This Side of Sad

by Karen Smythe

  When the weekend was over and Ted put on his well-worn cowboy boots — “I’m going to be buried in these,” he used to say — it seemed as if I’d imagined much of it, so I worked at remembering our time together. It was an instinct I had from the beginning, to lock in moments, to record my encounters with Ted deeply and clearly. I’d commit to mind the physical details: the feel of my jeans sliding down my legs, the colour of Ted’s shirt and socks, the smell of his deodorant, the taste of the food we’d shared, the feel of the sheets tangled around my ankles.

  I can summon such episodes still. They can tease or cause distress, but more than anything, they make me curious about where they come from. They are not permanent, but they are not fleeting, either. They are outside of time, neither here nor there and yet both here and there, when I want them to be.

  ***

  After my surgery I wasn’t in pain, but I was uncomfortable, and the incisions were itchy. James was still on summer vacation that first week of August, when a nurse from Community Care came every day to measure the fluids, check the sutures, change the dressings. Two tubes had been force-fed into my chest, in and out of deep incisions, and they formed symmetrical half hearts just under my skin that I could trace with my fingers. Seeing the tubes’ contours in the bathroom mirror, I had the urge to outline a Valentine on top of them by running a tube of lipstick along my bulged-out flesh. “I’ve prettied myself up!” I imagined saying to James, but he was still too distraught to risk it.

  I looked like a chemistry experiment. Bottles collecting draining liquid dangled where the tube ends surfaced at either side of my chest. I was supposed to be exercising so my pectorals wouldn’t become rigid or limit the range of my arm movements, but stretching with those tubes inside of me felt dangerous and unnatural, so I instinctively held off doing them for fear of tearing the sutures open. “I’ll get in shape later,” I told the nurse.

  ***

  I had hoped James might turn the huge, century-old barn, long empty of livestock and plows, into a home gym where he could lift weights and even run on a track during the winter months. When we bought the place, we talked about renting out the back field to a couple who’d posted a sign at the grocery mart: “Will pay for growing hay on your land.” But James hadn’t followed up. He’d decided instead that the long stretch we owned behind the house was perfect for building his mammoth rock structure — something taller than he was, and thicker than an overgrown hedge. He’d use mud for mortar if he had to, and fit the stones by close study and intuition. He etched the partial U-shape of the wall in the ground first, with a shovel. The line he drew undulated for forty feet along the west lotline, crossing over and curving back up to the house for about twenty feet in the shape of a partial U. It was an exaggerated fence, an open corral, and it made a statement; but exactly what James wanted to say, I wasn’t sure. I knew that the finished work, come September, would be strange, and beautiful, and that building his stone wall that summer was exactly what James needed to do.

  ***

  Throughout my teens, I volunteered at the North York General Hospital during the summer, to familiarize myself with the atmosphere of sickness and disease. One of the patients was a woman dying of cervical cancer, whose children were five and seven. Their artwork was pinned to a bulletin board next to her bed; crayoned suns shone down on blue stick people representing her family. The head nurse, who knew I wanted to become a doctor, saw me wiping my eyes after leaving the room one afternoon. “You can’t let cases get to you,” she said. “You won’t survive a single shift.”

  Candystripers, we girls were called, because we wore pink pinstriped cotton dresses with short sleeves and a zipper closure at the front, from hem to collar bone. Mine was closer-fitting than any other clothes I wore, and it made me uncomfortable to feel the male patients’ eyes on my body. A bedridden Italian man with a bad back spent all of July on my ward, and every day he asked me in halting English if I’d marry him. Josh laughed when I relayed the story and said he wasn’t surprised — he thought those uniforms were sexy. Later, when I told Ted that he wasn’t the first man who’d wanted to marry me, he tried for some time to find out who that smitten fellow had been.

  ***

  When Ted got back to his place after we slept together the first time, at mine, he called every few minutes. He called and he called, and each time I picked up, he said, “I can’t stop thinking about you, Mazz!” We’d talk for an hour then hang up, and five minutes later, the phone would ring again. “Teddy, stop!” I said, laughing. “I can’t study either, but I’m not trying to get into medical school.” My roommate was trying, though; Ted’s phone calls were aggravating Tanis. After a few weeks it became simpler to take my Norton Anthology of English Literature and go to Ted’s place to read while he studied for his science midterms. While he tried to study.

  Tanis left for the summer and we gave up our apartment, so at the end of the school year I moved into Ted’s. My job didn’t start for a few weeks, and Ted had paid his summer-school tuition, so we were running low on money. Ted made peanut butter sandwiches, fried bacon, and scrambled eggs, and my culinary repertoire was even more limited. I’d avoided learning how to cook on principle — I told my mother I would not play that role just because I was born female. (“You’ll only be burning your bra to spite your stomach,” she warned, and I suppose she had a point.)

  Ted lit candles most nights, and I set the card table using paper towels for serviettes. We thought we had everything, as long as we had each other — until the rejection letters arrived. I wanted him to fail, he said. I wanted him to sit around and read books with me and talk about art and make plans to travel to Turkey and Egypt together. Now he had to take courses over again, thanks to me. I’d turned his mind to mush. He hoped I was happy.

  From then on, I woke every morning feeling clammy, cold, and anxious. I wanted to stop July and the continuation of my life alone in Toronto from happening. I lay in bed, tensing my legs and bending my ankles, toes pointing up, imagining that my heels pressing into the mattress were digging into the earth, slowing down time. Ted would ask me to stop it, to get up if I was going to squirm around and bother him.

  ***

  James was explaining to Tony what had intrigued him when he saw me at the Y the first time. “Aside from those big eyes of hers, I thought, She must be an interesting person, since she’s taking a pottery course.” I added that I’d failed the wheel-throwing tests, and laughed, but James wouldn’t let me put myself down. “She’s double-jointed,” he said, and winked at Tony. I loved to see the deep crow’s feet at the outer corners of James’s eyes.

  If my attention drifted on weekends when James stayed over, he’d ask what was wrong. I was still going to Ted in my mind then, because it was comforting to know the depth and power and certainty of feeling I’d had for him was still there. But I couldn’t tell James. I didn’t know how to explain the sad joy I indulged in when my thoughts went back to Ted, or the lost and solemn mood a return from one of these vignettes instilled in me, or the lovely weight of the melancholy lingering in that place people call the heart.

  Eventually my heart began to call me back, back to James, pounding its message into me — “here-now, here-now, here-now” — the ache from its living beat crashing into my reverie. Forcing me to face the fact that whoever I’d been when Ted’s love first razed me — and whoever he’d been, then, as well— well, those people didn’t exist anymore. I managed to stop fighting time, to stop recalling what I’d lost, and I thought I’d left the past and Ted behind.

  seven

  The admitting nurse in pre-op frowned when she opened my file. “Cheryl” was written on her name tag beside a pink heart with a happy face drawn inside of it. “Oh, I see you’re having a bilateral mastectomy today,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” “It’s okay, Cheryl, really,” I said. I wanted to push her pity right back at her, shove it across the desk into her lap, but I also needed to be cautious about what I said in front of James, who
was still distressed about my diagnosis. “This surgery is a very good thing.” I touched my breasts. “They’re just double trouble, at the moment.” James’s right hand felt damp when I took it in my left. I leaned toward him for some privacy. “Come on, James,” I whispered, “laugh with me a little,” but even his smile trembled.

  Cheryl hurried through her spiel, telling me what to expect once I’d been rolled into the operating room and what would happen to me in recovery, after it was over. I had no interest in the brochure she gave me about the local support group for cancer survivors, who met for monthly coffee and cookies in a church hall downtown, and Cheryl seemed offended as she put it back down on her desk. “Good luck, Maslen.” She stood and shook my hand. “I’ve never heard that name before. Where does it come from?”

  “It was my grandmother’s family name, before she married,” I said. “My older sister was named after our maternal grandmother, and I was supposed to be named after our father’s mother. But she had an ugly, old-fashioned first name, so my mom kept her promise by calling me Maslen.” James and I turned toward the door to the patient-preparation room. “Can you imagine?” I said over my shoulder. “I could have ended up with no breasts and been named Gertrude!”

  ***

  Areola is a pretty name.

  ***

  When I rolled onto one side, my body would press on the drainage bottle just enough that, by morning, dark-red streaks stained the bedsheet. The sight of blood upset James — not just any blood, but my blood, blood that was bright as a rose in the clear plastic containers, or brown as mud where it had spilled and dried. He slept in the guest room after the first night I was home, and he stayed away for a long while, well after the drains were gone.

  I didn’t expect James to initiate sex for a while after the surgery, but months later we still hadn’t made love more than a few times. I always wore a camisole so he could choose to remove it when he was ready to face the scars. He never did take it off, though. He was gentle with me, as if he was afraid I might break if he pressed too hard, or that more of me would disappear if he wasn’t careful. He was no longer gluttonous — no longer wanting to revel in my body, to consume, not just consummate — and I missed that. A few times, I tied his hands with a scarf to the headboard and I’d say harder, slam it harder, the way he used to like me to, but he wasn’t into it. When one of us said, “Let’s go to bed,” we meant it was time for sleep. I think I decided then that it was simply a matter of aging. We were entering a new stage of life as a couple. Surely not all men want to screw until the day they die?

  Once I began to sleep alone, I began to dream about living alone again; I dreamed about the weeks I spent in my apartment in Toronto before Ted got into medical school, and then about the first few months he lived in the city, but not with me. I awoke from these dreams with a vague, transient sense that I’d just seen Ted the day before, and I missed him in a way I hadn’t for a long, long time. I see now that I was letting Ted back in.

  ***

  When Ted ended up at U of T in the fall, I suggested that I register for graduate studies in English; the department was practically next door to the Faculty of Medicine, so we could meet for lunch every day. He was discouraging. “What is graduate work in literature, anyway? You walk around the stacks, blowing dust off of old books, hoping to discover one that no one’s ever read? Or maybe you sit in an armchair reading stories and discussing them. Oh, wait — that’s a book club.” He was joking, sort of, and I laughed, a little, then changed the subject.

  That was an odd moment for me; it was as if I’d watched a slice of Ted slide away — the person who, when we’d met, had been keen on talking about so many subjects and ideas. It left a new, sharp edge to him that I hadn’t noticed before. I suppose that was why I began to tell Prof. L. about my personal interests and relationship-related matters in my letters.

  I don’t know if I thought of Prof. L. as a father figure, a psychoanalyst, a lost opportunity, or a close friend. The self I revealed to him was entirely different than any other version of me, completely unlike the writer of missives to Josh. When I sent an envelope off to Prof. L., it was thick with pages of what Ted would call self-indulgence.

  In one of his letters, Prof. L. asked if I’d reconsidered my plans for graduate school. I hadn’t; I still thought I might do a master’s after Ted and I had our adventures, once he was in practice — or maybe even after we had a kid or two. While Ted was in medical school, I was happy to travel on my own, recruiting students. My job suited me; I couldn’t have worked in an office, day after day, without going crazy from boredom. Ted was pleased with my decision, too. Neither one of us wanted to live an ordinary life. We didn’t know what ours was going to look like, not yet, and that was exciting. We were “keeping our options open,” Ted said whenever his parents asked about our plans.

  Between my trips, I browsed second-hand stores on Harbord Street for better editions of my favourites — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Waves and The Waste Land — and I picked up novels that hadn’t been on my BA curriculum. I also found a copy of Sontag’s On Photography, and as I read it, I could feel my brain opening up. Then I read Illness as Metaphor, twice in one sitting.

  I wanted Ted to read it, too. I had some ideas percolating about the connections between writing and medicine, about language and belief, science and art — all of which would have excited Josh — and I thought it would be something for Ted and me to explore together. I bought him his own copy, brand new, as a present. “No thanks,” he said when I handed it to him. He didn’t have time to read for fun. Besides, he said, Illness sounded like it was full of fancy philosophical footwork, and nothing useful. “Thinking about language is useful,” I wanted to say. “This book could make you a better doctor, even.” But I took the gift back and tucked it away. I’d bring it up again later, when Ted’s workload wasn’t so heavy.

  ***

  I asked the secretary in the Graduate English Department for syllabi from the previous year so I could stay up on trends in literary criticism, in case I changed my mind about graduate school. The pressed-board bookshelves with cheap copies of the undergraduate canon that lined my living-dining-sleeping space soon warped from the weight of hardcover editions by the heavyweights: Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault. Since I had a salary and didn’t spend much going out, I could afford those expensive books.

  I don’t have them anymore. None made the cut when James and I moved to the bungalow. Putting them in a box for the library, I remembered what Ted had thought about the program I’d toyed with taking. He said it would have been a waste of time because none of it went anywhere. I guess he could have been talking about us, too.

  ***

  It is important, when gambling, to keep a poker face. A face of stone. It prevents you from revealing any sign, any emotion or other indication of what you hold in your hand, of what move you will make next.

  ***

  One muggy summer night a month or so before Ted moved away for good, neither of us could sleep, so I asked for a massage. His hands felt half-hearted in the effort, and he was silent, so I asked what he was thinking about. When he said, “I don’t have to tell you everything,” I pretended I hadn’t noticed the irritation in his voice. “Okay, don’t tell me,” I said rising, pushing him back-first onto the mattress and climbing on top of him. “I’ll just look at you, then. I can read your face, you know.” I kissed his chin. “Every quiver.” I kissed his mouth, closed my eyes, and sucked a little on his lower lip. “Every look, every blink.” I kissed his closed eyelids, one at a time. “Love you, Teddy Bear.” He usually smiled when I called him that, but my tongue couldn’t feel any laugh lines deepening at the corner of his eye, so I opened both of mine. A thin bar of street light streamed through the gap between the curtains and shone on his face; his expression was serious, almost accusatory. Before he rolled himself out of bed, he said this: “You don’t know me nearly as well as you think you do.”

&
nbsp; A snapshot moment, that scene was a spot of time that produced a physical sensation I couldn’t name, but it had something to do with capture, with freeze-framing. Many years later, I read a Scientific American article about researchers using MRIs to investigate the brain’s activity during memory activation, and I understood what was going on when I mentally fixed a scene with Ted: the neurons connecting, the synapses sizzling. I could almost hear the sounds they made, too, like sped-up camera shutters snapping, slamming each detail into place.

  ***

  Lately I’ve been dreaming of Josh again. It’s as if memories are being pulled out of the limbic limbo of my brain, fibre by fibre, to form a filigree pattern resembling the shape of those feelings that belonged to Josh. There must be hundreds of well-inscribed scenes from our times together, lying in wait. Now that I’m alone, letting my mind roam, I am starting to recall details about our friendship that I’d left alone for ages.

  Sleeping with him was something I often had dreams about when I knew him, too, but they embarrassed me when I woke up and remembered that he could have any woman he wanted in the city of Toronto. Or New York. Anywhere in the world, really. For a long time I stayed afraid that no one else would measure up to him. But Ted came close.