by Lisa Moore
But a baby; the cry for a baby was like a haunting. John had thought they needed a priest or some holy man of another stripe to exorcise it. He felt that he’d been let in on a glimpse of what Sophie would become: hunched and puffy-lidded, ghoulish against the faintly green-tinted fresh paint. This had nothing to do with the nakedness of Sophie’s back in her black sequined dress or the sound of her flute in the late afternoon—the things he loved. She was looking for an enslavement that would chain them both. She wanted to put aside all of her elegance for something squalling and blood related. The sight of blood made John faint.
The walk across the lane from her apartment that night drenched him to the skin. He waited for the car to warm up. It smelled of the wet tweed coat he was wearing. It was as if Sophie had been washed away.
And she didn’t phone, though he’d expected her to and had made plans to change his number.
He saw her two months later on the street hanging off the arm of a guy with a guitar strapped to his back. She looked overjoyed to see him. There was no sign of fierceness now. She hugged him with one arm, not quite disentangling from the musician. She introduced John, calling him a really fantastic friend, and did not provide any identifying information about the musician who was tugging her away.
We’re late, Sophie explained to John. She shrugged, as if being late was a little caprice she shared with the musician, a cute quirk to which they had become inexplicably vulnerable as a couple.
After this chance encounter John had been briefly but thoroughly heartbroken. He saw what he had lost: the scratchy scarf she wound around her neck; she was gawky and too tall; she had a camera, was always concocting some kind of memento; once he’d seen her twist the foil from someone’s cigarette pack into an origami swan. He was thirty-two at the time; what was wrong with children? He found himself looking at backpacks and Snuglis. It was the fact that children were not portable that frightened him. Not portable enough. He racked his brain but he could not remember the musician’s name.
After Sophie, John discovered he enjoyed sleeping with younger women. Five, ten years younger. These young women were not in any hurry to get pregnant; they were militant about protecting against it. He loved their Face-books and pink cellphones and cotton panties, more athletic and good-humoured than sexy, with half-funny quips scrawled across the ass. He loved the hundreds of pictures they took of themselves with cameras held at arm’s length, their Mike’s Hard Lemonade and midnight binges of chips, dressing and gravy, and the empty beer bottles on the faded Arborite and chrome tables they picked up at the Sally Ann and frequently threatened to sell on eBay for a fortune. He liked their lip gloss with flavours from childhood (watermelon, bubblegum), and just how fast they were to parse a romance or a brawl.
They were fast/slow at sex, both diffident and indefatigable, petulant only in a sort of parodic way, and above all, generous. Ultimately, it didn’t seem to be about them. It was as though they had all read Dale Carnegie and expected to get somewhere by being friendly. He found there was plenty to go around, and he could not get enough.
John’s parents, before his father died, had spent time around the bay and eventually bought land near a lake where they spent their weekends. John had liked the saturated intensity of those childhood evenings, his mother and father on the wharf holding plastic glasses or enamel camping cups with rye and ice. His mother’s crocheted bikini, her dark tan. His parents would watch him fish and they would drink, sometimes talking to each other, sometimes not. When they spoke to him they spoke quietly, knowing their voices carried over the still surface. He could hear a neighbour’s fishing line at the other end of the lake, unfurling, cutting through the air.
His parents had been more together than apart. They had grown together; they had been the same. John did not want that for himself.
… . .
Helen Dating, 2006
AND SO, AFTER many emails, Helen had a date. She had said she would be wearing a purple coat and she would be at the bar, and it was awful sitting there alone with her gin and tonic.
Every eye was on her, knowing she was a fraud. Knowing she did not belong in a bar. She was a hunk of meat hanging on a hook, waiting for a buyer. She had been to Halliday’s that afternoon and the butcher had opened the door to the walk-in fridge and she’d seen what must have been, at one time, a cow, hanging from a hook.
She had smelled the frost and mineral-laden air. The rusty smell of frozen blood, and she’d seen the skeins of yellow fat. The butcher had come out and smacked his hands together and rubbed them back and forth, and he’d laid a steak on the stainless steel cutting board and turned on the saw, and he’d cubed it for her. Little stiff cubes with frost fibres in the purplish flesh, and this, Helen realizes now, is herself, her own heart, sliding back and forth under the blade.
Her heart was loud in her chest and it would be a lie to say she wasn’t exhilarated. None of her friends would have the guts to do this, to stay on this bar stool, to wait. She did not know one person who could do as she was doing.
The poor young waitress behind the bar—she tried so hard to look like there was nothing strange about Helen. She tried to look like she had never in her life heard of loneliness or decay or rot or maggots or something slower and less dignified, this middle-aged need to touch someone. The bartender mentioned the weather and her courses at university, she made small talk, and Helen kept saying, Pardon me? Because she couldn’t hold the beginning of a thought together with the end of it; she was too scared.
When customers came into the bar there was a blast of cold and snow because it was snowing hard, and the traffic would be a problem in this kind of weather. Helen sat where she could see the door and she counted seven men who might have been Heathcliff.
The man she was waiting for had called himself Heathcliff and he was an insurance salesman, but somebody somewhere had told him that women like literary types. They like to think you’re sensitive, he’d written to Helen.
He had confessed all this to Helen and he was liberal with the emoticons. They had written to each other every day for three months, Helen and Heathcliff.
Nineteen people entered the bar while Helen waited and seven of the nineteen might have been him. There were seven possible Heathcliffs, and they came in and got themselves a drink and left, and none of them looked at her. They sat by themselves without removing their coats and the bartender put drinks down in front of them and they drank hunched over the glass as if they expected someone to grab it.
Or they took off their coats and were joined by someone from the office and they drank one fast beer because the wife was waiting. The wife had supper on. They accepted a glass with their beer but they didn’t drink from the glass; they drank directly from the bottle and they put the bottle down with finality and shrugged themselves back into their coats.
One man in a herringbone coat with a wine-coloured cashmere scarf and black gloves leaned into the bar beside Helen, and of course she thought it was him.
Some weather, he said.
Is it getting nasty, she asked. The bartender put down a shot glass in front of the man and he peeled off a bill from a wad of bills and he said to the bartender: I want you to make me a solemn promise. You won’t give me another one of these supposing I twist your arm.
The girl rolled her eyes and Helen saw they were flirting, though the man was thirty years older. The girl was happy to flirt. She couldn’t have been more than twenty and Helen felt ridiculously warmed by the flirting. It was as if they were including her, and the girl was rolling her eyes for Helen’s benefit, and wasn’t it funny—the ugly weather and the older man draining the shot glass in one gulp and touching the glass back down deliberately. His cellphone rang and he took it out of his pocket and looked at the number and turned it off and put it back in his pocket.
That’s the wife, he said. He gave a little shudder and the girl behind the counter smirked. He was the kind of man who wanted the bartender to know what his usual was. It wasn’t
Heathcliff because Heathcliff didn’t have a wife.
The man exhaled deeply and Helen smelled the Scotch and a mint, and underneath those smells something bad. It was just a whiff of mint and Scotch and a bitter smell, the smell of a long afternoon trapped in an office, trapped in some unsavoury pursuit.
Now, the man said. Give me another one, my love. The girl made a little show of crossing her arms, closing her eyes and tilting her chin up, a show of primness. She was pretending to be unmovable.
Don’t make me come over this counter after you, the man said.
The girl sighed a deep stage sigh and poured the drink.
Because I don’t mind one bit coming after you, the man said. He was smiling. He was not Heathcliff.
And it occurred to Helen then that Heathcliff had come and gone. She was slow to accept it. She was stunned.
Heathcliff had come and looked at her and didn’t find her attractive. It was so far outside the scope of what she knew to be decent human behaviour that she could not fathom it, though some part of her also knew it exactly. She went to the bathroom and got down on her knees in front of the filthy toilet and puked. The floor of the bathroom had slush all over it and the knees of her nylons were soaked; a single tiny stone dug sharply into her knee. What she was vomiting was the belief that getting old didn’t matter. Because it did matter. It mattered a lot and there was no stopping it, and everything inside her heaved out that idea.
Helen had read an entire email about the pain of having a plantar wart removed from the sole of Heathcliff’s foot. She had commiserated. He had been afraid and she had written right away to find out how the laser treatment had gone.
They had been erotic online. She had confessed certain fantasies. He had said what he liked. She had been flowery and subtle; he was blunt and clichéd.
The bar door slammed with the wind. The wind took the door and it crashed closed.
Heathcliff never wrote her again, and Helen never wrote him. But the grotesque banality and the acute intimacy of the plantar wart email haunted her for months afterwards.
… . .
Back in the Workforce, 1990s
THERE FOLLOWED, AFTER Cal died and the children were older, a job in an office, and Helen had to learn about computers. All the other employees were twenty years younger. The bloody audit, the bloody audit. For ten years she had a boss who called to her through the corridors, Here comes the old bat. Trevor Baxter was American and he was trying to be funny.
Helen hated computers. All she did was work and sleep. She fell asleep in her car, waiting for it to warm up. She fell asleep in a bank lineup, her wallet spilling out of her hand. She was depressed, the doctor said. She was menopausal. He prescribed transcendental meditation. He prescribed confession and the Holy Eucharist. What about a trip, he said.
Trevor Baxter said, Here comes the old bat, five minutes late, I see. Standing in the door of his office, looking at his watch.
The old bat is late again, he’d boom.
Helen would not complain because she knew Trevor Baxter’s wife was leaving him and his heart was a canker. He could not boil an egg, he had once told her, weeping at his desk. He could not match his socks when they came out of the dryer. He banged around his empty house by himself; he did not sleep. He hadn’t slept in months.
The children are on her side, he told Helen. The children barely spoke to him. His sister-in-law had attacked him in the supermarket, shrill and castigating.
So tight you squeak, the sister-in-law had hissed.
Trevor Baxter had grown up in poverty. He would not have it. All the spending. He knew the value of a dollar. Let her loose with a credit card? he’d snorted. Not in this lifetime.
Trevor had come home one day and the dining room table was gone, and the chairs and half of the cutlery, and there were things missing it took him weeks to notice. His wife had taken the corkscrew. She had taken the oven mitts. The salt shaker that had been passed down in his father’s family for four generations. He had been making all the money for both of them; in his mind, it was for them both. And so she had taken half. There was nothing he could do to stop it. She had taken half but he had lost everything. That was the math of it.
Of course Helen pitied him; but beneath the pity was a colossal irritation.
You had someone, she wanted to shout at him. She wanted to hit him. She wanted to punch his face, and with each blow she would have said: You had someone; you had someone.
Back to work, Trevor Baxter said.
Helen pushed the Kleenex box towards him and he took one and blew his grey hairy nose, loudly, wetly, wagging it back and forth in the tissue, wiping from side to side. She saw that he was ugly; the ugliest, most misshapen man she had ever seen, and he would be alone forever, and Helen would be alone forever too.
And later in the morning he opened his door and shouted down the hall: Where is the old bat with my memo?
The girls in the office were young and they thought Helen was fair-minded. Helen could settle disputes with a tilt of her head; she was regal and intuitive about all the small hurts and poverties and flares of temper that ran like grass fires through an office; she collected for the shower gifts. Helen had something they did not have, something they aspired to but could not name. They would have been mortified to learn it was experience. They did not want experience. Helen was sad and the young women didn’t understand the sadness but they respected it. A blow had been struck, bull’s-eye, without warning, and it had scarred Helen. If such a thing should happen to one of them, they would want to survive it the way Helen had. She was not austere; she did not advise; she would not judge. Helen was what their grandmothers would have called a lady, the girls in the office thought.
These young women had missed feminism by half a decade. They thought of a lady as a woman who had achieved minor spiritual enlightenment, who was accomplished in—but ultimately eschewed—the domestic arts, vaguely romantic and generous. Helen was generous in her every gesture and the young women in the office saw she was not diminished by it. The girls knew Helen’s husband had gone down on the Ocean Ranger but they did not put it together with the woman who did payroll.
One day Joanne Delaney came into Helen’s office and closed the door behind her. Joanne Delaney’s eyes were glittering.
We have all decided to walk out, she said. We will walk out together. Every single one of us is willing. We are not going to let him speak to you that way any more, Helen. This is for all of us.
Even as Joanne Delaney spoke Trevor Baxter called out, Where is the old bat? Where is she?
But Helen took the situation in hand. Simmer down, Helen said. I can manage him.
… . .
Who’s There? 1995
ARE WE GOING to fight over a salad bowl, Cathy asked. There were two big salad bowls exactly alike. Cathy dug the bowl out from the back of the cupboard and wiped the dust out with a paper towel.
Mom, can I have this?
Why don’t you take everything, Helen said. Claire was five and starting kindergarten, and Cathy had a new apartment. They’d all gone over together for a look and it was a bloody shithole. Indoor/outdoor carpet that smelled like feet and you could hear someone on the other side of the wall opening a kitchen drawer and the clatter of cutlery.
You couldn’t fart in here, Helen had said. Without the whole world knowing.
Cathy had gone to night school and got her grade eleven, and then she’d registered at MUN. She’d done nursing. Helen said nursing and Cathy did nursing. All those books lying out on the dining room table. Helen would cook supper for them and she’d do the dishes while Cathy studied. Helen would put Claire to bed.
She and Claire read Goodnight Moon, and Thomas the Tank Engine, and they read Beverly Cleary and Amelia Bedelia and Five-Minute Mysteries. They read 1001 Knock-Knock Jokes over and over, the answers printed upside down on the bottom of the page. Orange you glad I didn’t say banana. Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning. Cantaloupe, I’m already married.
>
This had been Helen’s approach to parenting: Because I said so.
Parenting. The verb hadn’t even existed back when Helen was doing it, as far as she knew.
Helen did not take tranquilizers. Her children would never know it, but this was her approach to parenting: she was there for them. Her doctor had said pills, and she had said no. Helen was there, morning, noon, and night. That was her approach. She had wanted to die. She did not die.
The public health nurse had told pregnant fifteen-year-old Cathy: Adoption. She had said the Catholic Church offered support for girls in her situation. She didn’t say abortion. The public health nurses didn’t say abortion back then.
She had been speaking to Cathy, but she was looking at Helen.
The other children had skulked around the house during this time. There was a time when they were quiet in their rooms. They were quiet at the supper table. They were quiet while Cathy was throwing up behind the bathroom door. They could hear her retch and they heard vomit hit the toilet water and then the kettle would start to boil and it would sound like a roar. Gabrielle demanded to know what was going on. It made John stab his green peas. The tines hitting the plate ping, ping, ping, ping. And then he dropped the fork with a clatter.
Helen was sewing a wedding gown for Louise’s soon-to-be daughter-in-law and John had slouched against the door frame. She let the machine run the whole seam and the needle had cracked, and then she put down her glasses and said, What do you have to say for yourself?
Nothing, John said.
I am doing my best, she said. John pushed himself off the door frame with great effort and went down the hall and the screen door slammed.
Where are you going, she called after him. But he was already gone.
Cathy had raised the child with Helen, and now Cathy had a place of her own. Helen said about the expense, but they both knew it had nothing to do with money. This is the thank you, Helen thought. This is the way they say thanks these days.