When Joanna is pregnant with Samuel, a woman in prenatal class says, “Giving birth is like trying to shit out a grapefruit.” Joanna wonders why this woman is taking the class when she already has three kids.
After Samuel is born, after twenty-four hours in labour and eleven of those on the delivery table, Joanna thinks: Watermelon. More like trying to shit out a watermelon.
For months afterwards whenever she lays the baby down to sleep in his bassinet, she cradles his head in her hands and it is heavy but wobbly, like a piece of fruit, round and sweet-smelling, rolling and perishable. She cannot touch or look too closely at the soft spot which pulses in the middle of his head like a heart. She cannot bear to think of his brain inside, intricate and convoluted, so unprotected. Soon his skull closes over and he learns to hold his head up. Sometimes Joanna considers the size of his growing head with surprise at the thought of it ever having come out from between her own two legs.
Samuel, age four, is deeply involved in the process of naming things. Always he is asking, “What’s this?” Always Joanna is telling him nouns: cantaloupe, caterpillar, hippopotamus, onion, elevator, earring, pantihose, diamond, pomegranate.
Joanna feels either inspired by the newness of everything as seen through his eyes or exhausted by the thought of how much he has to learn, of how many words she knows that are cluttering up her brain. Is the brain infinitely expandable, always enlarging to accommodate the information available? Or will it get full some day and shut down?
Often now Samuel wants more information than she is able to give.
“What’s this?”
“A tree.”
“I know that. What kind of tree?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
Sometimes he asks the names of things he already knows, as if seeking reassurance that things do stay the same, that what he does know is still correct from one day to the next.
“What’s this?”
Garbage can, kitten, crayon, helicopter, apple, freight train, pear.
“What’s this?”
“Truck.”
“I know that. Why is it a truck?”
They are in the kitchen making supper. Joanna is at the counter slicing strawberries. Samuel is beside her on his plastic Sesame Street stepstool so he can see and reach.
“What are these again?”
“Strawberries.”
“What does that mean?”
“What do you mean, ‘What does that mean'?”
“I mean, What does a strawberry mean?” He is impatient and then offended when Joanna laughs. She is going to say that a strawberry doesn’t mean anything, but of course that’s not strictly true.
strawberry n. 1. the small, juicy, red, fleshy accessory fruit of a stolon-bearing plant (genus Fragaria) of the rose family.
“A strawberry just is,” she tries lamely to explain, doubting that Samuel will be satisfied with this.
But he is. “Oh I get it,” he says. “Strawberries aren’t supposed to mean anything. All they have to do is be red and taste good. A strawberry means a strawberry.”
Again Joanna laughs and he is proud of himself. It occurs to her that this is what she should have told Lewis seven years ago when he was fussing around about the meaning of love, the meaning of life. She should have said, “We don’t go around asking, ‘What is the meaning of a strawberry?’ so why do we all keep asking, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ The answer is the same. So why don’t we just shut up and live it? Why don’t you just shut up and let me love you?”
17. BUTTERFLY
THE SUMMER SAMUEL IS ONE YEAR old, he is afraid of trees. This fear comes over him after an ugly incident with the large potted fig tree in the living room. He is not walking alone yet, is still pulling him-self up to stand. When he tries to pull himself up at the fig tree, it tips, he loses his balance and goes face-first into the dirt and the leaves. For several months after this he carefully skirts all trees everywhere, as if they too are likely to fall on him. Joanna is amazed by the fact that he knows that the huge evergreen out front, the vast and rustling weeping willow at the corner, and the potted fig in the living room are, despite their different shapes and sizes, all still trees. How does he know this? How does he know that the German shepherd down the street, the tiny Chihuahua in a magazine ad, and Pluto in the Mickey Mouse cartoon are all still dogs? How does he know about dogness, treeness, essence? His fear of trees passes of its own accord.
The next summer, when he is two, he is afraid of long grass. The feel of it tickling his calves makes him scream. “Bugs!” he cries. He thinks there are bugs crawling up his legs. This motivates Gordon to keep the lawn more neatly mown. But still all summer long Samuel plays in the driveway, on the steps or the sidewalk. He likes to sit on the warm concrete with his toys spread all around him. Joanna says, “I guess he’ll never be a country boy. He’ll probably end up living in downtown Toronto, not a blade of grass or a tree in sight!” But this fear too passes of its own accord.
When he is three, he becomes (and remains) afraid of all flying insects, especially bumblebees and butterflies. Joanna can sympathize about the bumblebees. She is afraid of them too, their fat bodies buzzing past her head when she works in the garden. She ducks and flails her arms. Samuel does the same thing, shrieking. It is part of his inheritance.
But butterflies are beautiful. She cannot understand the problem. He is especially afraid of the large orange monarchs. She tells him they don’t bite, they just flutter by. But as always, when he is afraid, he will not let himself be reassured by her mere words. She fusses over how he will not take her word for anything. This will no doubt serve him well in later life but right now it is annoying. She buys him books about insects, storybooks in which all manner of insects don hats, coats, trousers, spectacles, and are brought to anthropomorphic life, speaking simple English, having adventures, families, and little ladybug friends. He says bugs can’t talk. He says ladybugs are okay. She buyshim informative non-fiction books filled with lavish photographs. He says the close-ups of butterfly heads look like monsters.
Finally she gives him a monarch butterfly she has kept in a jar for five years. She found it once on the side of the road, dead and perfect, just lying there as if asleep. For several days the jar sits on his dresser where he eyes it cautiously. Finally he asks her if she will open it and let him touch the butterfly. When he touches the orange-and-black wings, they crumble and turn to butterfly dust in his fingers. He laughs and takes to playing butterfly all over the house, swooping from room to room, flapping his arms in much the same way as when he plays sea gull but without the sound effects. He wants to know what sound does a butterfly make. She says she’ll have to look it up. He says that when he has butterflies in his stomach, he thinks they are real, trapped inside him like bugs in a jar. He wants to know how they get in there, how they get out, how can they breathe, and are they eating the inside of his stomach? Could she look all this up too?
Reading up on butterflies, she discovers that they have long been believed to be the souls of the dead. According to superstition, if you see a butterfly at night, it is an omen of death. Also, butterflies are cannibals.
By the time she has gathered this dismaying information, Samuel has lost both his interest and his fear. He says it is moths now that worry him. What is that white stuff on their wings, is it magic dust, is it poison? Will a moth die if he touches it, will he die if a moth touches him? He says they fly at him just like they do at a light bulb. He says they are trying to fly into his mouth. Joanna says why would they want to do that? He says maybe there’s a light in his stomach. Maybe it comes on when he opens his mouth, the way the fridge light comes on when you open the door. Joanna says she’s never heard such a thing. He says maybe the moths know something she doesn’t.
18. SMOOTH
ESTHER WAS PROUD of her smooth skin. She nursed a legitimate pride in her face which did not seem to venture into vanity. It was true. She always looked ten
years younger than her real age. She liked to tellpeople how old she was and then watch their eyes widen with disbelief. Even Joanna eventually had to admit that her mother looked better than all the other mothers she knew. Her face was clear and creamy, wrinkle-free. No crow’s-feet, no frown lines, no laugh or smile lines either. Which was not to say she didn’t do these things. Of course she did and, in fact, her face was usually mobilized with emotions, often conflicting. It was just that somehow they didn’t sink in, at least not into her skin.
She was always creaming and oiling her face, replenishing her moisturizer five or six times a day, applying a special heavier cream at night, trying all the latest lotions on the market but then returning to her old favourites in the end. Once a month she smeared a foul-smelling concoction on her upper lip to remove her moustache. Sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the depilatory to burn off the tiny black hairs, she invariably retold the story of a woman she’d seen once on the bus who had not only a full-fledged moustache, but sideburns too, curly black sideburns on both cheeks.
Joanna, like most teenagers, had pimples, mostly on her chin and her forehead. Occasionally a big juicy white one would sprout in the middle of the blackheads which covered her nose. She could spend an hour in front of the bathroom mirror, moaning and sighing over the advanced state of her ugliness, dabbing hopelessly at the bumps with the latest acne cream which Esther had picked up at the drugstore along with another jar of moisturizer for herself.
“I had pimples too, you know, when I was your age,” Esther offered from the other side of the bathroom door. “Maybe you’ll be lucky when you’re older, maybe you will inherit my skin.” She was only trying to help, Joanna knew that, but she was too smug and too smooth to be of much consolation.
Joanna did not inherit her mother’s skin. Her skin was just like her father’s: rather red, rather rough if looked at from a certain sunlit angle, marked by patches of tiny red broken veins on each cheek. But what looked rugged on her father, Joanna hated on herself.
“But you look so healthy,” Henry said.
Joanna said, “But I would give anything, absolutely anything, tohave skin like Mary Louise.” Mary Louise Dupont was a friend of theirs whose skin was pale and smooth and perfect, with just a faint blush of pink at the cheeks, no freckles, no pimples, no broken veins, never a blackhead in sight. “Just look at her,” Joanna said. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
“Yes,” Henry said. “But so are you.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“But wouldn’t you love me more if I had skin like hers?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, you would.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, you would.”
“But you know what they say, Joanna—beauty is only skin-deep.”
“Yes, stupid. And it’s my skin that’s the problem.”
“Shit.”
“You,” Lewis said after the first time they made love, “you have the smoothest skin in the world.” Joanna was lying on her stomach beside him and he was trailing one hand up and down the whole length of her back. She wondered briefly what other women’s skin was like but decided not to ask for fear of bringing Wanda to mind. She was fairly purring. Maybe it was true. Maybe she had inherited her mother’s skin after all, although she was sure this was not quite what Esther had had in mind.
Thinking about skin again later—not, of course, at this particular moment when she was surrounded by so much of it, smooth, yes, hers and Lewis’s too, also rosy, damp, tingling (hers) and tight, tanned, delicious (his)—Joanna realized she had no idea how Esther felt about the skin on the other parts of her body. There had been some mention of stretch marks and a certain preoccupation Esther had with the brown spots on the backs of her hands which she said were not age spots but something she had acquired while pregnant, sitting on the back step in the sunshine waiting for Joanna to beborn. Sometimes she said this fondly, other times meanly, as if the spots were some kind of stigmata. Joanna herself had never thought much about the skin on the other parts of her mother’s body. In fact she had never thought much about her mother having other parts, or having a body at all for that matter. Mothers, in those days and still, were generally considered to be sexless, shapeless, and celibate. It was as if all pregnancies had been generated by immaculate conception and, the eventual birth having been accomplished, all carnality and lasciviousness had been permanently expelled along with the placenta. Passing a pregnant woman on the street, you did not imagine her formerly svelte body wrapped around that of some hairy eager man, engorged and engrossed in the throes of passion. Passing a mother with her newborn cradled in her arms, you did not imagine her spread out on the delivery table, sweating and squealing or screaming. Especially you could never imagine your own mother with your own head coming out between her legs. Especially you could never imagine that your own parents would ever need to have sex again now that they had you.
After another afternoon session of voluptuous love-making, Lewis and Joanna were both in the bathroom, Lewis just getting out of the shower before he headed home to Wanda, Joanna peering into the mirror, trying to fix up her face and her hair before she headed downtown to do some errands. She was dabbing makeup on the patch of broken veins on her left cheek. Lewis shrieked, “What are you doing?”
Joanna said, “Well, I’m covering up these veins on my cheek.”
“My God,” Lewis said, “I just can’t believe you would do such a thing,” as if she were guilty of some heinous crime or at least of some serious transgression, even worse than adultery.
Joanna was embarrassed and indignant and she stopped covering up her veins.
After they stopped sleeping together, she started again. But every time she did it, she thought of Lewis and felt foolish. Every time she admired her own smooth skin (while lolling about in the bathtub or sliding in between the smooth sheets, occasionally convinced that she would die if she did not soon find someone to touch and admire her), she thought of Lewis and was briefly but utterly disabled withdespair. These memories were unfortunate but unavoidable. It was annoying, she thought, the way you could not pick and choose among your memories, selecting the ones you wished to savour and treasure (and perhaps embroider gracefully) while simultaneously discarding the sad sloppy detritus. It should, she figured, be merely a matter of mind over matter, mind over mind.
She should not have to think of Lewis every time she forgot to empty the kitchen garbage can and there he was in her mind, curling up his aquiline nose at the odour, crying out, “My God, Joanna, this is disgusting!” She should not have to think of him every time she pulled out the sink stopper after doing the dishes and all the soggy bits of supper went down the drain and Lewis said, “You’re supposed to leave the stopper in to catch all that, you know.” She should not have to think of him every time she thought of her own smooth skin.
These memories were like genetic inheritances, half of them from people you had never even met: your father’s eyes, your mother’s forehead, your grandfather’s double-jointed elbows, your great-grandmother’s trick knee, or your second cousin’s allergy to lima beans. These memories, like these inheritances, would never go away. You would never be rid of them, you just had to make your way around them, incorporate them, or try to eradicate them with weekly visits to your therapist. Joanna had resigned herself to being stuck with her father’s eyes, her mother’s forehead, and her memories of Lewis forever.
Gordon has that kind of smooth tight skin with which, it seems, only men are blessed. Always he looks scrubbed and shiny, as if he has just stepped out of the shower, the sunshine, or a month’s vacation in the mountains. He has no blemishes, no freckles, no blackheads. His face is so smooth you might even think he had no pores.
Joanna admires his skin and he admires hers. “You,” he says after they’ve been making love for months, “you have
the smoothest skin in the world.”
“What does other women’s skin feel like?” she asks.
“Rough, dry, scaly, flaky. Sometimes they have little bumps on their bums.”
“Oh yuck!” She believes him unconditionally. She is a superiorbeing. She stretches and rubs her smooth long legs all over him until he gets hard again. Of course she has the smoothest skin in the world—she inherited it from her mother.
She does not think about Lewis until later in the evening, while she and Gordon are finishing the supper dishes and she pulls out the stopper and lets all that soggy gunk go down the drain. There is a piece of pasta that won’t go so she pushes it down with her fingers. Gordon doesn’t notice. She thinks about Lewis as she wipes the counters and the stove. She thinks about how she didn’t even think of him when Gordon stroked and marvelled at her smooth skin and then put his penis back in. She thinks with surprise about how memories are maybe not permanent after all. If time does not have the power to heal all wounds, perhaps it can change all memories to make them more manageable. Perhaps it does have the power to obliterate whole moments altogether. Of course it does. Of course it is true, as William James said, that forgetting is as important as remembering.
19. COMMAND
“YOUR WISH,” said Lewis, “is my command.” He was giving her a massage with fragrant frangipani oil. She’d complained of sore shoulders and a kink in the small of her back. She’d been working since morning for six hours straight on a collage called Parts of Speech. Hunched over her art table, she had cut and pasted dozens of pictures of mouths: mouths open, laughing, screaming, eating; mouths closed, pursed, hissing, frowning, waiting. Some of these mouths were in agony. Some of them were in ecstasy. Sometimes you couldn’t tell which was which. From these mouths came words at all angles, words of all kinds: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs.
In the Language of Love Page 11