In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Esther was not the least bit sentimental about the pink lamp, and when Joanna asked if she could have it when she grew up and got her own place, Esther said, “What would you want with that old thing?” But she agreed. Joanna loved the pink lamp because it made her think of elegant ladies in long dresses with bustles and muffs, dashing men in top hats and waistcoats, sleek high-stepping horses pulling fringed carriages. She thought of the pink lamp as a leftover from a gentler, simpler, more classical time. She sometimes thought she had been born in the wrong century. Esther felt compelled to remind her that in those days they did not have televisions, vacuum cleaners, stereos, or cars. They had outhouses. In those days children did not have Barbies, dollhouses, or any other fancy toys. She herself had had nothing to play with but a stick and a ball. And yes, she had walked four miles to school even in the coldest weather. At various times during her brief scholastic career (she had quit school after Grade Ten because in those days girls were not expected to pursue higher education—they were expected to pursue their homemaking skills in the hopes of eventually procuring themselves a good husband), she had frozen her ears, her fingers, and all of her toes. Other than that, she did not often tell stories of her own previous life.

  Esther said there was no sense hanging on to the past. Those people who longed for the good old days had poor memories. Esther believed wholeheartedly in progress. She said she liked to stay abreast of things. She did not believe in nostalgia.

  Like most children, Joanna seldom thought of her mother as having once been a child herself. She could not imagine it. When she was older and would have liked to know more, it was Esther, it seemed, who could not or would not remember or imagine any of it.

  Joanna did not know if this was a deliberate abdication of her own past or if it was merely a negligent lack of interest. People of Esther’s generation did not look to their past lives as the cesspool of all their problems the way people Joanna’s age did. They did not go to expensive therapists who encouraged them to plumb their own pasts in order to garner insight into their unsatisfying present lives. People of Esther’s generation did not seem to realize that making peace with your past would allow you to enjoy your present and proceed fearlessly (more or less) into your own fulfilling future.

  When Joanna moved away from home she took the pink lamp with her. Also the box of old photographs Esther had been threatening for years to throw away. Joanna rescued it and packed it in with her other belongings. But not before she sat down and went through the photographs. She tried to get her mother to look at them with her but Esther was not interested. She said, “What’s done is done. Why not just leave well enough alone? Let sleeping dogs lie,” and went on with her ironing.

  Joanna went through the photographs one by one. To her they were not so much a homage to the past, a futile attempt to stop time dead in its tracks, but rather a demonstration of faith in the future. All families take such photographs, take them in the middle of daily life while looking towards that day (five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now) when they will be able to sit down and look back at what is now the present and hopefully remember and make some sense of where they have come from, where they have been and never will be again. Such family photos presume a certain optimistic belief that yes, the future will eventually arrive and the present (good, bad, or indifferent) will have meanwhile spontaneously become the past and they will be immersed in a new present, even while gazing down with wonder at the inevitable alchemy of time.

  The prints and negatives in the box were all jumbled together. There were notations on the backs of some: names, dates, places, by which to anchor and acclimate them, but most were blank. A photo of Esther posing in the middle of a stand of birch trees wearing an elegant black dress, black pumps, little white gloves, and carrying a box-shaped polka-dotted purse was followed by one of her older sister,

  Frances, twenty years earlier in a clown suit in a dark doorway with a small black dog at her feet. Of course all the photographs were black and white so the actual colours of their garments, their accessories, and the dog could only be imagined. The dress might have been blue, the purse might have been red, and the dog might well have been brown.

  There was a shot of an unidentified babe-in-arms, its face out of focus, crying or smiling. A small boy in a cowboy hat in a field. The same boy in a Davy Crockett hat in the same field. A flock of children watching a miniature train. The small boy with the hats might be one of them. Clarence in the war, young and handsome in his uniform. A sharp-faced man in a white suit, black shirt, posing stylishly with a silver-tipped cane. A white dog on a heavy black chain with its tongue hanging out. A series of Christmas trees which all looked the same, only the rooms around them having changed. The pink lamp appeared in several shots, in different rooms, on different doily-covered tables, flanked by different people, or by the same people who were growing, aging, changing, while the lamp remained the same.

  When Joanna asked what had become of the pretty handmade doilies upon which the lamp had sat, Esther said she didn’t know. Esther said she didn’t know who half these people were either. Joanna asked her why did she have a box full of photos of strangers then? Esther said they weren’t strangers at the time. She was, it seemed, no better at hanging on to people than objects.

  Later Joanna will discover that she is the same. When people move out of her immediate orbit, whether to another city, another neighbourhood, or a new stage of their lives, she doesn’t know how to keep track of them. Perhaps she has inherited this or perhaps it is because she was an only child, always acutely aware of her solitary state. Perhaps instead of trying to counteract that state, as you might expect, by holding people close and fast forever, she tends rather to perpetuate it. It begins to dawn on her that she is lackadaisical about other people. They are tremendously important to her for a time and then they are not. She begins to see her life in sections, as separate pockets of time and affiliation. She comes to each stage anew, having burned her bridges behind her, not consciously but somehow ithappens, so that none of the characters from one stage leak forward into the next. Except for her parents, of course. They are omnipresent. Although she can always recognize herself, going forward, looking back, she is not sure that other people could. You wouldn’t know me if you knew me now. The various stages of her life are like marbles set side by side, just touching, and it is only at the end, after the last marble has been put in place, that she will be able to see the pattern they have created. At any given moment it is hard for her to remember how she got here from there. At any given moment it is hard for her to imagine how she has and hasn’t changed.

  When she looks again at Esther’s old photographs (five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now) she will see that they themselves are like lamps, shedding their stories effortlessly like light upon a table. But the stories they tell are always aging too so that five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now what she will see in them will not remain the same. All memory is revisionist, all stories are apocryphal, all photographs hang suspended in the present tense. As if in aging, a photograph changes meaning according to how the viewer has aged and changed and yet remained the same. As if in aging, a photograph acquires rings like a tree, rings of light upon a small table the way the pink lamp once illuminated tables, corners, shadows, whole quiet rooms.

  53. DREAM

  OFTEN JOANNA IS BLESSED OR CURSED with the ability to remember her dreams in vivid full-colour detail. Sometimes she tells them to Gordon and Samuel at breakfast. Sometimes their eyes glaze over. But still she persists, trying to track down the tangents which shoot off from her dream images like sparklers, like synapses firing in all directions at once.

  Sometimes the more she tries to make sense of a dream, the more details she remembers, details which may or may not be important—how can she know? She has read the dream interpretation books trying to find out. She has spent time contemplating the vocabulary of dreams, a language of pictures, looking for clues. She has wondered about the dre
ams of blind people. Do they too see pictures in theirsleeping heads? And what about the dreams of deaf people? Are they silent like old movies? Could it be that in dreams the deaf may hear and the blind may finally see? She has deconstructed her dreams, both degenerate and divine. She has puzzled over dreams in which she herself does not appear, dreams in which she knows she is dreaming but cannot wake up, dreams in which she is someone she does not recognize, dreams in which she cannot see, hear, move, or speak. She has investigated the symbolism of dream bananas, dream lions, dream oceans, dream houses, dream mothers, dream lovers, dream death.

  Sometimes the harder she tries to remember a dream, the faster it dissolves before her very eyes. As if dreams were like snowflakes, perfect, pointed, each one unique, but you must get very close to see them, and the closer you get, the more they are melting away under the hot onslaught of your own eager breath. By the time she gets to the breakfast table, all she has left is a tidbit or two: a set of railroad tracks, a plate of spaghetti, a brown dog tied to a tree, sunlight on a young woman’s neck, the smell of apples, a tall man saying, “Stop it.” By the time she gets to the breakfast table, she has forgotten how to speak the language of dreams.

  What if all language was like this? The way sometimes you can look at a word you’ve seen a thousand times and suddenly it doesn’t make sense, is just a scramble of letters flung across the page. This enormous gaping moment of meaninglessness, this black hole of language, lasts only a second and then the letters obligingly re-form themselves, the word reappears, and you can go on with your reading, your learning, your life. But what if it doesn’t? What if you read a whole book and the words do not go into the folds of your brain the way they’re supposed to, but just dissolve one by one like dreams, amounting to nothing but a blank space, an empty cavity, an open wound? What if when you close the book, you can’t remember a single word? And when you open it again later, what if all the pages have gone blank? What if the next time you are searching for a word, you never find it?

  No matter how she tries to tell her dreams, she has only language to work with, that inadequate, inexact, iridescent vehicle upon which we must hang all of our lives, past, present, and future, sleeping, waking, and otherwise.

  54. YELLOW

  THE COLOUR OF YOUR MOTHER’S APRON from the time when all mothers wear aprons all day in the kitchen and she wipes her wet hands on them before holding out her arms to you when you get home from school at four o’clock.

  No.

  Your mother’s apron is always white with embroidery around the band and the bottom, purple grapes, blue teapots, red apples, or giant black musical notes, and although she wears it all day in the kitchen, she does not wipe her wet hands on it before embracing you. Instead she wipes them on a dishtowel because she does not want to muck up her pretty apron and sometimes she does not even say hello.

  The colour of a coward’s belly, the belly of your lover who will never leave his wife no matter what happens or doesn’t. No matter what happens next.

  No.

  Your lover’s belly is a rich creamy brown, like coffee with lots of milk. Or it is golden, glistening, burnt sienna or umber, and hard. Even in the wintertime his belly looks suntanned and oiled. When you kiss it, your lover’s belly is always warm. When you lick it, it always tastes salty, as if he is so potent there is sperm oozing out of all his pores. He may be potent but you are not and you know now that, no matter what you do, he will never leave his wife because he is convinced that if he does, she will die. You know now that when his wife licks his belly, it is also salty and warm and perhaps this is what he thinks keeps her alive.

  The colour of the sun, a round yellow ball in the upper right-hand corner of all children’s paintings. The trees are green, the sky is blue, the house is white, and the cat in the window is black.

  No.

  In your son’s paintings, the sun is just as likely to be purple, pink, or an empty circle. The sky is blue, yes, but the trees are orange, red, and yellow because it is fall, he says, the house is brown becauseyour house is brown, and the cat in the window is white. When you casually mention about the sun usually being yellow, he says, “No, it’s not. Look.” And of course he is right. The sun is not yellow. Most of the time the sun is no colour at all. The sun is a hole in the sky. You should not look directly at the sun. You have told him this many times. You have also told him that he can paint things however he sees them, however he likes. He says, “I can do it however I want.”

  Yellow. The colour of memory.

  No.

  The colour of everything you have forgotten. By accident or on purpose.

  55. BREAD

  ESTHER THOUGHT BAKING BREAD was a waste of time. “Baking your own bread,” she often said, “is backward. I just don’t understand it in this day and age.” This attitude also applied to making your own pie crust, squeezing your own oranges for juice, and when she saw on TV the inspirational little story of a woman who made her own soap, she fairly hooted with derision. “The next thing you know,” she said, “that woman will be washing her clothes on a rock in the river and riding a horse to the grocery store.” As if all such retro-domesticity were the province of primitive fools who preferred to do things the hard way. Who in their right mind would suffer through these trials of their own free will? Who in their right mind would go to all that trouble of kneading and rising and kneading the bread dough again and again, all day long, when they could have the bread already made, tasty, sliced, white, fresh enough, and delivered to the door three times a week before breakfast no less?

  “I,” Esther often proclaimed proudly, “have never baked bread in my life and do not intend to start.” Joanna suspected that her mother must have baked bread when she was younger, living on the farm. But Esther never talked about those times. It was as if she had had two lives, this life and that life. The dividing line was never clear but certainly, in thislife, she had never baked bread. She believed in the breadman who, along with the milkman and the mailman, formed the triumvirate of home-delivery demigods which kept modern life in motion.

  As predictable as the appearance of these men at the door on their appointed rounds was Esther’s appearance at Joanna’s bedroom door whenever she had gone in there to read, to think, to work on her art, or just to have some modicum of privacy. Esther eyed the need to be alone with great suspicion and could always find an excuse to barge in. Then she would stand in the doorway and survey the room, searching for signs of aberrant behaviour. Then she would lean towards the desk where Joanna was usually seated, now curling her arm protectively around the page in front of her.

  One of the first collages Joanna ever made at this desk began with a drawing in oil pastels of the kitchen table set for supper: pork chops and peas on three brown plaid plates on the yellow plastic placemats on the blue tabletop. Poised on either side of the middle plate was a pair of hands clutching the cutlery like spears. These hands, male hands, were not attached to arms. They ended at the wrists. On this plate beside the pork chops and peas was a small photograph of a naked woman which Joanna had secretly cut from one of Clarence’s dirty magazines. The woman’s body was twisted to the point of contortion so that both her breasts and her bum faced the camera. Perhaps she was double-jointed at the waist, like a department store mannequin who could be manipulated into all manner of acrobatic erotic postures. Below the drawing, in letters cut from newspapers and magazines, were the words: Man cannot live by bread alone.

  Even then Joanna knew that she could never explain the picture or the message or any other important part of herself to her mother.

  Living on her own, Joanna learned by trial and error (as most edifying things must be learned) how to bake her own bread. The cookbook she worked from explained every step in detail with diagrams and also informed her that the etymology of the word lady can be traced back to the Old English meaning loaf-kneader. All that kneading and rising and kneading the bread dough again really could takeall day and she loved it. With the
fragrant dough warm and malleable, alive in her hands, she felt comforted and connected to an unbroken stream of women throughout history. She thought about bread while she baked it. She thought about breaking bread, casting bread upon the waters. She thought about Communion bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Jesus served up to stalwart Sunday morning believers. She thought about the miracle of the loaves and fishes. She thought about the staff of life. She thought about Murphy’s Law and how the bread never falls but on the buttered side.

  By the time the bread was ready to come out of the oven, she felt cleansed and creative. She also thought smugly of Esther, as if her bread-baking were yet another form of adolescent rebellion. The apartment around her smelled wholesome, yeasty, and safe. She took a warm loaf to the landlady upstairs.

  Even after Esther has died (or especially after Esther has died), Joanna thinks about her while she bakes bread. She imagines her looking down from heaven (if indeed there is such a place, if indeed her mother has gone there), shaking her head and clucking her tongue. Sometimes she has long silent conversations with her dead mother, in which she explains why she likes to bake bread, how it makes her feel. She also tells her about preservatives, whole wheat, fibre, as if she cannot help feeling that still she must justify herself to her mother. She always suspected that Esther, in life, would have liked to be omniscient. She assumes that now, in death, she probably is.