This was before they had a dryer, and when Joanna came home from school at four o’clock, Esther would be out on the back step hanging up the last of it, humming with clothespins in her mouth. The whole backyard on a bright windy day was filled with a fragrant flapping chaos of colours like a flock of giant exotic birds.
When the wringer washer finally gave out, Esther allowed herself to be convinced (by Clarence and an eager appliance salesman on commission at Simpsons-Sears) that an automatic washing machine would save her a great deal of precious time and energy, leaving her more freedom to pursue her other interests. They might as well get the matching dryer too, which would eliminate the aggravation of all that hanging up and taking in, all that worrying about the weather,roving sea gulls and thieving crows, that nasty grit which floated over from the smelly paper mill. Best of all, the salesman said, a dryer would eliminate forever that unsightly low-class look of clothes on the line, your underwear and the stains on your sheets displayed to the entire nosy neighbourhood. Although Esther informed him that her sheets were never stained and she washed her underwear by hand, they bought the dryer too.
After that, when Joanna came home from school on Mondays, it was to find Esther in the living room ironing and watching “Another World.” Ironing used to be a Tuesday job but the new washer and dryer saved her so much time that now she could do it on Monday. Although it obviously pleased Esther to be getting a jump on things, even Joanna could see that with the new labour-saving appliances somehow the challenge had gone out of the job, and with it the joy her mother had taken in her weekly victory over dirt.
Now on Tuesday she cleaned the bathroom instead, vigorously scrubbing the tub and the sink, confidently ignoring the TV commercials which warned that abrasive cleansers would damage the porcelain. They got rid of the dirt, that was the main thing. She spent a lot of time working on the toilet, muttering about men and why couldn’t they aim straight, never mind remember to put the seat down. Once a month she replaced the little container in the tank which made the water blue, a bright pretty blue which turned a murky green when Joanna peed into it.
Although she was ambivalent about God, Esther had utterly and exultantly embraced the notion that cleanliness was next to godliness. The imperatives of household maintenance were not unlike commandments. Failure to obey them indicated sheer and shameful laziness and anyone who allowed her home to fall into filth was bound to suffer the consequences: guilt, shame, and divine punishment. These commandments were primarily binding upon women because they took care of such things. It was the women who had the instinct and the talent, men having so patently and repeatedly proven themselves to be sloppy, unreliable, and virtually useless in the sanitary struggles of daily life. Men didn’t even see the dirt, so how on earth could they be expected to know what to do about it?
It was a small step from household cleanliness to personal hygiene. There were many rules in this area too. Esther was always nagging Joanna to brush her teeth, comb her hair, wash her hands and face, clean the sleep out of her eyes. She said the same things to Clarence sometimes too. She supervised Joanna’s baths for more years than she needed to, long after Joanna was out of danger of slipping beneath the surface and drowning herself. Years later she was still standing on the other side of the closed bathroom door, reminding Joanna to wash between her toes, behind her ears, to scrub her neck and her elbows, especially her elbows which always looked dirty and rough, provoking Esther to go at them periodically with a lotion called Pretty Feet which was supposed to repair such unsightly areas by chafing off the dead skin. It left Joanna’s elbows red and raw as if they’d been burned.
“And don’t forget,” Esther always whispered, “to wash possible,” which was what she called her crotch.
Joanna wore a clean outfit to school every day, which Esther chose and laid out on her bed while Joanna was eating her breakfast. Esther liked to think of Joanna as the best-dressed girl in her school, but the truth was the other girls teased her about her wardrobe and she longed to wear the same grubby dress three days in a row like everybody else. Of course there was the thing about clean underwear every day in case you got in an accident and you wouldn’t want all those doctors and nurses to see your dirty panties, would you? A sight, Joanna couldn’t help but think, which would be unlikely to faze them anyway if the rest of you was covered with blood, your bones were sticking out, and your guts or your brains were slopping all over the place.
It was hard to keep track of all these things, hard to remember what was important. By the time she reached adolescence, Joanna had decided, like most teenagers, that her mother was nuts.
Joanna sometimes surprises herself now by still obeying (or at least trying to, or at least feeling guilty for not) some of Esther’s rules and regulations. It is disconcerting enough to hear her mother’s voice coming occasionally out of her own mouth. Wash your face brush your teethchange your shirt you look like an orphan clean up your room pick up these stupid toys before somebody trips and breaks their neck this room looks like a cyclone hit it if you don’t pick up these stupid toys right this minute they’re going in the garbage were you born in a barn or what? It is even more astonishing to find herself hollering wholeheartedly at Gordon for not having mowed the lawn for two weeks: “Just look at those dandelions and there’s a thistle back there the size of a rosebush! We’ve become the disgrace of the neighbourhood!” Then refusing to speak to him all evening after he says calmly, “Why, dear, if it’s that important to you, why don’t you do it yourself?”
It’s not supposed to be important. It’s supposed to be one of those trivialities which only shallow bourgeois people fuss over because they’ve got nothing more meaningful to occupy their minds. It’s not supposed to matter but it does, and sometimes she dreams about dandelions, thistles, dirty dishes in the sink, piles of laundry mildewing all over the basement, centipedes breeding under the bed, windows so dirty she can’t see out, snow in the driveway so deep she can’t get out, dirt so thick she can’t breathe and she dies. Once she dreams there are nine loaves of mouldy bread in the cupboard.
She still finds it hard to remember what is important. Certainly the importance of any number of big things is quite clear: famine relief, nuclear disarmament, gun control, child abuse, family violence, world peace, love, truth, freedom, and the environment. She has a list clipped from the newspaper, ONE HUNDRED WAYS TO SAVE OUR ENVIRONMENT, taped to the inside of one kitchen cupboard door. The list begins with Reduce consumption whenever possible, moves on through Keep the lint screen in the dryer clean, Diligently repair all leaks and drips as soon as they occur, and Eat lower on the food chain. It ends with Reduce stress in your life and Have fun and be joyful. She really tries, she really does, but sometimes the pressure of trying to be environmentally correct gets to her. Sometimes she has relapses and throws away a perfectly good glass jar, eats a greasy double cheeseburger out of a Styrofoam box, goes berserk in the grocery store and buys individually wrapped processed cheese sticks for Samuel, a T-bone steak for Gordon, and a jumbo roll of pink paper towels for herself. Sometimes she fallsheadfirst into a bucket of stress like quicksand and forgets all about having fun and being joyful, while also being good to the planet.
Then there is the shifting middle ground of those things which may or may not be important in the long run, which are crucial to one person and inconsequential to the next, which seem essential and life-sustaining one day and downright stupid the next. This category includes money, a new car, sex, laughter, friendship, save the whales (the elephants, the whooping cranes, the ostriches), gardening, music, ballet, art, literature, and all other forms of happiness.
Finally there are all those things which are no doubt meaningless but also no doubt important whether you think they should be or not. How is it, Joanna often wonders, that so many meaningless moments can also be so important?
How is it, for instance, that purchasing, carrying home, and then putting up in the kitchen three wicker plant baskets (mul
ticoloured, mostly purple, pink, and turquoise, in graduated sizes with hoop handles, flat on one side, to hang on the wall) can fill her with such pride of ownership, such joy of home decorating, that she calls Gordon at work to tell him what she got? For weeks afterwards every time she sees the baskets she smiles, and she likes them so much she goes back to the store and buys another set for the bathroom and this time they’re on sale, twenty per cent off, and this makes her even happier. How is it that the herbs she snips from the plants she has put in these baskets taste so much better than they did when they were just sitting on the windowsill in square green plastic pots? How is it that when the basil dies she feels like a failure?
How is it that when she’s finished five loads of laundry, all of it dried and folded and piled on the bed, she is filled with such an ardent sense of accomplishment, filled with such immense satisfaction, that she presses Samuel’s soft sweatshirts to her nose and inhales the fresh clean scent just like some dumb housewife in a TV commercial who is convinced she’s discovered the meaning of life?
How is it that when she comes home from the market on Saturday afternoon with bags of fresh fruit, she immediately spends twentyminutes washing and polishing the Empire apples and the Bartlett pears, humming and smiling and admiring their plump round bodies, their tight fragrant skins, arranging them carefully in the big wicker basket like a bouquet of flowers? How is it that this makes her feel like such a good, happy, and generous person? How is it that when Samuel sees them, hugs her and says, “Oh, Mommy, I love you, you’re such a good Mommy,” for once she actually believes him? As they sit at the table crunching, Samuel eating an apple out of one hand and a pear out of the other, how is it that she feels so confident, so clear, in such complete quiet benevolent control of her own small (but significant) corner of the world?
How is it, let’s face it, that the black clingy cotton shirt she picked up half-price at Benetton’s can make her feel so sexy, so attractive, surely the most desirable woman in the world? Striding along the downtown streets in this new shirt and her flowered stretchies, her hair is swinging, her crotch is tender and damp, she is smiling at strange men, certain that behind her back they are sighing and swooning with aggravated unrequited lust, will probably have erotic dreams about her for weeks, and their poor droopy wives will wonder what’s gone wrong.
Isn’t she an artist, a mother, a modern woman? Isn’t she supposed to be above such things?
Yes, how hard it is to remember what is important. Is something important necessarily meaningful as well? Can something that is meaningless be important anyway? What is the connection between meaning and importance? What if there isn’t one? What is the meaning of meaning? What if there isn’t one? What if everything is meaningful and we just don’t know it yet? What if not everything is a moral issue after all? What if it is? What if her mother was wrong and not all of a person’s actions come complete with a moral quotient? What if her mother was right? What if there is no point in trying to remember what is important? What if it doesn’t matter? What if everything is important?
If everything is important, how can we ever hold it all clear in our minds? What if it turns out that all the things in life that she thought were important aren’t? Or what if all the things in her lifethat she was good at, all the things she took pride and pleasure in, all the things she practised and practised and finally perfected, turn out to be meaningless and unimportant? What if it turns out that all the times she said, “It doesn’t matter,” she was wrong? What if it turns out that all the times she said, “It doesn’t matter,” she was right?
The questions keep multiplying and reproducing themselves, as if by fission, like monstrous amoebas run amok. This is like Samuel always coming to her with questions to which he already knows the answers. Strings of questions: Is it raining? Is it windy? Are you drinking coffee? Are you getting dressed? What’s your first name? What’s my last name? Are you my real mother? Do you love me? Will you always be my mother? Will you always love me?
Sometimes she tries to explain that this is not how questions work, how you’re supposed to ask questions about things you don’t know yet, not things you can see very well with your own two eyes, how there are many important questions worth asking but these are not some of them. Instead of answering, she asks him, “What do you think?” and he says, “I don’t know, I can’t remember, sometimes I just don’t know what I know.”
One morning after another barrage of questions about the perfectly obvious, Joanna says, “Oh, honey, no more, this just makes me tired,” and he says, “Me too, Mommy, sometimes I just get so tired of the inside of my head.” Which Joanna and Gordon think is charming and precocious, but when she tells it to Clarence on the phone he is alarmed and says, “I hope this doesn’t mean he’s going to be mentally disturbed.”
Sometimes Joanna gets so impatient with Samuel’s questions that she snaps at him in sheer frustration: “I don’t know, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter, stop it!” Sometimes she tries to tease him by giving the wrong answers but he gets so impatient he cries. Then she tries to explain that there are many things in life worth crying about but this isn’t one of them. Then he wants to know what is.
33. FOOT
HENRY HAD, WITHOUT A DOUBT, the smelliest feet in the world. He liked to say so himself. He was proud of them. He figured he would have made it into The Guinness Book of World Records if only they’d had the good sense to add the category. A brand-new pair of cowboy boots on Henry’s feet for a day and a half smelled like a pair of runners that had been worn twenty-four hours a day without socks for the last ten years. Henry’s shoes had to be removed before entering the apartment and left outside the door.
Depending on the brand, his socks either rotted away in great ragged spreading holes or went stiff like little woollen corpses. Joanna was in charge of hauling all their dirty clothes down to the laundromat once a week which was a chore she didn’t mind but she absolutely adamantly unconditionally refused to wash Henry’s socks. Henry solved this problem by throwing his socks away at the end of the week, buying new ones in big bags by the dozen for only ten dollars.
The first time he stayed over, he left his shoes outside the door with the socks tucked inside them, went immediately to the bathroom and washed his feet for ten minutes while Joanna put on some romantic music, poured two glasses of wine, and dabbed perfume on her pulse points. When he came barefoot into the living room smelling of strawberry soap and took her in his arms to waltz slowly to the bedroom, she thought this foot-washing routine was a charming exotic (or eccentric) ritual which he might have learned in some foreign country, Japan or Finland or some equally peregrine land.
Some months later, they were downtown partying with some friends at the Neapolitan and Henry (in his favourite T-shirt, black with white block lettering which said INSTANT ASSHOLE: JUST ADD ALCOHOL) said he wanted to dance. He stood up and took off his work boots, tucked them neatly under the table which then cleared instantly, everyone up and scattering, holding their noses and waving their hands. This was a story Henry loved to tell later, whenever anybody asked him why he didn’t dance much any more. Every time he told it, the story got better and better until finally it wasn’t just their table that had emptied, but the whole damn bar, in avirtual stampede (it was a wonder nobody got trampled to death!) to the door and then everybody ran outside, dozens of them, turning green and gasping for air, huddling together in the pouring rain. Joanna, who thought she would die of embarrassment every time he told this story, said only, “It wasn’t raining.”
Henry had a way with stories. He could turn the most trivial incident into a hilarious anecdote which he improved and embroidered with each retelling. He was fond of funny sayings which he managed to work into every story. “She was two axe-handles and a plug of tobacco wide,” he would say of an overweight woman. “Strong like bull, smart like suitcase,” he said of those he considered less than brilliant. A person who had died was either “done like dinner” or “ti
ts up in the rhubarb.” Of those who found themselves embroiled in self-inflicted trouble, he said, “If the shit fits, wear it.” Whenever he and Joanna were off to the Neapolitan for the evening, he would say, at least twice, “Let’s get drunk and get a personality on!” At first Joanna found this habit charming but after a while it became almost as irritating as the smell of his feet.
Years later, whenever Joanna caught a whiff of someone else’s foul foot odour (in the summer in the park, in the shoe store at the mall, at a party, people dancing through the kitchen in their socks), she would think of Henry and cringe.
Years later still. Joanna has just come in from digging the garden with Samuel and he is proudly showing her the seedlings they started in the house, his own garden in flats, sunflowers and sweet peas already three inches tall and his carrots sprouting in clumps like green hair. She is just resting at the kitchen table for a minute, reading the paper, sipping some pink lemonade, and she catches a whiff of her own bare feet, sweaty and sticking to the cool linoleum. She thinks about Henry. She hasn’t talked to him for years. He lives in Toronto now, has a wife, a job, a baby and everything—all the things he swore he never wanted, all the things she could not imagine him having. She thinks about Henry, his smelly feet, his stupid T-shirt, and for a minute she misses him. For a minute she wonders what her life would have been like if she’d married him. She has no regrets. She’s just curious, mostly about all the people she might have been and will never be now.
34. SPIDER
“KILL IT, KILL IT!” Esther shrieked. There was a daddy longlegs in the bathtub. Spiders, as far as Joanna could figure, were the only things in the world that her mother was afraid of.
In the Language of Love Page 17