by Joan Barfoot
Here are other pleasing pictures: Tom’s intently loving face above hers, her fingers reaching to his cheekbones. He can hover in bed like a whirlybird, so attentive only the two of them and the moment exist.
Is that overwrought? Stylistically excessive and, more seriously, quite unrealistic?
He has most tender eyes, a very dark blue. Even darker when he is ardent or, for that matter, angry.
Playing badminton in her back yard on a windless hot day, both of them taut to win, because they are people who like to win, but laughing also at their own determination. Behaving like children; which may be the point, or at any rate the theme. Tom, sweating, taking off his T-shirt, baring his pot-belly, with its narrow trail of dark hairs, to the light. Men can do that and think nothing of it.
She likes that belly, silhouetted here and there in various circumstances in her memory. It’s like an extra warm presence, something more to embrace, and rather endearing. She hopes he feels the same about hers.
Also, really, she adores his penis, his fingers, his tongue. She is entirely happy in his hands, which is not something she can say about all the hands she’s been in.
Who knew that at forty-seven her imperfect body would still be turning in clever hands? And that her own hands (Tom says) are clever in return. And (Tom says) her tongue, breasts and other very sensitive parts. Who knew she’d be lucky enough to find, at this advanced stage, such an adept and clever lover?
“Advanced stage” has its piquancy, which perhaps adds zip. There is awareness of bodies changing, winding down, time running out.
“Come on, Lila,” Tom says again. “Tell me.”
She grins more broadly. “I was thinking how much I like fucking you. How much I’m looking forward to a whole lot more of it.”
“Lila! People can hear!” He’s laughing too, though. He is tickled, at least when they’re safe, by mischief.
Usually, she must be more discreet. “I guess,” mock-wistful, “ripping off your trousers to give it a go in public will be as illegal in England as it is at home.”
“Only in the streets, where the horses might be frightened. But we may find a deserted moor, who knows, if we look.”
“My Heathcliff.”
“My Cathy.”
Lila’s back yard is no deserted moor, but they have made love out there, forgetting, or ignoring, the perils. Well, fresh air and danger—pretty exhilarating, pretty heady. And here’s another of his appeals: because he asks, “Remember when we made love in the grass? I’d never done anything quite like that before.”
It’s a grand thing, having a history that contains so many views and memories, just the two of them. Lila feels greedy for shared visions, possibly because with Tom she feels deprived of them. Heroin to an addict, booze to an alcoholic, chocolate to a child—Lila wants more and more and more.
“I surely do. Stuffy hot night and mosquitoes. I got bites, and grass stains on my butt. Loved it. Just loved it.”
“I got the grass stains on my knees. Do you think any of your neighbours saw? I wondered about somebody getting up for a piss and glancing out the window. Made me hope my ass held up okay in moonlight.”
“Your ass is moonlight. Anyway, they’d more likely have heard us, but they’d be too polite to mention it. And what could they say? ‘Next time you’re going to have enormous orgasms outside at midnight, could you please keep the noise down, we have jobs and need our sleep’?”
They are giddy with giggling, like children at recess, heads together, talking nonsense.
What did she expect when they started? She guesses she expected herself to be cooler, less involved, less volatile and vulnerable. It may also be that she expected to be more vital to him. She may have imagined she would outweigh everyone else.
As if it were a matter of weights and measures.
As if it were not.
“We’d better shape up,” he says. “We’ll get kicked off the plane.” This makes them laugh more: the picture of being hurled, strapped into parachutes if they’re lucky, into the freezing air and down, expelled for misbehaviour.
“I keep wondering how a nice English professor got to be so vulgar.” He uses the word “vulgar” as if it’s one of those chocolates that splash cherries and cream into the mouth; as if it’s delicious. “Was it something you read?”
“Absolutely. That, and a few other pleasures.” It is true, stories are not insignificant in a life, wherever they come from. Television also, Lila expects, although more, say, for her students than for herself. But what goes in comes out somehow; nothing is wasted or entirely lost, either to the keen observer or to the porous personality.
This has little to do with vulgarity, but Tom, for instance, might be unnerved to know how alert she is to shifts of his limbs and to his alterations of tone. The alertness he does discern has sometimes annoyed him. She supposes it can make him feel exposed, or burdened. She supposes she might feel that way also, faced with acute attentiveness.
But a smart child, and Lila was a smart child, keeps an eye, which is not a trick that gets unlearned, although it doesn’t necessarily get much sharper, either. She can sniff tension and identify camouflaged joy or distress, but that does not particularly help to track causes or ways to repair.
“I learned practically everything I know from stories,” she tells him. “Reading them or watching them.” He will assume she is referring only to fiction, but she is not.
A child has no way of knowing the origins of adult tensions, but a wise child knows they’re there, and when they’re dangerous. Not, for Lila, physically dangerous, not like that kind of terrible story, but with a kind of thick-aired, mysteriously grown-up resentment that could make it hard to breathe around the house.
Whatever did this, a single, dramatic, huge event or a series of smaller, unforgivable, unforgettable sins, is beyond Lila, even now. But something between her mother and her father threw a silence like a sheet of glass between them.
It couldn’t have been money; her father was in charge of a bank branch’s loans and mortgages and certainly earned enough for comfort. Not a woman, women, either: he was too perpetually, when not at work, around the house. A man? Surely not. Not her mother, a woman dedicated to doing good, if not exactly to goodness itself.
Something sexual, then, between the two of them? Something profoundly passionate, at any rate, and secret.
Could Lila have asked? After she became an adult and could have inquired as an adult, would they have answered her?
If they had little to say to each other, they also had little to say about each other. In their different ways, they were ferocious, clasping their shared passionate secret tight to themselves.
Lila and her brother Don endured painful dinners during which their father seldom spoke, and their mother chattered about her days, and Don’s and Lila’s days, her voice so falsely, brightly high that Lila’s teeth could ache by the end of a meal.
At night her parents went separately to her room to tuck her in, and then to Don’s. Her father leaned down to kiss her forehead; her mother tugged the covers up and gave them a brisk, efficient pat. Then what did they do with the rest of their evenings, with no children between them? Supposing despair, Lila still cannot bear to imagine.
She felt pulled between them like a rope. She felt she and Don held them together like a rope. The children of divorce, she thinks now, too often lack appreciation for their circumstances.
Beginning school, she stared uncomprehendingly at Dick and Jane and their beaming, encouraging parents. From the bookshelf at home, A Child’s Garden of Verses didn’t echo with any vagaries of love she could recognize. Could her parents ever have resembled the Romeo and Juliet of her children’s version of Shakespeare? She wondered what would have happened to Romeo and Juliet if they had lived. The bitter secrets of A Girl of the Limberlost felt more familiar, and for a while, she was
quite at home in the fraught dramas of the Brontës.
She read as if her family were more than the humans involved, but were also a set of stories she wasn’t advanced enough to grasp.
Don had his own ways. He stayed out a lot and denied an interest in thick air. Perhaps associating Lila, too, with gloom, he avoided her as well. None of this is a subject he will discuss; or maybe, it occurs to her, it’s not one he can bear. He and Lila still don’t have much in common except the colour of their eyes, affection for his children, and one terrible event.
He’s on his second marriage, though. He must at least have learned not to stick around once something irretrievable has occurred.
It is now Lila’s view that her parents went wrong for reasons that do not concern her; that had only to do with adults, not their children. This can happen. There is nothing about marriage, or well-intentioned promises, that prevents it from happening.
It is necessary to be able to get free when it happens.
“You okay?” Tom asks, and Lila realizes she has put a hand to her throat, as if she feels sick, which she doesn’t.
She nods. “You?”
“Yeah, but I think I’ll hit the john. Or at least the line-up for it.”
“Queasy?”
“No, the Scotch. And the excitement. Anticipation. Shit, Lila, you don’t know how much I’ve looked forward to this.”
He is such a goddamn sweet man, she could squeeze the life out of him.
How is the atmosphere in his household? Thick with secrets, of which Lila is surely the thickest? Or is it mainly an efficient, time-tabled flurry of two busy, preoccupied people?
Tom keeps secrets in all directions. He has more than the usual quota of privacies.
“You have no faith,” he has several times complained. In him, he means. “Trust me,” he says, and she does, as best she can.
He will talk freely about his daughters, if not his wife. He speaks of them proudly, and as if they are holy, and as if, even now, he can make them, good or ill, what they will be.
“But,” Lila has argued, from the disadvantaged viewpoint of the childless, “you can’t ever tell what’s going to go ping in a mind. You have no idea what’ll be remembered, or how, or why, for that matter.”
“I know,” he agreed, “you’re right,” but his heart wasn’t in it.
What Lila meant, though, is that, for instance, no one would have imagined Aunt June would have stuck, somewhat larger than warranted, in Lila’s own mind: a woman long dead, who wasn’t really an aunt, and who probably wasn’t even especially fond of Lila. Has she ever mentioned Aunt June to Tom? She’s told him so much, it’s hard to keep track.
Each summer of her childhood, her parents and Lila and Don made the hundred-mile drive to spend a week with her mother’s parents. As they turned in the laneway, Lila’s grandmother would be stepping from the old brick farmhouse, her hair wrapped in a thin braid around her head, her arms open, her print housedress (whatever happened to housedresses? Same thing that happened to housewives, Lila supposes) protected by an apron, her face flushed from the heat of her kitchen.
Lila flew from the back seat into those arms. Don tore off to the barn and its haymows and kittens and breathtaking sweet-sour smells. Later the two of them would cross paths, switch places, and sometimes they were even together, climbing into trees and haymows, catching frogs, wading in the little river.
Every year, that small summer period was suspended from real time. In that household, people even older than her parents were in charge, and those older people were wholly indulgent, embracing. Lila, off her watchful hook, felt feverish with relief.
The good part about going to see Aunt June, who was actually a neighbour, was that Lila’s grandmother would pack a small picnic and they’d head off, the two of them hand in hand together along the path the cattle and farm equipment used through the fields. Her grandmother identified birds, and pointed out groundhog holes, and she and Lila discussed the shapes of clouds and she called to the cattle, who each year frightened Lila for a while, until she got accustomed again to their peaceful, limpid curiosity.
How old was she before she understood they were being fattened up for slaughter? She knows she saw her grandfather slightly differently then.
Lila’s grandmother, who smelled of laundry, lilac and yeast, and who had many tones of voice, told her, “Be nice, now. I know June’s a little bit different, but she’s my very good friend.” She was, Lila guesses, her grandmother’s version of Patsy, or Nell; who are, as far as Lila knows, the only people in the world aware of where she is now and how she is spending these two weeks.
When June was in her early twenties, a tractor rolled over on her father—“squashed him flat,” Lila’s grandmother said—and her mother died a few months later. “Broken heart.” Was that possible? It sounded terribly romantic.
If Lila’s father died, Lila was sure her mother’s heart wouldn’t break. Her mother’s heart seemed more tuned to outside sorrows, and somewhat hardened to her own.
Lila tried to imagine what would happen to herself and Don if either her father or her mother died. How they would feel. Her mind went blank; as, apparently, did June’s, more or less. She stayed on alone, on her little patch of land, but since, Lila’s grandmother said, she blamed machinery for her father’s death, and thus her mother’s, she refused, like a Mennonite, to have anything to do with it again. So she never drove a car, and wouldn’t have an electric stove. She had an old wood one and cut her own wood for it, because obviously she wouldn’t hear of a chainsaw. She grew her own vegetables, and for other supplies she either walked four miles to town and back, or somebody like Lila’s grandparents picked things up for her. Naturally there was no vacuum cleaner, and she did all her washing by hand and hung it out on a clothesline.
She must have been very angry. Her father was careless with machinery, her mother didn’t love her enough to stay alive, and so, it appeared, June turned her own life ridiculously, fanatically over.
She also raised goats, quite a different and more disagreeable matter than cattle, and when Lila and her grandmother reached June’s land, her grandmother scooted them through the gate, keeping a good grip on Lila’s hand and the picnic basket. “Now, don’t show fear,” she’d say. “They won’t bother you if you look bold and confident.” Which Lila considers one of the more useful lessons she learned from her grandmother, although it didn’t exactly work with the goats, which came racketing up, butting each other and sniffing and taking little runs at Lila and her grandmother, who kept saying things like “Keep moving now, we’ll be there in a minute,” and “Shoo,” and “Keep back, you nasty thing.”
Past June’s rickety porch, and the screen door with its holes and dents, there were—what else?—more goats: lying in the kitchen; galumphing around the living room; resting on Aunt June’s bed, on top of beautiful, wrecked old quilts. There’d be a kid or two being bottle-fed, or a billy cleaning off Aunt June’s breakfast plate, because she just set dishes down on the floor to be licked. She said she and the goats didn’t have anything they couldn’t give each other; which is why Lila’s grandmother packed their lunch.
Still, June sold milk and cheese and nobody died from it. It’s true men didn’t ask her out to dinner, but they did buy goats from her and slaughter them, which was the one thing she wouldn’t do herself. Lila’s grandmother said, “June, it really might be easier for you if you didn’t give them names.” But she did; the moment one was born she’d call it something. Lila remembers June introducing her to one lounging on the bed. “This is Delilah, she’s a lovely little girl just like you. Would you like to pet her?”
Frankly, Lila thought Aunt June herself looked a bit goatish, scrawny, brown and slightly whiskered. How could this person be the best friend of her own fastidious grandmother?
But when the two of them talked, what revelations for a listening child!
Who was getting married, who wasn’t, who was pregnant—“expecting”—and who wasn’t, who was fighting or drinking or carrying on.
It’s rather sweet that that’s what they called it: carrying on.
They had some concept of what they called “decency.” From what Lila could tell, they considered it the basic requirement for fixing almost any difficulty, and judged it to have less to do with rules than with tolerance: giving people room. This would have been especially evident to June, who must have known people found her odd. Certainly Lila, off in a corner eating her sandwiches, dodging the goats, thought she was weird.
Lila still suspects June and her grandmother were right, though: that if their version of decency were a first principle, the rest would only be details. Tom, however, when she suggested that once, looked almost insulted. “I expect there’s more to politics and history than that, really.”
“I wonder. Really. Politics and history are the details, but humane behaviour, respect—that might be the true trick.” But it was not a subject to linger over. She and Tom are not necessarily a good pair to discuss decent behaviour. Look at them.
On the other hand, Lila has considerable respect, which is surely at least part of a decent regard, for Tom’s wife. She can make the argument (although not with Tom, who’s touchy) that Dorothy is a grown-up woman, not a bit helpless, who can see what is there to be seen if she wants, and can make her own choices, as in some respects she already has. She is fully equal to Lila, or Tom, in all this; and more than equal in some ways.
As reasoning goes, that may tip towards the specious. At least it’s tortuous; although it’s also gratifying, how supple Lila’s mind can be. It makes her laugh.