In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  She hangs up wishing he would remarry. If nothing else, it would give him someone else to worry about. It would also give her someone else to worry about him with. But this notion seems never to have occurred to Clarence. It is as if Esther’s death were the end of possibility. As if he were now suspended in time, unable to go back, unwilling to go forward, afraid to take a step, afraid to make a change, afraid of remembering, afraid of forgetting. Afraid. Joanna realizes that she has no idea of what it is like to be old.

  47. CABBAGE

  ESTHER WAS ALWAYS A SNOB about cabbage. She said it was something that poor people ate. She said the smell of boiling cabbage would stink up the house for days.

  About cabbage (as well as cucumbers, green peppers, and peanut butter), Esther also said, “I can’t eat it. It repeats on me.” In another context, she often said of her friend Agnes from the bridge club, “One of the things I just can’t stand about Agnes is the way shealways repeats herself.” Joanna felt the giggles bubbling up inside her as she pictured Agnes opening her mouth to bid at the bridge game and, instead of words, out came a cabbage, and another, and another, till the whole room was filled with them.

  Grocery shopping one Saturday afternoon, Esther told Joanna to make herself useful and go pick out a good head of lettuce. In the produce aisle, the cabbage was right beside the lettuce. While Joanna tried to figure out what exactly constituted a good head of lettuce, a woman, in a worn cloth coat, beat-up shoes, and stockings sagged down around her ankles, was picking through the precarious pyramid of cabbages. Finally she pulled one from the middle and the whole thing gave way. There were cabbages everywhere, rolling around Joanna’s feet, down the produce aisle, under people’s shopping carts, and the woman just walked away. Esther glared at Joanna as if it had been her fault and then she said, inexplicably, “See?”

  Twenty years later Joanna dreams about those rolling cabbages. In the dream the cabbages turn into heads when they hit the floor: real heads, perfect pale green heads, with eyes, noses, and horror-struck mouths. It is a full-fledged cabbage nightmare.

  Gordon just laughs. He, like most people, has no strong feelings about cabbage one way or the other. He can take it or leave it, although he did say once that he thought purple cabbage was rather pretty. Sliced through the middle and looked at in cross-section, it is, he said, not unlike the cross-section of an upside-down volcano, the purple parts being like veins of lava running through rock, ready to erupt at any given moment. Or perhaps it’s more like a fingerprint magnified a thousand times. Either way he is sure that cabbages are like snowflakes and human beings: no two of them exactly alike, each one of them precisely individual, and that in itself could be considered remarkable.

  Joanna is working on a series of collages about fruits and vegetables, so it’s no wonder she’s dreaming about cabbages. She finds herself paying an abnormal amount of attention to the aesthetic, in addition to the nutritional, value of produce. Picking a peach, a tomato, an apple, or yes, a purple cabbage, takes a lot longer when you have to contemplate its beauty and symbolic significance as well as itsripeness and price per kilo. It is a matter of the way you look at things determining what you see. It is a botanic extrapolation of the power of mind over matter. Cabbages as human heads, geological formations, or fingerprints: anything is possible.

  She brings her cabbages home from the grocery store and sets them up around her studio. After she has contemplated them, she will take them to the kitchen and turn them back into food: cabbage rolls, cabbage soup, cabbage strudel, coleslaw. After a week Gordon will suggest it’s time to move on to cauliflower, broccoli, perhaps some sweet peppers which are available in all colours just now.

  48. HARD

  “YOU’RE SOFT IN THE HEAD, woman,” Henry said. “But hard, oh so hard, in the heart.” It was midnight. They were getting ready for bed.

  They had agreed to break up. Henry was packed and ready to go. Because everything in the apartment belonged to Joanna anyway, it didn’t look much different. He’d rented a room in a sleazy downtown hotel until he could find a place of his own.

  “You’re soft in the head, woman,” Henry said. “But hard, oh so hard, in the heart.”

  “Yes,” Joanna whispered, although she could not have said what she was agreeing to: his words or the way he was licking her stomach. She could picture her head like a soft-boiled egg and her heart like a fist.

  “I’ll never love anyone as much as I love you,” Henry said as he slipped his hand between her wet thighs.

  “Yes you will, sure you will,” Joanna said, spreading her legs and guiding his fingers inside.

  “No, never,” he said, “not in my heart of hearts.” She pictured him holding a giant hand of cards from that porno deck he’d bought in Las Vegas, all he had to show for his trip. Jack of Hearts, Queen of Hearts, King of Hearts, Heart of Hearts.

  They imagined they would be friends forever. They could not imagine that Henry would live in that sleazy hotel room for nearly ayear, at which point he would meet and suddenly marry a woman named Linda from Toronto and move there. They could not imagine how hard it would be to stay friends after having been lovers and, later, how hard it would be to keep in touch once Henry and his new wife had moved away.

  49. EAGLE

  IN AESOP’S FABLES there was the story of the eagle and the crow. A young crow perched on a rock near a flock of sheep sees an eagle swoop down, pick up a lamb, and then fly back to its nest. The crow tries to do the same thing but chooses as his prey a huge ram which he cannot budge. Realizing his mistake, the crow tries to fly away but his claws are tangled in the ram’s wool. A shepherd sees his predicament, pulls him off, clips his wings, and gives him to the children for a pet. The moral of this story was: Know yourself! Do not undertake more than you are able.

  This advice seemed to contradict much of the other advice Joanna was given, those pithy maxims of encouragement: Where there’s a will, there’s a way and If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! From this perspective the crow would have been considered a quitter. The paradoxical nature of these various words of wisdom was confusing but it was the exclamatory injunction, Know yourself! that really worried her.

  How was she supposed to know herself when every day she felt different? During the course of any given week, she thought of herself as pretty, ugly, stupid, smart, quiet, noisy, kind, nasty, generous, stingy, cheerful, crabby, lazy, hard-working, hateful, lovable, weak, strong, serious, and silly. She did not see how she could be all of these things. She imagined that nobody else could be as changeable and uncertain as she was. Perhaps when she grew up, she would be the same person every day. But for now the only things about herself that she knew for sure from day to day were the facts that she had dark brown curly hair and big brown eyes. But then again her eyes were blue when she was born and her mother dyed her hair.

  The command Know yourself! was like Mrs. Crocker in Englishclass always assigning the weekly composition on Friday afternoon with the cheerful admonition, “Write about what you know!” Then she would have them turn to a list of topic sentences in the textbook, a list from which they must choose one from sentences like:

  1.I have found from experience that the world can be seen and appreciated from my own doorstep.

  2.“Where there’s a will, there’s a way” is illustrated by the lives of many poor boys who have become famous.

  3.We find the most colourful jewels in Woolworth’s.

  4.There are many disturbers of the peace.

  5.There are mind poisons, just as there are body poisons.

  6.The endeavour of education to keep pace with the rapidly growing ignorance appears to be quite hopeless, since there are year by year so many new things of which to be ignorant.

  Joanna knew nothing about jewels, poison, or disturbing the peace. She did not know any poor boys who had become famous. From her own doorstep, all she could see was the neatly mown grass, her mother’s carefully tended flower garden, and, occasionally, the neig
hbours’ orange tomcat eyeing innocent sparrows or washing himself in the sun. She felt ignorant about everything important, including her own true self. She thought she was more like the crow, an ordinary pitiful nuisance, hardly at all like the regal self-satisfied eagle.

  She thought of the eagle as an indigenously and exclusively American bird. Because they lived close to the U.S. border, most of the TV channels they received were beamed up from the south. She knew more about Minnesota than she did about Manitoba, more about Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe than about Louis Riel and his Red River Rebellion. In her mind the eagle was always perched atop a giant silver flagpole from which the self-confident Stars and Stripes waved strenuously.

  Here they had the beaver instead, a pudgy awkward rodent with webbed feet, orange teeth, and a tendency to excrete intestinal parasites into the drinking water. Here they’d had until recently the Union Jack which she had drawn every year in elementary school, measuredand outlined carefully with a ruler and then coloured in with red, white, and blue pencil crayons while the teacher explained once again what it stood for. But it was the flag of England really, not Canada. There was another flag called the Red Ensign, but nobody flew it. Then the government decided it was time for a new flag, so now they had the red maple leaf on a white background which nobody liked.

  Joanna was fifteen the summer of 1969 when the Americans first walked on the moon and the whole world watched it on TV. Neil Armstrong stepped from the lunar module Eagle onto the surface of the moon at Tranquillity Base and the whole world heard him say, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Joanna was sleeping over that night at Penny and Pamela’s. Their parents and their little brother Billy had gone away for the weekend. The three girls were having a slumber party, eating chips and stealing sips of whisky from the Texas Mickey Mr. Nystrom had won at a fishing derby. They were dancing in their baby dolls around the TV set when Neil Armstrong took his giant leap. They thought they were drunk and took turns swooning into each other’s arms, crying, “The Eagle has landed! My God, thank God, the Eagle has landed!” while the astronauts tramped around on the moon far above them in their spacesuits, setting up their experiments, unveiling a plaque, and planting the American flag in lunar soil.

  Two days before the moon landing, Senator Edward M. Kennedy had driven his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in the middle of the night. The young woman with him, a twenty-eight-year-old Washington secretary named Mary Jo Kopechne, had died. Senator Kennedy had not reported the accident to the police until the next morning. The whole world was shocked. The Kennedys, the perfect precious doomed Kennedys, were in the news again. “Their poor mother,” Esther said.

  Four days after the Eagle had landed, the astronauts were back on earth, safe and sound. That night Clarence drove Joanna, Penny, and Pamela downtown to see the new movie Easy Rider. Joanna fell immediately in love with the handsome renegade biker Peter Fonda, and when he and Dennis Hopper were shot to pieces at the end, she was so stunned that afterwards she could not remember leaving thetheatre, getting back into Clarence’s car, and riding home again. The next day Senator Kennedy pleaded guilty to the charge of leaving the scene of an accident. He received a two-month suspended sentence and a year’s probation. The whole world was relieved. Esther said if he’d been an ordinary man, he would have gone to jail.

  Two weeks later actress Sharon Tate and four other people were found murdered in her Hollywood Hills mansion. Sharon Tate was pregnant at the time which made the brutal crime even more horrific.

  A week after that it was Woodstock, half a million hippies gathered on Max Yasgur’s farm to listen to rock music, dance naked, do drugs, and make love, not war. Once again the whole world watched history being made on television. Joanna watched it too, sulking in front of the TV set, feeling too young, too boring, too ordinary, too Canadian, to be part of the excitement. Everything important and interesting, it seemed, happened south of the border. No wonder she knew nothing.

  That night she dreamed of the American flag up there waving, stuck in the moon, omnipotent and arrogant with giant eagles swooping all around it. The lunar surface was crowded with longhaired men, bare-breasted women in brightly coloured skirts, and naked babies eating dirt. In the background there was loud music, Janis Joplin wailing in her whisky voice, Country Joe and the Fish singing bad words out loud, Jimi Hendrix cranking out his psychedelic guitar version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” There was also Senator Kennedy swimming with his mother and Sharon Tate searching under a bush for a crying baby. Joanna herself rode through this dream on the back of Peter Fonda’s Harley which had a gold eagle painted on the gas tank. They passed her own parents weeping, a pale beaver gnawing a tree, and a crowd of people singing “O Canada” and saluting the red-and-white flag.

  The following year four students were killed and nine others injured at Kent State University, Ohio, gunned down by the National Guard while protesting the entry of American troops into Cambodia. As it turned out, the dead students had not been participating in the demonstration. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died of drug overdoses in the fall.

  The day after Janis Joplin’s death in Los Angeles, James Cross, British trade commissioner in Montreal, was kidnapped by the FLQ. Five days later Pierre Laporte, Quebec Minister of Labour, was also kidnapped. On October 16, the federal government implemented the War Measures Act. Over 450 people were detained in Quebec. The following day the body of Pierre Laporte was found in the trunk of a car near St. Hubert airport.

  Although Joanna had never been to Ohio, Los Angeles, or Montreal, she knew that she too was under siege. Even safe boring Canada had been invaded by anger. Peter Fonda was nowhere in sight.

  50. STOMACH

  OFTEN ON A SULTRY SUMMER AFTERNOON there were half a dozen prepubescent girls lying facedown in the street in front of Joanna’s house. Often Joanna was one of them. They had just come from the Branding Park swimming pool. Their bathing suits were still wet on their slender bodies. The more developed (and so more daring) girls wore bikinis with breast cups. Their hair was dry but flattened by the rubber bathing caps they were forced to wear according to pool regulations. Joanna’s cap was festooned with floppy rubber flowers in all colours. The girls’ eyes were bloodshot and stinging from the chlorinated pool water. Some of their ears were still plugged as if they had just stepped off an airplane. They spread their beach towels in the street and then lay down upon them, pressing their damp stomachs against the hot asphalt where they slowly steamed dry.

  Soon after came the young boys who had watched their exodus from the pool and then followed a few minutes later. They strolled down the sidewalk ogling and whistling, the bolder ones flitting through the prostrate girls, flicking their wet towels at the air above their giggling shoulder blades. Once an older boy, a high school boy, rode through them on his bicycle, weaving around their naked outstretched arms and legs as if they were a slalom course.

  At the sound of an approaching car, the girls would leap up andscatter like birds, startled pigeons or doves let loose from a magician’s black hat. They clutched their towels and caps against their stomachs as if suddenly discovering themselves stark naked in the street. If the car was driven by a man, usually he would toot and wave as he passed. If it was a woman driver, she would just ignore them and grimly proceed.

  Meanwhile the boys ran on to their homes, making rude noises and snapping their towels at each other now, harder, connecting, leaving red welts across bony shoulders, long straight thighs, flat brown stomachs. All of their bodies were hairless, boys and girls both, still straddling the spiky fence between innocence and hirsute hormonal knowledge.

  Later, sometimes, in the middle of the night, older teenagers would climb the chain-link fence around the pool and swim unsupervised in the dark. They were yelling, screaming, singing, waking up the whole neighbourhood. If Joanna got up on her knees on her bed and peeked through her curtains at just the right angle, she could see them leaping and diving, t
heir apparently naked bodies twisting and glinting like fish in the moonlight, the water exploding up around them like fireworks or a fountain of displaced diamonds. They played until the disgruntled neighbours called the police and the cruiser came sliding towards them, circling, silent, with its red lights flashing.

  All of Henry’s friends had beer bellies of which they were inordinately fond. Friday nights at The Neapolitan, Pete the roofer would take hold of his gut in both hands and shake it at Joanna. “This,” he said, “this here belly is the only thing I own that’s really paid for.” Luke the carpenter would lean back in his chair to better display his stomach which strained vaingloriously against his red plaid flannel shirt. Sometimes there were buttons missing and his hairy navel showed. He often unconsciously caressed his belly, stroking it, patting, adjusting it like very pregnant women do. “Bought and paid for by UIC,” he said.

  Henry himself was in pretty good shape. He credited this to the fact that, up until five years or so ago, he had religiously lifted weights and worked out on the bench press. But then he’d had to sell the weights and the press because he was broke. Now he’d given upexercise altogether because it cut too much into his drinking time. Now, he said, he was committed to leading a thoroughly dissipated life. He knew it would catch up with him some day. He warned Joanna that one morning she would wake up beside a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound pool of fat with his heart, his liver, and the remains of his stomach in a bucket beside the bed.

  They had these big-bellied men over for Christmas dinner. Originally Joanna was not keen on this idea but Henry reminded her persistently that they had nowhere else to go. Finally she relented and took pity on them. They ate heartily for what seemed like hours. Afterwards they lay around on the living-room floor moaning and burping and unbuttoning their pants. While Henry and Joanna did the dishes, they dozed off. Then Henry tiptoed around them with the Polaroid camera Joanna had given him for Christmas and took pictures of their bellies flopping over their belts. He insisted that these photographs remain stuck up on the fridge. He wanted, he said, to be reminded of where he was headed. He never did get around to taking pictures of the Christmas tree, the decorations, or any of the other festive paraphernalia.