In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  She knows that at home he manages to look after himself well enough. He shops, he cooks, he cleans, he does the laundry. Often he tells her about these quotidian manoeuvres in detail when he telephones on Sundays, calling long-distance to tell her he made pork chops for supper last night, he vacuumed yesterday, he washed clothes on Thursday, he even ironed a shirt. Here he seems to fall helpless the minute he walks through the door. He cannot remember how to work the coffeemaker, the washing machine, or the VCR. He will not even walk to the corner store for milk. He will do without until someone else goes to get it. He does not like to mention that there is no milk. He does not want to be a bother. He tries to help out by doing the dishes after supper but he can never remember where the pots and pans go so he leaves them spread all over the counter for Joanna to put away. When she tries to assure him that it doesn’t really matter where they go, just fit them into the bottom cupboard any old which way, he says, “Your mother had a special place for everything.” He will not wash the metal vegetable steamer because one time when he washed it at home, one of the silver leaves fell off and Esther yelled at him. Now he leaves it on the counter, bits of broccoli, spinach, or cauliflower all dried out and stuck in the little holes. It takes him an hour to finish the dishes and he never wipes off the stove.

  While his world folds in ever more closely around him, he especially likes to watch the weather channel. What is this delight he seems to take in tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, and floods? Why does he smile so intently at the wet women crying into the reporter’s microphone that they have lost everything, everything, everything? When he is not watching the weather on TV, he is watching it from the window and relaying his observations back over his shoulder to her.

  “It’s clearing up a bit.”

  “Looks like more snow.”

  “Boy, that wind is really bad.”

  “Boy, it’ll be a cold one tonight.”

  She wants to say, Who cares?

  She says, “Oh, that’s nice, it’s clearing up.”

  She wants to say, What difference does it make?

  She says, “Oh dear, we sure don’t need any more snow, do we?”

  She wants to say, I don’t give a shit!

  She says, “Oh?”

  Everything he says makes her mad. She wants to feel sorry for him. She wants to feel sympathetic and patient but instead she feels angry and then she feels guilty for that. Which only makes her madder. She knows that she is mad at him for getting old, aging not the issue so much as the way he is doing it. She wants him to be another kind of old person. She wants him to be like the old people in TV commercials for life insurance, Geritol, and new improved denture cream. They are tanned and cheerful, confident and energetic. They are golfing, sailing, bike riding, swimming. They might take up skydiving some day soon. They are fiercely alive, they are not waiting for anything, they are not afraid of death, and they don’t give two hoots about the weather unless it interferes with their recreation. She wants him to be like the old artists she has met. They are charming and eccentric. They wear bandannas and blue jeans, cowboy boots and Indian cotton shirts, a single gold earring and a ring on every finger. They have long grey ponytails. They are busy, opinionated, vigorous, and often lecherous. They are determined to live forever and if they cannot manage that, they will go out painting, dancing, dreaming, or drinking.

  She does not want her father to be this lonely tired old man who watches TV all day (loud because he will not admit that his hearing is going), who talks only about the weather, the housework, and his friends who are dying, who wears polyester bell-bottoms and cheap plaid shirts, felt slippers and slip-on rubbers. He does not read. He has no hobbies. He is not interested in much of anything any more.

  Joanna knows she is being unreasonable. What does she expect him to do at this late date? Adopt a liberal attitude, study gourmetcooking, cultivate an interest in the arts, perhaps take up water-colours, learn to play the clarinet, write a book of poetry? He never did any of these things when he was young. Why should he start now?

  She turns down the radio and hears him in the living room, stirring and snorting. She hears his felt slippers shuffling on the hardwood floor. He comes into the kitchen chuckling over a news item he’s just heard: a man was stabbed last night in a submarine shop on the other side of the city, stabbed six times by his wife, critically wounded but still alive. They said he had been beating his wife for years. Clarence laughs. “Poor guy! Imagine being stabbed by a woman! How embarrassing! He’ll never be able to hold his head up in this town again.” Joanna thinks but does not say that it’s too bad his wife hadn’t cut his head right off, also his balls. Clarence looks at her, still laughing, wanting her to laugh with him. But she will not laugh if it kills her. It might.

  He sits down at his usual place at the table, folds his hands in his lap, and looks out the window. He says, “Boy, it’ll be a cold one tonight.” He does not seem to notice that the table is covered with books and papers and Samuel’s action figures. Joanna clears the table, just barely resisting the impulse to sweep it all up with her arm and send it crashing to the floor. She yanks the silverware drawer open so hard it nearly falls out. She tosses the plastic placemats on to the table. She begins to slap the plates down in that way all angry women do. He does not seem to notice. He is picking at the foam rubber backing of his placemat which has cheerful pictures of fruit on it: grapes, strawberries, apples, oranges, watermelon, and a big pineapple in the center. Oblivious to her anger, he watches the window of the stove as if it were a television, the way people watch their clothes in the dryer at the laundromat. Perhaps he still thinks all women are like this: furious. Perhaps they are. Inside the stove the light is on and the chicken is sizzling and sputtering grease.

  Gordon and Samuel come thumping in the back door, slapping the snow off each other, laughing and teasing, dropping their jackets and boots in a pile in the porch.

  “What’s for supper?” Gordon asks, innocently enough.

  “Chicken,” Joanna says.

  “Again?” Gordon says. Joanna glares at him and he says, “Oh good, I love chicken.”

  “Oh oh, grumpy,” Samuel whispers to his father and goes to sit on his grandpa’s knee. She can feel them all looking at her back as she takes the chicken out of the oven. She accidentally slams the door.

  Gordon gets Samuel settled at the table and then dishes out the potatoes and the peas. Joanna piles the chicken pieces on a platter of pink carnival glass which had been Esther’s once and which Clarence had mailed to Joanna in a big box of Styrofoam a few months after Esther died. He had taped a note to the platter: Maybe you can use this. I sure never will.

  Clarence has been here for nine days now. Joanna has come to the point in the visit where she has given up trying to impress him with her culinary skills. (This impasse arrives earlier and earlier each visit.) Last night they ordered Chinese food, pizza the night before, and the night before that she made sausages which she knows he doesn’t like. Tonight, in an attempt to both apologize and appease her own guilt, she has made chicken just like Esther used to make. It is an old family recipe which Esther copied out carefully on a little card for Joanna when she moved away from home.

  Joanna has taped the recipe card to a page in her own recipe book. Below it she has taped a black-and-white photograph of herself and her mother sitting at a picnic table in the pines. In the margin it says: August 1957. They are sharing a bottle of pop and smiling at Clarence behind the camera. They are sitting in the shade but behind them the sun is so bright it has washed the grass white. In the background in the bushes is a tilted wooden signpost with an arrow which says MEN. On the table is the big wicker picnic basket filled with this very chicken, prepared by Esther the night before, carefully wrapped in tinfoil and kept in the fridge overnight. As soon as Clarence has finished fussing with the camera, Esther will open the basket and set out the special picnic plates which are red plastic, divided into sections with a round one at the top for the
matching red picnic cups.

  Once every summer, towards the end of August, just before the Labour Day weekend, they drove an hour and a half to get to thispark and have their annual family picnic. Every year they had this same chicken, cold and tender, delicious with pickles, carrot sticks, green olives, and white bread. Every year Clarence took a picture of Esther and Joanna just before they began to eat. Joanna has especially fond memories of these family picnics, preserved in the photo album now, Joanna a little taller, Esther a little older, year by year, except for the one year when the park had been invaded by swarms of horseflies and they had to eat their chicken in the car.

  After Esther died, Clarence sent Joanna the old picnic basket, still filled with the red plastic plates and cups, mismatched and tarnished cutlery, turquoise plastic salt and pepper shakers. Samuel uses the plastic cups now and the plates come in handy for birthday parties. The picnic basket sits in Joanna’s studio filled with old brushes and dried-up tubes of paint and glue.

  Clarence takes a drumstick and a wing and digs in. “Boy, this is really good,” he says with his mouth full. “I’ve never had anything like this before.” Joanna reminds him that it is Esther’s recipe, she used to make it all the time, always complaining about how it dirtied up the oven, spitting all over the place like that, but Clarence says he can’t remember. When she tells him about the picnics, the basket, the horseflies, the plates, he says, “Oh well, if you say so, maybe you’re right.”

  “Oh never mind!” Joanna snaps. She grabs the salt shaker away from Samuel who says, “I was just looking at it. You don’t have to be mad at me. ”

  Joanna is so busy hating herself for being such a grouch that she is not listening any more and does not notice when or how Gordon and Clarence have got to talking about the war. Clarence is telling the story of how one winter there was no food and it was so cold and there had been many casualties and he hadn’t heard for weeks from his older brother Evan who was in another regiment and he was so worried but nobody knew anything and guess who showed up in the middle of the night, driving a General’s jeep no less: Evan bringing blankets, a whole fresh chicken, and a half-empty bottle of rum. “I was so glad to see him I just started to cry,” Clarence says and begins to weep softly right at the table.

  He pulls a dirty handkerchief out of his pants’ pocket and blows his nose. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m old, I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I never used to feel like crying but now sometimes I do.”

  Gordon and Joanna look politely down at their plates while he pulls himself together. Even Samuel seems to realize that he should be quiet and eat, or at least pretend to. Joanna has never in her life seen her father cry.

  Unless you count the time at Esther’s funeral when his eyes were full but he would not let them run over. When Joanna patted him, he smiled. She did not cry at her mother’s funeral either. She wanted to, especially when they dropped the dirt on the casket in the hole. But she was afraid that if she started, Clarence would too, and then neither of them would know how to stop or what to do next. She imagined then that the other people at the funeral were admiring her strength. Now she worries that they were thinking she was cold and hard-hearted.

  “It’s all right,” she says now. “It’s all right.” But she cannot look her father in the eye.

  Later she goes to bed early, exhausted by her own anger, her guilt, and the unnerving evidence that her father has feelings every bit as profound and painful as her own. Samuel is sleeping, Gordon and Clarence are watching the hockey game. Joanna falls asleep to the sound of the hockey commentator’s voice rising and falling play by play. Gordon and Clarence are mostly silent but occasionally they groan or cheer softly, clapping their hands or slapping their knees. She falls asleep quickly but does not sleep soundly, the night behind her eyelids inscrutably spattered with restless discoloured dreams. She does not dream about the war, the stove, the horseflies, or the picnic.

  72. LONG

  JOANNA LONGED FOR PIANO LESSONS. Every other child she knew took lessons of some sort: piano, accordion, violin, ballet, tap dancing, or Ukrainian. Most of these children hated their lessons. But Joanna, lessonless, longed for them. Penny and Pamela, who had to takepiano lessons and hated them, longed instead for a pony. Joanna had been on the back of a shaggy Shetland pony once and both its height and breadth had terrified her. They were at the farm of her father’s friend, Mr. Hartley, who was saying how his old mare Maisie would kick him to death if she ever got the chance. Then they made Joanna sit on the pony so they could take her picture. The pony twitched his tail so it slapped Joanna across the back of the head, and then he pooped, a smelly steaming mass plopping wetly to the ground. They made her sit on the pony until she cried.

  Horses were like flowers, she figured, pretty but not to be trusted. Left to their own devices, they were just as likely to turn on you. In their house, flowers appeared only after an argument, their presentation, it seemed, most often prompted by guilt. Then Esther would either throw them out, still in the box, with the comment that she had plenty of her own flowers growing outside, better flowers, cheaper too. Or else she would snort at them while setting them in a vase on the kitchen table where she glared at them periodically until they drooped and dropped their petals all over the place.

  It was not a pony but a piano that Joanna longed for. A sturdy upright piano: burnished wood, shining black-and-white keys, three bright gold pedals below. A plushly upholstered bench before it, the kind where the lid came right off and inside there would be piles of sheet music: sounds set down in a mystical language of lines and black dots. Joanna figured that if she just looked at this new alphabet long enough, she would be able to break the code, the way Clarence did the cryptogram in the paper every night after supper. He looked and looked at the letters until FHBVS ZHCDZ HCAL RNAVSI FNSDCVZZ RWVSV AHCI ZHJBVS KHZW KJLQSHZW became DIVER SINKS INTO WATERY DARKNESS WHERE TINY SILVER FISH FLOURISH. If she looked and looked long enough at the sheet music in the piano bench, perhaps the melody would similarly materialize.

  Later it will be while seated on Penny and Pamela’s piano bench that Joanna drinks wine for the first time, a sickening sweet red. She will always remember the name, Castelvetro, and the voluptuous look of the red liquid in the green bottle. She will not remember,however, how they got the wine, where Penny and Pamela’s parents were, what music might indeed have materialized once they’d polished off the whole bottle between them.

  Now Esther said, “Piano lessons cost money. Pianos cost even more. Besides, where would we put it? The front room is too small. Just look.”

  Joanna looked. Into the long narrow room crowded with armchairs, plant stands, a console TV, and a china cabinet which was Esther’s pride and joy. She could spend all day just cleaning and rearranging its contents, squirting Windex all over its glass doors and shelves. There was the couch with Clarence stretched out on it, his long legs hanging over the arm, his bare feet dangling, bony and white. They made her think of a chicken before it was cooked.

  Joanna tried to put pianos out of her mind. She decided that she wanted a set of Encyclopedia Britannica instead.

  Esther said, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Encyclopedias cost money.” When the well-scrubbed salesman came around she wouldn’t even let him get a foot in the door. Joanna sadly watched him walking away and thought he was probably the smartest man in the world, privy to all secret knowledge, science, history, and the meaning of life, and she would probably never see him again.

  As it happened, not long afterwards, Safeway started selling the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia, one volume per week, only ninety-nine cents each with purchase. They collected the set, one volume per week, and Esther cleared a place for them on the bottom shelf of the bookcase beside the big dictionary and the Bible Joanna had got for perfect attendance in Sunday School three years before. The other four shelves didn’t have books on them, but knick-knacks: china horses, flowers and frogs, four Dalmatian puppies tied to their mother
with little gold chains around their necks. Each ornament was set on a frilly starched doily which Esther had made herself by a mysterious process called tatting. Eventually these were all replaced with plastic doilies. Plastic was all the rage then and Esther took to it like a bee to honey. Plastic was a revelation: it never wore out, it never got old, and when it got dirty, you could just wipe it off with the dishcloth. Esther happily bought plastic doilies, plasticflowers, plastic placemats, plastic lampshades, a plastic Hallowe’en pumpkin, plastic mistletoe, and a plastic Christmas wreath for the front door.

  The Funk and Wagnalls books looked all right: burgundy bindings with gold letters stamped on each spine. But they were disappointing: too small, the pages not shiny enough, and the illustrations were all in black and white. Joanna seldom looked at them. A set of encyclopedias bought one book at a time in a grocery store, of all places, was not likely to be much good anyway.

  Clarence tried to console her. “Why the long face? Stop always wanting what you don’t have,” he said. “Make the most of what you’ve got. There’s no time like the present. Life is too short.”

  From Joanna’s twelve-year-old perspective, he was beginning to sound stupid or sadly mistaken, the unpleasant present was looking like it would go on forever, and life loomed before her unbearably long. The future would probably never arrive.

  Joanna figured she might well live for another sixty years. That would mean another twenty-one thousand and nine hundred days. Another five hundred and twenty-five thousand six hundred hours to get through, another thirty-one million five hundred and thirty-six thousand minutes, another one trillion eight hundred and ninety-two million one hundred and sixty thousand suffering seconds.