This Side of Sad

by Karen Smythe

  ***

  That tiny photograph on Facebook of a person in a djellaba was Ted. As soon as he accepted my Friend request, he changed his Profile picture to a headshot, and there he was: silver hair short and bristly, almost buzzed, with a receding hairline; aviator sunglasses; that sharp bump in the bridge of his nose. Clean-cut and still slim. Whoever held the camera must have called out to him, because he was craning his neck instead of turning completely around to look at the photographer. I’d know that smirk of false surprise, that pleasure at being looked at, anywhere. It was chilling, seeing it again, on a face I’d not watched grow older. But I didn’t — I didn’t — what’s the word, swoon? I didn’t swoon.

  The names on Ted’s Friends list were not familiar to me. He didn’t seem to have kept up with his medical school classmates, and I wondered if they’d really been as close as Ted always made them out to be.

  What I didn’t tell Ted, when he asked if I’d run on the beach with him one day, he in a tux and me in a long white dress, was that I would never agree to a traditional wedding. The idea of wearing a white dress and being “given away,” not to mention taking someone else’s name, was deeply offensive to me.

  Gina had had that kind of wedding. (At the reception, which Mom was too sick to attend, Dad said, “Mazzie, I can only afford one big wedding, so you’d better plan to elope.”) I was Gina’s maid of honour and agreed to wear the frilly, light-blue satin dress she’d had made for me, but I wasn’t about to wobble around on the high heels she had dyed to match. I bought some flats, white with a strand of blue woven into them, which I thought was enough of a concession.

  We fought about it. My mother insisted I stop being selfish. “It’s her day, Maslen. It won’t kill you to wear those shoes for a few hours.” My mother was dying, she would be dead in a few weeks, but my anger was tough to temper. “Really,” I said as calmly as I could; I was acting, practicing the script that I’d write out and send to Josh. “I thought forcing the bridal party to spend money on ugly shoes and dresses that will never be worn again — somehow I thought that was being selfish. I stand corrected.”

  ***

  They’re like disappearing eyebrows, I thought, those scars I wore on my chest. At first, when they were bright red and sharply angled, they expressed anger; then they lightened up to a rosy pink and relaxed, showing mere surprise. Eventually they will fade and become nearly invisible, but I don’t want to lose them. Not because they’re like an epitaph on a headstone, marking the fact of an existence, making their former presence on my body known: “We were here.” They are not memento mori. But they are memories, body memories. They don’t say, “Mourn”; they say, “You’re still here. You’re here, now. So live.”

  ***

  That last summer with James, a sense of unease, a free-floating kind of anxiety, settled over me. It was brief and infrequent, this feeling, and it was nothing compared to James’s ordeal, but I knew it meant that I was keeping something from myself.

  I know now that at least part of what caused it for me was doubt. Doubt that James would ever return to his normal self. And something else, too, perhaps — an inkling of a slipping-down feeling of my own, of that smooth slide of letting go.

  twelve

  Tony visited us at the farm only twice. He and James went for a walk out back, the first time; James was proud to show Tony the extent of the property, and the woods behind our acreage. The second time, when he told us about his engagement, Tony asked James all the right questions — “How are you feeling? Anything new from your doctor? Enjoying retirement?” but they were almost by rote. I could see he was losing interest in the minutiae of James’s suffering and in the tests that continued to turn up nothing.

  ***

  Fine-fabric dresses worn several times by one person keep the imprint of that figure for decades. Such garments are diagnosed: they are said “to suffer from memory.”

  ***

  “You forget all the pain once you hold your newborn in your arms.” That’s what my mother always told me, but I find it hard to believe. Surely a woman’s body remembers that extreme alteration of itself — the stretching of the cervix beyond belief to accommodate the baby’s head. “Labour” seems far too gentle a word for what I imagine it must feel like. Gina had difficult, long labours: thirty-six hours for Anna, who was over eleven pounds and whose birth required two hundred stitches for Gina. David was smaller, but no more eager to leave the womb. Ben gave Gina diamond rings after each of their children was born.

  ***

  The only jewellery I’ve ever worn is my wide, rose-gold wedding band, and earrings to match to whatever outfit I put on for the day. Each morning before going to work, I’d feel a small surge of satisfaction as I selected the perfect pair and slid the hooks through my pierced ears. I have a huge collection, some from the countries I’ve been to, but I also made many pairs by recycling fake pearls in various combinations. These two- or three-bead creations hang on baker’s cooling racks that James attached to a wall in our spare room. I still get a synesthetic pleasure feeling their colour when I look at them dangling there.

  It’s the same pleasure that I got from the clear bottles I filled with coloured water and set in my window, when I lived alone after university. To achieve the shades I wanted, I put each of the basic food dyes — red, yellow, blue — into clear glass lab bottles, which I filled with water; then, using a syringe, I created purple, gold, and green as if by magic. Ted was impressed that I’d used titration to make colours, though he didn’t understand what I meant when I said that, for me, they had a tactile quality. I loved the way those jewel tones in jars splashed panels of gemstone-shaded light across the sill and onto the floor, like a temporary piece of art.

  ***

  I’m smitten with Yo, Picasso’s self-portrait at age nineteen. Yesterday I looked at the reproduction in a modern art monograph I’ve had forever. He is posing in a billowy bright-white shirt, and a coal-black hank of hair drips down the right side of his broad forehead. The orange of his cravat blends with the colours on the palette he holds to the side. I imagine that the canvas on the easel we can’t see is also a self-portrait, another picture of Picasso painting himself. And in that painting there is another smaller Picasso painted on another smaller canvas, and so on — a mise en abyme that makes the abyss seem not dark, but celebratory.

  The teal background is made up of vertical strokes in navy and green, which the eye blends. The brush lines create an energy that seems to push Picasso’s body off the canvas — as if he is ready to be catapulted, to bounce down and stand, suddenly alive, in front of you.

  ***

  I’m going to the AGO again. I wander around without following the arrows pointing visitors to this or that collection. Some paintings can stop me dead — a Gabriele Münter or a Kandinsky landscape — and I look at it until I know it, until I can close my eyes and see it. If I stand there staring long enough, a navy-jacketed staff member will start to circle the perimeter, getting closer on each pass. If Josh were with me, he’d probably act out a call requesting backup: “Suspect is wearing a khaki obi belt cinching an oversized maroon T-shirt tunic at the waist, with a pair of sheer grey tights topping black ballet flats, no socks. Strands of fine, pinned-up silvery hair are sliding loose and lining her neck. She’s a mess.”

  I probably do look askew, because I still am.

  ***

  Gina has always said I look better in pictures than in real life, and she isn’t entirely wrong. I’ve started to build a Facebook album with some of those I kept from work. I looked through hundreds of photos in which I posed proudly with language students after their certificate ceremonies. In most I have an arm around one or two of them. They often looked both happy and sad, preparing to go back home to their regular lives.

  One of my favourite students was from Korea. He wore large, black-framed glasses and had uneven teeth and acne, but he was always smiling. Most who came to study English with us gave themselves English names —
Lily or Kate, for girls; Joe or Phil, for boys — but this fellow called himself Garden. He liked to talk with me at the reception desk. He’d ask me questions before class, like “What is a Monday-morning quarterback?”

  Part of the reason I enjoyed my work was the brevity of the relationships I formed with students, parents, teachers, and colleagues abroad. Even after Ted left and I accepted the administrative post Nancy offered, I kept apart from the people I worked with. I comforted the homesick, assisted struggling learners, reassured family members, and supported classroom managers, but it was easy, since the end had been in sight from the beginning. Those connections were circumscribed, limited. I thought of myself then as a warm person because I was perceived that way. But “controlled” is what I would say now, to describe what kind of person I had been.

  ***

  Gina had been married to Ben for ten years when she decided to have the sagging skin under her eyes surgically removed. For ten thousand dollars, a plastic surgeon would make slits under her lower lash lines and snip off some of the fatty tissue from the pouch below each eye, before sewing the two raw edges back together. She scheduled it for a time when Ben was away on business, because she wanted to surprise him with the return of her youth.

  I was her escort for the day surgery, which took place in a Yorkville office building that looked like a five-star hotel. Just before she was called in, Gina told me she was afraid of being put under, but the doctor assured her the results would be worth it. “You’ll look amazing! Your husband will be thrilled by the transformation, believe me!”

  I had all of Gina’s rings in my purse for safekeeping: her wedding and engagement set and the two stacking, bejewelled bands Ben had given her after the children were born. I didn’t want an engagement ring from Ted, and that bothered him for a while. James was happy as long as we wore matching wedding bands. I’ve never shared my sister’s taste for bling, but I was bored and started to play with Gina’s jewellery. As I sat under the fluorescent lights, listening to the receptionist provide prices to callers (“You may as well do your upper lids while you’re at it, for the extra five thousand”), I was taken with the way the large, bezel-set gems shone when light struck their surface just so. At some angles they became little round mirrors, reflecting whatever happened to be in the way — ceiling tiles, signs on the wall, a part of my face. Little pieces of clarity, carved from stones made valuable by the sheer weight of the earth, and by time.

  When Gina woke up from the anaesthetic, I took a post-op picture of her face for the record. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, Mazz,” she said. She wasn’t fully coherent, but I was touched. I promised her I wouldn’t put the photo on Facebook.

  ***

  Ted didn’t pay much attention to my Facebook postings. He “Poked” me once; I didn’t quite know what to do with that. More recently, a notification flag appeared on my Home page, indicating that Ted had “Liked” a photograph I’d added to an album. How strange, I thought, to have Ted looking at me but remaining unseen — both of us remaining hidden from each other. We were sending glances from afar, playing a game of hide-and-seek for grown-ups. I was disgusted when I realized I wanted him to want me again. She was still there, that version of me, the person I’d been with Ted. I’d kept her locked up for as long as I’d been married to James.

  ***

  Tony brought Kathleen to the house after their honeymoon, perhaps to give his new wife a glimpse of who he’d been for decades — the man who had spent countless days and evenings at our bungalow, who’d been so close to James. For Tony, I was the last link to that James, and for me, Tony was a link to the younger James I’d never known. When I opened the door and saw Tony and Kathleen standing there, I realized that the night was not going to go as I’d hoped. It would not be a time for feeling close to Tony or to James. It couldn’t be. Because this was the beginning of Tony’s leaving.

  James used to say that Tony handled problems in his relationships like a magician: he moved people into mental compartments, created new boxes or rooms for them to live in, and then let a mysterious fog hold it all together. Without fully abandoning the person, he’d slowly start to share less about himself, and to recede. He was so good at this that the person he was forgetting about would come to believe that he or she had been the one who initiated the separation from Tony.

  Tony had put James in one of these small rooms before James died, and now I had one of my own.

  ***

  I knew I wasn’t meeting James’s needs once he retired, but I didn’t know what, exactly, they were. I watched James alter course, but I didn’t know how to turn him around. I tried to be patient and compassionate, to explain away the concerns he raised, but that seemed to annoy him. If I had known more — known him better, known what else to say, known how to read the signs of his particular kind of despair — I could have been a better wife to James. But I’d married a man who had not been much interested in discussing or exploring feelings; he’d prized clarity, and desired it, and then he changed into a man with indecipherable needs. We were caught in a stand-off that neither of us had the know-how to end.

  ***

  The scars no longer stare me down in the morning. And during the day, when I stretch at the gym or reach for an ingredient on a shelf in the kitchen, the skin across my ribs doesn’t pull as much. My eyes don’t go there when I undress at night, either.

  As the second anniversary of my surgery approaches, I’ve been thinking about posting something brief — something along the lines of, “Two years down, three to go!” I think I want to do this to tell Ted, without telling him, what happened to me. To see what, if anything, he might say.

  He’s still there, Ted, where he’s always been. Contained in that spot in my heart, where I left him, once James and I became a married couple. And this, what is this I am feeling now? Is it love, the same love? Yes? No. No, of course not. This must be grief. The old grief resurfacing, slowly seeping out, while my mourning for James carries on. Yes. That’s it. That’s what it must be.

  ***

  Life with James had been so easy, for so long, that I didn’t realize how much work a marriage could need — how much of an investment it was, when you pledged your heart to another person. I knew you had to make an effort to keep moving in the same direction, at the same time and pace, even if that speed is zero and you are both trying to maintain equilibrium. There is some art to that. There is probably even a book out there called The Marital Arts. I thought I’d seen a book with that title while browsing one day, but when I picked it up to peek inside I discovered it was really called Martial Arts.

  The last time I worried about being asked whether or not I was married — an awkward question, for my generation — was in the pottery class I took the winter I met James. There were four other women there, and when the teacher asked us to say something about ourselves, three of them identified themselves as stay-at-home moms; the fourth had a husband who’d recently retired — dramatic pause — “Enough said!” The teacher had that horrible, snorting sort of laugh, and got the hiccups. I spoke last and said only that I worked in international business, which they had no interest in. They didn’t ask why I was wearing a lab coat instead of the recommended apron, either. It was Ted’s, the one he’d left in my closet, and it still carried a trace of his scent.

  Now, if asked, I would have to say I am a widow. “I’ve been widowed.” That sounds so selfish, doesn’t it? As if James’s death was an act of violence against me.

  On Facebook my status is “Married.” I’m still wearing my wedding ring.

  ***

  Even though I was thirty-one when I married James, I felt like a child when it came to things like love and loyalty and letting go.

  ***

  While James worked on his stone construction — the Great Wall of Nowhere, he knew some men at the hardware store in town called it — he wore jeans and plain white T-shirts that wouldn’t come clean without copious amounts of bleach, had he use
d it. “What difference?” he’d say when I offered to try; he was working alone in the field. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but I thought James might feel better if he put on some fresh clothes once in a while — when he went into the hardware store or to Village Groceries, for instance. It might have given him a lift.

  When I’d pull into the long driveway and see him unloading yet more stones behind the house, the brown and grey splotches covering his clothes always reminded me of camouflage. I’d rub my fingers together at the thought of the grit and dirt on those rocks he handled, which dried James’s skin so badly that it fissured.

  ***

  Gina’s eyes were bleeding. When she woke up after the procedure, she was delirious and made jokes with the nurse, who dabbed at the rivulets of blood streaming down her cheeks. Her rings were still on my fingers, and she fiddled with them as if they were a rosary. Her nails were chipped and bitten, as they’d always been. They harboured black grime under the crescents, despite the diamonds, and could have been cleaned up with a fifty-cent nail file from the drugstore.

  ***

  Gina’s menopause has started. I’m going on forty-six now, so the end of my cycle could start any time. Gina says perimenopause was hell on earth and just as hot; she set up “pause stations” in her bathrooms at home — piles of clean towels, a few light-cotton sleeveless blouses, a tabletop fan, and a hair dryer — and carried a change of shirt and bra when she went out. Nancy went through the same thing; she told me they call it “the change” because you have to change the sheets most nights for two years running. The only point I can see for hot flashes, evolution-wise, is to deter men from wanting sex with cranky, damp, red-faced females whose eggs are well past their prime. “It sort of makes sense that men go for younger women, when you think about it,” Gina told me once. “I want to tell Ben to leave me alone, but you have to pretend you want to, or they’ll go elsewhere. That’s marriage for you.”