest Hill. We hung out in the Common Room together, smoking and talking while Mark or Stuart strummed Dylan on their guitars, or listening to visiting poets who still dressed like hippies nearly a decade after the sixties ended — Susan Musgrave and Gwendolyn MacEwen both gave readings, though I didn’t know who they were, at the time. Rob had intense brown eyes like mine, and sometimes we’d just sit and look at each other across a coffee table. I was compelled to hold his stare when I caught him looking at me, studying my face. Josh couldn’t stand him.

  In August Rob dealt blackjack at the Canadian National Exhibition, known as the CNE or the Ex. He was made to wear a silly Styrofoam flat-top with a narrow, flat brim and red-striped hatband; he looked foolish, but the pay was good. I took the streetcar there most nights and waited for him to finish working, and he’d drive me home. It was always after midnight by then; we’d go downstairs to the rec room, which smelled like cigarette smoke, and I’d lie on top of him on the sofa.

  The first time, he held me while we kissed; Rob smoked, too, and I liked the taste of it in his mouth. The last few times he came over, after he rubbed my clit and fingered me, Rob unzipped his jeans and pulled out his erection, putting his hand on top of mine, moving it up and down until I found and kept the right rhythm. My head was on his abdomen, and his moist cock smelled like stale bread. It wasn’t unpleasant, the smell, but it wasn’t exactly tantalizing, either. When he came, his semen squirted onto my face, just missing my eye. I wiped it away with the hem of my broomstick skirt and was careful to wash off the white residue, before tossing my outfit into the laundry hamper. I saw no need to alert my mother to these late-night basement activities. Talking about sex had never been easy for Mom; when I asked if she’d tell me about the facts of life a second time, a week after we’d had the talk, she winced a little, though she did retell the story. (I was eight, and I’d not forgotten the details — I just wanted to hear them again.)

  ***

  In grade eight, when I hit puberty, my body’s chemistry changed in an odd way: I had to stop wearing my grandmother’s sterling chain-link necklace because an hour after I polished it with toothpaste, it would blacken again, leaving a charcoal garland around my neck. Gina said this proved there was an invisible toxic field around me that boys instinctively stayed away from. And they did, until I decided to go to the other school.

  Rob noticed me right away, he said, the day I arrived to register. In the first week of school, when he saw me walking out to Yonge Street, he slowed down his car and offered me a ride home. I was wearing a pleated, plaid skirt from the fifties in shades of teal and rust to my ankles, and a Chinese silk blouse in a lighter shade of teal, clothes I felt good in; but I was flustered by Rob’s attention. I knew about his social ranking at Forest Hill, and it was disconcerting to be standing on the sidewalk, talking to him through the rolled-down window of his Audi. When I said, “No thanks, I like to walk,” he shrugged his shoulders and drove away. I hadn’t meant to be coy, but later he said he liked me for reacting that way.

  When I told my sister that Rob had offered to drive me home, she stared at me in disbelief. “ Rob stopped for you? In that outfit?” Her eyes scanned my skirt; she looked at my boots, which were flat-heeled with pointed toes, as if they were a special affront. My sister was ashamed of my emerging fashion sense — sourced from Kensington Market retro shops, Chinatown, and Little India — which I called “vinternational.” Gina’s term for it was rather less eloquent.

  Gina favoured the ridiculous uniform of rich kids in our neighbourhood: Lee jeans or overalls and clunky Grebs, or Kodiaks, those steel-toed boot that construction workers wore. She knew I hated them, but she’d convinced our mother to give me a pair for my fifteenth birthday. Their existence depressed me every time I saw them in my closet, so I dropped them into a Goodwill donation box. When I told Rob that story, a few months after we’d met, he started calling me his little rebel.

  Before Rob left for university, we took a walk to the park near my parents’ house. I wore a pair of cotton harem pants, a semi-sheer, crinkled beige blouse (but no bra) from India, and well-worn huarache sandals. We talked as we walked along the trail that led from the community centre into the valley. Then we climbed a hill and lay on our backs side by side. He’d already told me he didn’t want to be my first, because it was too much of a responsibility. “Besides,” he said that day, “you’re smart and pretty and sweet, but between us there’s nothing to hold on to.” Later, when I confided this to Josh, he told me I should have pointed to Rob’s crotch and said, “I know what you mean.”

  ***

  Ralph Lauren cologne — that was what I smelled, whenever Josh hugged me. His entire body seemed to exude the essence of Polo, which was one of the birthday gifts I gave him every year. He loved my lilac scent, too (I wore Diorissimo). “You still smell like Mazzie,” he said before we kissed hello or goodbye, after not seeing each other for a while.

  ***

  At university I shared an apartment with Tanis, the daughter of my father’s colleague. Josh called a lot from New York in those days. If Tanis answered, Josh would say, “Me again. Tell Mazz it’s her boyfriend.” After a few weeks Tanis would tell me to get the phone whenever it rang. “It’s probably for you again.”

  I’d known Josh for almost three years, but the timbre of his voice still made me feel like molten metal. I made shorthand lists of things to tell him on the phone. In person, I wouldn’t have needed a prop to think of things to say; but on the phone, after we’d been apart for a while, I could freeze and be too quiet, which made Josh think I was mad at him, or pretending to be mad at him. (I did that, too, sometimes.) I kept my notes at the ready, tucked behind the last page of the pad Tanis and I used for phone messages.

  Sometimes Josh was energetic on these calls and talked non-stop. He told me stories about his life in New York: which celebrities he’d seen at Studio 54 on the weekend; where he’d met the girl he was now dating; what modelling assignments he had picked up. He was going for auditions, socializing with Blythe Danner, hanging out with Todd Rundgren. He was up, optimistic; he wanted to see me soon.

  Sometimes the calls came in clusters, one each night for a few days in a row, and had a pattern. The first call was filled with chat; when he called the second or third time, he might say, “Can’t help it. I had the Mazzie urge again today.” But by the fourth call, his voice sounded different. “Yeah, it’s just me. Say something funny, Mazz. I need a boost.” I could always pull him out of the dumps, he said. “You are one of the few people in the world I can be myself with.” It puzzled me that the higher Josh rose, the lower he seemed to feel.

  ***

  I didn’t scissor the photographs of Josh out of the publications he appeared in, because I preferred to keep the magazines intact. I liked to flip through the glossy pages randomly, as if for the first time, and to co
me across his face without knowing exactly where I’d find him. That way, it was like one of his surprise visits; he’d often show up at my house without calling ahead, and if I wasn’t home, he’d tell my mother it was okay, he just had an urge to see me, that’s all.

  I held on to them for years, those magazines. I moved them with me from apartment to apartment, even though they were as heavy as bricks. At some point, while I was still with Ted, I accepted the fact that Josh had moved on, and in a massive closet cleanup, I got rid of them. I even tossed out his letters and all of those postcards he’d sent from Milan, St. Moritz, Paris, New York, Oslo — wherever there was an assignment for him. “Miss you, Mazz,” he’d say. “Love you, Mazzie. Write soon.” Ted hadn’t felt threatened, since he knew Josh and I had lost touch, but he was happy when I told him I’d cleared out some of the ephemera from my past nonetheless. When James came into my life, I didn’t talk about Josh at all. I suppose I thought I had nothing to say about him, by then.

  ***

  Ted’s classmates thought he had it made, with me: I was into baseball, I could talk about art, golf, hockey, and medicine, and I drove a manual car. They were especially impressed by the manual car, for some reason. Most of the medical students were male, and I didn’t get on well with their girlfriends, who were interested in shopping, decorating their future houses, and eyeing engagement rings. So Ted and I didn’t socialize with them all that much. Besides, I travelled so much with my job that we wanted to spend time alone with each other, when I was home.

  I also worked for years to get into medical school. That was who I was supposed to become, a doctor — I had my father, Josh, Gina, and everyone else convinced. But doubt percolated and persisted in second year, when I took a lab course in Cellular Physiology, and all of the slides looked identical to me. How would I learn to diagnose a sickness if I couldn’t differentiate one cell from another? One night at three a.m. I sat up in bed and thought, I don’t have to do this. The relief made me euphoric; my lungs expanded and I palpitated with pleasure all over. This must be the way you’d feel, I thought, breaking up with someone you didn’t love, at least not in the way you wanted to. I shared this with Ted when I told him why I’d changed my mind about Medicine, but I didn’t include it in the story I told James, when we met, about abandoning my Biology degree.

  ***

  Ted’s father had studied Medicine at the University of Toronto in the fifties. He knew that a few of his colleagues’ kids were in medical school now, so he asked Ted to bring his class list with him when we visited on Thanksgiving weekend. I recognized some of his classmates’ names, which didn’t surprise me; a lot of people I grew up with had talked about going to medical school.

  “Wow, there are a lot of Jewish names here,” Ted’s dad said. “We only had five Jews in a class of one-fifty.” I asked him why he’d counted them in the first place. “Because the medical school did. There was a quota system back then, limiting the number of Jews who could be accepted into the program,” he said. “The university, the hospitals — they all worked that way.” Then he smiled, as if he couldn’t wait for the punchline of the joke he was about to tell. “I guess the chosen people weren’t often chosen to study medicine!” He expected me to laugh with him, and when I didn’t he kept talking, as if he could win me over. Still, I said nothing. “You know, Maslen, poor Ted here would have made it in much earlier, if the system had stayed in place.”

  Ted and I were getting into the car later that night, on our way to meet some friends for drinks. “I didn’t know your dad is anti-Semitic,” I said as casually as I could, but Ted defended him. “That’s just how it was in those days, Mazz.” He started backing out of the driveway. “He didn’t make the rules. He didn’t know any better. No one did.” I stared at Ted, who was working himself into a near-rage — not against his father, but against me. “Don’t forget, Mazz, my dad started with nothing. He had to work hard to get where he is. He was a paper boy when he was a kid, and he gave every penny to his mother. He put himself through school.” Then he waved his arm at the two-storey, three-car-garage Tudor house we were about to drive away from. “He made all this happen. For us, for his family. That was all he could think about — making it. He made himself into something.”

  ***

  I married James more than a year after Ted last contacted me, because I was thirty-one years old and couldn’t think of a reason not to. Besides, James wouldn’t take no for an answer. That was what I liked most about him, I said, when I spoke about James at our wedding dinner — his knowing what he wanted, and going after it, and taking it.

  Tony made several toasts. He welcomed me to the child-free tribe. If he ever got married again, he’d follow our lead: keep it simple, keep it small. Tony liked me from the first time he met me, he said; he was glad James found his Tonto, even though he, Tony, was now the Lone Bachelor, having to fend for himself in the wilds of single life. I promised I would let James out to play, once in a while.

  ***

  The year before James died, we moved his father, Lou, into an old-age home. Each resident’s room was identified by a removable bronze nameplate on the door; an empty slot indicated an absence of the ultimate kind. Whenever this happened, the few personal belongings of the deceased were put into clear plastic bags and left on top of the stripped, plasticized mattress for a day or two in case any family members showed up to claim photographs in broken frames, hand mirrors smeared with fingermarks, jars of Vaseline, or pastel-coloured velour tops that were standard Christmas gifts for men and women alike. I’d see dentures lying loose in the detritus like discarded smiles.

  Lou had been tough for me to get to know, mostly because James was very clear from the beginning about the fixed limits he placed on his own relationship with his father. For the first few years, whenever we visited Lou at his house, I reminded myself of two stories that James had shared with me:

  1. Lou did not attend James’s graduation because he held strict ideas about what men should do for a living, and teaching was not one of them; and

  2. Lou wanted James to learn how to hunt, to fish, to shoot at squirrels like boys did in his day, but James refused all of it; he couldn’t even stand putting a worm on the hook. James liked to feed the birds, to watch butterflies emerge from cocoons underneath the eaves, to play catch with their dog, Blackie. One day Blackie was hit by a car and was dying in the road. Lou approached, handed James a rifle, and walked away.

  Yet Lou had become a lonely old man with a spry sense of humour and a lingering, charming zest, and I grew to love him the way I would a grandfather. The father my husband grew up with was not the same person who’d become my father-in-law. I don’t think James understood how I could behave with Lou as if I didn’t know what James had lived through. I didn’t understand that unforgiving streak in James — though if I had, I doubt I would have been able to behave any differently.

  five

  After university, before I found my job at the language school, I took an aptitude test that included 3-d problems. Afterward I was told by the career counsellor that I should avoid carpentry, which was hardly a surprise. James wasn’t much for manual work, either; to this day, the unmitred baseboards in our kitchen lean loose against the wall. When he started to build a massive rock wall behind the farmhouse, I wondered where this stone-smith had come from.

  I was looking out the kitchen window once when I saw him remove one of the stones he’d fitted into place and then throw it, hard, to the ground. James was going on sixty, though he looked older to me, just then, almost as old as Lou. But then he picked up another rock and I watched him ease it into the gap, standing back to gauge the size or the colour — I wasn’t sure which — and the anger and frustration was gone from his face. I wish I’d asked him more questions about his project, and what it meant to him; I think I was so grateful that he was interested in it that I didn’t really worry about why. Anyway, at that moment, my husband suddenly looked very young. I relaxed and decided I’d te
ll him this later, when he came inside needing food more than solitude. I’d put my arms around him and tell him he looked like a little boy, building a fort out there.

  ***

  When I was a child, there was a song our whole school knew by heart. Groups of kids would start singing it in the yard at recess, their voices escalating to a frantic level as they competed to out-shout each other:

  Oh, they built the ship Titanic, to sail the ocean blue.

  And they thought they had a ship that the water wouldn’t go through.

  But the good Lord raised his hand, said the ship would never land.

  It was sad when the great ship went down.

  Oh it was sad, so sad! Yes it was sad, so sad!

  It was sad when the great ship went down (to the bottom of the — ).

  Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives.

  It was sad when the great ship went down.

  It sunk. Kerplunk. What a hunk of junk. P.U. It stunk!

  We didn’t know what the lyrics were about. Children laughing at dead children? God deciding to kill everyone on board? None of us knew what “Ring around the Rosie” was about, either, though the girls often sang it exuberantly in the spring. We’d walk in a circle, holding hands and smiling right up to the end, when we’d swing our arms — “Hush-a! Hush-a!” — and then scream, “We all fall DOWN!” as we dropped to the ground.

  You can lose everything, absolutely everything, at less than a moment’s notice. I suppose that’s what those songs were teaching us: to make play out of fear and sorrow. Death happens; we might as well sing about it, to keep going. To keep going.

  ***

  My niece was sitting on the kitchen floor, playing with the plastic farm set that I’d brought with me to Gina’s. Not quite one, Anna picked up a horse and said, “Neigh,” and I rewarded her by clapping. Anna grabbed a cow, and said, “Moo!” and we both laughed. Then she dropped the toy and pointed at me, smiling at her own cleverness, and said, “Muzz!” It was shocking, not because Anna knew my name (more or less), but because of the deep tug within me the instant she said it. It was like a magnetic force, pulling us together; a physical attraction, almost. I thought that what I felt when she called me Muzz must be something close to maternal love.