Boysie went into a discount store nearby to buy a package of cigarettes. He saw some magazines with SEX written on their covers; he pondered on the wisdom of buying one of them, but then changed his mind. He had tried before to get a better picture, to see the bigger light about Dots and about women in general (when he used to run about with Henry, he and Henry felt they knew everything about women). But that was when neither of them was very close to a woman. Now Dots is close, so close to Boysie in the physical sense, that sometimes he wonders whether she doesn’t have a friend, another nurse’s aide, with whom she could talk, or even gossip. He feels this lack of friends in her, because more than once, when rifling through her chest of drawers, and expecting to find something, he had set his mind on finding some letter written to her by somebody. But never has Dots written anybody, and nobody so far as he could discover has ever written to Dots. But he wants to know her, inside out, and he stands now in front of the revolving rack of books, that has so many books about sex and getting to know a woman … Everything Anybody Ever Asked About Sex! … was that the name? or was it What You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and Was Afraid to Ask? He took this book out of the rack, and as he turned the pages he noticed the manager of the store looking at him. There was a smile on the man’s face. Boysie put the book back down, and paid for the cigarettes. The man kept smiling even as Boysie went through the door.
The envelope was stamped SPECIAL DELIVERY. It was an official envelope, and the address was typed tidily in a block. Her name was on it, but she could not think of anyone in the world who would be writing her. All the letters she ever received, in fact, all the envelopes she ever received, had a small rectangular window in them, which showed her name, and a part of the name of the company which had sent it to collect her unpaid balance. They were all bills: for the payments on the furniture, for the payments on the clothes which she bought from Eaton’s and for the colour television set she had just bought. The only real envelopes without windows came around Easter, and Christmas, and occasionally one would come from a European nurse’s aide who was getting married, or from a family member thanking Dots for looking after some patient, or for sending flowers. She picked up the envelope as she entered the door, and she closed the door and went straight to the window where the light was strongest to see whether she could see through the envelope and therefore have some idea of the news inside. But the light was not strong enough: it was late March, or was it April? … Dots knew only the days on which paydays fell … and it was a dull afternoon, and she had to turn on one of the table lamps. The cat emerged from the bedroom, dragging her nightgown behind it, and after bending itself into an arc, it rubbed itself against her ankles.
She got on the telephone and dialed a number. As she waited for the telephone to be answered, she wondered whether in fact the letter hadn’t been addressed to her husband; and so she looked at the name again, and saw that it said Mrs. Boysie Cumberbatch. But still, the typewriter could have made a mistake. Boysie himself never got any letters, either; most of the envelopes in their letter box were addressed to her — except those at Easter and Christmas, and she knew that Boysie paid all his bills in cash.
“It’s me!” She had called Bernice. “Not too bad. And you? And Estelle? And the boy?” She took the telephone to a chair and sat down. She threw her shoes off her feet and the cat ran to them. The shoes were too heavy for the cat to lift or carry, but it tried nevertheless, and this made Dots laugh. “Looka, you blasted cat … I talking to this cat, here … that’s true, because sometimes I think that I myself am going mad as hell, always talking to a bloody cat! Looka, cat, looka you!” She gave the cat a slight kick. “What I called you for is, do you know anybody who would be writing me a letter in a big official envelope?”
“Wait,” Bernice said. Her voice was clear. “Let me go into the bedroom and talk to you.”
Llewellyn was visiting her. He had taken his books with him, to study, but he had not got around to doing that yet. Estelle was at the hairdresser’s, and Mbelolo was with his father.
“I could now talk,” Bernice said. “Lew was too near to me for me to hear you good enough.”
“I axe you if you could think of anybody who would write me this letter.”
“Noooo …”
“It typed, too.”
“Really?”
“Let me read you the address it have on the top. The Clark Institute … you know where there is?”
“That is the mad people’s place where they does examine you to find out if you have a mental breakdown. Did you say you get a letter from there? Perhaps Boysie getting you committed, girl!” And Bernice laughed, just as Dots would have laughed had she made the joke. And when she sensed the silence at the other end, she said, “Why don’t you open the letter and read it?”
It was such an ordinary suggestion to make, but Dots had not thought of it.
“I know,” Bernice consoled her. “You been looking at it through the light!” She had done the same thing, many times. “Open it, man, and read it to me, then. I will keep you company as you read it, if it is bad news.”
“But before I open it, I want to tell you something, though.”
Bernice thought she was stalling for time, and she said, “Lew here. And I can’t spend too much …”
“All right, all right. I opening it, I open it!” Her hands trembled a bit, and she snatched the letter out of the envelope and shook it open (it was difficult doing it with the receiver in her hand), and with some surprise she looked at the one-line letter before she read it to Bernice. “Oh Christ, I thought this was a letter, in truth! Lissen to this. My dear Dots, It’s been so long since we have seen each other that I wonder how you are. Yours truly, Agatha.”
“Is that all she could think of writing to you?”
“And in a big letter this size!”
“You think she wanted to write something more?”
“Now that you mention it, I think so. We haven’t been exactly friendly to Agatha. Not since Henry, her husband, died. He and Boysie were so close! I can feel sometimes how deep Boysie must miss Henry. He don’t tell, but I know. Feelings.”
“We should really answer-back the letter, though. Even if the two o’ we sign it. I always wonder where Agaffa is, whatever happen to her! The address …”
“Clark Institute is all.”
“Poor child, you know.”
“I blamed her for killing Henry. And that is a thing that I can never understand. Whether it is she who really kill Henry, or if Henry commit suicide, as the newspapers claim.”
“That is a part of our lives that we can’t talk too much about, Dots. All we know for sure is that Henry dead. He dead a long time now. Only yesterday, Estelle and me was talking ’bout Henry. I dreams about him sometimes.”
“I never tell you that before, but I dream about Henry sometimes, too. And in some of my dreams, me and Henry are in bed together. But I won’t tell Boysie about them dreams!”
“That is wishing, you old bitch!”
“Is that what it is, gal?”
Bernice was now less depressed about hearing about Agatha. Dots was, lately, not the type of person she wanted to spend much time with, not even on the telephone. So strange a relationship did they have these days: before, she and Dots would have talked an entire afternoon; they would have knitted their lives closer in the common torment and problems of women who had left their homes for this big new land of Canada. They would have shared secrets which Bernice did not entrust to Estelle, and Dots to Boysie her husband.
“How our friend?”
“Who?”
“The orderly-man who …”
“That bastard?” And Dots exploded in her sensual gurgling laughter. Bernice knew that the conversation could take any bounds now, perhaps no bounds at all. “We went to lunch as usual. And last night he got me to go to his room. Christ, child, I almost didn’t get back in time for work.” There was a pause, during which only the crackling of the telephone mad
e a comment. Bernice knew. She knew all the time that it would happen. “He still think I have money to give him. One or two remarks he dropped to me last night warn me that that bastard isn’t really interested in me. Is my money on his blasted brain. Somehow, I hope that Boysie won’t find out. I think he would kill me. But …”
“Put your ears closer! Can you hear when I whisper? This person, a certain person I know that you know, is the same thing. Axed me yesterday if I could lend him two hundred dollars to buy books!”
“No, not Lew!” The pause again.
“Took me by surprise.”
“It’s a sad thing. A thing you can’t even discuss with him, eh?”
“I lost faith in him.” Dots could hear the change in her friend’s voice. “A woman my age still have to have some hope. Hoping against hope. But hoping is hoping. The happiness he gives me. Never mind. I can’t tell you what is going through his mind. In bed, and I can say this to you, as one woman to a next, in bed, well … I don’t have to say more.”
“Let me axe you something. Very personal. This thing is bothering me all day.” Dots was not sure that what she had to ask Bernice could be asked in such a way that Bernice would not be critical. And being a woman of great suspicions, not wanting to remember all of the past, but wary of the present, she tried to cloak the question in such a way that Bernice would have at least to see the question as a theoretical one. “When a person is making love. Let us say a person, a woman. A woman, then. When a woman is making love with her man or her husband, and that woman is unfaithful to that man or to that husband, in a way that she was never unfaithful before, is there some way that the man or the husband could find out the truth?” The pause again. “Also, do you think there is anything wrong when a woman dreams or wishes that the man doing it with her is another person?” She could hear the sudden intake of breath. She had, in spite of her caution, shocked Bernice. But Bernice started to laugh. And so Dots laughed too. “Could it be that a woman, whilst she is having one man, and dreaming about a next, could it be that she is …”
“Jesus Christ, girl!” Bernice said. She was laughing and Dots was laughing.
“Could it?”
“You asking me?”
“Could it?”
Again, Bernice laughed. “When a certain person isn’t here, I am going to tell you about all the fantasies I hear the lady I works for say a woman can be guilty of. And she is a expert at that. At fantasies!”
Dots would come home from work, and before she did anything else, she would put on her pink quilted housecoat, sit down and glance at the newspaper, from cover to cover, and spend the rest of her time with the paper, reading very carefully the column Today’s Child. Even after she had decided to adopt the child with the osteogenesis she would look at these columns. It was not that she was about to change her mind. Dots was as steadfast a woman as one could hope for, and she was irrevocably faithful to Boysie, faithful in her mind and in her duty, if not in her body. She had not seen the orderly again. It had terrified her. In her own way, she was so faithful that she was dull. She read the column now to compare her choice of child with the others. She wanted to be sure that she was about to adopt the most disadvantaged child in Toronto. If she had understood her motivations, she would have called her decision to do so atonement.
She had not yet thought it was the right time to tell Boysie about it. She felt that it would probably never be the right time to tell him. But she lived through the dreams of having little Jane in her home (“We will have to move out of this district. Down in here is not good enough, not decent enough to raise up children in. And Jane would need space, and”) until those dreams became life itself.
She discussed with Bernice on the telephone just before she went to bed, in bed with the cat between her legs, what chances she had of making little Jane into a well-adjusted child. At first Bernice laughed at the plans she had for the child; but as Dots’s determination grew into something like an obsession, Bernice too became more reasonable in her prejudice against physical and mental disadvantages (and indeed, this broad-mindedness surprised her, as she became aware of it), and tried seriously to comfort her friend, and at the same time, tried to steer her along a path of reasonableness. She no longer referred to Little Jane as “your invaleed.” It was now Little Jane.
“How Little Jane feeling today?” she would now begin a conversation.
“Oh, not too poorly today,” Dots would say, and anyone listening to their conversation and not knowing the facts would swear that Little Jane was already a part of the family, and was in bed beside her. But in more senses than one, Little Jane was indeed living in Dots’s life. When Boysie was not at home she talked to Little Jane, as she used to talk to the cat. Gradually the cat became “You blasted cat,” and Little Jane “my little child.”
The day will come, Dots prayed aloud every night when Boysie was not at home (she prayed aloud for she felt that words directed above her head of consciousness were more easily heard if spoken), the day will come when I will have Little Jane. In the meantime, she placed a soft pillow, bought specially for Jane, beside her every night. And because she was awake when her husband came in, at whatever hour, she removed it in time, before Boysie came stumbling into the lightless bedroom.
Bernice was breathless when she came over. She had hardly sat down. She asked Dots for the second time if she was alone. When she caught her breath, and was sure that they were alone, she held Dots by the hand and led her into the bedroom. Up until this time Dots didn’t know what to expect. She had only said on the telephone, “You home? I have something to show you.” And she had put the telephone down. Dots remained in a mild quandary of anticipation and torment: perhaps something was wrong with Estelle, although she could not think of what the problem was; Estelle was in good health and was happy, and so was her son. Could it be about Boysie? Could it be about the orderly? Had she heard something on the television about an industrial accident: recently, there had been many such accidents in Toronto; the weather was turning warm, and people were taking chances with their dress and with their luck. It could be … and she stopped at that point in the speculation; she had never really solved the guilt, nor could she face the repercussions of her crossing the street and sleeping with the orderly, and she never tried to see what she would have to see, through conscience and through the complication in her life, had her little flirtations with the man been discovered by Boysie. It was too difficult a thing for her to think about. She was not the kind of woman who could tackle problems in their abstract: she was well versed in seeing a problem, once it had become fact, right through to the end, but the end had to be seen as easily and as clearly as the problem itself.
Bernice told her to sit down on the bed. Dots’s mind wandered from the present dramatic situation in which her friend had her back now, years back to that other time when closeness and circumstance had found them sitting beside each other on a bed up in Forest Hill Village where Bernice worked at the time, and when the pressures in their lives and those same two factors, closeness and circumstance, had tumbled them, basically against their other sexual instincts, into an act of homosexuality. They knew then that their loneliness had caused it, just as their boredom and closeness in that boredom had driven them to perform an act they both detested. Again, Dots tried not to think about this. She closed it out of her mind and waited for Bernice to say what she had come to say.
“Child, I don’t know if to call this coincidence, or just plain luck.” Dots did not worry to ask her what she was talking about, for she knew that she would soon find out. It was just Bernice’s way of saying important things. “You remember the conversation we had the other day?” Dots again refused to say anything, but she thought of Little Jane and of the orderly and of the disgusting way Llewellyn was behaving to Bernice. “I have it here, right here in my pocketbook.” She fumbled among the many things in her pocketbook for what she wanted to show Dots, and when she could not find it, she emptied all the contents of t
he pocketbook on the bed. The cat jumped on a piece of facial tissue which was balled up, and which had lipstick, or blood, on it. Rouge, lipstick, an Afro comb, a photograph of Bernice, Estelle, Llewellyn and Estelle’s son fell out too. “Here is the thing! Read this.”
Dots took up the paper, which was clipped from a magazine, Psychology Today as the top of the page said, and read aloud. She read aloud because she always read aloud anything anybody asked her to read. With Boysie it was the opposite. He had to be coaxed to read anything aloud. Dots was a worse reader than Boysie. Perhaps that is why she always liked to read aloud. She screwed up her eyes, pretending to be concentrating, that the passage was very difficult to read, that she was giving it all her mental attention. She read: Sue, considers herself happily married. She enjoys sexual intercourse with her husband and usually reaches orgasm. However, just as she approaches the peak she imagines that she is tied to a table while several men caress her and touch her genitals …
“Oh my God!” Dots gasped. Shame covered her face. Her mind went straight to the orderly’s dirty sheets. She could not believe that such a thing as this could ever be printed.
“That is the same reaction I had when the lady I works for over in Rosedale gave this to me to read. What a shameful thing! I was so ashamed. I was so damn shame that I wonder why she would think o’ giving me a thing like this to read. But I want you to read the whole thing before you talk again. I sorry that I didn’t have the bravery to cut-out the whole thing, but I managed to steal as much as I could from the magazine. So, read it, and then I want to hear what you think. Start-back from the part ’bout the table and the various men.”
However, just as she approaches the peak she imagines that she is tied to a table while several men caress her and touch her genitals “Oh my God!” and have intercourse with her. It is a fleeting image; as she passes into orgasm it disappears. Dianne too is happily married. Yet she finds sexual foreplay with her husband more exciting if she imagines herself a harem slave displaying her breasts to an adoring sheik. While having intercourse, she sometimes envisions making love in the back seat of a car or in an old-fashioned house during a group orgy. “Jesus Christ, Bernice! This could be true?” She thought again of the orderly’s semen-stained sheets. She likes to imagine being forced by one man after another. “This blasted woman is sick!” In one favourite scene she goes to a drive-in movie and is raped by a masculine figure whose face is a “blur.” “Bernice, my stomach can’t take any more! It making me feel so guilty, just like if …”
The Bigger Light Page 18