In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Joanna was very proud of this Bible. It was, she figured, her just reward for all those months (winter, summer, dry, wet) of walking the six blocks alone to Moseby United Church while her parents stayed in bed. All those months of walking back home again chewing on the church program which always caused Esther to worry that she was missing some essential vitamin or mineral from her diet and it was this nutritional lack which gave her the urge to eat paper. The truth was she liked the taste of it.

  Joanna kept her Bible beside her bed. Often she patted it or kissed it before she went to sleep. What she liked best about it was the smell and the black ribbon bookmark glued right into the binding which she thought was very sophisticated and elegant.

  Two months after Joanna got her Bible, President Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas. Much later she will remember that she first heard the news of the assassination in Woolworth’s downtown. Esther was buying Christmas gifts and Joanna was trailing her up and down the aisles, bored and overheated in her winter clothes. She will remember pretending to look through the costume jewellery, the pastel nylon panties, the packages of stamps for collectors. She knew she wouldn’t be able to convince Esther to buy her anything so she didn’t even try. She will remember standing for a long time in front of the fish tanks at the back where there was a goldfish that had grown to the size of a trout. She thought it must be a hundred years old. She will remember that as the news came over the store’s loudspeaker she was whining and wanting to sit down at the lunch counter for a double Coke float. She will remember that everyone and everything stopped. Then started up again a few minutes later. She will remember staring at the horrible look on her mother’s face and then they did go to the lunch counter where everyone was talking at once and one woman was crying out loud while eating a piece of cherry pie. She will remember thinking as she stepped back into the street afterwards that everything looked the same but was not.

  Much later she will question this memory. Everybody of her generation has a memory of this day, November 22, 1963. It is a question they still ask each other twenty or more years later, by which time President Kennedy has become familiarly known by his initials. “Where were you when JFK was shot?” It was a landmark in all of their lives. It was also history in the making, something their future children would study in school. At the time, of course, they did not think of it that way.

  Everybody else remembered being at school when the news came. It was a Friday afternoon. Why was Joanna at Woolworth’s? Maybe she wasn’t at Woolworth’s. Maybe she has made the whole thing up. Why would she manufacture such a story? If it isn’t true, why does she remember so clearly the hundred-year-old goldfish, the look on her mother’s face, and the woman crying over her pie? Why does she remember not much enjoying her double Coke float, staring instead behind the counter at the milk shake machine, the glass case filled with half-eaten pies, and the yellowed photographs of a hamburger, an egg salad sandwich, and a chocolate parfait with whipped cream and two maraschino cherries on top? She does not remember if she and her mother were talking or silent, then or on the bus home later. She knows they were not crying. She would have remembered that.

  Nineteen sixty-three was also the year Joanna first got glasses. She had been having trouble seeing the blackboard at school and they had discovered she was myopic. So maybe she had been to the eye doctor that day. But then wouldn’t she remember stumbling around Woolworth’s with her pupils still dilated from those horrible drops that took all day to wear off? Perhaps that would explain why she remembers feeling like she was going to throw up, fall down, or stop breathing altogether. Perhaps it was the eye drops that had made her feel that way. But if she’d had the drops that day, she wouldn’t have even been able to see those pictures behind the counter. But maybe she was remembering them from another day, an ordinary day at Woolworth’s when nothing special happened. Maybe she was remembering them from another day and sticking them on to this day, November 22, 1963. Some memories were like that: bits andpieces pulled from different places, different times, grafted one on to another so seamlessly that you could never know any more what had really happened and perhaps it didn’t matter or perhaps you didn’t want to know.

  What if, by sheer coincidence, that had been the day she actually got her glasses? Wouldn’t she then be able to remember seeing the whole world clearly for the first time in a long time?

  Although she is not religious, Joanna has moved the Sunday School Bible around with her for all these years. She has always intended to read it straight through. She has just been waiting to find herself in the right frame of mind, a frame of mind, she figures, which should be simultaneously lofty, studious, and ready to be swept away.

  The Bible sits now on a shelf in the living room with several other seldom-opened volumes. She dusts it along with War and Peace, Gray’s Anatomy, and Remembrance of Things Past in a handsome three-volume boxed set. In fact the only time these books are ever opened is when she is dusting. Bored and distracted, sometimes she flips through them for a minute or two.

  She discovers several passages underlined in her Bible, blue ballpoint obviously drawn with a ruler under verses in both the Old and New Testaments. She had marked verses 7 and 8 of the Fifty-first Psalm: Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;/wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow./ Fill me with joy and gladness;/let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice.

  She had not only underlined Ephesians 6, verse 8, but had also drawn a light bulb in red ink in the margin beside it: Knowing that whatever good any one does, he will receive the same again from the Lord.

  She cannot remember when or why she might have marked these passages. She is not sure what hyssop is and she has never had any broken bones. She does not remember ever being completely convinced that doing good would necessarily be repaid in kind, by the Lord or anyone else. She cannot remember what great idea this verse might have ignited in her mind. Had she been temporarily possessed by the urge to do good works? Had she indeed done them? Whenhad she stopped? Why? When, for that matter, had she stopped patting and kissing her Bible and put it up on the shelf like any other book? When had the Bible become one of these books she never looks at but cannot give away either?

  61. MEMORY

  JOANNA THINKS A LOT ABOUT MEMORY. She reads about it too, articles by experts who seem utterly certain that memory is a brain function. They talk about engram trails which are memory-traces, supposedly permanent changes in the brain which account for the existence of memory. Like the grooves perhaps on a record album which, when the correct apparatus (turntable, needle, amplifier, speakers) is applied, will produce music. Perhaps this could also account for those songs that get stuck in your head. Or perhaps engram trails are like those lacy silver slug trails on the sidewalk in the morning. Probably they are more intricate than that. A doctor cutting open a brain in search of memory might find a complex configuration like that left on tree trunks which have been inhabited by termites. Loops and lines, channels and rivers, intersecting, overlapping, diverging, converging, veering off, circling back, a map to the center of the universe or the meaning of life.

  But what about those memories which occur in other parts of the body? The picture Joanna has of her mother may well reside in her head, but the rest of it (the anger, the bitterness, the longing, the fear) could be lodged anywhere. What about those memories which are a lump in your throat, a vacuum in your lungs, a knot in your stomach, a cramp in your shoulder, your hipbone, your heart? What is the geography of memory? What is the difference between geography and anatomy? What if the last map is the heart?

  Memory moves past the body too. Memory is that vast surreal territory in which all perspective is lost, a kaleidoscopic shifting plain upon which a tree may be larger than a mountain and a cloud may swallow the sky. Memory is also a microscope, a telescope, a magnifying glass which trained on one spot too long will cause an eruptionof flame, fury, joy, or desire. Examining the contents of her own memory, Joanna finds disorder verging on to c
haos. And yet memory, she suspects, may well be the only vessel in which this disorder can be contained.

  If all language is life in translation, then all memory is a conjugation of the past. Like learning the verb to be in French. All pasts are compound and conditional. Also imperfect and subjunctive. All pasts are imperative.

  Memory is neither cause nor effect. Memory is both cause and effect. Once the paperboy was delivering in a thunderstorm. Just as he put the newspaper in the door, there was an audible strike of lightning to the west. For a long time Samuel was convinced that the paperboy had made it lightning. For a long time Joanna believed that you could not remember what had never happened. That you could not forget what you never knew. Now she is not so sure. Samuel still has trouble with the difference between because and why.

  All memory is revisionist. All language is apocryphal. All memory is collective, the sum of all your selves. All language is learned and all the stories you tell yourself are hazarding a guess.

  The antonym of memory is oblivion.

  The anodyne of memory is oblivion.

  The antidote to oblivion is memory.

  62. SHEEP

  DRIVING THROUGH THE COUNTRYSIDE on a Sunday afternoon, they pass a flock of sheep grazing in a green field. The sheep are white. Their feet and faces are black. Samuel in the back seat sings his version of the nursery rhyme he has learned at day care: Blah, blah, black sheep,/Have you any wool?/Yes sir, yes sir/Three bags full. He goes on to recite “Little BoPeep” and “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” Joanna throws in “The Lord Is My Shepherd” and Gordon hums a few bars of “Waltzing Matilda.” Sheep lore. Wisely, they do not mention sheep to the slaughter, wolf in sheep’s clothing, or the discomfort of feeling sheepish when caught in some foolishness or petty larceny which no self-respecting sheep would ever deign to consider.

  Giggling, Samuel says, “Sheep sure are interesting, aren’t they? But what is this stuff in the song about wool?”

  Joanna explains that wool comes from sheep. She describes the whole process as far as she knows it. Samuel is at first skeptical and then delighted with the idea. He presses his face to the window and says he’ll keep watching for more sheep, red sheep, blue sheep, green sheep. Maybe he’ll see a purple one like the sweater his grandpa gave him last Christmas.

  Gordon starts to explain about dyeing. Samuel is horrified. “Dying?” he shrieks. “You mean they’re dead? You mean they have to kill them?”

  Joanna reassures him that no, they do not. There is dying and then there is dyeing—with an e. Samuel says that when it comes to dying, he will do it with an e. He would much rather turn purple, green, blue, or orange than go into a hole in the ground before he gets to heaven. He is pretty clear about heaven. He knows that good people go there after they die. His grandma has gone there. Joanna is not especially clear about heaven or the odds of Esther having gone there. But she, like most parents, finds herself calling up the notion of heaven in her attempts to explain death to a four-year-old.

  It is easier, she has discovered, to convince a small child that people (pets too, although they have their own special section of heaven) go to a happy new home in the sky after they die than it is to tell him they just disappear, stop, cease to exist, expire, end, end, end. Null and void. Annihilated. Erased. She has not mentioned the antithetic apparition of hell because Samuel has expressed no curiosity as to where bad people go after they die. It seems that discussions of the afterlife (or the lack thereof) are best handled in the same manner as the birds and the bees—tell the child only as much as he wants to know at the time. Do not offer too much information.

  An imaginative child can conceive of heaven easily enough. Samuel likes to speculate as to its contents and conditions. In heaven, he says, dead people turn into angels and then they can have whatever they want. Heaven is like a giant department store filled with toys and treats, flowers and fruits, books and movies, gum. But thereis no money in heaven. Everything is free. There is no such thing as bedtime or bathtime. There are no doctors, dentists or barbers. Nobody in heaven ever gets cavities or fevers or upset stomachs and their hair does not grow. In heaven there are no monsters, no bugs, no thunderstorms, no nightmares, no tears, and no fear. Heaven is a little crowded but there is always somebody to play with. In heaven nobody ever gets yelled at or sent to their room. In heaven nobody gets mad and nobody ever makes mistakes.

  But oblivion is such an abstraction that even an imaginative child cannot imagine it. Perhaps oblivion is hell.

  Samuel would also like to know where he was before he was born. When he looks at the old photographs of Joanna when she was a child, a baby, even younger than he is now, he asks, “But where was I?”

  “You weren’t born yet,” she says.

  “But where was I?” he persists. He wants to know if he was in the kitchen, the backyard, was he at Grandpa’s house, was he at day care, was he sleeping in the other room? He cannot conceive of a world which existed before he did.

  After their Sunday drive in the country, they go home and have supper. After supper, they curl up and watch a little TV. Gordon clicks maddeningly through all the channels two or three times, muttering, as he always does, about the fact that even with all these channels, there’s nothing on worth watching. Joanna grabs the clicker and finally they settle on a program about guardian angels.

  There is the story of a woman travelling with her young daughter through an uninhabited desert-like portion of the American countryside. There are no towns, no traffic, just an unending hot road through nothingness. The young daughter’s appendix is about to burst. The car breaks down. The daughter is delirious. The mother is desperate. Suddenly an old blue pick-up truck materializes out of nowhere and pulls on to the shoulder behind them. An elderly couple gets out of the truck. While the old man fixes the car, the old woman calms the little girl and strokes her forehead until she falls asleep. Then they get back in their truck. The mother drives away. When she looks in her rearview mirror, the truck is gone. She gets her daughter to the hospital just in time and the doctor saves her life. On the wall in the waiting roomwhere the mother sits, there is an old photograph of the very same couple who rescued them. Below the picture is a brass plaque which says the couple left all their money to the hospital when they died in 1958. It is now 1989. They have been dead for more than thirty years.

  There are more stories about guardian angels. Samuel is confused and a little worried about the fact that these angels would seem to be ghosts. Joanna tries to explain by saying that they are magical helpers from heaven.

  Samuel says, “From heaven? Maybe my grandma could be ours.” Joanna’s eyes fill up with tears.

  In the morning at breakfast Samuel asks, “Did you dream about them?”

  “Who?” asks Joanna. She is only half-listening while she scrambles the eggs and puts the bread in the toaster.

  Gordon is just coming out of the shower. “Did we dream about who?” he asks.

  “Those angels,” Samuel says impatiently. “Did you dream about those garden angels?”

  63. BATH

  WHEN JOANNA WAS TRYING to get over Lewis, she spent a lot of time in the bathtub. Three or four times a day she would fill the tub with steaming hot water right up to the overflow. As the water flowed into and out of the tub all day long, she was glad her rent included utilities. She felt only marginally guilty at the prospect of her nice landlady getting the bill. She would strip quickly, avoiding the sight of herself naked in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. She did not feel attractive or desirable. She could not see her naked body without also seeing Lewis admiring it, caressing it, kissing it, licking it, fucking it with all his might.

  The sight of her own unused thighs, untouched shoulders, utterly abandoned breasts might send her over the edge, hurtling down into a crevasse of despair, where she might remain forever, irrecoverable, unrecognizable, rent. All her life she had been led to believe thatlove, true love, was an end in itself, an unequivocal accomplishment
after the attainment of which everything else would take care of itself. Now she might have to face the fact that their great love had been a pointless exercise in destruction.

  Immersed to her chin in water so hot it nearly hurt, she felt calmer, cleaner, rosy, soothed. She imagined all the anger, the hatred, the hurt, and the heartbreak being lifted from her body by the hot water as if she were in a sauna sweating the dirt out of her pores, all the toxins and tensions being sucked out of her until she was dizzily reborn into the steam. Silently she chanted, Lewis, I love you. Lewis, I do truly love you. Lewis, I still love you. But Lewis, can’t you see how much I love you? Eventually she realized that these incantations were not breaking the spell but fortifying and prolonging it. So then she started thinking, Lewis, I don’t love you. Lewis, I don’t love you. Lewis, I don’t love you any more. And for the time she lay sunk in the water at least, it might well have been true.

  If she had been allowed to talk to Lewis, she would have told him this. But she was not allowed to talk to Lewis. The marriage counsellor Wanda was taking him to twice a week had decreed that in order to save his marriage he must sever all contact with Joanna—no meetings, no calls, no letters, no nothing. Before the counsellor said this though, they were still talking on the phone sometimes. In fact, Lewis had insisted that Joanna should feel free to call him whenever she wanted to. He said he knew how hard this was for her. Usually these calls went on for a very long time until either Joanna slammed the receiver down in his stupid ear or else Wanda arrived home from work or else, if she’d been there all along, got fed up and started vacuuming or yelling in the background.