She still bites them and once in a while, when Samuel catches herwith her fingers in her mouth, he clucks his tongue like Esther used to and says, “Oh, Mommy, don’t be such a baby!” But other than that, her nails are no longer an issue.
It is not in the way women hold their hands or their feet. It is not even in the way they hold their mouths when they’re angry or their shoulders when they’re frightened. It is, Joanna thinks, in the way they are always holding their breath.
15. SHORT
“LIFE IS TOO SHORT,” Clarence often warned Joanna when she was sulking through the long boring hours of another Sunday, wishing she could hurry and grow up because she was still labouring under the mistaken impression that adults could do whatever they liked. “Stop wishing your life away,” her father said, not unkindly. “Make the most of what you’ve got.” “There’s no time like the present.” “Life is too short.” Et cetera, et cetera, and many other platitudes which Joanna found impossible to believe.
When she got older and moved away from home, she had to admit that her father had a point. Also her mother, who had often warned her that once she got past twenty-one, the years would just get shorter and shorter until the day she died.
Sometimes now Joanna feels that her life is passing before her very eyes even as she is engaged in the time-consuming process of living it. Now that she is a bonafide adult, an artist, a wife, and a mother, not only does it strike Joanna that yes, life is too short, but, after a difficult day and a few glasses of wine, it also often seems that life is elsewhere.
Life meaning: 1. an elegant late dinner in a posh restaurant where the chefs are French, the food is superb, the wine over-priced and sublime, and nobody needs to have their food cut up or go to the bathroom the minute the meal arrives and nobody has to leave early because the babysitter has to be home by eleven.
Life meaning: 2. a Mediterranean cruise on a ship the size of an apartment building where immaculately groomed waiters deliverdrinks and meals all day long and no children under twelve are allowed on board (also, it would appear from the brochure, no uninteresting or unattractive people of any age, nor anybody with an unsightly wardrobe and no suntan).
Life meaning: 3. a temperate summer afternoon spent at the new patio table under the blue-and-white umbrella which has an unmistakably festive French air about it and four matching chairs, a whole afternoon spent reading, drawing, and dozing without feeling obliged to weed the garden, mow the lawn, hang out the clothes, untangle the badminton net, find the red croquet mallet, or clean the cat poop out of the sandbox.
Life not meaning: 1. a long hot simultaneously boring and terrifying afternoon spent at the park while your child and forty-seven others fight, pee their pants, slop their ice-cream cones all over their shirts, and flirt with broken bones, concussions, sudden death, and/or permanent disability on swings, slides, teeter-totters, monkey bars, and an assortment of other diabolical playground equipment from which one of them is bound to plunge headfirst the minute you open the book you have optimistically brought along in your bag, which also contains toys, Band-Aids, apple juice, Kleenex, a Batman hat, rocks, feathers, and an acorn, thus handily disproving the notion you once held that after your son was toilet-trained, you wouldn’t have to lug that stupid bag all over the place, the only difference now being that it doesn’t have diapers in it any more.
Life not meaning: 2. the furnace, the fridge, the washer, and the car all breaking down in the same week, thus cleaning out most of your savings in repair bills, and when your son spends all day Saturday begging for a remote-control aircraft carrier for seventy-five dollars which he saw advertised between cartoons, you tell him he can’t have it because you’re broke, and when you ask him, “Do you know what broke means?” he replies readily, “Sure, like glass, broken glass. Like when I knock my drink off the table with my elbow and then there’s broken glass and sticky apple juice all over your nice clean floor and you are so mad your face gets all red.”
Life not meaning: 3. yet another weekend spent doing the laundry,mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, cleaning the toilet, dusting the bookshelves, cleaning out the fridge and disinfecting all those plastic containers that have been sitting in the back for a month, and so on and so on and so on and so, on and on and on, until you fall asleep in front of the TV in the middle of the news and then you go to bed where you make love or not and then dream about a small gold locket your mother gave you when you started school, engraved with your initials, and you put a picture of yourself inside but the locket was lost twenty years ago, in a sandbox, the school yard, the garden, or gone down the drain, and in the dream you find yourself naked with a fine gold chain hanging empty around your slender neck.
Life not meaning: 4. washing the kitchen floor at ten o’clock on Friday night.
Joanna is down on her hands and knees, up to her elbows in the hateful soapy water, muttering, “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this God-damn floor.” Which is not true. She loves this God-damn floor, chose the tiles and laid them herself, with Gordon’s help, slowly, lovingly, the pattern emerging square by square beneath their hands. She loves this God-damn floor every single time she looks at it.
Gordon says, “Why wash it now then?”
She says nothing. What does he know? Men don’t see the dirt like women do. Men can’t even see what needs to be done unless you point it out to them. He probably wants to go to bed and make love or something.
He persists. “You don’t have to do it now, do you?”
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I do, I have to do it right now.” Which is also not true. But she keeps scrubbing and muttering with her head down. Her hands in the bucket are wrinkled, the cleanser gives her a rash, she couldn’t find the rubber gloves, her hair is hanging over her eyes, her knees on the hard floor hurt, her shoulders are shaking as if she is crying but she’s not. She knows that if she tries to explain herself she will only sound ridiculous and then Gordon will sweettalk her out of being miserable. She knows that she is being difficult but she does not want to stop. She knows she is having what Esther called “a snit” and she intends to make it last.
She knows damn well there are many people whose lives must be even more trifling and meaningless than hers.
There are the people, for instance, who write to Ann Landers in a rage because they were invited to a wedding and asked to bring money instead of a gift. Plus they were told to leave their loathsome children at home. Or they are insulted because the salesclerk at the dress shop said they were too fat, too old, and too ugly to wear a miniskirt. Their six-year-old grandson never thanked them for last year’s Christmas present. Their fiancée forgot to mention that she was married before, has three children living with their father in Alaska, and was in jail twice in Vermont for shoplifting.
Well yes, Joanna reads Ann Landers too but she would never dream of writing to her and she often disagrees with her sensible syndicated advice.
There are the people, for instance, who regularly call the radio phone-in garden show to ask the horticultural expert why their forsythia only bloomed on one branch this year, how to keep the squirrels from eating their lily bulbs, how to transplant a fifteen-foot-high apple tree without killing it, how to prune a cedar bush into the shape of a poodle. Their voices on the airwaves are urgent. They have been trying all week to get through to the gardening guru who remains calm and pronounces the Latin names like reverent incantations.
Well yes, Joanna listens to the garden show too but only because it comes on right after lunch while she’s stuck at the sink doing dishes.
There are the people, for instance, who read the tabloids every week and believe them. They even do the quizzes which proclaim to reveal your personality through your driving habits or how you eat hot dogs. They learn that their shoe size predicts their longevity, the longest lives going to size 7 women and size 11 men. Pregnant readers are pleased to discover that they can determine the sex of the baby by regulating the food they eat. Those wanting a boy s
hould eat mostly fruits and vegetables, especially carrots and bananas. Those wanting a girl should limit their consumption of fruits and vegetables and concentrate instead on milk, cheese, and yogurt.
Well yes, Joanna reads the tabloids too but she doesn’t believe a word of it. She buys them when she’s bored in the supermarketcheckout line. She clips the best headlines and sticks them on the fridge: MELTING WOMAN TO WED! ADAM & EVE’S SKELETONS FOUND—IN COLORADO! SATAN ESCAPES FROM HELL—VIA ALASKA OIL RIG!
This last article features a full-page photograph of a huge cloud of black smoke billowing from a flaming rig. Satan’s face is clearly visible in the cloud formations: open growling mouth, jagged dripping fangs. Thirteen oil workers dead. Seeing is believing. Didn’t she believe once that the cows, camels, bears, and lambs she saw in the clouds above the backyard on Mary Street were as likely to be real as anything else? Didn’t she often see the man in the moon and wonder how he got there, what his name was, where his arms and legs were? Isn’t she still as eager for answers as any of these people composing letters to Ann over breakfast, finishing their lunch in time to catch the garden show, settling in after supper with their socks rolled down around their swollen ankles to read the Weekly World News? Doesn’t she too still believe that somewhere out there, somewhere elsewhere, there are experts who know everything and people who are perfectly happy with their lives?
The kitchen floor is finished now. Gordon has given up and gone to bed. Her snit has lifted, along with the ground-in dirt, cracker crumbs, and sticky spots with fluff stuck to them. Perhaps her snit has escaped like Satan and is hovering even now in a crabby-faced cloud over the house, causing all the neighbours to quiver and gasp, running to their telephones to dial 9-1-1 or the Weekly World News.
Life may or may not be elsewhere. But certainly she must admit that yes, it is too short, just as Clarence said. This wisdom however is hard to hang on to when you’ve thrown yourself headfirst into a snit, a bucket of hot soapy water, or life, daily life, in your size 7 shoes.
16. FRUIT
WHEN JOANNA FIRST HEARD the word “melancholy,” she thought it must be a fruit. She first heard the word from Esther: Esther saying to Clarence, “Some people like melancholy. They love it, they thriveon it. Me, I prefer peace.” Joanna thought she said “peas.” She figured melancholy must be a cross between melon and cauliflower.
She was at an age where she was just beginning to realize that words don’t always mean what they seem to. Take cauliflower, for instance. She’d only recently discovered that cauliflower was neither a flower nor a dog. Esther had explained to her that Lassie on TV was a collie dog. Cauliflower, she figured, must have something to do with Lassie.
They never had cauliflower at their house because Clarence only liked it with cheese sauce and Esther said cheese sauce took too long and was always lumpy anyway. Joanna finally ate cauliflower one night at Penny and Pamela’s (with cheese sauce, yes) and she was surprised to discover that it was a vegetable, white and blossom shaped, a little on the mushy side. Melancholy, Joanna imagined, would be juicy and sweet like honeydew melons but not green, orange like cantaloupe. Once she suggested they have melancholy for dessert. Esther just laughed and they had peaches instead. Perhaps melancholy was similar: furry and fragile, easily bruised. The feel of the peach fuzz made her shiver, like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Later on, of course, she learned what melancholy really meant.
melancholy n. 1. [Obs.] orig., black bile: in medieval times considered to be one of the four humours of the body, said to come from the kidneys or spleen, and to cause irritability, sullenness, sadness, and depression. 2. a tendency to be sad, dejected, or depressed. 3. sad, meditative musing; pensiveness.
When Joanna hit puberty just as Esther hit menopause, Esther said, many times, accusing and angry, “Why are you always so melancholy? You’re just like your father.”
Finally Joanna said, “Well, he can’t be that bad. You married him, didn’t you?”
Clarence went around the house for days after that singing “My Melancholy Baby.” Even Esther had to laugh.
One afternoon after sex Lewis was still depressed. They were sitting at her kitchen table in their housecoats, hers pink chenille and hisplush white terry cloth, a Christmas gift from Joanna which she kept in her own closet because of course he could hardly take it home to Wanda. When Joanna suggested he simply tell Wanda he’d bought it for himself, he said no, he didn’t like to lie to her. When Joanna laughed unkindly and said it was a little late for scruples, he said he didn’t like to lie to her about little things when the big lies he was telling her were so dangerous.
Now they were sitting at Joanna’s kitchen table in their housecoats at three in the August afternoon with the blinds closed, the doors locked, and the answering machine on. They were drinking scotch and water. Was this, Joanna wondered, what their great love had reduced them to?
She did not like to wonder this out loud for fear she was right and maybe Lewis had just never seen it that way before, and once she’d stupidly pointed it out to him, maybe he would suddenly see the light and go back to Wanda with his tail between his legs because it was The Right Thing To Do. That was how it most often happened in those romantic movies she watched compulsively on the VCR now and hated: those morality movies in which the illicit lovers (illicit, of course, because he was married or she was married or they were both married, to perfectly nice people who did not deserve this betrayal) loved and suffered and then loved some more, until finally one of them, the heroic one, ended the affair and walked nobly but sadly away (usually through a train station, an airport, or a rainstorm) because it was The Right Thing To Do. Joanna lived in terror that Lewis too might some day be overcome by this particular strain of nobility and leave her.
Indeed, Lewis was more depressed than usual today, swirling his dwindling drink around in his glass and brooding extensively about love and life. How many kinds of love were there? If he still loved Wanda (and he did, he had never once said he didn’t love her), but he loved Joanna too, how was that possible? How could he love two women at one time? There was not enough of him to go around. How could he live without Joanna? How could he live without Wanda? Assuming that love was real, then what was it for?
Sometimes Joanna thought they were so busy inspecting their lives that they scarcely had time left to live, let alone enjoy, them.
Inevitably, all of this self-examination would lead to a deeper and broader depression, some tears, another drink, and either more sex or more questions. What is the purpose of passion? What is the power of guilt? And finally, what is the meaning of life?
This afternoon Lewis looked deep into his scotch and said, “It’s as if Wanda and I were living in the Garden of Eden until you came along and changed everything.”
What, Joanna wondered, did this make her? The serpent, that well-known, well-hated slimy insidious reptile? Or the apple? That delicious and dangerous, forbidden and perishable fruit? The Bible never said it was an apple anyway, it was just a fruit, it could have been anything, it could have been an orange, an apricot, a watermelon. It could have been a kumquat.
“The Garden of Eden, my ass!” she said. “You were more like Babes in Toyland, the two of you like children playing house, Wanda in her apron, cooking up your supper, you the good husband in your slippers, reading the paper. You the great artist and she was always there stroking your ego and telling you how wonderful you are.”
She didn’t know what she was talking about but she couldn’t stop. She was making it all up out of pieces of her anger, her envy, and her loneliness. Lewis never said much about his daily other life, having learned early on that the thought of him and Wanda having a quiet supper together (fresh pasta, green salad, warm buns, and white wine) could throw Joanna into just as much of a jealous frenzied resentful rage as the thought of them making love while she went to bed once again with a book. The details of their domestic habits were as dangerous and damaging to her as the spectre of
their sex life.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lewis said now. “You don’t know anything. You’ve never been married.”
“I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for that crap.”
“If you’re so smart, then why aren’t you happy?”
“You’re not happy either, asshole!”
Was this what their great love had reduced them to: a level of such mutual misery that the worst thing they could accuse each other of was unhappiness?
Joanna cried and Lewis got dressed.
“Do you mean to tell me,” she sobbed, “that now you’re just going to walk away and leave me here like this, you rotten bastard?”
“Yes,” he said. “I have to go home. Wanda will be wondering where I am.”
“So now you’re going to go home and play good husband?”
“Yes,” he said, “I am.”
“What a farce!”
“Yes,” he said, “it is.”
Joanna grabbed a grapefruit from the wicker basket in the center of the kitchen table and heaved it at him. But he was already out the door and the grapefruit split wide open when it hit the solid wood, spurting pink pulp and sticky juice everywhere. She wished it was his head.
When Joanna calls home to tell Clarence that she and Gordon are getting married, Clarence says, “That’s good. He’s a good man. A little melancholy maybe, but I like him anyway. He seems to be very level-headed.”
Clarence comes for the wedding, which is a simple civil ceremony at the courthouse downtown. If this is a disappointment to Clarence, he does not say so. He also does not say anything about melancholy. He says, “I’m proud of you, dear,” although he does not say exactly for what. After the ceremony, the wedding party goes to the Long Street Diner for a fancy dinner and then back to Joanna and Gordon’s apartment for champagne and cake, a chocolate cake because Joanna does not like fruitcake. On top of the cake, there are two white plastic doves with ribbons of all colours cascading from their beaks. Joanna and Gordon have been living together in Joanna’s apartment for six months. If this arrangement bothered Clarence, he did not say so. In a few more months, they will buy the big house on Laverty Street.
In the Language of Love Page 10