We So Seldom Look on Love

by Barbara Gowdy

  A drawing of a man’s hat was Beth’s father. He was a hardworking lawyer who stayed late at the office. Beth had a hazy memory of him giving her a bath once, it must have been before her mother ran off. The memory embarrassed her. She wondered if he wished that she had gone with her mother, if, in fact, she was supposed to have gone, because when he came home from work and she was still there, he seemed surprised. “Who do we have here?” he might say. He wanted peace and quiet. When Beth got rambunctious, he narrowed his eyes as though she gave off a bright, painful light.

  Beth knew that he still loved her mother. In the top drawer of his dresser, in an old wallet he never used, he had a snapshot of her mother wearing only a black slip. Beth remembered that slip, and her mother’s tight black dress with the zipper down the back. And her long red fingernails that she clicked on tables. “Your mother was too young to marry,” was her father’s sole disclosure. Her grandmother disclosed nothing, pretending to be deaf if Beth asked about her mother. Beth remembered how her mother used to phone her father for money and how, if her grandmother answered and took the message, she would draw a big dollar sign and then an upside-down V sitting in the middle of a line—a witch’s hat.

  A drawing of an upside-down V without a line was church. When a Presbyterian church was built within walking distance, Beth and her grandmother started going to it, and her grandmother began reading the Bible and counselling Beth by way of biblical quotations. A few months later a crosswalk appeared at the end of the street, and for several years Beth thought that it was a “Presbyterian” instead of a “Pedestrian” crosswalk and that the sign above it said Watch for Presbyterians.

  Her Sunday school teacher was an old, teary-eyed woman who started every class by singing “When Mothers of Salem,” while the children hung up their coats and sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of her. That hymn, specifically the part about Jesus wanting to hold children to His “bosom,” made Beth feel that there was something not right about Jesus, and consequently it was responsible for her six months of anxiety that she would end up in hell. Every night, after saying her prayers, she would spend a few minutes chanting “I love Jesus, I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” the idea being that she could talk herself into it. She didn’t expect to feel earthly love; she awaited the unknown feeling called glory.

  When she began to float, she said to herself, “This is glory.”

  She floated once, sometimes twice a week. Around Christmas it began to happen less often—every ten days to two weeks. Then it dwindled down to only about once a month. She started to chant “I love Jesus” again, not because she was worried any more about going to hell, she just wanted to float.

  By the beginning of the summer holidays she hadn’t floated in almost seven weeks. She phoned her Aunt Cora who said that, yes, floating was glory all right, but that Beth should consider herself lucky it had happened even once. “Nothing that good lasts long,” she sighed. Beth couldn’t stop hoping, though. She went to the park and climbed a tree. Her plan was to jump and have Jesus float her to the ground. But as she stood on a limb, working up her courage, she remembered God seeing the little sparrow fall and letting it fall anyway, and she climbed down.

  She felt that she had just had a close call. She lay on her back on the picnic table, gazing up in wonder at how high up she had been. It was a hot, still day. She heard heat bugs and an ambulance. Presently she went over to the swings and took a turn on each one, since there was nobody else in the park.

  She was on the last swing when Helen McCormack came waddling across the lawn, calling that a boy had just been run over by a car. Beth slid off the swing. “He’s almost dead!” Helen called.

  “Who?” Beth asked.

  “I don’t know his name. Nobody did. He’s about eight. He’s got red hair. The car ran over his leg and his back.”

  “Where?”

  Helen was panting. “I shouldn’t have walked so fast,” she said, holding her hands on either side of her enormous head. “My cranium veins are throbbing.” Little spikes of her wispy blond hair stood out between her fingers.

  “Where did it happen?” Beth said.

  “On Glenmore. In front of the post office.”

  Beth started running toward Glenmore, but Helen called, “There’s nothing there now, everything’s gone!” so Beth stopped and turned, and for a moment Helen and the swings seemed to continue turning, coming round and round like Helen’s voice saying, “You missed the whole thing. You missed it. You missed the whole thing.”

  “He was on his bike,” Helen said, dropping onto a swing, “and an eyewitness said that the car skidded on water and knocked him down, then ran over him twice, once with a front tire and once with a back one. I got there before the ambulance. He probably won’t live. You could tell by his eyes. His eyes were glazed.” Helen’s eyes, blue, huge because of her glasses, didn’t blink.

  “That’s awful,” Beth said.

  “Yes, it really was,” Helen said, matter-of-factly. “He’s not the first person I’ve seen who nearly died, though. My aunt nearly drowned in the bathtub when we were staying at her house. She became a human vegetable.”

  “Was the boy bleeding?” Beth asked.

  “Yes, there was blood everywhere.”

  Beth covered her mouth with both hands.

  Helen looked thoughtful. “I think he’ll probably die,” she said. She pumped her fat legs but without enough energy to get the swing going. “I’m going to die soon,” she said.

  “You are?”

  “You probably know that I have water on the brain,” Helen said.

  “Yes, I know that,” Beth said. Everyone knew. It was why Helen wasn’t supposed to run. It was why her head was so big.

  “Well, more and more water keeps dripping in all the time, and one day there will be so much that my brain will literally drown in it.”

  “Who said?”

  “The doctors, who else?”

  “They said, ‘You’re going to die’?”

  Helen threw her an ironic look. “Not exactly. What they tell you is, you’re not going to live.” She squinted up at a plane going by. “The boy, he had … I think it was a rib, sticking out of his back.”

  “Really?”

  “I think it was a rib. It was hard to tell because of all the blood.” With the toe of her shoe, Helen began to jab a hole in the sand under her swing. “A man from the post office hosed the blood down the sewer, but some of it was already caked from the sun.”

  Beth walked toward the shade of the picnic table. The air was so thick and still. Her arms and legs, cutting through it, seemed to produce a thousand soft clashes.

  “The driver was an old man,” Helen said, “and he was crying uncontrollably.”

  “Anybody would cry,” Beth said hotly. Her eyes filled with tears.

  Helen squirmed off her swing and came over to the table. Grunting with effort, she climbed onto the seat across from Beth and began to roll her head. “At least I’ll die in one piece,” she said.

  “Are you really going to?” Beth asked.

  “Yep.” Helen rotated her head three times one way, then three times the other. Then she propped it up with her hands cupped under her chin.

  “But can’t they do anything to stop the water dripping in?” Beth asked.

  “Nope,” Helen said distantly, as if she were thinking about something more interesting.

  “You know what?” Beth said, swiping at her tears. “If every night, you closed your eyes and chanted over and over ‘Water go away, water go away, water go away,’ maybe it would start to, and then your head would shrink down.”

  Helen smirked. “Somehow,” she said, “I doubt it.”

  From the edge of the picnic table Beth tore a long sliver of wood like the boy’s rib. She pictured the boy riding his bike no-hands, zigzagging down the street the way boys did. She imagined bursting Helen’s head with the splinter to let the water gush out.

  “I’m thirsty,” Helen sighed. “
I’ve had a big shock today. I’m going home for some lemonade.”

  Beth went with her. It was like walking with her grandmother, who, because of arthritis in her hips, also rocked from side to side and took up the whole sidewalk. Beth asked Helen where she lived.

  “I can’t talk,” Helen panted. “I’m trying to breathe.”

  Beth thought that Helen lived in the apartments where the immigrants, crazy people and bums were, but Helen went past those apartments and up the hill to the new Regal Heights subdivision, which had once been a landfill site. Her house was a split-level with a little turret above the garage. On the door was an engraved wooden sign, the kind that Beth had seen nailed to posts in front of cottages. No Solicitors, it said.

  “My father is a solicitor,” Beth said.

  Helen was concentrating on opening the door. “Darn thing’s always stuck,” she muttered as she shoved it open with her shoulder. “I’m home!” she hollered, then sat heavily on a small mauve suitcase next to the door.

  Across the hallway a beautiful woman was dusting the ceiling with a mop. She had dark, curly hair tied up in a red ribbon, and long, slim legs in white short shorts.

  To Beth’s amazement she was Helen’s mother. “You can call me Joyce,” she said, smiling at Beth as though she loved her. “Who’s this lump of potatoes,” she laughed, pointing the mop at Helen.

  Helen stood up. “A boy got run over on Glenmore,” she said.

  Joyce’s eyes widened, and she looked at Beth.

  “I didn’t see it,” Beth told her.

  “We’re dying of thirst,” Helen said. “We want lemonade in my room.”

  While Joyce made lemonade from a can, Helen sat at the kitchen table, resting her head on her folded arms. Joyce’s questions about the accident seemed to bore her. “We don’t need ice,” she said impatiently when Joyce went to open the freezer. She demanded cookies, and Joyce poured some Oreos onto the tray with their coffee mugs of lemonade, then handed the tray to Beth, saying with a little laugh that, sure as shooting, Helen would tip it over.

  “I’m always spilling things,” Helen agreed.

  Beth carried the tray through the kitchen to the hallway. “Why is that there?” she asked, nodding at the suitcase beside the front door.

  “That’s my hospital suitcase,” Helen said. “It’s all packed for an emergency.” She pushed open her bedroom door so that it banged against the wall. The walls were the same mauve as the suitcase, and there was a smell of paint. Everything was put away—no clothes lying around, no games or toys on the floor. The dolls and books, lined up on white bookshelves, looked as if they were for sale. Beth thought contritely of her own dolls, their tangled hair and dirty dresses, half of them naked, some of them missing legs and hands, she could never remember why, she could never figure out how a hand got in with her Scrabble letters.

  She set the tray down on Helen’s desk. Above the desk was a chart that said “Heart Rate,” “Blood Pressure” and “Bowel Movements” down the side. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “My bodily functions chart.” Helen grabbed a handful of cookies. “We’re keeping track every week to see how much things change before they completely stop. We’re conducting an experiment.”

  Beth stared at the neatly stencilled numbers and the gently waving red lines. She had the feeling that she was missing something as stunning and obvious as the fact that her mother was gone for good. For years after her mother left she asked her father, “When is she coming back?” Her father, looking confused, always answered, “Never,” but Beth just couldn’t understand what he meant by that, not until she finally thought to ask, “When is she coming back for the rest of her life?”

  She turned to Helen. “When are you going to die?”

  Helen shrugged. “There’s no exact date,” she said with her mouth full.

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Why should I be? Dying the way I’m going to doesn’t hurt, you know.”

  Beth sat on the bed. There was the hard feel of plastic under the spread and blankets. She recognized it from when she’d had her tonsils out and they’d put plastic under her sheets then. “I hope that boy hasn’t died,” she said, suddenly thinking of him again.

  “He probably has,” Helen said, running a finger along the lowest line in the chart.

  The lines were one above the other, not intersecting. When Beth’s grandmother drew one wavy line, that was water. Beth closed her eyes. Water go away, she said to herself. Water go away, water go away …

  “What are you doing?” The bed bounced, splashing lemonade out of Beth’s mug as Helen sat down.

  “I was conducting an experiment,” Beth said.

  “What experiment?”

  More lemonade, this time from Helen’s mug, poured onto Beth’s leg and her shorts. “Look what you’re doing!” Beth cried. She used the corner of the bedspread to dry herself. “You’re so stupid sometimes,” she muttered.

  Helen drank down what was left in her mug. “For your information,” she said, wiping her mouth on her arm, “it’s not stupidity. It’s deterioration of the part of my brain lobe that tells my muscles what to do.”

  Beth looked up at her. “Oh, from the water,” she said softly.

  “Water is one of the most destructive forces known to mankind,” Helen said.

  “I’m sorry,” Beth murmured. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “So what did you mean you were conducting an experiment?” Helen asked, pushing her glasses up on her nose.

  “You know what?” Beth said. “We could both do it.” She felt a thrill of virtuous resolve. “Remember what I said about chanting ‘Water go away, water go away’? We could both chant it and see what happens.”

  “Brother,” Helen sighed.

  Beth put her lemonade on the table and jumped off the bed. “We’ll make a chart,” she said, fishing around in the drawer of Helen’s desk for a pen and some paper. She found a red pencil. “Do you have any paper?” she asked. “We need paper and a measuring tape.”

  “Brother,” Helen said again, but she left the room and came back a few minutes later with a pad of foolscap and her mother’s sewing basket.

  Beth wrote “Date” and “Size” at the top of the page and underlined it twice. Under “Date” she wrote “June 30,” then she unwound the measuring tape and measured Helen’s head—the circumference above her eyebrows—and wrote “27½.” Then she and Helen sat cross-legged on the floor, closed their eyes, held each other’s hands and said, “Water go away,” starting out in almost a whisper, but Helen kept speeding up, and Beth had to raise her voice to slow her down. After a few moments both of them were shouting, and Helen was digging her nails into Beth’s fingers.

  “Stop!” Beth cried. She yanked her hands free. “It’s supposed to be slow and quiet!” she cried. “Like praying!”

  “We don’t go to church,” Helen said, pressing her hands on either side of her head. “Whew,” she breathed. “For a minute there I thought that my cranium veins were throbbing again.”

  “We did it wrong,” Beth said crossly. Helen leaned over to get the measuring tape. “You should chant tonight before you go to bed,” Beth said, watching as Helen pulled on the bedpost to hoist herself to her feet. “Chant slowly and softly. I’ll come back tomorrow after lunch and we’ll do it together again. We’ll just keep doing it every afternoon for the whole summer, if that’s what it takes. Okay?”

  Helen was measuring her hips, her wide, womanly hips in their dark green Bermuda shorts.

  “Okay?” Beth repeated.

  Helen bent over to read the tape. “Sure,” she said indifferently.

  When Beth got back to her own place, her grandmother was playing her “Sea to Sea” record and making black bean soup and dinner rolls. Talking loudly to be heard over the music, Beth told her about the car accident and Helen. Her grandmother knew about Helen’s condition but thought that she was retarded—in the flour sprinkled on the table she traced a circle with a
triangle sitting on it, which was “dunce,” and a question mark.

  “No,” Beth said, surprised. “She gets all A’s.”

  Her grandmother pulled out her pad and pencil and wrote, “Don’t get her hopes up.”

  “But when you pray, that’s getting your hopes up,” Beth argued.

  Her grandmother looked impressed. “We walk by faith,” she wrote.

  There was a sudden silence. “Do you want to hear side two?” Beth asked. Her grandmother made a cross with her fingers. “Oh, okay,” Beth said and went into the living room and put on her grandmother’s other record, the Christmas one. The first song was “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” Beth’s father’s name was Harold. The black bean soup, his favourite, meant he’d be home for supper. Beth wandered down the hall to his den and sat in his green leather chair and swivelled for a moment to the music. “Offspring of a Virgin’s womb …”

  After a few minutes she got off the chair and began searching through his wastepaper basket. Whenever she was in here and noticed that the basket hadn’t been emptied, she looked at what was in it. Usually just pencil shavings and long handwritten business letters with lots of crossed- out sentences and notes in the margins. Sometimes there were phone messages from his office, where he was called Hal, by Sue, the woman who wrote the messages out.

  “ pdq!” Sue wrote. “ asap!”

  Today there were several envelopes addressed to her father, a couple of flyers, an empty cigarette package and a crumpled pink note from her grandmother’s pad. Beth opened the note up.

  “Call,” it said, and then there was an upside-down V. Underneath that was a telephone number.