In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  These depressing ruminations usually preoccupied her on Sunday, during that gaping wasteland between lunch and supper when there was nothing but sports on TV, her homework was done, and the phone never rang. It was the seriousness of Sunday, the longest day of the week, which inevitably overwhelmed her, the way it was always just dripping and dripping and draining away.

  She realized she hadn’t figured in leap years, which were even longer.

  Esther said, “Stop wishing your life away. Once you hit twenty-one, the years will just get shorter and shorter and before you know it, you’ll be dead.”

  Much to Joanna’s grudging surprise, she was right. Time too, like horses and flowers, proved to be untrustworthy. It could be counted on to pass, yes, but never at the same rate, one hour plodding by too slowly as you checked the clock every five minutes, the next oneflitting by so fast that you suspected it was probably faster than the speed of light, or maybe it had never happened at all. There was always too much of it. There was never enough of it. A week or a month which seemed interminable in the living, in memory turned out to have been the same length as any other, if not shorter. Time, it seemed, was just as likely to be a figment of your own imagination or, even worse, a figment of somebody else’s.

  Later, with Gordon beside her in bed and Samuel snug in his bassinet, Joanna will lie awake for hours praying that she will live forever, or at least, long enough. She will realize that there are times in your life when you don’t know whether to regret or be grateful for time’s passing. You are aging certainly and that is perhaps regrettable but there is also the self-congratulatory sense of having made it through another year (another month, week, day, another hour even). There is always the remote possibility that some day you will turn out to be not only older but wiser too.

  “Time is of the essence,” Esther often said. Yes, Joanna had to agree, the statement having the indisputable ring of truth, of secret knowledge, arcane wisdom. But what, Joanna will always wonder, the essence of what?

  73. RELIGION

  ESTHER WAS UNDECIDED ABOUT GOD. It was hard to tell what she thought of Him from one day to the next.

  Joanna was sent to Sunday School every week. While Clarence stayed in bed, Esther made Joanna’s breakfast and then helped her get dressed. Joanna wore a short two-piece grey suit, black patent leather shoes, white ankle socks, and a white lacy thing more like a doily than a real hat bobbypinned to her dark curly hair. Even though Joanna knows she couldn’t have worn this same suit every week for all those years, she will always remember herself going off alone to Moseby United Church in this outfit.

  In the photo album there is a picture of her wearing the suit, holding a pair of white gloves in one hand. It says: READY FOR SUNDAY

  SCHOOL, EASTER 1960. Behind her are the grey drapes patterned with floppy red flowers, also the TV set. On top of it there is a bouquet of yellow and red plastic roses on a white plastic doily and another photograph, of Joanna when she had the mumps the year before, propped up in bed in her red flannelette nightie with her glands bulging, surrounded by stuffed animals.

  The Sunday School photograph is the last one in the album. The later photographs were kept in a shoe box all jumbled together, some of them still in the original developer’s envelopes. It had always been Clarence’s job to keep the album up to date. For years he was meticulous and then, for no apparent reason, he stopped. As if Joanna’s life, or at least his belief in his own ability to keep it in order, had ended right after Sunday School, Easter 1960, when she was almost six.

  Once Joanna was on her way to Moseby United Church, Esther went back to bed. By the time Joanna got home, her parents were just coming around, sipping their coffee at the kitchen table in their pyjamas, smelling of sleep, with their hair all messed up, their eyes soft and blurry. They were very kind to each other those late Sunday mornings, refilling each other’s coffee cups, sharing yesterday’s newspaper, Esther sectioning up pink grapefruit halves with her special grapefruit knife, Esther laughing merrily when the juice squirted across the room, hitting the window or Clarence’s chin. Esther trailing her hand across Clarence’s shoulder as she got up to butter the toast.

  Joanna thought it wasn’t fair. She wanted to stay in bed too and then lounge around in her pyjamas until noon. Although she hated the sour grapefruit which always made her eyes water, she wanted to be offered one anyway. She wanted to heap on the sugar with the special serrated spoon. But by the time she got home from Sunday School, the grapefruit halves sat gutted on the counter like broken baseballs or coconut shells. Why was she the only one who had to go?

  Esther said she had to go because she was a child and all children need religious instruction. Sunday school, Esther said, would teach her the necessary moral values. Joanna at nine and three-quarters wasn’t worried yet about her values, moral or otherwise. She thought value was something you got for your money when you found plastic placemats on sale half-price at Simpsons-Sears.

  moral adj. 1. relating to or capable of making the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil. 2. in accordance with the principles of right and wrong. 3. of a good character; sometimes, specif., virtuous in sexual conduct.

  Sunday School, Esther said, would save Joanna’s mortal soul. Joanna hadn’t yet given her soul much thought.

  mortal adj. 1. destined to die eventually. 2. of man as a being subject to death. 3. of this world. 4. of death. 5. fatal; deadly. 6. of war, fought to the death. 7. unappeasable. 8. intense pain, fear, grief, etc. 9. Theology, a sin causing eternal damnation and death of the soul; distinguished from VENIAL.

  Joanna never could keep the two words straight in her mind, moral and mortal, but clearly they were connected: to each other and to Sunday School with all its talk about God, death, and goodness, with all those unlikely parables about Jesus and His miracles, each with a moral you were supposed to figure out for yourself and then live by. Either way, moral or mortal, Joanna wanted to stay home Sunday mornings and sleep in.

  Esther told Clarence (Joanna was eavesdropping again) that she was undecided about God herself but she wanted Joanna to make up her own mind. Besides, what if she was wrong? What if there really was a God, an all-seeing all-knowing all-punishing God? It seemed wiser, Esther said, to hedge their bets. Besides, Sunday was the only morning they got to sleep in.

  The summer Joanna was ten she went one afternoon with Penny and Pamela to their friend Maria’s house. Maria lived with many brothers and sisters in a three-storey brick house two blocks over. Maria’s older brother, Bernard, who was going to be a minister, was holding a Bible Study group that summer every Tuesday afternoon in their big shady overgrown backyard. There were eight or ten other children there and they sat around two wooden picnic tables while Bernard read to them from the Bible in a glorious soul-stirring voice.

  Soul-stirring, yes: now Joanna was starting to think about her soul because someone had finally touched it. Bernard. Bernard with his deep brown eyes and thrilling pouty mouth. All summer she had been secretly wishing she was Catholic so she could become a nun. She saw now that she would have to revise this desire because the conditions of nunhood (as she understood them) would make it difficult to pursue her love for Bernard. Her desire for divinity was quickly superseded by her desire for Bernard.

  After the reading, Bernard gave each of them a small green-covered booklet which said: CONSECUTIVE DAILY BIBLE READING (A PLAN FOR READING THE ENTIRE BIBLE IN ONE YEAR). Then Maria and Bernard’s mother came outside in her apron with lemonade and chocolate chip cookies for everyone. Joanna was converted, Joanna was saved, Joanna would give her whole life over to God, Jesus, Bernard, and his mother.

  She flew home on the path of righteousness with the precious pamphlet in her hand. Esther, when she saw it, flew into a rage. (Esther was unpredictable those days, would fly into a rage over the least little thing, would fly, as Clarence put it, right off the handle over dirty socks left on the bedroom floor; over a quart of milk left on the counter, gone sour
and smelly in the heat; over the fancy casserole she’d slaved over all afternoon and nobody even said how delicious it was; over cracker crumbs and popcorn in the chesterfield, wet towels in the bathroom, fingerprints on the furniture, and dirt. Dirt, dirt, dirt, nothing but disgusting dirt everywhere she looked. Clarence said it was a “woman’s thing". What he meant was menopause but Joanna thought he was referring to Esther’s obsession with cleanliness.) Esther tossed the Bible reading pamphlet on top of the pile of last week’s newspapers all bundled and tied to go out with the garbage. She forbade Joanna to go to Maria’s ever again.

  “Tricks,” she said scornfully. “It’s all tricks, a bunch of mumbo-jumbo! What a load of rigmarole!” Esther liked this word. She gave it an extra syllable—"rig-a-marole"—in a disgusted voice. “These people,” she said, “are no better than those damn Jehovah’s Witnesses selling their religion door-to-door.” Joanna had no doubt as to how Esther felt about them. Many times she had crouched inthe kitchen below window-level while the Jehovah’s Witnesses pounded at the back door in religious fervour, looking for lost souls, and Esther whispered, “Be quiet! Don’t answer it!” Joanna stood there as if trapped in a game of statues and the mounting tension tickled inside her till she thought she’d laugh or scream her head off.

  “Tricks,” Esther said and the subject was closed.

  She also said this about those Mexican jumping beans advertised in the back pages of Joanna’s comic books. And about those little grow-your-own-seahorses you could send away for: Just add water and they will come to life before your very eyes! Living seahorses! They will provide you with hours and hours of entertainment and joy!

  “Tricks,” Esther said, about those beauty aids advertised in the back pages of her women’s magazines: Remove unwanted hair forever in just five minutes! Erase ugly age spots with Going, Going, Gone Fade-Out Cream! Look slimmer instantly with our new Tummy Trimmer! Increase your bustline without exercising, surgery, or pain!

  “It’s all tricks,” Esther said.

  After supper that night, Joanna secretly rescued the Bible reading pamphlet from the garbage pile and took it to bed with her. She read it under the covers with a flashlight. The only other time she’d dared do this was last winter when she was reading The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford, the heart-warming, tear-jerking story of Bodger, the old bull terrier, Luath, the young golden Lab, and Tao, the Siamese cat, trekking two hundred and fifty treacherous miles through the wilds of Northern Ontario to get back home. She got caught in the act then, reading and weeping with the blankets like a tent over her head, the wavering flashlight trained on all that fine print held two inches from her sniffling nose. It was probably the sniffling that gave her away.

  “You’ll go blind!” Esther cried as she plucked blankets, flashlight, and book from Joanna all at once. The book was temporarily banished, as if it were some evil influence, something dirty and dangerous like those magazines Clarence kept hidden and which Esther didn’t know Joanna had already found: all those naked long-limbed women with their big brown nipples and the sun shining on their bums. These women filled Joanna with desire: a desire to touch them, to betouched by them, to touch herself between her legs, a desire to feel the warm sun on her bare-naked bum.

  The first required Bible reading (January 1: Morning) was Matthew 1. She consulted her Sunday School Bible. Matthew 1, she discovered, began with the genealogy of Jesus Christ, a long list of unwieldy unlikely names:

  Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the king.

  There was more. Joanna felt hysterical and flipped to the final reading, December 31, Malachi 4, which said, among other things:

  For behold, the day comes, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go forth leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts.

  In the middle of the night, Joanna put the pamphlet back on the pile and it went out with the papers in the morning.

  She forgot about Bernard easily enough. She was still young, her desires were elastic, she was fickle and still largely unformed.

  One Sunday morning later that year Esther said, “Do you want to go to Sunday School today?”

  Joanna said, “No,” and the subject was closed.

  Neither Henry nor Lewis believed in God. They both liked to make disparaging remarks and bad jokes about Him. Henry’s favourite was the one about the drunkard who boarded a bus and staggered to an empty seat beside a nun. The nun, mortified by his inebriated condition, said, “You, young man, are going straight to Hell!” The drunkard lurched to his feet and stumbled towards the door, yelling, “Driver, driver, let me off! I’m on the wrong bus!”

  Lewis said he’d given up on God when he was eight. He’d been praying that year every night since October for a bicycle at Christmas, a red bicycle, of course, a CCM. He saw it in the window of Mattson’s Hardware downtown. He and every other kid he knew was praying for that bicycle, praying to God and Santa Claus both, the two invisible deities they believed to be watching over them, making their lists and checking them twice, just to be sure who was naughty or nice. There were plenty of presents under Lewis’s tree that Christmas morning but no red bicycle in sight. He checked the basement, the garage, and the backyard. Nothing. It was a sentimental trite little story which Lewis could make some fun of now but at the time it was enough to destroy his belief in God and Santa Claus both, those two white-bearded old angels who were, it was now revealed, mere figments of the collective imagination.

  Lewis admitted that he had prayed for the odd thing since (for a safe airplane flight to Europe once because he was afraid of flying, for a lucrative commission from a local art aficionado, even for a painless solution to his situation with Joanna and Wanda) because, though he no longer really believed in God, praying was a knee-jerk reaction in times of fear and emotional distress. Besides, it couldn’t hurt, you never know. But his prayers had consistently gone unanswered. Or if they were answered, the answer was no. God, he figured, must be out of the office, gone for lunch, gone away for theweekend, or whooping it up on a cruise ship somewhere in the Caribbean.

  On a more serious note, Lewis said that with the world in such a perpetual mess, how could any rational person still convince themself that there was someone in charge?

  Henry and Lewis were both (as Joanna sometimes thought later, when she was trying to sort through the romantic disasters of her life thus far) godless men. Perhaps that was part of the problem. Maybe they were doomed by their disbelief and she, too, by being an accessory to their atheism.

  Not that Joanna had got religion or anything. She did sometimes wish she was religious because maybe then she would have some guidelines to go by. Maybe then, when she found herself facing some prickly moral emergency, she’d be able to determine the appropriate rules and regulations and thus act accordingly without confusion or ethical compromise. If only she were imbued with a stalwart sense of divine conviction—if only she were, so to speak, divinely convicted—maybe then she could know, for once and for all, the difference between right and wrong. But she, like her mother, was still undecided about God and she too figured it was wiser to hedge her bets. Although she now attended church only under duress (that is, for weddings and funerals), she did still refer to Him in all His glory with a capital letter in a tone of voice which co
uld be interpreted as reverential or, at the very least, respectful. She was certainly not above making deals with God when necessary: God, please let me get this grant. If I get this grant, I promise I will never be greedy again…God, please don’t let me have gonorrhea (syphilis, herpes, or AIDS). If I don’t have a sexually transmitted disease this time, I promise I will never have sex again…God, please give me strength. If You will get me through this one, I promise I will never whine or complain ever again.

  Occasionally letting out a string of curses which featured all His various names in vain, colourfully modified by a series of good old Anglo-Saxon expletives, she would not have been completely surprised to find herself struck down by a lightning bolt vigorously hurled out of heaven by a divinely indignant and muscular arm.

  If Joanna is still undecided about God, she is, however, pretty sure about punishment. Gordon likes to tease her about her Calvinist streak which, he says, is a mile wide and twice as long. Gordon, like Henry and Lewis, doesn’t believe in God either and is remarkably untroubled by the whole concept of religion. Joanna doesn’t know much about Calvin or his theological doctrines but she does know that she lives in a perpetual state of expecting punishment. If she spots a police car cruising the block, she imagines with a jolt that they are coming to arrest her for some major crime she has committed but conveniently forgotten. The story of the ten plagues of Egypt strikes her as likelier than Cinderella, Snow White, and all other more modern permutations of happily ever after.

  She feels guilty. Guilty as sin. But she’s not sure for what. She knows she is no longer an innocent. A truly innocent person would not be so suspicious and frightened when the phone rings in the middle of the night (or the middle of the afternoon, for that matter), and when she answers it, there is silence, sometimes the sound of a breath drawn in sharply or let out slowly, then an ominous click in her ear. A truly innocent person on such an occasion would simply say, “Must have been a wrong number,” and go unperturbed back to bed, back to washing the kitchen floor and humming, back to a nutritious family supper with Cheery Cherry Cheesecake for dessert. A truly innocent person would not spend the rest of the day or night looking over her shoulder, trying to figure out who it had been, how much they knew, or what they were trying to find out.