In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Gordon is much better at grocery shopping than she is. Maybe he really does enjoy it. He strolls heartily down the aisles. He chats amiably with the little old ladies who invariably park their carts so no one else can get by while they squint through their trifocals at ingredient listings, preparation directions, and price-per-unit calculations. He fondles the fruit, paws through the loose mushrooms for the most perfect specimens, and taps a dozen melons before selecting the best one—the one, Joanna thinks nastily, that will be ripe in exactly forty-seven minutes, which is how long it will take to finish up here and get the damn thing home. He loves to try new products and conducts serious conversations about the economy, the government, and the weather with the woman installed at a table at the end of the frozen food aisle, who is offering free samples of low-cholesterol cocktail wieners, high-fibre cereal with oat bran and almonds, or tiny paper cuplets of hand-squeezed pulploaded orange juice. It is the best (and the most expensive) orange juice in the world and the cuplets are just like the hospital ones they bring your pills in. He calls the cashiers by name. They all wear little plastic tags. Their names are Doris, Daisy, Joanie, and Mo. They tell him about their varicose veins, their children’s zanyantics, their second cousin’s baby shower, and the best way to prepare a leg of fresh New Zealand lamb.

  Joanna, on the other hand, just wants to get it over with. Shopping alone, clutching her list and gritting her teeth, she bulls her way through the aisles, snatching off the shelves as fast as she can only the items she’s written down, preferably without having to bring her cart to a full stop. She buys mushrooms in a blue plastic tub, six tomatoes in a cardboard carton, apples in a bag, and the melon on the top. She averts her eyes and shakes her head whenever she passes the freesample lady. At the checkout she reads the magazine headlines and studies the sugarless-gum display with her wallet open.

  In the early days of their marriage they went late at night to the twenty-four-hour A&P on Barrie Street. There were few shoppers then, most normal people being at home asleep in bed. At midnight the other shoppers were serious quiet childless couples like themselves. Or else they were university students, slightly drunk and silly, loading up on chips and Cheezies and enough mix to get them through the rest of the party. Sometimes in the winter there were one or two dirty homeless men who had come in to get out of the cold and so they were spending an hour buying a loaf of day-old bread.

  Now they go on Friday night or Saturday afternoon, like everybody else. Like all the other children in the store, Samuel cries and fusses, dirties his diaper, throws his bottle, an apple, and a jar of mayonnaise on the floor. A bored young man with spiked hair comes to mop it up. Gordon enjoys himself while Joanna gets more and more depressed: by the ever-escalating prices, by the thought of having to unpack and put away all this expensive stuff when they get home, by the knowledge that she has become the kind of person who spends Friday night at the A&P. She feels boring, normal, and defeated.

  As they drive home through the rain at dusk, a Bruce Cockburn song called “Trouble with Normal” comes on the radio. After the song has ended and the broadcast has moved on to exuberant commercials for life insurance, heating oil, and Pepto Bismol, then to depressing international news about another civil war in the Third World, another American evangelist accused of sexual transgressions, and another child abducted in Toronto (that evil city), Cockburn’s lyrics continue to play like a refrain or a rebuke inside her head. Samuel in the back seat is singing “Three Blind Mice”: “They all ran after the farmer’s wife/She cut off their tails with a carving knife.”

  At home she will put the groceries away, get Samuel bathed and into bed. Then she will have a bath herself while Gordon reads and dozes on the couch. In the bathtub she will mourn briefly for all she has lost and all that she has gained.

  Samuel is a picky eater too. The transition from milk and apple juice to solid food is a rough one. Joanna has, like most modern mothers, high ideals about nutrition. Her child will never want for healthy homemade food. Her child will never be forced to eat that commercial crap in the little jars, mushy, weird-coloured slop laced with sugar, salt, and who knows what other poisons. She buys a hand grinder and a book about how to make your own baby food. She spends hours cooking and then pummelling carrots, apples, potatoes, garden-fresh peas, lima beans, turnips, and squash. She prepares gourmet infant meals which Samuel promptly spits all over her. He likes bananas. That’s all. Bananas mushed up with milk. Everything else ends up in his or her hair.

  On Samuel’s first birthday, Joanna makes him a special supper. She puts the tomatoes in boiling water, then dips them in cold water and peels them, picks out every single seed, boils them down, purées them in the blender. She boils the spaghetti noodles till they are very soft and cuts them lovingly into tiny Samuel-size bites. She arranges it all in his special Beatrix Potter bowl and lets it cool. Gordon puts Samuel in the high chair and Joanna puts the bowl on the tray. Samuel waves his arms at his meal and gurgles happily. Joanna feels like a good mother, a very good mother, a damn-near perfect mother. Gordon hovers around the high chair with the camera ready. Samuel puts the full bowl upside-down on top of his head. The food slides down his face. He throws the bowl on the floor and waves his arms around some more. Gordon is roaring with laughter. Samuel is crowing and smearing the tomato sauce and noodles all over his face. Joanna is laughing too and pointing, saying, “Smile for Daddy now, smile! Say cheese!”

  But down on her hands and knees, sponging the slop off the linoleum, she begins to cry softly, softly, so softly that nobody notices, and in the morning, first thing, she goes to the A&P and loads up the cart with two dozen little glass jars.

  9. MOUNTAIN

  LEWIS AND WANDA WERE GOING to the Rockies for a ski week in March. This was a trip they made every year. They loved skiing. They loved mountains.

  Three days before their departure, Lewis asked Joanna if she would house-sit for them: they’d been broken into once before and they were worried. Joanna agreed.

  An hour later Lewis called back and said, “No. Please forgive me. I wasn’t thinking clearly. It would be too painful for you.”

  But Joanna said, “No, I want to do it, let me.”

  They left on Thursday afternoon. Lewis called from the airport to say goodbye one more time. He had, he said, told Wanda he was going to the washroom. Into the telephone he said, “You know I won’t be able to write, probably not even a postcard. You understand,” and Joanna said, “Yes, I understand.” It was hard to believe that words could ever cross those mountains anyway and still make sense on the other side. Words would be snowbound, banging up against icebergs and rock faces, solid straight through. He might as well be going to another planet for all that she could reach him there. Inside the mountains, the silence, she supposed, would be as vast as the space. She thought about the Frank Slide eighty years ago when the side of Turtle Mountain came loose in the Crowsnest Pass and the rock covered railways, roads, houses, and farms, the whole sleeping town of Frank, Alberta, mothers, fathers, children, lovers, dogs, cats, cows, and goldfish. The new highway went over the spot now—she’d seen somebody’s vacation snapshots of it once. There was nothing to see but a vast grey field of boulders and a historical plaque commemorating the disaster. Everything must be imagined, including the bodies, like words, still locked within the unreliable, unyielding earth.

  Joanna had never been to the mountains herself. She didn’t like travelling. She didn’t know how to ski and had no desire to learn. If she and Lewis ever ended up together, she figured then maybe she would.

  Into the telephone now he said, “I love you,” and in the background Joanna could hear a tumult of travellers and then his flight being called.

  “I love you, yes, I do love you,” she said, encouraged by the sound of his voice. Maybe he really would leave Wanda someday. She had to keep hoping for that. She’d said to him once (in anger, but truthfully), “I want to be your lover, not your mistress.” A lover, she figured, was alwa
ys propelled by anticipation and passion, by a picture of a future very different from today. A mistress, on the other hand, was calm and self-contained, well-dressed and quite satisfied with two afternoons a week, having mastered her problematic expectations and gone on with her separate successful life. A lover would be wild-eyed and volatile, subject to hysteria, insomnia, substance abuse, perched always on the brink of weeping or wailing, of delivering an ultimatum or taking it back. A mistress would have her rendezvous pencilled into her leather-bound monogrammed appointment book.

  On Friday Joanna was busy all day, had a meeting with a new gallery owner that ran late, drinks downtown afterwards, but she thought often of Lewis and Wanda’s house sitting there empty, not bleak but still, the beams shifting imperceptibly in the cold weather, then settling again with something like a sigh. She was comforted by the image of each uninhabited room with every article in its place: every table, chair, and knick-knack fairly gleaming with harmony as in a painting, a still life with flowers and fruit in a hand-turned wooden bowl. She did not think much about skiing or gondolas or hot-rum toddies, woolly sweaters and rosy cheeks in front of a field-stone fireplace. This trip had been planned last winter, long before she and Lewis became lovers. There was nothing she could do. It, like many things lately, was out of her control.

  On Saturday she went to the library and borrowed books about mountains. Maybe this way she could reach him. Maybe this way she could find out what she needed to know. They were heavy hard-covered coffee-table books with large glossy pages of thrilling full-colourphotographs briefly captioned with useful and intriguing snippets of information.

  There were no people in these pictures, at least no live ones, only ghosts and the occasional daring mountain goat. There was certainly no sign of Lewis schussing down the slopes in his red balaclava, lime-green gaiters, and black-mirrored goggles, looking like an alien attempting to fly. There was certainly no sign of Wanda, either whisking and whispering down behind him or stuck whining at the top because she was afraid. Certainly, no matter how long Joanna looked at the pictures, none of her questions would be answered in them. They might as well be hieroglyphics.

  On Sunday around suppertime she went over to the house. It had snowed during the night, two or three pristine inches everywhere, white city snow which would soon enough be muddied brown, not blue mountain snow which might remain unseen, unsullied, for years. She drove her car back and forth in the driveway several times. Lewis had asked her to do this to make the house look lived-in. Then she parked her car snug up behind theirs, a nondescript blue mid-size, plugged in, she noticed, with a perfectly coiled orange extension cord. She could imagine Lewis carefully plugging it in while he and Wanda waited for the taxi to the airport, could see him checking the connection once, twice, patting the hood as he walked away, and her throat swelled with a sudden excess of emotion.

  She swept the snow off the front steps with the broom he’d left by the side of the house, took the accumulated mail out of the box, and felt the neighbours watching her.

  She unlocked the front door the way he’d shown her. It was a sticky lock and she had to jiggle the key several times to release it. She took off her jacket and boots (her socks too, for no reason) and left them in the foyer.

  In the living room she perched on the arm of the sofa beside the fig tree and the floor lamp with the stained-glass shade. She had been here many times before, to dinner, to parties. She had endured whole evenings in this room, long hours made bearable by meaningful glances over the edges of coffee cups and crystal liqueurglasses, long hours made keen by the threat or temptation of giving herself away.

  Now the hardwood floor glowed warmly immaculate beneath her bare feet and she could see the streetlights coming on through the white sheers hung across the front bay window. She flipped automatically through the sheaf of envelopes in her hand: bills mostly, junk mail, something from the tax department for Lewis, a bulky letter in a mauve envelope for Wanda, a bank statement addressed to them both, a postcard with a picture of palm trees, green water, white sand. She read the card without conscience, for postcards, by their peculiarly public nature, seem to be fair enough game for curious eyes. It said, among other things, Remember the time we were all down here together? Remember the mangoes? We miss you. Let’s do it again soon! Love always, Don and Susie. Joanna was obscurely hurt to think that Lewis had never mentioned these people, obviously longtime continuing friends with whom he had shared meals, parties probably, whole holidays, maybe even secrets.

  She left the mail on the coffee table beside an aesthetically arranged seashell collection, a blue ceramic bowl full of walnuts, and the last three issues of Ski Magazine.

  In the kitchen she found a note from Wanda stuck to the fridge with a ceramic magnet in the remarkably lifelike shape of a lobster. Beside it was a snapshot of Lewis and Wanda drinking out of Styrofoam cups at a picnic table in the pines. The note explained when to water the plants, when to put out the garbage, and how to unlock the liquor cabinet. It also contained the name and number of the ski chalet where they could be reached in case of an emergency. She did not read this part because she did not want to be tempted to get hysterical and call him.

  Stuck up beside the note with another magnet, this one in the shape of a pineapple, was a full-colour brochure for the chalet. In the pictures, the mountains were alternately rosy and protective or black and white and dangerous. It occurred to Joanna that if Lewis really did want to get rid of Wanda, it would be easily enough accomplished in the mountains: just a little nudge and Wanda would go straight over the edge, surprised and still smiling, Lewis left perchedon the summit alone with his skis braced and his eyes shut, to not see the look on her face when she started to tumble, head over heels and screaming, falling so far that when she hit the bottom, Lewis would hear nothing. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

  But Joanna wasn’t sure that Lewis really did want to get rid of Wanda. At least he didn’t want to actively get rid of Wanda. Once he said he wished that she too would fall in love with someone else and leave him and then nobody could ever construe the whole sad situation as being in any way his fault. Then he would not have to spend the rest of his life feeling guilty and, after a decent interval, six months at least, he and Joanna could get together publicly and nobody, least of all Wanda, would ever suspect that they’d been sleeping together all along. Once he said he wished Wanda would just disappear and be done with it.

  Maybe an avalanche would be the answer, Wanda’s removal taken clear out of Lewis’s hands, Wanda’s small body dragged off by tumbling tonnes of snow travelling at one hundred kilometres per hour, Wanda’s small body scooped up and then deposited at the bottom of the slope to be dug up by search dogs in the summer, every bone in her body broken, her poles and goggles still attached.

  Joanna opened the fridge and poked around: eggs, milk, plain yogurt, apples, tomatoes, an orange the size of a grapefruit, a chunk of white cheese with blue mould on one side. She was momentarily awash in a wave of nausea or fatigue.

  “Tired,” she said into the empty house. “I am bone tired.”

  She leaned against the stainless steel sink and looked out the window into the backyard where the bright moon on the white snow cast an eerie edge of light across the shrubbery, the blackened raspberry canes, the bird feeder hung from the poplar tree.

  She poured herself a drink of brandy and went up the stairs with the snifter cupped in both hands. Her legs, she noticed as if from a great and precarious height, were trembling.

  In Lewis’s studio she browsed through the books on the shelf, leafed through a pile of receipts and scrap paper in a wire basket on top of the filing cabinet. She thought fleetingly that he might haveleft her a note somewhere, a message somehow, something to signal that he knew she was there. But no, that was foolish. How could he possibly have managed (or risked) such a thing?

  She examined his brushes and paint tubes which were meticul
ously arranged on a small metal table to the right of the easel. The brushes were placed in precise descending order according to width. The paint tubes were laid out in an accurate spectrum from dark to light. She picked the tube of Chinese blue from its proper position and wedged it in between Verona brown and raw sienna. Then she moved it back.

  Lewis’s paintings were propped all around the room in various stages of completion. She had often expressed envy at his ability to work on several paintings simultaneously. Personally she felt compelled to finish one piece before beginning another. She was the same way about books, reading one at a time all the way to the end before picking up a new one. Lewis was the opposite, reading five or six different books at once, a novel by Milan Kundera, poetry by Leonard Cohen, a biography of Salvador Dali, a travelogue of the Greek Islands, Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung. Joanna thought they must get all mixed up in his mind, like poorly done watercolours bleeding into each other so everything ended up an ugly muddied brown. She said that if she tried reading that way, Carl Jung and Salvador Dali would end up drinking ouzo in a taverna on the island of Rhodes, reciting Cohen’s poetry and debating Kundera’s concept of eternal return.

  Lewis just laughed and said his mind didn’t work that way, he didn’t let things get muddled up, he’d trained himself to keep things in separate compartments to hold disorder at bay. In light of their current situation, Joanna did not like to contemplate the contents of these compartments in too much detail. She knew there was one with her name on it.