More in Anger

by J. Jill Robinson

  “Ah,” said May.

  “And who, anywhere within fifty miles,” Pearl asked May, “would not look at me blankly if I said something like Many people would sooner die than think? Or if I said, Too little liberty brings stagnation, who would nod knowingly, and engage in conversation?”

  “I might look at you blankly,” said May.

  “But you know what I mean.”

  “I suppose I do,” said May. “But Pearl, there’s Fred home from choir. I haven’t got his tea on.”

  “Well, you had better go wait on him hand and foot, then, hadn’t you?”

  At first, Pearl had made half-hearted attempts to befriend the wives of other professional men, but these times were rare because usually Tom had the car. But she felt it was her duty as a doctor’s wife to make the effort. Tom expected that she would associate with these women, as his darling mother would do, take to their level of social discourse like a duck to water. Pam Carpenter. Loretta Nielson. But she had no desire to talk about meatloaf recipes, or the PTA. She did not want to talk about church plays and teas or to serve on committees. She was not being pretentious, as he had accused her of being; it was just that her frame of reference was different. Her scope was broader. She wanted to go home the moment she arrived at their homes, even as she stood rigid with tension ringing the doorbell with a false smile pasted on her red lips. So she stopped trying before she had really started; what she had to endure along with the pretence was hardly worth the effort. She had better things to do with her time.

  She could not look to her children as a source of intelligent conversation either. The way they nattered on endlessly, it would be ridiculous to suppose children were capable of much in the way of dialogue. At best they were parasites, threatening to suck her dry with their constant demands. Mummy this, Mummy that, all day long. It made her skin crawl sometimes until she wanted to scream. And sometimes she did. To her it defied logic, but the less she offered them, the more they wanted. Why couldn’t they get the message?

  Vivien, daughter number four, was conceived when quick nighttime couplings were all that remained of Pearl and Tom’s once intense and fiery relationship in bed. When Pearl had discovered that she was pregnant again, she cried for days. Would she never be free? She sat at her dressing table and looked at her sad, weary face. How in heaven’s name had she got here? How could she ever extricate herself from this? Her life—her body, her mind—would never be her own again.

  The ransom she demanded of Tom from then on for sex became so high that Tom wouldn’t pay it, and he no longer approached her in the night. If he attempted to kiss her hello or goodbye, she turned her face from him. She believed he didn’t want her enough to do even the smallest thing she begged of him, even if it meant he got sex in return, something he had always wanted. That’s how far gone they were, she wailed, that’s how much he didn’t want her anymore. He was silent. So the fourth baby—ye gods, another girl—came home to air that was thick with anger and resentment. A steady stream of disappointment emanated from both her parents. Pearl’s nighttime wailing and crying startled the newborn baby awake and into crying and made sleep restless for the other three children, as they felt anger’s reverberations in every breath they drew into their soft, clean lungs.

  What a crew her children were, all yammering and in the way every second. More unsatisfying work she had never done; she would rather her liver were plucked out every day. Ruby, the eldest, was an uncommunicative child who did her utmost to avoid helping and stood there like a dumb thing when she was asked a question. Pearl wondered if she was slow, though Tom insisted she was not. Her report cards from school praised her high intelligence. But why, then, did she stare so stupidly at her mother when she was told what to do? As though she barely comprehended, or did not at all.

  “Don’t you hear me? I said, rock Vivien’s carriage.”

  Ruby, lost in her thoughts, didn’t move. Pearl spoke more loudly.

  “Didn’t. You. Hear. What. I. Said? Why are you standing there! Are you stupid? Now listen to your sister wailing. Look what you’ve done. Go away. Fat lot of help you are.”

  Laurel, a handful for her teachers because she would not sit still or be quiet, lacked focus, was both flighty and belligerent, and was no help either. She ran off at the first sign of trouble, most of it caused by her own thoughtlessness and carelessness. And the two little ones—Amy, with asthma and allergies and a ceaseless appetite, and Vivien, underweight and such a crybaby she wouldn’t eat or shut her trap unless she were constantly held, and ye gods, who had time for that? What cruel cosmic joke was the universe playing on her, plaguing her with such a crew?

  And then there was of course her husband. She was provoked beyond endurance by him, by the inane, dreamy expression on his face and his retreat into silence when confronted; by his withdrawal; by his refusal to give a straight answer, an intelligent answer, any answer at all. Damn him anyway! Was she going to be trapped forever by lamebrains? Yes.

  But she would not quit even if she could. She stuck things out to their conclusions, she said to him. She was like her father, whom she admired enormously, unlike some people she could name who never got anything much going at home. And whatever it was he did at work, it didn’t involve making enough money to feed their family or to fix all the things that went wrong. What kind of a useless man had she married?

  “Useless, am I,” said Tom. “I see.”

  Pearl sighed the heavy sighs of a martyr and she took the yardstick to her children when her hands got tired from spanking. Someone had to bring up their four. She would resign herself to what was apparently fated to be her mission in life: raising selfish children and feeding a useless, yes, a useless husband. Year after year after year. She brushed her hair with her silver-backed brush every night and every morning. She did thirty sit-ups and ten deep-breathing exercises. She gardened, though her success with plants was as hard to see as her success with her children. She spent hours digging and weeding, but nothing seemed to help what was, she determined, basically inferior soil.

  As far as the children went, she would raise them right. She was made of Scottish stuff, at least on her father’s side. With her father’s grim determination, daring anyone to find fault, she consulted Canada’s Food Guide and balanced her daughters’ protein, carbohydrate, vegetable and fruit intakes. Supper was on the dining room table every night at six o’clock sharp, and if you weren’t there you didn’t get fed. Pot roast or pork chops fried in the cast iron pan; macaroni and cheese baked in the oven; chicken stew with dumplings bubbling on the stove; potatoes and carrots cooked in the pressure cooker. Canned peas and canned wax beans, canned asparagus and canned corn; canned pears, canned peaches, or Jell-O with rubbery edges, and peanut butter or chocolate chip cookies. All served on a matching set of Melmac dishes except on Sundays, when the table had a cloth and was set with the hand-painted Wedgwood wedding china, each piece ever so slightly different yet at first glance the same. What a garden of a life those flowers had once suggested. Ha. She scrubbed the pots and ran the dishwasher when it was working, and when it wasn’t, she washed all the dishes, too. And if there was half an hour at the end of the day for her to read a book, more often than not she was too exhausted to read much beyond a page, and what she read—de Beauvoir, Sartre—made her more, not less, unhappy with her lot.

  When Tom came home and she laid into him for being late, for abandoning his family to lead his pleasant and charming life in the outside world, he turned on his heel without stopping and left the house. She followed him. She took pleasure in goading him; at least something to do with him made her feel good. “Where are you going now? What’s wrong with us all, that you can’t bear to be in the same house with your own wife and off-spring? Tom? Tom!” She could see Amy and Vivien, four and three, peering out their bedroom window. They watched as their father got back in his car, backed into the turnaround, and drove off in the rain and snow.

  Occasionally, as the years passed, there were sig
ns, hopeful indications that didn’t all end in disappointment, though most still did. After much prodding, for example, Tom had finally located enough inner fortitude to part ways with Strong and open his own practice. This move resulted in more money, and the purchase of a second car, which gave Pearl more freedom. She was able to hire a young man to help her with the garden. He cut and cleared branches, cleaned the eavestroughs, mowed the lawn, and dug manure and peat moss into the gardens, which then improved. And a cleaning woman, Irma Olsen, now came in once a week. Let her get down on her hands and knees to wash and wax the floors. Let her clean the bathroom and dust. At least Irma would be getting paid. Money. If only she too could have some money of her own, if only she didn’t have to ask her husband if she could please, please have two nickels to rub together. What a difference that would make.

  No other man in the neighbourhood went off to work wearing Dack’s shoes and a tailored suit and tie over a professionally pressed white shirt. If men went to work at all—many of them didn’t—they went in work clothes: coveralls, or dark green pants and shirts, or blue jeans and plaid flannel work shirts. One fellow fixed radios and TVs in his garage. Another had fourteen dairy cows that occasionally pushed down the fence and trespassed on the Mayfields’ land. The children from the families whose parents did not work didn’t have much in their school lunches; Laurel reported that the kids in the family on the left of them were sent off to school with glass jars of water, and apples or pears stolen from the Mayfields’ orchard, in big brown paper bags with the tops rolled down, or in plastic bread bags.

  “You ungrateful wretches don’t know how fortunate you are,” Pearl told her three remaining children as she drove them to their lessons. Ruby had by now graduated from high school and miraculously landed a scholarship to attend university in California. “Just look around you at all the children who have so much less. Look at the Babcocks up the hill, all ten of them impoverished both physically and mentally. Look at the Whites next door, and the Jensons up near the school. You four have so much to be grateful for, and instead you’re always whining, and selfish.” She shook her head in disgust as she gripped the steering wheel of the station wagon with both hands. “If you turn out badly, believe you me, the blame cannot fairly be placed on me.”

  But more money didn’t translate into more peace or happiness for long. Getting a little relief only illustrated how much more was needed. Pearl had thought Ruby little more than a millstone but she must have been of some help, as she was, on occasion, missed. Pearl had broken down and asked her parents for money more than once, and they had obliged, but the last time she asked, her father had said no. The shame she felt at being denied translated into more anger at Tom for putting her in such a humiliating position. In the evenings, when he got home, they collided within minutes—why was he always late? He always had some excuse. Over and over again they separated, collided again, ignoring, accusing, jabbing, always ending with cold, hard silence, followed by Tom’s retreat to the piano. There was tension before he walked in the door, in fact; he ignited it like a match to propane first with his foolish and futile attempts at a cheerful greeting as he came in and then with his attempts to ignore her. He wasn’t going to get off easily if she had anything to say about it.

  One day she found she couldn’t wait, and she met him in the carport, stood waiting for him to get out of his car and followed him into the house. “How dare you maintain a pretence of happiness?” Pearl lashed out. “Waltzing in here without a care in the world when I am fed up to the teeth from slaving all day for you.”

  Tom, who had started having a couple of drinks before coming home, closed the closet door and turned to her. “Pearl, you at least have been on your own all day, while I’ve been surrounded by sick people, people to whom you wouldn’t give the time of day. You might remember that, before you complain about everything so strenuously.” Pearl tried to interject, but he held up his hand. “The people I see every day all want something of me,” he continued quietly and coldly, “and some of them—a good too many of them, actually—are of a kind I do not relish and would not choose as company. Some of them smell, quite frankly. But I have no choice, these people are my patients, and they are my duty as well as my—and your, if you need reminding—bread and butter.”

  “Ha,” said Pearl.

  “What, if I may ask,” said Tom, “do you consider your duty if it isn’t your home and family?”

  “For the record,” she said as he stopped talking and attempted to move past her, “I have not been alone all day. For too much of the day, in fact, I’ve been surrounded by little wretches who want something from me all the time. I’d be happy to trade you any day. They’re your children too, remember, or have you forgotten?”

  Tom looked over her shoulder at his piano. “Excuse me,” he said to Pearl.

  Pearl’s voice changed. “Oh, Tom,” she beseeched, clutching his arm. “Please wait, just for a minute? Couldn’t you please, please for one second appreciate how hard it is for me? Don’t you ever attempt to see things from where I stand?”

  Tom yanked his arm away from her. “You are standing in the way,” he said, and walked around her and sat down on the piano bench. He placed his hands lightly on his thighs. He bent his head.

  “No,” she said. “No, you don’t, damn you anyway.” Her voice rose in anger as she stood on the top step and looked down at him. “The extent to which you don’t care is abundantly clear. Just look at you at that damned piano.” Tom lifted his hands to the keyboard and began playing. Major scales. Minor scales. Quickly, and loud. Next, the Bartók. Or the new one, the one by Dave Brubeck.

  If she had time in the evenings after the supper dishes were done—and as the children grew, she was able to find half an hour or an hour more often—Pearl knit sweaters for herself. She did not knit as well as her sister, she knew, but she enjoyed it when she was too tired to read, and she counted it as something she did for herself. Too, the results of knitting were tangible, satisfying, and unlike domestic work, knitting stayed done for more than ten minutes and even garnered occasional praise. These days she could find more time to read, too, and as well as de Beauvoir and Sartre she was reading Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Beckett.

  She tried to resume contact with her university girlfriends who, like her, were raising young families, but neither she nor they really had time to correspond beyond notes on Christmas cards. Pearl had more than once made what she considered valiant efforts and written them each three- or four-page letters. But her attempts seldom gleaned a reply even from Marion, never from Esther, and she felt shunned. Who cared if she lived or died? Anything was more important than she was. She was abandoned. Unloved. Pain easily turned into anger, which coursed hotly through her body. To outward appearances she looked cold, and hard, and aloofly self-contained, but inwardly she seethed. The anger followed familiar paths.

  No one cared an iota except perhaps little Amethyst, now in school and who, if she were coaxed, would kiss her mother even after she’d been thrashed, though it was hard to tell anymore if she was motivated more by greed than by genuine affection for her mother. But at least she would do as she was told. And Amethyst was the only one who didn’t argue or cast her injured, baleful looks. She said, “Yes, Mummy. Okay Mum,” and her bed was always made and her homework was always done, though she seldom laughed, and always looked somewhat worried. She, one out of four, was fine, except for excessive snuffling from the allergies, and she earned the rewards that came her way, her clothes and her cookies and ice cream, though Pearl continued to have some concerns over the excessive eating. As a toddler, Amy had gone off to visit the neighbours and there she had begged for food. Begging food! Pearl had spanked her thoroughly and then pinned a note to the back of her shirt where she couldn’t reach it: Do Not Feed Me. In what was surely a show of spite, Amy had now taken to eating her hands—chewing her nails down to the quick—and sneaking food from the refrigerator. And so it was no wonder Amethyst was plump, while Vivi
en, who seemed barely to eat, was so thin.

  The snow was turning to sleet by the time Tom came home one day in mid-December; his car made fresh tracks in the driveway. His supper was waiting for him on the kitchen table, cold and congealing. Pearl opened the front door to confront him, but when he saw her there, he turned around and headed back to his car.

  “Where are you going now?” she said.

  “I don’t need this,” said Tom, and he closed his car door, backed into the turnaround and drove off in the sleet, making a second set of tracks over and beside the first, weaving in and out, combining and separating.

  “What kind of Christmas is this going to be?” she called after him. “Tom? Tom!”

  After the car’s tail lights disappeared, Pearl slammed the front door. She stormed into Ruby’s bedroom and shut the door behind her. Ruby, nineteen, looked up in fear from her book. “About Christmas,” Pearl said. “I’m telling your grandparents not to come after all. It isn’t convenient. They can go somewhere else.” Ruby looked at her. “You know, I’ve about had it with the whole shiftless lot of you. You are out of your minds if you think I am going to play Santa on top of everything else. See how you all like that.”

  Ruby asked her mother in a whisper who was going to be Santa then. Pearl said that she didn’t know and she didn’t care. “Ask your father,” she said. “He has all the answers.”

  But Tom wasn’t around the next day or the next. He was busy at Christmas, Ruby knew. All the doctors were. There were so many car accidents, there were so many drunks driving and getting into fights.

  Ruby was worried about trying to be Santa all by herself, but she worried about asking Laurel to help her because Laurel, at thirteen, might still believe in Santa. And even if Laurel didn’t still believe in Santa, Ruby worried that it would upset her to hear how their mother was refusing to do it. But above all she was worried that she couldn’t do it right herself. So she told Laurel anyway, and on Christmas Eve, when Tom was out on a call and Amy and Vivien were in bed and who knew where their mother was, they filled the stockings and wrapped the presents from Santa that Pearl had bought before she got angry and quit and which were stored in big shopping bags in her closet. Ruby felt guilty the whole time, as though she and Laurel were doing something they weren’t supposed to do. Laurel cried and cried and Ruby said couldn’t she please, please stop. But Laurel was a little sister herself, and couldn’t.