Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  I wondered if Wilson and Oscar were early, crude models of extremes of male influence in my life or the great characters before whom others would pale. I waffled between a sense that my life was already over and that it had not really begun. I was so much more settled than most of the other people I knew, yet my commitments seemed to have dwindled rather than increased.

  My fellow students worried about money and pregnancy and the constant irritation of intimacy in ugly surroundings. My artist friends were old enough not to have outgrown those concerns but to simplify the last of them to the constant irritation of intimacy anywhere.

  I didn’t have to keep late hours to get my work done, and Rocket encouraged me to take long walks on the beach, which have always been one of my greatest pleasures. With her protective company I was also free to explore the university grant land bush, trails intersecting for miles through scrub forest edged with berries and wild flowers. At home Maud’s antics often made me laugh aloud, and her warmth in my lap as I sat reading was a simple comfort.

  After Oscar, I didn’t encourage already attached men to come to call without their wives or girl friends. I deflected any domestic complaints offered over public coffee at the university or a glass of wine at an opening. I did sometimes listen to their wives as an antidote to my envy. Very few of them seemed content with their lives. In those old days I thought, though never said, that they should be. I was surprised at how many of them envied me.

  “You’re the only one of us the men ever listen to,” one wife observed, a woman both brighter and more committed to her own mind than I was, but she was delayed in her studies by two small children and her husband’s academic needs.

  The men did listen to me for the simple reason that I asked good questions. Their wives wanted equal time for giving answers. Even quiet men can’t tolerate that; they stop listening.

  Men married to artistic rather than academic women fared little better. To the complaint that time at home was eaten up with everyone else’s needs, husbands were apt to shout, “God, if I had some time at home, I’d have a poem to show for it!” This was before the time that men did stay home, even the best of them, more than once a week. Though some did laundromat duty and food shopping, they thought of these tasks as interim measures until they could make enough money not to feel humble in their expectations of service. Yet their wives also looked forward to a time when life would be made more tolerable with money.

  Only one out of all those graduate school marriages survives into the 80s. Among male artists and their wives, the odds are better (or worse, of course, depending on one’s point of view). I speculate that wives of artists don’t expect life to get better, early on resign themselves to or embrace a role of cherishing genius without rationalization. My mother lived that way with my father, not expecting diamonds or a plumber either.

  “If only men were superior,” wailed one young wife, “it would make life so much easier.”

  For all their difficulties, for their envy of my freedom and serenity, I knew those women also pitied me, particularly on those occasions when I needed an escort, the more for their remembering the years of Wilson. I tried not to feel sorry for myself. I knew the Oscars of this world are worse than nothing. About the Wilsons of this world I wasn’t entirely sure.

  As a young woman of the 80s I might not have waited until I was thirty to consider what my own sexual tastes actually were. Perhaps I was backward even for my own generation. I didn’t give friends the opportunity to tell me so. Lee Fair was the first person, aside from my mother, in whom I ever confided. The impulse took me by surprise, for she was not only younger than I but one of my students.

  Like Wilson, Lee had published a book of poems in her early twenties. Unlike him, she had then married and had a child, a choice no wiser for her than it would have been for him. Yet she defended what she had done on the grounds that motherhood is central to the female vision. No woman without that experience could have very much to say. She was too fiercely vulnerable for me to point out how few of our well known women writers had children. The Brontës, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein were all childless.

  I had assumed rather than thought about children myself. I was not particularly interested in those belonging to my friends, but I did not read that as a dislike of children. Mine would be well brought up as I had been.

  Lee’s child, Carol, was both remarkably quiet and watchful compared to other five-year-olds I had known. I did not actively dislike her, but I was unnerved by the critical appraisal in her gaze. Any time she was due to arrive with her mother, I took as much care about my appearance as I would for a lover.

  She asked odd questions, too, like “Were you a sad little girl?” She was attracted to sorrow, as Wilson had been. She told me, “My daddie didn’t die. He just went away.”

  Some of my childhood books were still on the shelves, and I found some of my old dolls, stuffed animals, and games in the cupboard with the neglected Christmas ornaments. As Carol became accustomed to the place, she spent less time suspiciously staring, though she went on asking questions.

  “Did you always play by yourself?”

  “A lot of the time,” I said. “I liked to. I liked to play in the garden.”

  Sometimes I stood by the window watching her climb among the rocks as I had done, and I supposed my mother often watched me when I was unaware of it. Then Carol would turn, look up and wave. I waved back and turned away, not wanting to seem to spy.

  “You should have a child,” Lee said. “Why don’t you have one?”

  “I manage better with animals,” I replied, wondering for how many years I’d used self deprecation as a way to defend myself against personal questions.

  “You mother your students.”

  “Do I mother you? You don’t seem to me that much younger than I am.”

  “I’m not,” Lee said. “And at the rate I’m going, I’ll be twenty years older than you are by the time I finish my MA.”

  Lee’s face was dark and strained, and there was already a lot of grey in her mane of black hair. She was always exhausted, working as a cocktail waitress on week-ends, studying late into week nights, finding time for Carol.

  “I don’t have your stamina,” I said.

  “I don’t have it either. I just don’t have any choice…now.”

  Like so many other women I knew, Lee made me feel guilty, but the others all had men to stand between them and any altruism I felt. Lee was alone, and I did want to do things for her to make her life easier.

  “Don’t offer to do things for me,” she warned, “because I’ll let you.”

  “Is there anything immoral about doing your laundry here while you have a meal rather than down at the laundromat?”

  “Not yet,” Lee said.

  Her guardedness, her fear of dependence, made me at first more careful of her feelings than I would otherwise have been and perhaps less aware of my own.

  One afternoon, when I offered to pick Carol up at kindergarten to give Lee an extra hour at the library, she said, “Don’t get indispensible.”

  “Oh, sometimes you seem to me as impossible as a man,” I said in sudden irritation.

  “Sometimes you seem as insensitive as one,” she retorted.

  That exchange, as I thought about it, seemed to me basically funny.

  “Does neither of us like men very much?” I asked her over coffee, after Carol had been settled in my study with some books.

  “I don’t have anything against them as long as they leave me alone,” Lee said.

  “You don’t want to remarry ever?”

  “No,” she said. “Why do I seem to you impossible?”

  “You don’t. It’s only that I don’t expect to have to be as careful with you as…”

  “With a man?”

  “The men I’ve cared about anyway.”

  Then for the first time I tried to describe my years with Wilson to the final distress of having destro
yed whatever it was between us by one fatal question. I talked about Oscar, too, the rigid, the controlling structures men made in which there was never simply room to be.

  “Why did you choose men who didn’t want you?” Lee asked.

  “I wasn’t aware…with Wilson anyway…that I had,” I answered, but, as I saw the doubt in her expression, I supposed I wasn’t telling the truth. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you really not know now either that you’re choosing a woman who does want you?” Lee asked quietly, and, when I did not respond, she said, “Is that to be my fatal question?”

  “It mustn’t be,” I finally managed to say.

  “You may not be able to help that,” Lee said, and then she called Carol to her and went home.

  Again I was faced with my peculiar blindness to my own motives. For months I had been courting Lee in the ways traditional to a lover rerouting myself on campus on the off chance of meeting her, stupidly disappointed when a similar head of hair revealed a much older and less appealing face. I had brought her small presents, even flowers, and taken her to restaurants and the theatre. I had taken advantage of a convention of physical affection between women to take her arm as we walked along together, to hug and even sometimes kiss her.

  When Lee warned me off, there was always also an invitation in it as there had never been with Wilson, and my impatience with her caution was my desire to set no limits on my love, to let it open and flower as it would, at last.

  I had never been able to tolerate Oscar’s charge that Wilson was a homosexual. It was with perverse relief that I could now exonerate him with my own sexuality, at least the possibility of it.

  If I were, in fact, a lesbian, there did not have to be any limits set with Lee, who by now was no longer my student. I might even propose that she move in with me. Who could criticize such an arrangement, one woman helping another? Carol. Well, Carol could be my child, too. I had already begun to give her my childhood. Lee could give up her hideous job, even finally have time to write again. She could have my study. I did most of my work at the university anyway. And Carol could have my old room which I now used as a guest room.

  So I sat happily rearranging the uses of the furniture without a single moral or emotional apprehension.

  When I saw Lee the next day, I embraced her joyfully. Then I looked into her uncertain face and said, “Don’t you see? It makes everything so much easier.”

  Lee laughed in disbelief.

  “Tonight you won’t have to wake Carol and take her home.”

  I felt neither shy nor frightened. Lee and I had been casually naked together in the changing room at the pool. I already knew a delight in the shape of her breasts, the curve of her back, the length of her thighs. And I knew how tender and sure her hands were, tending her child. I also knew she wanted me and had wanted me for a long time.

  When we finally lay together in absolute intimacy, all my sexual bewilderment and constraint left me. I understood my power because I could feel it in a singing heat to be fed to a roaring. I was hardly aware of Rocket’s one howl which soon faded into resignation.

  “Rocket, you beast,” Lee said to the dog in the morning, fondling her ears. “Did you have to make a public announcement?”

  Carol said, “I had a funny dream, that I could float…in the air.”

  I was having the same sensation awake, a combination of euphoria and lack of sleep.

  For Lee our love-making did not clear away all the obstacles. When I proposed that she give her landlord notice and move in with me, she wanted to know if I’d really thought about living not only with her but with Carol.

  “She’s not always an easy child.”

  “It isn’t as if I didn’t know her. Carol and I like each other.”

  “But you’ll have to love her,” Lee said.

  “I do,” I protested. “Why don’t we ask her if she’d like it?”

  “And if she says no?”

  I realized I was not prepared to put my fate quite so simply at the whim of a five-year-old.

  Lee was embarrassed when I talked about money.

  “You don’t create a problem,” I tried to explain. “You solve one.”

  With Lee and Carol to support there was a practical reason for me to take my academic career seriously, accept a full time appointment the following term and have a real use for my salary. Lee could go on with her MA or not. Maybe it would be better for her to stay home, write, and have more time for Carol.

  “Even men resent dependents. Wouldn’t you?” Lee asked.

  “Why should I? You’re the point of my life.”

  For a month Lee and Carol spent three or four nights a week with me, and we all grew increasingly tired and strained. Carol began to have unsympathetic dreams, woke needing her mother’s attention.

  One night I heard her say to Lee, “You smell funny.”

  After that Lee left a basin of water on my dresser and washed her face and hands quickly before going to Carol. I did not quote, “Will these hands ne’er be clean?”

  One morning after a particularly unsettled night, Lee said, “It isn’t going to work. Carol just can’t handle it.”

  “She simply can’t handle living in two different places. Half the time she doesn’t know where she is when she wakes up. If you moved in, she’d be able to settle down.”

  “Why don’t you ever go in to her?” Lee asked.

  “Well, I will from now on. It didn’t occur to me,” I admitted.

  Of course, when I did, Carol bellowed, “I want my mother.”

  We decided that I should keep Carol on my own over the week-end when she saw very little of her mother anyway. It would also give Lee a chance to get the rest she badly needed. It worked because I devoted myself to Carol. I took her to the zoo. We went to a toy shop and bought new books and some doll furniture which we set up together in her room. I fixed her her favorite macaroni and cheese, and then read to her.

  The effect of such attention backfired when Lee came home. Carol simply became as demanding of me as she was of her mother, behaving very like Rocket in her attempts to keep between us, making herself the center of attention even at the price of our irritation. Again Lee’s solution was to move out, mine for them to move in, and Carol was now on my side.

  Lee did not so much change her mind as give in. All in one day, she gave her notice, quit her job and dropped out of the university. Then all the nervous energy which had kept her going through her impossible schedule drained from her, and she slept like a patient after major surgery.

  For several weeks, I got up if Carol called in the night, got up in the morning to get her off to kindergarten and myself to UBC, collected her and brought her home to Lee who increasingly often had not bothered to dress. I did the shopping, the cooking, the laundry, the cleaning, exercised the dog, mowed the lawn, electric with energy to be all things for Lee, provider, mother, lover, for Lee was filled with sleepy gratitude and sexual sweetness.

  “Are you sick, Mommy?” Carol finally asked her.

  “I suppose so,” I heard Lee reply.

  “Are you going to get well?”

  “I suppose so,” she said again, but the listlessness in her voice suddenly alarmed me.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her later that night. “Are you getting rested?”

  She only murmured and kissed me.

  Early in the morning she was restless, got up, went to the bathroom, came back into the bedroom and stood by the window.

  “Are you all right?” I asked again.

  For an answer she came back to bed and held me in her arms.

  When I woke again, her breathing was unnaturally heavy. I tried to wake her and couldn’t. The empty bottle of pills was in the bathroom for me to find. I phoned the doctor who phoned an ambulance.

  When Lee had recovered enough to talk, she said, “I should have told you. I was trying to find someone to love Carol…”

  “But how could you not want to live?” I asked. “
We’ve been so happy.”

  She turned her face away from me and closed her eyes.

  Hysterical crying or giggling are the luxuries of a woman who lives alone. I had Carol to take care of, comfort, reassure. When she had gone to sleep, I hardly had time to note my own exhaustion before I was asleep myself.

  When I woke to the new, requiring day and tried to think about Lee, I could not. I moved automatically through my appointments until lunch time when I could spend a few minutes with her in the hospital.

  “No Visitors” was posted on her shut door.

  I went to find a nurse.

  The nurse took me to a waiting room. “Her mother’s here. She’s been trying to reach you.”

  “Her mother?”

  I did know Lee had a mother and a father. She spoke of them very little, as little as she spoke of her ex-husband or anything else about her past. She came from Winnipeg and said that even the name of the city made her teeth hurt.

  A woman with pure white hair and eyes even more exhausted than Lee’s came into the room.

  “Dulce?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I must thank you for being so kind to Lee and Carol through this distressing time.”

  Kind? I could not imagine what Lee had told her mother.

  “I’m making arrangements to take them back to Winnipeg with me tomorrow. Would it be convenient if I came and packed their things tonight?”

  “Is that what Lee wants to do?”

  “I’m afraid she doesn’t have much choice. She can’t simply be a burden to strangers.”

  “She’s been no burden,” I protested. “She was simply terribly tired…”

  “Perhaps she hasn’t told you,” her mother said. “She has a history of…this.”

  “But Carol has just really settled in and started to feel at home.”

  “She hasn’t had an easy life,” Lee’s mother said.

  It wasn’t exactly lack of sympathy for her own daughter which she expressed in concern for Carol; she seemed simply saddened and resigned.