More in Anger

by J. Jill Robinson

  She was in grad school now, supposedly thinking complex literary thoughts, challenging her intellect, reading deeply, preparing presentations. Not killing more and more time with Chas. As they drove, she’d glance at her texts beside her on the seat, maybe tell him what she’d been reading about her specialty, the metaphysical poets, and she quoted some of them to set them in her mind, and told him why they were called that, and what the differences were among them. She taught him their names, and praised him like a pet when he could repeat them. Donne. Herbert. Marvell. Vaughan. Crashaw. And maybe, said some, Traherne. “Good boy!” she laughed. “Well done!”

  “Woolf,” said Chas. “Woof woof.”

  She told him what she was learning about love, and about the tug-of-war between bodily pleasure and the welfare of the soul in Henry Vaughan. She told him about Sir Philip Sidney, and the love between Astrophel and Stella. About Pound, and Stevens, and why they were so hard to access and why that was good, or bad, depending on what you thought about poetry. Was accessibility a crime or a virtue?

  “You’re getting good stuff into that pretty head of yours, aren’t you?” Chas said proudly, with a loving smile. “But Vivvy—can you change a tire?”

  On their first New Year’s Eve, he showed up with red wine instead of white and she lost it. How many times had she said white? Didn’t he know by now she hated red? She was so pissed off she called him a stupid fucking idiot and he left. And as he left, with the door wide open and other tenants in the foyer, he yelled at her for the first time.

  “I don’t fucking need this, Viv. I don’t.”

  She slammed the door behind him. Her heart pounded with excitement. But he didn’t come back. He didn’t answer his phone, wouldn’t come to his door or his window. His roommate, Teddy, half snapped and wearing a Santa hat, answered the front door with a smoke between his lips and a hot rum in his hand. “Sorry there, Vivvy. Not home. Well, home but not home. You know?”

  At the corner store, she bought a deck of smokes with pennies and nickels she scrounged from all her pockets and then she sat on her couch, which, like all her furniture, had come from Chas, and looked around at the emptiness. No liquor. Nothing.

  As midnight approached, she walked down to his house again. His truck was gone. The house was dark. The front door locked. His downstairs window was locked. What a bitch she was. She deserved to be locked out. She walked back to her apartment building down the alleys and heaved open the back door. Why was she like this? She went down the steps and closed her apartment door behind her and locked it. Stood alone in the silence. With a deep aching wish for her life not to be the way it was, for her not to be the way she was. What was the matter with her? She needed to somehow occupy the container that was her life differently. She needed to exorcise the nasty and mean someone crammed in here with her, crowding her out, breathing fire. Making her be a way her true self wasn’t. She didn’t know who she was sometimes, it was crazy, like she was possessed. If only Chas would. It would help. If only he wouldn’t. Then, then she would be better, but first he had to. But what hope was there of that? That night she quit drinking.

  On their honeymoon in Honolulu, she knew she should be happy, but she wasn’t. At least not right now. Right now she was totally pissed off because her new husband had made no move to carry her over the threshold of the hotel room, no move to take her in his arms, to sweep her off her feet and make passionate I-can’t-live-without-you, newly married, now-you-are-my-wife love to her the way she thought he should. He was waiting for her to get things going. Again. To make the decisions. Again. Why did he never take the initiative? Why was life always such a goddam struggle? Would she never be happy?

  “What’s with you, anyway?” she asked Chas. “Don’t you want me?”

  “Let’s see, Viv,” he said nicely, buttoning up his new Hawaiian shirt. “We just got married. We’re in Hawaii on a honeymoon. What do you think?”

  “What’s the matter with you, then? Or better, what’s the matter with me?”

  He didn’t answer. Just stood there, looking sad. And angry.

  “What’s the matter with me, Chas?” she prodded. “Why won’t you touch me? Am I so repulsive?”

  He shook his head.

  “Jesus. You never fucking answer, Chas. You might as well be a deaf-mute for fuck’s sake. Where’s the joint?”

  “In the ashtray,” he said. “I’m going to the bar.”

  “Bar bar bar. Since I quit drinking, you always go to the bar. So fucking go, Chas. Avoid the issues. Just fucking go. Leave me here to have my honeymoon by myself.”

  And he did.

  She slid the patio door open slowly and stepped out onto the cement balcony, where a white pigeon was perched on the railing. “Hey birdie,” she said. The pigeon cocked its head and the sight was repulsive. There was no eye on the other side of its head, no feathers, just a gaping hole pecked into its skull, feathers, flesh, eye pecked off and out and down to the bone.

  Chas turned on the TV right after his morning piss while he got ready for work and made his lunch. When he came back in the door from work, he had two numbers rolled and he handed her one and kissed her if she let him and held out the lighter. He cracked a beer and turned on the TV again to watch the game while she cooked them gourmet meals, which were followed by some crib and maybe a video. But if he was late and hadn’t called to tell her, a blind fury rose in her and she pitched the food in the garbage as he came in the door. His friendly face turned livid, his grey face filled with thunder.

  “You don’t like me,” he said, miserable, angry. “That’s what it is, plain and simple, Viv. You don’t like me.”

  “I like you, Chas. I love you with all my heart. More than anything on earth.”

  “You’re pissed off all the goddam time about something. Do you know that? It’s goddam impossible to make you happy.”

  “That isn’t true. I’m not. If you would just—”

  “Shut up, Viv! Give it a rest. For fuck’s sake.”

  “But really, Chas, it’s the truth. Isn’t it? There’s always something you’d rather do than come home on time, isn’t there?”

  “No.”

  “Because who the fuck would want to come home to someone like me? Don’t lie to me. Right? Right?” She followed him down the hall. “So. I’m not saying another word after this. After today. If you don’t care, neither do I. You make me so goddam mad, Chas. I love you, but you piss me off so much I can’t tell you.”

  “The whole world pisses you off, Vivien. And you piss your-self off, too.” And he slammed the door.

  An hour later he came back, his eyes bloodshot. He was going to start the kitchen renos on the weekend, he said, and he would appreciate some input. A ceiling fan, a new kitchen counter, a bigger kitchen window. Would plain white paint do the trick? What did she want? Would she please just tell him what the hell she wanted?

  She graduated and started teaching part-time. They bought a little house. They each had a vehicle. She liked buying him clothes; she liked buying music; she bought him a watch. On Friday nights he brought home flowers and Chinese and they got out the chopsticks and emptied every bowl and plate before they rolled over to the sofa to open their fortune cookies and watch TV until the double-fudge brownies were done and she loaded on the ice cream and chocolate sauce and brought them over. Goldie the engagement dog lazed between them on the couch, head on a knee, paw in a lap, and occasionally their hands touched as they petted him. Viv started running to keep the weight off, while Chas grew pudgy. She grew to love running, loved how invigorating it was, the growing distance she could cover. She became as proportionately lean as she had been when she was a child, when she could feel her bones beneath her flesh and muscle. If she ran angry, she ran better, faster. Now, if she could find a way to do that with the rest of her life.

  “This is the good life,” Chas said. “We’re living it, honey.”

  Nice to see that you have finally settled down, wrote her mother. I attribute
that fully to Charles. Charles is a fine fellow. Steady. Reliable. Charles is just what you need.

  “I am bored out of my fucking skull,” she said to the mirror.

  “You just can’t live without some bloody drama going on,” Chas said behind her. “You should have been an actress. You’re wired with drama. I don’t think you even want to be happy, do you?”

  “Actor. Of course I don’t want to be happy, Chas. Why would I? What do you think? To be blunt, what I want is to get laid. You haven’t kissed me in weeks.”

  “You think I’m crazy? You think I’m going to climb into a chipper? When’s the last time you kissed me?”

  “Right. This is going nowhere fast, Charles. You know, the more you pull away, the worse it’s going to get. I’m serious.”

  The day the semester ended, Viv, furious at Chas over his obvious rejection of her, rolled some joints, hopped in the van and headed for the coast. In under an hour she had fled her mother’s. The bitch. Why had she gone there, anyway? Viv was barely in the door when her mother handed her a list. Not even a hello, Vivien, how nice to see you. No how was your trip. No would you like a cup of tea. It was clean the eavestroughs. Take out the garbage. Sweep the sidewalks. “You had better concentrate on getting changed into your work clothes,” her mother had said in greeting. “You’re late.” Put it on a fucking placard, Mother.

  What the hell had she thought would happen? That her mother would be understanding? Give her marital advice? Console her? Fat chance. But Viv had tried, anyway. “I am having some trouble in my marriage, Mum,” she had said from the stepladder. “I don’t know what to do.” And what happened then? Her mother told her that whatever it was, it was her own fault. That Viv should look to herself, to her own behaviour, for an answer to that. Viv could have dropped crap from the eavestroughs onto her head but she resisted. She should have known her mother would take his side. Was she out of her fucking skull for going there with some weird form of tattered and bleeding hope? Practically begging for help? What a suck she was.

  Approaching the exit for Beresford, she lit a joint and rolled down the window. Trees along the roadsides tossed in a building wind. The clouds were dark and low. Viv drove the six miles down 200th Street and stopped the van on the side of the road near their old place and got out. The big chain-link gate was locked, but she refused to be deterred and her anger propelled her over the high barbed wire fence and she jumped down, started walking down the gravel pit road that would lead to the property line.

  The oldest nightmare she could remember had taken place on this road. In the dream, instead of turning up their driveway, Pearl had come in here, which was puzzling because she never came in here. It was pitch-dark, and Pearl had stopped the car on the deserted gravel road. She put on the emergency brake, turned off the lights and turned towards Viv. Pearl’s eyes gleamed in the dark with a wild and white craziness, and Viv’s heart stopped. Her mother was going to kill her.

  Now, instead, she wished someone would kill her mother, bash her fucking head in. Viv strode more quickly, anger still pulsing. Why did no one ever take her side? Why was she still so fucking stupid about her mother? Why couldn’t she ever, ever get it through her thick head and give up?

  She felt better the moment she breathed the air in what had been their part of the woods, as though her body recognized the place in her lungs; as though the woods remembered her and still belonged to her, and her to them. Her body remembered how to move through the woods, how to push branches out of the way while bending, while turning; when to step on, step over, push through. Here, she couldn’t get lost no matter how deep she went into thickets and forest.

  And then she was home. Home, at the heart of the property. Home, in the tree roots where she had curled up and found comfort. When she was six eight ten twelve thirteen fourteen and then. She stopped, closed her eyes and listened as the rain started to come heavily, slapping against the vine maple leaves, dripping from evergreen branches then soaking her hair and her coat. “Don’t cry,” she whispered, sitting down in the cubbyhole formed by the roots and wrapping her arms around herself. Please don’t cry.

  She felt calm when she again raised her head, when she saw her child-self up ahead running towards her from the log that crossed over the creek, running towards this forest all those days all those years all those times ago, along those familiar paths, now gone, grown over. She knew the trees, knew the tall old green beside the dead gold grasses of last year’s meadow. She knew this place better than she knew anywhere else on earth, and it knew her. Here she was again, all these years later, again seeking solace. She stood and moved on towards the creek, where she expected to be able to glimpse the house from its banks. But the trees had grown huge, and her view was blocked by trunks, branches, leaves and ferns.

  The rain became a downpour as she drove to her father’s. From one house to the other, she thought, from her mother’s to her father’s, like she was a clothesline screwed in tight at both ends and heavy laden with dripping wet clothes. Her mother’s rotting deck and pine needles, her constant complaining and criticism. Her father’s stinky old planter boxes, his negativity and his rye. And Scotch. And gin. The fucking north and south poles of her life. What the hell was going on? Where did she belong?

  “Have you been crying, dear?” her father asked solicitously, greeting her at the front door.

  “Yes,” she snuffled.

  “Has someone been unkind to you?”

  “My mother. Of course. Do you have any Kleenex, Dad?”

  “I have this—will this do?” He took a clean pressed handkerchief from inside his suit jacket. “Has she, dear?”

  “Thanks. Don’t sound so surprised. Of course she has. When is she ever anything else?” She sobbed against his chest. “Oh, Daddy. She has always been mean to me. Always.”

  “Dear heart. I’m sorry to hear that.” He patted her shoulder. “Come in. What have you been doing to get so wet? Maybe you should get changed. I think that what you need is a drink. Would you like a drink? I’m having one.”

  She pulled angrily away. “I don’t drink. Remember? Why don’t you ever remember, Dad?” She followed him into the house and up the stairs. “Dad? Why didn’t you help us? When we were little, why didn’t you tell her to stop being so wretchedly bloody awful to us? Dad?”

  “I didn’t know, dear! I was at work, you know.”

  “Not all the time, you weren’t. Not at night, and on weekends.”

  He paused, spoke more coolly. “Well, I don’t know about that. Maybe I was on call. Would you like a drink or not?”

  “No! I told you. You never listen to me.”

  “I do, dear.”

  “Dad, Mum was horrible to you too. You must remember that. And surely you must have been able to figure out that if she treated you like that, chances were you weren’t the only one. Or did you just believe her when she said we were just plain bad?”

  “Dear, you are sounding quite fierce and you’ve only just arrived. I don’t remember her saying that.” He opened the fridge.

  “How convenient for you.”

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  In the bedroom that used to be hers, she found a hot pink track suit of Amy’s in the closet. Amy, Amy. She announced her presence everywhere, oh sweet and obedient daughter, and unlike Viv, was welcomed and at home everywhere she went. Must be nice to have the “good” market cornered. Must be nice to be so nice. Viv peeled off her wet clothes and put on the track suit. It was too big and she hated pink.

  “You look better, dear,” her father said when she entered the living room. “Less dishevelled, overall. Certainly dryer. Pink is a nice colour on you. Now sit down over here. I have something to show you. Have you heard about Cecilia Bartoli? She’s quite a girl. With quite the voice. Everyone’s talking about her, you know.” He waved the video box in Viv’s face.

  “Don’t, Dad. I’ve seen that video about ten times.”

  “She’s a lovel
y girl. I don’t think you’ve seen this one. Not this particular one. Sit back down, dear, and I’ll put it on for you. It’ll take your mind off things.”

  “I said I’ve seen it.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t.”

  “Dad, I just got here. I don’t want to watch TV.”

  “Sit down on the couch and watch this video with me. You’ll feel better.”

  “No, thank you.”

  He stood up. “Vivien—”

  “Dad! Quit telling me what to do all the time!”

  “You are really quite fierce,” he said mildly, as the video began and Bartoli’s voice filled the room. “You know, Vivien, you can’t possibly fight the whole world. And I think you are fighting it more than it is fighting you. Make love not war, you know that bumper sticker, dear? Now be a good guest and sit down.”

  The idea of their mother’s falling in love at all—or anyone’s falling in love with her—verged on the obscene. Viv had laughed when Amy called to tell her. “Who with? With whom? You have got to be kidding,” she said. But there was Pearl, and there was Roger Werner. (Where had she found him? Surely not at the hair-dresser’s, she and Amy giggled. Did she meet him at Safeway? At the doctor’s?) And now, after a mere six months’ courtship, they were getting married. Pearl’s giddy behaviour, which included a rusty kind of giggling on the phone, was unsettling. Her attempts at being coy with wedding details, her bizarrely girlish response to Roger’s mooning and fawning over her (which was so odd in itself), were downright strange. But. Maybe a transformation was possible. None of her daughters would have believed it to be possible, but it was beginning to seem that they were wrong. Miracles did happen, right? She certainly seemed happier, said Amy. Well, maybe now they could visit without going into emotional contortions, said Ruby, while Laurel’s comment was that maybe now they would be able to have a real relationship with their mother. Dream on, said Viv. But. Maybe she was mistaken. And it seemed to be so: during the coming year Pearl seemed capable of being genuinely nice.