Her accomplishments made her proud, though no one seemed to appreciate the changes—the improvements—as much as she. Vivien wanted the “magic carpets,” as she called them, back; Amethyst wanted the pole lamps of all things. Tom did not “care for” the sisal and would have liked to have been consulted. Pearl threw up her hands. Fine. She was through caring what people thought. She was getting things done. She was through waiting around for someone else to take action.
For several months, even a year, she seemed satisfied, almost happy for a while, reading in her room, pinning quotations up on the outside of her new study door:
Mother, wife, sweetheart are the jailers.
Or
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior.
Or
All oppression creates a state of war.
After most of the money was gone and the house was, for the most part, how she wanted it, Pearl wasn’t through yet. She lined up the daughters who remained at home and defiantly stared each of them in the face as she made her pronouncement: “I am finished being the victim. I am going to show you all what an intelligent, determined woman is capable of doing. I have learned that, I quote, You cannot gain peace by avoiding life, end quote, and I am finished avoiding my life. Look at me when I’m talking to you. I am no longer going to be dependent on your father for support that does not come. I am going to make my own money and do with my life as I please. I am going to become a teacher, and then the rest of you can bally well do as you like. I am finished caring. About you, and for you. I am going to have a life of my own, and you are not going to stop me.”
Pearl submerged herself in her studies and came as close as she ever would to regaining the happiness she had felt at McGill. She went into her room and shut the door. How delicious! In addition to the textbooks required for her teaching certificate, Pearl began reading Bertrand Russell and George Sand. She taped new signs on her study door and changed them more often: Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition; the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
She didn’t stop caring for her family entirely, but she stopped setting the table for breakfast and left boxes of cereal, Pop-Tarts and a bowl of oranges on the counter. School lunches were Wagon Wheels, apples and Velveeta sandwiches. Instead of pot roast or chicken stew for supper, Pearl served them canned peas, canned corn, Minute Rice, Steakettes, fried Spam.
Tom came home after work and sat down at the table without speaking while his daughters passed him serving bowls and plates of food. When he stopped eating, he folded his serviette in half, then folded it again, and again. “I deserve better than this,” he said quietly, excusing himself and rising from the table.
“Let me guess where you’re going,” said Pearl.
He said nothing.
Pearl got up, pushed her chair in. “Damn you all anyway,” she said to her daughters. She went back into her study and closed the door. Then she opened it again. “And do the dishes.”
Back and forth, back and forth, Pearl drove into Vancouver for night classes, and on weekends her study door was closed more than it was open. She immersed herself in the books, felt moments close to joy when her brain, reawakened, sucked up everything it could find.
Two semesters later, Pearl opened the manila envelope and with pride extracted her teaching certificate. Again she lined her daughters up in her study and told them with triumph in her voice, with something resembling happiness, and pride, that she was now qualified: she could find a job teaching high school English. She had truly broken her own shackles. She was an example to them all, she crowed, their father included. She did not need them, not any of them, and while they seemed incapable of much in the way of admiration, standing there so dumbly, Virginia Woolf would not have been. No longer would she be at their beck and call. They had better get used to not having her around, and that threat wasn’t idle, either.
Pearl sat on the bench of her boudoir table looking at her hair. She still had on her favourite flannelette pyjamas covered with little yellow flowers. Her black hair was shoulder-length now but still held its curl from the perm, and would bounce back into place when she brushed it, in a way that she liked. Today was her first job interview—the first of her life. She would look nice—professional and nice—for the interview. She was nervous, but she was well qualified, and well groomed, and the principal was a patient of Tom’s. Which ought to work to her advantage, all things being fair. Her silver dressing set lay before her. She picked up her hairbrush to begin brushing her hair, counting the strokes to fifty. And as she did that, of course she thought about her sister May, as she always did when she brushed her hair, because May had always envied Pearl her dressing set because it was sterling silver while hers was only plate, because their parents hadn’t approved of May’s marriage. Every day Pearl brushed her hair and every day she thought of this. She swung around on the bench and bent over to brush her hair between her knees. Sides, ten each; front to back, ten; back to front, ten. She put her hairbrush down in its spot between the comb and the shoehorn, stood up, and unbuttoned her pyjama top. She took the top off and laid it on the bed and glanced at her partial nakedness in the mirror. At her loosening belly and fallen breasts with those large, dark nipples that had fed her four children. Those useless daughters of hers. What bliss an empty house. Next she pulled down her pyjama bottoms and stepped out of them and then picked them up. She folded her pyjamas neatly and put them under her pillow, patted the pillow, then smoothed the pillowcase. She crossed the room to her dresser, where she took out white cotton underpants and a white cotton brassiere. Next she pulled on her panty girdle. She sat down on the edge of the bed to unroll and put on her stockings, standing again to attach them to the garters as naturally as if she had done it a thousand times, and likely she had. Then she took a white dress slip from the drawer and slid it on over her head.
Pearl hadn’t gone to May’s wedding; they were living in Nanaimo at the time, because Tom was on a locum, and she had Ruby and Laurel to look after. May’s wedding dress had been blue, of course. What other colour could May’s wedding dress, or any other kind of dress of hers, possibly be? Everything always had to be blue. And why? To match her eyes, of course. Pearl slammed the underwear drawer shut. Why was she thinking all this today of all days? Blue this, blue that, blue the other thing, she said under her breath.
Nobody else could have blue. Why? Because until May came along, no one else in the family except their grandfather had blue eyes. And then, when May was born, lo and behold, she had blue eyes. Everyone in the family and down the block and around the corner was simply overjoyed, as one could imagine. From that moment on, she could do no wrong. It had made Pearl sick, and still did.
Why was she thinking about all that? She had better things to think about, like getting this job. Mad at herself now, Pearl slid open the tall closet doors and shoved the clothes on their hangers this way and that. She took out a black and white pleated skirt and put that on, next a white blouse with a wide pointed collar and handsome silver buttons up the front, and then finally she hiked up the skirt to pull the blouse down from underneath. She smoothed the skirt with her hands. She stood in her stockinged feet looking at herself in the full-length mirror. She would do. With some earrings and beads. She went to her jewellery box. Now, it was blue. Blue leather. How could that have happened?
Pearl put the earrings and beads down on the bathroom counter. She unzipped her makeup bag and took out her pancake makeup, rouge, powder and lipstick. She wet the sponge at the sink and applied the pancake, distorting her face as she did to tauten the flesh of her cheeks, chin, upper lip. She applied a tiny dab of rouge to each cheek and rubbed it in. Perhaps it was too much. She paused. Too late for that now. Next was the powder. Then she took a plastic-backed brush from the drawer and brushed her hair once again, though just a few strokes this time, and then she combed it into place. Next she took the can
of VO5 out of the cupboard below the sink and she sprayed, generously coating her whole head of hair.
Pearl pulled the two outside mirror panels forward and inspected the back and sides of her hair. Wondered vaguely what she might be asked at the interview, about her teaching methods, which were formed very much from theory and not practice, and about her experience, which was pathetically little. Ah, well. She would find something to say. How one comported oneself was half the battle.
She was running out of time. Earrings. Beads. Ye gods, where were her shoes? She took her black pumps from the shoe rack. She stepped into the shoes and went again to stand in front of the full-length mirror.
She took her camel hair coat from the hall closet. Where were her gloves? Maybe she was nervous after all. She pulled on her gloves. She picked up her purse and walked to the front door. When she opened it, the horses whinnied at her over the fence. No one had fed them their oats this morning. Feed the animals first, her father always said, and so she put her purse in her car and went to the shed. Mr. Thompson would have to wait five minutes. What a difference riding horses had made to her childhood. She had loved to ride and had hoped her girls would too. But only Amethyst and Vivien appeared interested in the horses, and Amethyst was allergic. Laurel spent her time listening to her transistor radio and writing idiotic love poems in a notebook she kept under her mattress.
There was mud on her coat and she went back inside to sponge it off. Then she stood on the threshold before stepping back out of the house. This was it: she was going. In her garden the daffodils were out. The tulips were out. She pulled the front door closed behind her more firmly than she needed to, and she walked more quickly than she needed to, a tension in her body that implied escape, and climbed into her blue Ford Falcon and drove away.
Pearl’s students were completely uninterested in anything she had to say and they would not be quiet. They threw things at each other and at her, and one day two boys made a fire in a garbage can in the aisle. She came home from that chaos to find the house a mess and there was no food to put on the table and everyone was mad at her for not being able to do it all and stared at her with sad faces. Ha! Her limbs had been tied to four horses and then someone had gleefully cried, “Gee haw!” Her life was all a huge disappointment and her resentment at the unfairness of it all grew. She felt like the pressure cooker, the safety bobbin tipping crazily on top as the trapped water screamed and threatened to blow. Ruby was gone and Laurel was gone and still there wasn’t enough time in the day. She was late for everything. Supper was late and she was late for school. She was late dropping Amy and Vivien off at their lessons and she was late picking them up. It got worse, and she began to be ten, fifteen, twenty minutes late, half an hour, even an hour. Two. Then she was greeted by their sullen little faces. They didn’t care what had happened to her, they didn’t care how much she was trying to do, damn them, the selfish little wretches, as long as their needs were being met. Their supper. Their lessons. Their lunches. Sometimes she was held up so long by traffic or staff meetings or grocery shopping that she left them to their own devices. They could bally well walk home.
What was the matter, anyway? Life had become more, not less, difficult to manage. The money of her own to spend as she liked was most welcome, but at what cost to her? No one saw her struggle, or if they did, no one cared about her superhuman efforts on their behalf.
After all I’ve done for you. It was true, damn it all. She had driven them to their lessons. Taken them to the library, the art gallery, the beach. She had fed them. Washed them. Washed and ironed their clothes. Mended their clothes. They had always had books, and dogs, and then the horses—but nothing was ever enough. Their greed was insatiable, and not a single word of thanks ever crossed their lips.
Some days it was almost too much to bear. Some days she just let the floodgates open and abandoned any semblance of control, usually when her husband wasn’t around, but on occasion when he was. You never saw a man disappear so fast. She knelt down and unleashed her rage, let loose crying, and wailing, lashing out at whoever came near. She screamed down the hall at the closed bedroom doors, I am working all day and all night too, and for what? For what? What is the matter with you all? She walked down the hall and struck out at their bedroom doors and at their bodies with her hands, with wooden spoons, and the yardstick. Damn you! She chased them. Damn you all! she shrieked, and she sobbed at their heartlessness, at how she had been abandoned, so unfairly, how she had always, always been unloved. Not one of them cared, nobody loved her. And then she got mad, and dried her tears, and called her children to her study. Soon enough, she warned, they would see just how little she cared. The children stared at the floor. They already knew.
On this, her second trip to Ireland, to Yeats country this time, she sat in a park in Sligo and stared long and hard at the place where two streams converged and became stronger. What a time she was having, away from all responsibility except to herself. How good it was to be completely free of encumbrances. To look after herself, only herself. She could sit here quietly forever, she thought, left alone, left to her solitude and her thoughts. And as she sat there, it came to her. Her older two daughters were for all intents and purposes gone. Amy was fourteen, Viv thirteen. What was stopping her now? Not guilt for abandoning her children when they still needed her—they were all now in their teens or beyond. She had the means to support herself; she had a car, and her wits. She and Tom were sleeping in separate rooms now and barely spoke—they would not miss each other. She could leave. She could go.
But leave after sinking all that money into the house and property in her futile efforts to make it a home? It wasn’t fair. But what choice was there? It was the price of her freedom. Either she accepted the cost or she paid more dearly—with the remainder of her life. She watched the water course by in front of her and thought fleetingly of Crane’s ambivalent universe. Nothing, no one really cared. She would have to leave her study, her gardens, her origami light fixtures. Leave the place she had toiled over for almost twenty years. Where she had met failure day after day. Her determination not to give up, her stubborn stick-to-it-iveness had in the end been laughable, not laudable. She was as bad as her mother. And now, if anything was going to change, really change, it would have to be she, she who was the only one who took any initiative about anything, she who would have to leave if she was going to save herself, because she was the only one who gave a damn about her welfare. If she did not, she would be swallowed again by that world where she was never enough.
She had a choice. She did. She had thought about leaving before, had even tried to leave before, but her sense of responsibility had always brought her back, much notice anyone took of that. Maybe this time she would find the strength to put herself first. Maybe this time she could get it right. She mustn’t rush. It might take another year to save her money and lay her plans, but now, now she saw a beacon of hope above the dark mess of things waiting for her at home. When she returned, she would not, she would not be swallowed up again by that family, that selfish, ungrateful family of hers.
Why was it so much easier to keep perspective, gain perspective, from a distance? She ought to know something about that from her art studies. In Ireland she could see what she needed to do, could see what was wrong, what was necessary to fix it. But back home, up to her neck in it again, she felt only in great danger, flailing, screaming, begging for sympathy that never came. No one loved her. No one cared. She had been a fool to think it might be otherwise. Hope after hope dashed on jagged rocks. No more. When she got back from her holiday, things were going to be different. She would play second fiddle no longer. She promised herself.
VIVIEN
Her bangs, usually cut short in a half moon, were shaggy and long, almost in her eyes. Barefoot, in cut-offs and a T-shirt, Viv, thirteen, was sitting on the mare, Dolly, out in the field, practising looking wistful, and practising whistling—both required holding her mouth in a particular way. Dolly had her head d
own, and was nibbling at the scanty remains of grass. She wasn’t wearing a bridle; Viv had looped two hay ropes together and then noosed them loosely around the horse’s muzzle. After a while she gave up on the whistling and began singing the songs she made up as she went along. Yearny cowboy songs. Songs based on the ones she heard on the radio at her friend Colleen’s. He don’t love me, why don’t he love me, please won’t you love me. Ballads of broken or breaking hearts.
She lay back on the horse’s rump and looked up at the clouds. She had been so sure that turning thirteen would make a difference, but it hadn’t. Who was she, anyhow? Someone named Vivien—Viv now, she had decided—who lived in that room and sat at that place at the table and whose name was on that drawer in the kitchen and above that coat hook in the playroom. Someone who was going into grade nine in September. But what she still did not know, longed desperately to know, was what was the matter with her. What is wrong with you? her mother demanded again and again. What is the matter with you, Vivien?
She hadn’t heard the questions for a while. Her mother was gone again. Not for good—she hadn’t said that for a while—but on a holiday, one of the holidays the money from her teaching job allowed her to take now. This time she was far, far away in Ireland, and right then, in that moment, Vivien was feeling good. She loved being on Dolly. She liked the feel of the old mare under her, her warm fur and regular breathing. Viv’s legs and cut-offs were filthy because Dolly hadn’t been brushed or curry-combed in a long time, and her dusty fur came off in drifts and handfuls, and stuck to Viv’s clothes and her legs. Viv didn’t care about the dirt, but when she went back to the house she’d have to shuck her clothes at the back door and run naked to her room so that Amy wouldn’t get allergic.
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