In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  What she really did see was a pair of dirty white runners curled up slightly at the toes on the front step, a Persian carpet draped over the railing to air, three bags of garbage waiting to be walked to the curb, their blue recycling box filled with bottles, cans, and newspapers. Once there were at least a dozen cases of empty beer bottles neatly stacked, a brand she’d never known Lewis liked.

  The last time she drove past on purpose, it was four months since Lewis had told Wanda the truth, and there they were, large as life, on a sunny Saturday morning out on the front step drinking coffee. Wanda was sitting on the top step in a pretty blue blouse reading the morning paper aloud to Lewis who was stretched on his back beside her on the warm concrete in the green shirt which was Joanna’s favourite. Behind them Joanna could see clean pink sheets and all their underwear flapping on the clothesline in the backyard. She could also see that she was the furthest thing from either of their minds.

  One of the things Joanna and Gordon like best about their house on Laverty Street is its big kitchen with the windows facing the street. So many of the houses they looked at had tiny dark kitchens stashed to the back or the side, utilitarian little rooms with space only for the requisite appliances and a stingy bit of countertop. These kitchens usually had just one window, most often over the sink looking out at the brick wall of the house next door. These kitchens were like bathrooms, necessary but shameful somehow, best kept hidden from the public eye.

  It is an older suburban neighbourhood with many large trees and mostly two-storey red-brick houses set close together. To the north the neighbourhood deteriorates quickly. To the south it escalates slowly, edging by increments all the way to the very upper-class area on the waterfront. They are in the middle where the houses are well-tended with flowers in the front yards, clean relatively new cars in the driveways, wooden decks and fences in the back. Many of their neighbours are retired people.

  After they have bought the house, while they are still waiting forthe previous owners to move out, Joanna and Gordon drive by it often, usually late in the evening, and through the kitchen windows they can see these people gathered around the table eating or just talking, their faces warmed by the yellow light of a wicker lamp hung from the ceiling above them. One night the house is in darkness, they think there’s nobody home, and then, moving mysteriously across the room as if self-propelled, there comes a birthday cake lit up with dozens of flickering candles and they can hear these strangers singing right out on the street.

  Their kitchen is large and bright with plenty of room for cooking and eating. It is a room to spend time in. People, Joanna has discovered, generally fall into two distinct categories as far as rooms go: there are kitchen people and there are living-room people. This distinction is most pronounced at parties where the guests unconsciously gravitate to one room or the other, so that by the middle of the evening there would seem to be two separate parties in progress. There are always more people in the kitchen.

  At their housewarming party, for instance, three weeks after they’ve moved in, the kitchen is quickly clogged up with guests hovering around the table where the hors d’oeuvres are laid out, lounging against the counters, the stove, and every empty inch of wall space, somebody always in front of the refrigerator, somebody perched on the edge of the sink, all of them with drinks and crackers in hand, laughing and smoking and munching and admiring the big windows, the smoky blue blinds, Joanna’s collages all over the walls.

  The more they talk, the more boisterous they become, each with a funny story about houses they’ve lived in or escaped from, renovations they’ve done or dreamed of, real estate agents they’ve hated or loved, everything needing to be told at least twice at top volume to be sure nobody misses it. Joanna in the midst of it thinks this is the best party she’s ever had, maybe the best party she’s ever been to. Several of the kitchen people say as much as they help themselves to another beer, another cracker, another carrot stick.

  The living-room people are sitting around politely nursing their drinks and conversing knowledgeably about mortgages, interest rates, and the very best plumber in town. They keep opening the windowsto clear out the cigarette smoke which is drifting in from the rowdy kitchen. They keep turning down the music so they can hear themselves think. Until finally one of the kitchen people goes into the living room, rolls up the rug, puts some rock-and-roll music on the stereo and starts dancing. Joanna and Gordon join in energetically but Joanna feels a little self-conscious to find herself all dressed up and dancing in her bare feet in her own living room, which so far has been used mostly for quiet evenings watching TV or her and Gordon curled up on the couch reading after Samuel has been put to bed.

  The truth is she seldom ventures into the living room during the day, except first thing in the morning to open the curtains so the plants won’t die in the dark, and sometimes in the afternoon, especially when it rains and then she closes the curtains and snuggles under a woolly afghan on the couch, daydreaming or napping cozily for an hour (which, she has often thought, is one of the biggest advantages to working at home). But usually she works all day in her studio upstairs at the back of the house. Sometimes though, when she’s thinking about a new project or when she feels lonely, too isolated working at home alone while the rest of the world goes on (or goes wild or goes crazy or, for all she knows, goes away) without her, she sits at the kitchen table and looks out the window instead.

  Laverty Street is very quiet during the day, a pocket of middle-class life which is not a shortcut to anywhere and so there’s not much traffic. Sometimes the retired couple across the street is out working on their already immaculate yard or coming home from the shopping center with bags of stuff, once a new barbecue, a lawn mower, a pink toilet.

  Sometimes there are people walking by, talking with their heads down, sometimes pointing and looking up. Then Joanna gets close to the window and peers up too, with a feeling of excitement and wondering what she is expecting to see: a flying saucer? an enemy fighter plane? a jet coming down in hideous flames?

  Most often what she does see is a migrating V of Canada geese or a glossy fat crow with something four-legged and furry dangling from its beak, or once just at suppertime a gracefully arching jet trail being spun in slow motion out of a minuscule metallic speck like thesilken strand of a spider’s web and Samuel, pointing, cries, “Look, he’s making a white rainbow!” Sometimes it really is a rainbow. Everybody loves rainbows. Once she sees the Goodyear blimp.

  She thinks she might do a collage called Kitchen Window. In it she will include trees, birds, squirrels, a rainbow, real blades of grass, real maple leaves going orange in the autumn. There will also be bicycles, cars, garbage cans, a lawn mower, a pink toilet, a pot of gold, a man crying, and yes, of course, the Goodyear blimp. It will contain windows too, many windows with faces looking out, and she will cover the whole thing with fine white cheesecloth like a screen. In one corner, there will be real shards of broken glass.

  Many times when Joanna looks up, there is nothing at all, just a bowl of blue sky, and she feels acutely disappointed, also a little embarrassed as if she has been tricked.

  31. ROUGH

  DAISY THE CAT WAS BORN in a barn and she never quite got used to living in a house. No matter how hard Joanna loved her, no matter how completely Clarence ignored her, and no matter how often Esther hollered at her or smacked her with the fly-swatter, Daisy remained wild at heart for all of her short life. She ran up and down the living-room drapes as if they were trees. She would eat anything that had been left momentarily unattended. She ate a whole package of frozen calves’ liver left out to thaw. She ate half a chocolate cake left out to cool before icing. She ate straight through the rind of a cantaloupe to get at the juicy fruit inside. At night she slept with Joanna, stretched flat out sucking on the ribbons at the neck of her nightie, kneading her chest with both paws, licking her cheeks with her rough pink tongue. Esther said she did this because she’d been weaned too soon. Joanna loved her with
all her heart, which sometimes she thought of as wild.

  They got Daisy from a man Clarence worked with at the paper mill. His name was Ed Hartley and he lived with his crippled wife on a farm west of town. The Hartleys had no children but they hadcows, horses, chickens, geese, a Shetland pony named Pete, four dogs named Mutt, Jeff, Big, and Little, and many nameless cats.

  Clarence, Esther, and Joanna drove out one Sunday afternoon to choose a kitten. The kittens were too young really to be given away but their mother had been accidentally stepped on by a horse.

  The Hartleys lived in a small square building covered with tar paper. This building was originally meant to be the garage for their big new house which, at this stage, was a concrete foundation sticking four feet out of the ground with the window holes boarded over. Clarence said the big house had been at this stage for ten years. Meanwhile the Hartleys had set up housekeeping in the garage. There was a sagging plywood ramp up to the door. Inside, it was all one room, with the sleeping area curtained off in a corner. The floor was covered with odd-shaped pieces of linoleum in different patterns, held together with black electrical tape. The room was not very clean. There did not appear to be a bathroom, so Joanna was glad they weren’t staying long.

  While Clarence and Mr. Hartley took Joanna out to the barn to pick her kitten, Esther stayed behind to have tea with Mrs. Hartley who was a small, rumpled, cheerful woman in a large wheelchair. Her legs hung from the chair seat like the legs of a monkey doll Joanna had as a baby, a doll made of men’s grey work socks, stuffed with old nylons, its long legs spongy and floppy with soft large lumps. As they walked out to the barn, Joanna could not imagine what her mother might find to say to such a woman in such a house.

  Near the barn there was a barbed wire fence Mr. Hartley said was electrified. It kept the cows and horses in, he said, and the wild critters out. It would not shock them bad enough to kill them, just enough to teach them a lesson. Joanna had received a small electric shock once when plugging in the iron for Esther and she remembered how the current had felt running up her skinny arm and all the little hairs stood on end.

  In the barn, Joanna patted and cuddled each of the four kittens in turn. She chose the white one because right away it purred and licked her chin with its rough pink tongue.

  On the way home, Joanna in the back seat was busy with her kitten, rubbing her chin, deciding on a name, pressing her face against thesoft white fur. Up front Esther said, “That poor woman. What a rough life she’s had.” She said this in a voice Joanna had seldom heard her use before: a soft sad voice, trembling almost with genuine sympathy and admiration perhaps for all that Mrs. Hartley had been through and survived.

  A few months later Joanna came home from school to find Daisy sleepy and wobbling around the kitchen with a red cut on her belly. Esther said Daisy had hurt herself on a wire fence. Joanna thought of the Hartleys’ electrified fence. Later still, she realized that, in fact, Daisy had been taken to the vet and spayed while she was at school.

  When Daisy was a year old, she was hit by a car right in front of their house one sunny Saturday afternoon. Joanna saw it happen from the picture window. She ran into the street and held Daisy’s bloodied body in her arms as the death car sped away.

  Daisy, she knew, was the only living creature on the face of the earth who had ever loved and understood her. Now she was gone. That night Joanna began writing a kind of diary, a series of letters to Daisy, on the gold-embossed parchment writing paper she had received that year for her twelfth birthday. She kept these letters hidden in a box behind the books on her middle shelf so Esther wouldn’t find them.

  Esther said there would be no more pets after Daisy because it hurt too much when they died. Later Joanna will understand that this was not a good enough reason. She will learn about falling in love while knowing full well your heart may be broken. She will learn about fighting for your life every day while knowing full well we are all going to die.

  For years afterwards, whenever she hears someone say, “Boy, that’s rough!” upon hearing bad news, or “He’s had a rough life,” upon hearing of someone else’s repeated tragedies, Joanna will think of Mrs. Hartley and Daisy and her rough pink tongue.

  She will think of Daisy’s death and her father saying, “Honey, I know it’s rough,” while she leaned against him, sobbing into his brown sweater which was also rough and smelled of autumn leaves and earth.

  She will think of the mysterious scar on Daisy’s white belly, of Mr. Hartley’s electrified fence, and Mrs. Hartley’s legs dangling like a monkey doll’s from her shiny wheelchair.

  32. CITIZEN

  “IT IS VERY IMPORTANT,” Esther often said, “to be a good citizen.” She was not an especially civic-minded person in the usual sense of the word. She often didn’t even bother to vote because, as she said, she and Clarence had been voting for opposing candidates for twenty-five years so their votes cancelled each other out. She thought the mayor was an asshole but this did not strike her as a misfortune she could do anything about. She was, it seemed, comfortably resigned to a state of political impotence. Let somebody else worry about such issues, somebody, the implication was, who had nothing better to do with their time. Nothing ever changed much anyway no matter who got in. And really, what did it all have to do with her in the end?

  Politics aside however, there was, according to Esther, an extensive list of requirements for good citizenship. To be a good citizen you must keep your lawn mowed, your shrubs pruned, your hedges trimmed, and your garden weeded. You must eliminate every single dandelion from your property by dragging around a solid weed-killer bar once a week.

  You must keep the outside of your house clean. This involved hosing down the dust and vacuuming up the spiderwebs around the doors and windows. You must get your storm windows up in October and down again at the end of April. You must have the trim, if not the whole thing, freshly painted, preferably in a new colour, every other year. You must keep your eavestroughing clear and your fall leaves raked, even though it was your stupid neighbours’ stupid tree that dropped its leaves all over your yard. (It was a well-kept secret that Esther had finally succeeded in killing the Irvings’ messy maple tree by watering its roots with turpentine and Javex in the middle of the night.)

  You must keep the snow shovelled all winter long, including the public sidewalk out front. You must put salt on the steps so the mailman didn’t slip on the ice and break his neck and sue you. If you had a dog, you must keep it tied up and perfectly quiet at all times. You must pay all your bills on time, including the paperboy when he came to collect.

  You must obey all laws about everything, especially traffic laws about which Esther, although she’d never learned to drive herself, was very conscientious. The only laws which could be safely circumvented with a clear conscience were those involving customs declarations at the border crossing from the United States. Once a year they went down to Duluth to buy sheets and towels and shoes at J. C. Penney’s and it was okay to hide these items on the way back so they didn’t have to pay the duty. This contraband was justified, it seemed, by the unfortunate fact that, through no fault of their own, they lived in a country where the prices were higher, the exchange rate never worked in their favour, and the textile selection was miserably inadequate.

  The qualities of a good citizen had a tendency to expand and accumulate until they bled into a correlative list of qualities necessary to be a good person. The borderlines between these two ideals were blurry and Joanna had trouble keep tracking of the difference. Was a good citizen necessarily a good person and vice versa? Could a good person be a bad citizen? Could a good citizen be a bad person?

  A great many of the requisites for good personhood hinged upon cleanliness. Your house must be kept spotless at all times. This required daily, if not hourly, maintenance. Esther swept the kitchen and all other uncarpeted floors twice a day. She dusted and vacuumed every afternoon. She laundered her rags as carefully as if they were hand-embroidered linen hei
rlooms. She was quite visibly proud of her comprehensive collection of household cleansers, disinfectants, and detergents, which she kept in a locked cupboard under the sink as if they were priceless antiques.

  Joanna was often conscripted into the ever-escalating campaign against dirt. She was sent onto the back step to shake the bedroom rugs and all the grit from them flew back into her face. She was sent into the bathroom armed with a rag and a bottle of Windex and she’d better not leave any streaks. She was sat down at the kitchen table with a sharp knife to pick out all the crumbs and sticky stuff jammed in between the tabletop and the rim. Her bedroom was a favourite target for Esther’s outrage. “This room,” Esther would say, standing in the doorway with her arms crossed,one foot tapping, mouth grim, “this room looks like a dog’s breakfast.” Or she said, “This room looks like a cyclone hit it.” Which left Joanna grinning at the image of cans of Dr. Ballard’s and a dozen Milkbone biscuits being swept away in a windstorm. “Stop smiling and starting cleaning,” Esther said. Joanna set grimly to it, reminded once again that cleanliness, like most important things, was not supposed to be funny.

  Every Monday Esther did the laundry. This involved a complicated process of sorting by colour, fabric, and several other mysterious characteristics of clothing which Joanna never quite figured out. Once satisfactorily sorted, the dirty clothes lay in limp expectant piles all over the floor. The washing process itself involved adding a variety of fragrant powders and liquids to the churning water in accurate measures at precise and somehow precarious moments.

  Esther would already be hard at it Monday morning when Joanna left for school, usually still at it when she came home again for lunch. Esther would wave her into the kitchen to fix herself a sandwich, while reminding her that wringer washers were still the best but they were dangerous too, requiring her undivided attention, and she was living proof, having had her left arm accidentally put through the wringer right up to the elbow when she was young. Luckily there was no permanent damage. But there could have been. She could have been crippled for life. As it was, the only lingering effect was the way her arm ached in the cold or the damp.