Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  “He didn’t hit me once … not all the time he’s been here. You’re the mean one. Anyway, I can hit him back.”

  “I wouldn’t advise it,” Alma said.

  “You’re a girl-fucker!” Victor shouted in high good spirits, and then laughed into the tense silence he had created.

  Alma hit him hard in the face. He had a startled, puzzled look as his tongue tasted blood from his nose.

  “Don’t,” Roxanne said, moving between Alma and her younger son.

  Later Roxanne wondered whether they would have sorted it out better if she hadn’t interfered. As it was, Alma left the room, and Roxanne cleaned up Victor’s face. She wanted to talk with him. She wanted to say, “The right word is lesbian, but most people still think that’s as bad as girl-fucker. All either of them means is that your mother and I love each other, and that’s a good thing.” Then she could have told him how to apologize in a way that he could understand. But Victor was not Roxanne’s child, and Roxanne’s feelings were very different from Alma’s. Roxanne was often frightened; she was never ashamed. She didn’t say anything, and he sent himself to his room as soon as the nosebleed was under control.

  “He didn’t mean anything. It’s just a dumb thing he heard.”

  “I know he didn’t,” Roxanne said.

  “Is Mother going to want us back?”

  “Tony, the problem is she doesn’t want you to go. Neither do I, except it will be fun for you to see Arizona and do things with your dad.”

  “Why did she hit Vic like that?”

  “She was scared.”

  “Of Vic?”

  “Of what the world teaches him.”

  “I don’t learn it.”

  “I know you don’t, and I’m glad.”

  Alma had no conversation of the sort with either son. The farewell in the morning was stiff with unforgiven misunderstandings, Alma playing the abused and deserted woman, the boys marchers into a forced exile. Only Mike was absolutely cheerful.

  As the Lincoln finally pulled away, Alma turned to Roxanne and said, “Don’t go to work today. Tell them you’re sick or something. I can’t stay here alone.”

  Roxanne agreed readily enough.

  “We’ll take a picnic and go to the beach,” Alma said.

  It was a beautiful day. A lot of other people had had the same idea, mostly mothers of preschool children and the unemployed. Alma stripped down to a black bikini, oiled herself, and said, “I bought this for you. Do you like it?” Alma said that of anything new she put on. Roxanne didn’t own a bathing suit.

  “Yes,” Roxanne said.

  “No, you’d rather be at Wreck Beach.”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been?”

  It was going to be one of those sexual conversations which might set a lovely erotic tone to the whole day but could as easily tip into angry accusations.

  “Would you like to go?” Roxanne asked.

  “I feel safer among the young mothers,” Alma decided. “But we ought to do something a little wild to celebrate our freedom, don’t you think?”

  Roxanne knew Alma was feeling no more like celebrating than Roxanne did.

  “Most of the nudes at Wreck Beach are men.”

  “So you have been,” Alma said.

  “Once as Pierre’s bodyguard.”

  “Do people … do anything?”

  “Mostly look at each other. There are always a few people tangled up in blankets or sleeping bags.”

  “Would you like to do that?”

  “Not at Wreck Beach.”

  “I want to do something special with you like fuck on the beach or go to a gay bar.”

  “Why those things?” Roxanne asked.

  “I want you to know I don’t care.”

  “Don’t care?”

  “Next time I’ll break his jaw if I have to.”

  “Oh. Alma, he’s just a little boy.”

  “Growing up to be a man as foulmouthed as his father.”

  Roxanne savored that moment of Alma’s hostility toward Mike, but she had to rescue Victor from it.

  “I wanted to talk with him,” Roxanne said. “We really should talk to them both. We should do it together.”

  “Tell them we’re girl-fuckers?” Alma asked lightly.

  “Tell them we love each other.”

  “It’s none of their damned business,” Alma said.

  They watched a toddler, running with diapers at half-mast away from a laughing mother toward the water.

  “You lose them anyway,” Alma said, “That’s the whole point.”

  “Are you afraid Mike won’t send them back?” Roxanne asked.

  “Yes … and no. You aren’t being very good at my mood today, darling. I want to forget I am a mother. I want to be an irresistibly wicked woman in an amusing and relatively safe way.”

  The bars were too rough for Alma to enjoy being irresistible. The coffeehouses catered to fifteen-year-olds, so Alma couldn’t help be reminded that she was a mother. The only possibility was finding a poetry reading or concert that would attract a lot of women and perhaps develop into a party afterward. Roxanne knew enough women from the women’s meetings she had gone to to get a party started, but not on a weeknight in summer.

  “You’ll have to give me some time. There’s no place to go except on weekends.”

  “I want to be a lesbian,” Alma said, rolling over on her stomach. “Oil my back.”

  Roxanne obeyed and let a buggering finger play for a good five minutes in full view of young mothers who simply would not notice anything outlandish or indecent going on on their part of the beach. It frightened her badly but it also made her drunk with lusting gratitude that this absolutely magnificent woman wanted her not only in secret but out in the bright light of day to which Alma, out of wonderful ignorance, was immune. She did not know she could be not only exposed but arrested.

  Where they couldn’t be comfortable was at home. It was contaminated with the boys’ absence.

  “I don’t care where we go, just out,” Alma said.

  No matter where they went, whether to the movies or swimming, they had to deal with men wanting to pick them up.

  “This has never happened to me before in my life,” Alma said.

  “Kids are great bodyguards,” Roxanne said.

  “Or husbands.”

  Roxanne found in the paper an announcement of a talk at UBC in the Student Union Building. “Women’s Liberation—Where Now?” She tried not to take the title personally. If she couldn’t protect Alma from men on the make, Roxanne could provide more seductive alternatives.

  “You mean that’s where lesbians go on a Friday night?”

  “The more interesting ones.”

  “Will everyone be a lesbian?”

  “No.”

  “How will I tell?”

  “Some of them wear buttons.”

  “What will I wear?”

  Roxanne was nearly always caught off guard by Alma’s sudden appearance in any room. She had a style, a presence that attracted attention—her height, her fairness, her simply expensive clothes, the serene planes of her face. Tonight she was in beige raw silk, matching trousers and tailored shirt, thongs on her long, elegant feet. Her ring was a brown sapphire. Roxanne anticipated the stir Alma would cause with pride and apprehension.

  There were perhaps seventy women in a room casually arranged for a talk, some straight chairs fanned across the center of the room unoccupied. Everyone sitting down had chosen the couches along two walls of the room. There was no obvious speaker’s chair or table. Amiable nods turned into welcoming smiles when it was clear Roxanne was with the woman they had never seen before. Roxanne had to introduce Alma to half a dozen women before they could sit down.

  “Who are they all?” Alma asked.

  “Judy’s a painter; Ann works for CBC; Shelagh’s with the human rights office; Dadie’s a grad student in sociology.”

  “How do you know them?”

  Roxa
nne by now was not surprised by Alma’s surprise. The fact that Roxanne had been to jail so colored Alma’s vision of her past that Roxanne had given up trying to set the record straight. It was a source of mild disappointment to Alma that Roxanne didn’t run with a ring of lesbian prostitutes in her spare time.

  “The Women’s Caucus downtown,” Roxanne said.

  “There is a woman wearing a button. You weren’t kidding!”

  A woman sitting on the other side of Alma asked, “Who is this very famous feminist speaker from Toronto nobody’s ever heard of?”

  “She’s my sister’s sociology prof at York,” someone else replied.

  “She’s my sister’s ex-lover.”

  “It should have said so in the Sun,” the first speaker concluded.

  Roxanne smiled. She had forgotten how wryly friendly and kindly rude these women could be. She hadn’t made friends with them exactly, but, when she was lonely, she could drift into their headquarters and always find something to do, mailings to get out, posters to make, babies to tend. Maybe there were still dances to go to where, even alone, you could make a good evening, if you were willing to ask for it. Would Alma like to go to a dance?

  The speaker arrived. Roxanne was more and more often surprised to find the authorities much younger than she was. This professor might have been twenty-five. She was very good-looking. She was kissing everyone who was interested.

  “She’s gay?” Alma whispered.

  It was not a particularly interesting talk, mostly about women’s co-ops, credit unions, banks. Roxanne wished she could interest herself in money, but she was no better at concentrating on it than she was on keeping her mind blank. She listened to the room, the small sounds of restless liveliness women make when they are bored and excited. Alma, beside her, did not move; she was actually listening.

  “But that’s exactly what’s the matter with me,” Alma said excitedly the moment the lecture came to an end. “She understands me completely. It’s what Allen has been trying to tell me for years: money is freedom. She’s right. She’s absolutely right. We have to get our hands on money; that’s all there is to it. Oh, I want to meet her. Do you think we could just go up and introduce ourselves? I just have to say to her …”

  “Of course,” Roxanne said.

  Dadie, the graduate student, caught Roxanne’s arm and held her back from following Alma up to the speaker. “There’s a party at my place after this if you and your friend …”

  “We’d like that. Thanks.”

  “I’ve lost track of you since you left the record store,” Ann of CBC said.

  “I’ve got a job out in Point Grey now.”

  “She new in town?”

  “No,” Roxanne said. “She grew up here.”

  “She doesn’t look … local.”

  Before the evening was over, Roxanne felt like a sort of press secretary for Alma. People seemed shy to approach her directly and so asked their questions of Roxanne instead. Alma was unaware of anyone but the professor, at whose feet she sat, too busy admiring to care whether she was being admired or not.

  “Oh, I wish she taught at UBC,” Alma said as they finally drove home. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who understood me like that. I feel as if my life had been changed. Didn’t she impress you at all?”

  “She’s very good-looking,” Roxanne said, wanting to give her full marks where she could. “I really don’t understand economics, politics …”

  “Do you want to clerk in a drugstore all your life?”

  “Might deliver mail for a change,” Roxanne admitted. “One way of paying the rent is much the same as another—oh, not if you’re educated, I guess.”

  “But it doesn’t pay anything. You can’t do what you want to do without money. And if Allen hadn’t thought of it, you never would have applied for a Canada Council.”

  “I don’t really want that grant.”

  “Oh, if only you’d listened tonight, you’re doing just what she said we do, backing away from money because it’s power, and we’re all terrified of power. Money’s turned Mike into a human being; he doesn’t have to pretend to have power he doesn’t have. With money, Roxanne, you’d be somebody.”

  Roxanne remembered a saying she’d learned from a black friend in jail: “I know I’m somebody because God didn’t make no junk.” It was not a time to tell Alma about it.

  “That doesn’t matter to me either.”

  “What does matter to you?” Alma demanded.

  “You, the boys, friends, my tape recorder …”

  “Yes, but beyond that … there is something.”

  Alma wanted to look for it in other lectures, readings, parties. She began to send out manuscripts of her stories and drop hints about her writing until someone suggested that she give a reading. Smoothing a strand of hair behind her ear, she said modestly, “Oh, I haven’t published anything.” At the end of that evening Alma was explaining to Roxanne that their trouble was defining themselves in male images of success, like being published or performed, when the real value lay in the work itself and sharing it with its real audience.

  Alma had time during the day to get on with her writing. Roxanne rarely looked at her wall, out too late at night to get up early in the morning, loath to let Alma venture out too often on her own.

  “You’re bored with a lot of this, aren’t you?” Alma asked suddenly.

  Roxanne tried to protest.

  “No, but you’ve heard it all before, the theories about why we’re not better than we are. It isn’t that you don’t understand.”

  “I’ve never been very good at the theory,” Roxanne said. “I guess what I’ve always liked about women’s liberation is the women.”

  Alma let out a shout of laughter. Then she looked seriously at Roxanne and said, “You’re so honest and so smart and so good, why are you living with me?”

  A thing begins for any number of reasons, from the way a nipple tugs at a blouse to on whose lap you happen to be sitting on the way home; a thing goes on for only one reason: love. Roxanne was as sure Alma loved her as she was that she loved Alma. Roxanne would stay through times of jealousy, times of being unable to work, times of long and stupid misunderstandings as long as she loved and was loved, which was the hope of happiness.

  “Did you ever go to a consciousness-raising session?” Alma asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What was it like?”

  “What I didn’t like,” Roxanne said, “was people talking about their childhoods: toilet training, sibling rivalry, mother fixations, father fixations. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t have a family to make me unhappy or a course to teach me everyone is unhappy.”

  “I had a lovely childhood,” Alma said. “You’re so silent about yours, I imagine unspeakable things.”

  “It was very ordinary, except I was raised by a series of people. If I think back, I tend to feel sorry for them. It can’t be easy to try to raise kids you don’t love. What puzzled me—you always hear people complain that women talk about nothing but their babies—these women never did. They didn’t want to talk about anybody but themselves.”

  “Well, that’s liberating.”

  Roxanne sentimentalized motherhood. She realized that she missed Tony and Victor far more than Alma did. Roxanne encouraged herself to go on feeling their absence as a test of how genuinely she loved them and wanted them in her life. But of course, women shouldn’t be more interested in their children than they were in themselves. And those meetings, for some of them, were the only time in the week they could let themselves come first.

  “Only naturally very self-centered and selfish women make really good mothers,” Alma explained. “Kids improve them, but they survive. I, for instance, couldn’t have given you up for the boys. If I’d been able to, Tony and Victor would owe me my life. Owing me theirs is enough of a burden.”

  “What I mainly didn’t like about the group was that you weren’t in it.”

  “I keep thinking how b
rave you must have been to go to all these things alone. I wouldn’t dare.”

  Roxanne didn’t say that she went alone precisely to be alone, to have an excuse not to be with the woman she was supposed to be with. When Roxanne finally had the courage to end that relationship, she promised herself that she’d never again get involved with anyone who wasn’t bigger, smarter, and saner than she was. She did not tell Alma such things, not so much out of fear of her jealousy as out of embarrassment, Roxanne seemed to herself nearly retarded in learning both how to love and whom to love. Alma would have a good deal less respect for Roxanne’s experience if she knew how superficial and negative a lot of it had been.

  Alma had three rejection slips in one day.

  “You’re probably sending them to the wrong magazines,” Roxanne suggested.

  “A good story is a good story,” Alma said glumly.

  “But magazines appeal to different sorts of people. I can see that every day.”

  “Only a hack would think about the audience!”

  In the next ten days she had four more.

  “Don’t most writers have drawers full of them?” Roxanne asked.

  “If they send off the stuff they wrote at fourteen. At thirty-three, I’m either a professional or a failure.”

  Alma had such confidence in her own negative judgments Roxanne couldn’t see how to quarrel with them. She certainly was no judge herself. For her what Alma wrote was lies, of the sort Roxanne wished she didn’t tell. Alma’s characters had only those sorts of bad feelings anyone would be expected to have, and they seemed as good at lying to themselves as they were to each other. But all the stories Roxanne read did that. There was no more point in finding fault with it than with complaining that all violins were playing the same note. Probably what Roxanne mistrusted in Alma’s work editors would see as strength, and what Roxanne loved, the quirky speed of it, hurrying when you expected leisure, taking emotional corners on two wheels, counted as a fault.

  When the tenth rejection slip arrived, Alma said, “Okay, that’s that.”

  “What’s what?”

  “I quit,” Alma said. “The one thing too long a marriage taught me is not to stick at what I’m bad at.”

  “But don’t you like to write?”