Real Life

by Sharon Butala

  Meagan lay primly in her bed, her five-year-old body hardly disturbing her blankets, one smooth, plump hand with its chipped green nail polish on three fingers resting neatly on the quilt, her barrette still holding back her straight fine brown hair that was exactly like Christine’s. Christine bent and kissed her cheek, then carefully unclipped the barrette and slipped it out.

  The street lamp beside the house cast a bar of light across the foot of Meagan’s bed, turning the pink-flowered quilt a ghastly blue-mauve. Staring down at it, Christine was reminded of the long drive back through the moonless night, the purr of the motor, and then the pulsing of the monks’ voices came back to her: the richness of the sound, and its rhythms, as if the monks were calling to lure some unseen, unknown, but precious thing.

  In the living room her mother had already set out two of Christine’s wedding-present, cut-glass tumblers on the coffee table and was pouring a little Scotch into each one. Christine fell into the armchair across from the sofa. Her mother began, “He’s already in daycare, what difference …” Christine moved angrily, crossing her legs and then uncrossing them.

  “We need to talk,” her mother said after a moment, adding ice, not looking at Christine.

  “Does it have to be now?” She reached to take the drink.

  “Yes, now,” her mother said, sitting down on the sofa.

  “I’m not ready for the institutional route yet,” Christine said stubbornly. “You know I’m not. Besides, there’s still that clinic in Montreal—”

  “Nobody’s going to pay for that and you know it,” her mother said. “I just want to tell you to call that special service for a sitter next Wednesday. I have a doctor’s appointment.” Christine nodded, leaned back, and closed her eyes briefly. “You can forget Graeme. If he wanted to help, he’d never have left in the first place. He’d send the money on time, he’d—” Christine raised both hands to her face, forgetting she was holding a glass, spilling her drink. “I’m sorry,” her mother said. Christine put her hands down, blinking, setting her drink on the table beside her chair, brushing with the other hand at the beads of liquid quivering on the smooth navy fabric of her skirt.

  “I can’t let you go on this way, Chris. It’s too hard to watch you struggling to keep up with everything. Aaron taking every drop of energy you have. Meagan not getting the attention she needs—”

  “Mom …” Christine began.

  “As if it’s your fault the way Aaron is,” her mother said. “You always were hard on yourself.” Tenderness had crept into her voice. She sighed, and when she spoke again, her voice was wry, Christine could hear her struggling against her anger. “One day soon you’re going to have to give it up.”

  She meant Christine would have to give up the fight to keep Aaron with her, which surely, at bottom, was based on the stubborn belief, no matter what her common sense and all the experts said, that one day he’d wake up and say, “Good morning, Mother, I’d like toast for breakfast,” and everything would be fine at last.

  “If I don’t love him,” she said, “no one will. You know that’s true, Mom.” Her mother opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it again. This, too, was familiar to Christine. She could read her mother’s mind: But he doesn’t know the difference.

  The next week the air had a crisp bite to it, the brilliantly coloured leaves had fallen and been blown away, leaving behind the forked black branches of trees stretching harshly against a sky resonant with light. Still, the very clarity of the light, the pale fields she caught glimpses of stretched out between the ranges of hills, and the flocks of crows and blackbirds that swept away in unison at the approach of her car pleased and soothed her. How Meagan would love the birds, she told herself, imagining her delight in them as they lifted and swirled away.

  More relaxed this week, at break she followed her students to the gloomy, dark-wood-panelled dining room with its long rows of tables and chairs where the monks provided coffee and cookies. As she stood in the coffee lineup, the only male in her class, Richard, came toward her from the urns, carrying two full mugs.

  “You shouldn’t spend half your break waiting in line,” he said to her as he handed her one of them. Touched, she accepted it, feeling her face flush, then turned and sat down at the nearest unoccupied table. He followed, sitting across from her, reaching for a paper napkin from the dispenser and stirring two sugar cubes noisily into his mug. He was short and heavily muscled and wore his grey-blond hair in a long ponytail down his back.

  “Are you married?” This startled her, but glancing at him she saw that this was not a pass, although what it was, she couldn’t tell.

  “Separated. You?”

  “Long divorced, no children, considering whether I should become a Bride of Christ or not.” He grinned at her. She was confused, and asked him, “Why did you ask me that? What do you mean—a Bride of Christ?” He didn’t take his eyes from her face and she felt his gaze as too intimate, although not in the sexual way she found herself craving. She lowered her eyes to her coffee.

  “You look tired. I bet you have children.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Two.” The rest of the class were pulling out chairs and sitting down around them.

  “I meant that I’m considering joining the order here as a brother.” Surprised again, she studied his face. It was lined, he must be fifty, she thought, and it seemed to her there was a darkness or uncertainty lurking in the backs of his eyes, despite his composed, even peaceful expression, which now appeared less than sincere to her. She stirred her coffee.

  “Then you’re not an English major. Why are you taking my class?”

  “You were short the minimum twelve students. Father Dominique called me and I thought it might be interesting.”

  “And is it?” she asked him. Hearing the inadvertent huskiness in her voice she cleared her throat carefully, as if to explain to him that the coquettish sound had been a mistake.

  “Too soon to tell,” he said, grinning easily.

  “Why do you want to become a monk?” she asked, then twisted her napkin in embarrassment at her own question.

  “Oh,” he said. “You mean, why would men choose to live without women?”

  “No!” she said, taken aback. “It was a stupid question. I’m sorry.” Smiling, he moved his hand, dismissing her apology.

  “One doesn’t choose to live without this or that, so much as one chooses to live with …” He stopped and she wanted to ask him, “With what?” but what she found coming into her mind was an image of Graeme in bed with her, his smooth scholar’s hand moving down her naked torso, and before she could stop it, desire was flooding through her.

  “I have to get my notes organized,” she said abruptly, and rising, set her mug by the urn, and went hurriedly out.

  But once outside in the long, empty hall, she found she wasn’t sure which direction to go to get back to her classroom. Tentatively, she moved forward. The first three doors along this hall were closed, she was sure she’d left her classroom door open, and besides, now she noticed there were no lights on in any of the rooms. Puzzled, uncertain whether to keep on this route or to turn back and try another, she hesitated. Up ahead was a dead end and another hall running perpendicular to this one, and now that she thought about it, she was sure they’d turned at least once on their way here. Encouraged, she walked quickly forward and at the corner, turned left.

  But this couldn’t be it: This hall was not as brightly lit, and there was something, some ambience, she wasn’t sure what it was, that was subtly different from the hall she’d just come through. She paused uncertainly, lifting her head like a deer sniffing the air for danger, trying to assess what this strange, but compelling quality was. Some—stillness—for lack of a better word, an intense quiet that was not so much a mere lack of palpable sound, but an attendance, as if the molecules of air that hung invisibly around her held both patience and intent. It seemed to her, in her moment’s halt, that this was what, without even recognizing it was so,
she’d been for years now, longing. Something to fill Graeme’s absence—no, more, something to fill the hollow left by her father’s death, by all the nameless and unremembered childhood hurts, to replace the anguish that was Aaron, by the grappling with daily life. She held herself still, not breathing, and waited.

  A door ahead of her opened and a monk—no, it was Father Dominique—backed out of a room, murmuring softly to someone inside. He turned and strode away from her down the hall, his robe making the air whisper, his feet drawing an authoritative squeak from the wooden floors. Christine realized that she’d strayed into the monks’ quarters. In the instant it took for this fact to sink in, just before she turned and hurried away in the direction from which she’d come, she found herself straining to hear the sound of chanting, wanting with every cell to stay until she found the room where the monks lost themselves in their age-old prayer.

  In mid-November Meagan came down with measles and had to stay home for a week. Her mother moved in with them to care for her, and then for Aaron when he arrived home from his special-needs daycare. Mid-semester was always a time of steady, droning work: seeing students, preparing lectures, teaching, doing her research and preparation for her night class, or attending meetings. Taking time off because a child had measles bordered on the impossible. And Aaron was sure to come down with it next. Ill, he seemed stricken by a kind of frenzy that made him even more unmanageable, as if the new sensations in his body terrified him, or threw him so off balance that what little control he had was destroyed. Sure enough, a few days after Meagan’s diagnosis, Aaron developed the telltale spots too.

  By the end of the week her mother was looking drawn, her dark eyes sunken, as if she were carrying on by sheer will alone. After Christine’s father’s early death and the worst of the grieving, her mother, with the strength of which Christine was still in awe, had squared her jaw and carried on raising Christine and her two brothers on her own. Now all of this vigour seemed drained from her, and although Christine said nothing—her mother was nearly seventy, after all—she watched her when her mother wasn’t looking, urged her to bed early, while she bathed the children herself and got them into their beds. No matter what, she told herself grimly, measles don’t last forever.

  Christine was standing at the door putting on her coat when, behind her on the red-painted chest, a remnant from the blissful first days of her marriage when it seemed only the gayest colours would do, the phone rang.

  “It’s Graeme,” her mother said. Christine glanced out to where her car sat in a fog of exhaust, warming up for her drive to the monastery. Reluctantly, she took the phone.

  “I’ve decided to come back at Christmas for a few days to see the kids.” Christine waited. “I thought maybe I’d take Meagan for a week, go out to the coast and see Mother and Dad.”

  “I guess that would be okay,” Christine said. That he would not take Aaron was hardly a surprise.

  “If you would arrange for Aaron to go into that home—just for the week—you could come with us.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “Chris?” In the brief silence she’d seen the three of them on the plane, Vancouver in all its damp beauty and calm, and then Aaron banging his head rhythmically against the floor or wall as he sometimes did, and no one holding him gently before he hurt himself. They would give him tranquillizers, they would tie him in his chair or bed. Would they strike him?

  “I’m going to be late for class,” she told him. “Mother will fill you in.” Her mother took the receiver. She was saying, “They both have measles,” as Christine shut the door behind her.

  She drove through the city, down streets covered with snow tinted purple by the powerful street lights, past the university, its stone buildings shadowed and unwelcoming now, onto the highway, and then onto the narrower, darker road that led to the abbey. It always shook her to talk with Graeme. She wanted to hate him, sometimes succeeded, but never for long. And even when she hated him, the truth was she still persisted in loving him. Surely it was only because there was no one else in her life to help her erase his hold on her? She missed him, sometimes terribly, she missed his body against hers in bed.

  A spasm passed through her gut, a clenching inside her, so that she bent over the steering wheel, making a strangled noise that sounded like a sob. She hadn’t known the depth of her own need, and the need itself, and the fact of her not even knowing, frightened her so badly that for an instant the void of her own insanity opened before her, and she cast about frantically for something calming to grasp onto.

  The monks came to her then, the quiet way they walked, the mild way they spoke to her as she passed them in the hall or sat near one of them at coffee break. In what peace they must live, she thought, that attentiveness in the air around them—and her body tensed, listening for the deep throbbing of their voices in prayer. What was it they said? she wondered. Help me, maybe? Or Succour—Give me succour?

  Richard was late to class.

  “Sorry, Christine,” he mumbled as he made his way to his seat. “I was talking to the abbot and just forgot the time.” She’d come to her lecture on counter-arguments to the theories she’d been teaching, and when Richard was settled, she asked the class for any flaws they might have spotted themselves.

  Richard said, “Aren’t postmodernist critics saying there is no art? As well as no authority? How are we to go on if this is true?”

  “You just hate the new stance because you’re a middle-aged white man,” a young woman answered him. “And it takes away your built-in authority—” Richard moved his head in irritation.

  “How powerful do I look to you?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, went on, his voice growing in force. “I reject it because it would destroy the known world and offer nothing in its place. It would have us slide back into anarchy.”

  Christine found herself thinking of Aaron running down the street in the night, flapping his arms as if he were a bird or plane, screaming in that mindless, high-pitched, piercing way of his, that nothing would stop, that had finally caused Graeme to rush out the door, before—Christine saw it, she remembered it now, suddenly, with horror, how could she have forgotten?—before he caught his own small son up in his arms and strangled him.

  The last trip before Christmas. Christine pushed aside a stack of student essays and set the phone down solidly in front of her.

  “Mom?”

  “What’s up, Chrissie?” her mother asked, and the note of weariness in her voice struck Christine to the heart, so that for an instant she couldn’t remember why she was calling.

  “Not much,” she said, “I mean—I have to ask a favour of you.” Her mother said nothing. Christine knew this to be her cue to back off, but her elbow rested against a pile of unmarked exams, and another pile sat on the shelf. “Can you look after the kids after school until I get back from the country?” For a moment her mother was silent, and Christine had a feeling she was holding back something she wanted to say, but she pushed this intuition aside in the face of the extremity of her need.

  “I suppose I could.”

  “I’d never ask you, Mom, but I’ve stacks of papers to mark and I can’t miss the faculty meeting at four, and I leave for the abbey at six-thirty and I just don’t see how I can get home.”

  “I know, I know,” her mother said. “Christine, I’m warning you”—Christine’s heart gave a thump—”that this can’t go on. Something’s got to give.”

  “I know it, Mom,” Christine assured her. “If we can just get through this week. Then I’m off for almost three weeks and we can both get a rest.”

  “Right,” her mother said. “I’ll get Meagan from kindergarten and I’ll be there when the bus drops Aaron off.” Then she hung up. For a long moment Christine sat at her desk with her elbows resting on it, her head in both hands.

  There was to be a Christmas gathering of the faculty in the foyer after the meeting, and Christine had hoped to be able to attend for a while. She so rarely got out, never saw men sociall
y it seemed to her, and what hope was there of another relationship if she never met anyone? Besides, she’d heard Peter Wilmer in Communications was divorcing. She’d once sat on a committee with him, and had been attracted to his boyish face and his easy manner. She thought hopefully that if they had a chance to talk casually at a party, they might hit it off.

  But the meeting dragged on and she had to leave before it ended. She squeezed her way out of the row and made her way as silently as she could up the wide steps to the doors at the back. In the cloakroom she found her thick jacket, scarf, and mitts, picked up her briefcase which bulged with her night class’s exams, and made her way regretfully out of the otherwise empty building into the crisp winter evening outside.

  It must have been snowing during the meeting. While the car warmed, she brushed a thick layer of the light, sparkling stuff off the windows and the hood. Glancing upward anxiously, she saw that although it hadn’t cleared yet, the sky had lifted and it looked as if the snowfall had ended. Encouraged, she got in, drove off the campus and out onto the street, where the fresh layer of snow lifted around her tires in a thin, glittering cloud as she passed. It made her think of walks with Graeme on nights like this, before the children were born. How they’d stood under the trees by the night-black river watching the snow fall, and embraced and kissed, their faces cold and wet with snowflakes, while inside their bodies heated, aching to meld together. Then she had thought they would go on forever in just that way.

  About ten miles out of the city it began again to snow lightly. At the twenty-mile mark the fall was thicker. The air must have grown colder too, because the flakes that were falling were small and dry and hit the windshield with a shower of faint pings. Snow was beginning to cover the road ahead of her, so that when she passed rapidly through the inches-deep fall, it rose high around the car and, for an instant, obscured the road. She would have driven more slowly, but she was afraid she’d be late. Often, though, she had no choice but to brake until she could see again.