In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Sometimes she would like to go and turn herself in. She would like to throw herself on the mercy of the courts: mea culpa, mea culpa! As if mercy were constructed like those black iron fences around churches and mansions, the ones with the uprights pointed like spears upon which the guilty will be unceremoniously but bloodily impaled. She would beg for forgiveness, amnesty, an official pardon, all of which would be withheld.

  But she’s not sure where she should go to confess. To church? For the sin of having fucked a married man, not once, not twice, but probably two hundred times, once seven times in a single day. To the police station? For the crimes of having stolen that pair of black lacepanties when she was twelve, having forgotten to renew her licence plates, having imagined murder more than once. To city hall? For three unpaid parking tickets, property taxes again in arrears, the house needing a paint job, and several varieties of noxious weeds flourishing in the backyard. To the Children’s Aid Society? For having given Samuel Kraft Dinner for lunch three days in a row, having once slapped him when he stuck his tongue out at her, having imagined how easy it would be to suffocate him when he was three weeks old, for having occasionally envied childless couples, for having many times wished he would go away and leave her alone, for having even gone so far as to say it out loud.

  She suspects she will be punished not only for her transgressions, but for her pleasures as well. There are few enough things in life which offer pure pleasure, or there are few enough times in life when you can afford to take pure pleasure in anything. She remembers Esther often joking, “Everything I like is illegal, immoral, or fattening,” as she polished off a butter tart, a piece of cherry cheesecake, or a jumbo Dairy Queen banana split.

  She also remembers Esther often saying, “Don’t get your hopes up, don’t ever get your hopes up too high.” Esther, having no apparent faith in happiness herself, could seldom bring herself to share in anyone else’s. She felt compelled, it seemed, to warn them of its pitfalls, obligated to remind them of its untrustworthy transience and the need to keep their feet firmly planted on the ground. For a long time Joanna thought this was a mean streak peculiar to her mother alone.

  Now she knows that many people share this trait. They cannot take pleasure in another person’s triumphs, big or small. Instead they are sarcastic, resentful, and envious, as if there were only so much happiness available in the world and the fact that someone else now has a share must mean there will be less for them. It is not necessarily your enemies who will react this way. Just as often it is your friends, those very same friends who have listened sympathetically to your problems day after day in a small café over endless over-stimulating cups of cappuccino, night after night on the telephone, that invisible umbilical cord from one dark kitchen to another. Now that you’re finally happy, they don’t know what to do with you.

  Sometimes they cannot even look at you any more because they do not want to see that you have changed, that you have indeed become the person you meant to be before you got sidetracked—because if you have changed, then maybe they should too.

  There is always someone, it seems, ready to remind you that hopes are mere delusions or tricks which, once drummed up, are bound to be disappointed, dashed, or found to be foolish in the face of real life. If pride goeth before a fall, then so might hopes and pleasure. Either way, Joanna is uneasy in her happiness. It strikes her as something for which you must pay and pay, and then some.

  Sitting alone (Samuel having been safely deposited at the day care) one sunny October afternoon in a trendy downtown restaurant sipping cappuccino and munching on a toasted bagel with cream cheese, Joanna realizes that even now she wouldn’t be greatly surprised to find herself struck down right here for no particular reason, struck down in the prime of her life just for the hell of it. Perhaps punishment does not incorporate a statute of limitations. Perhaps punishment, like wage increases, can be administered retroactively for something she thought she’d gotten away with years ago. For something like that fantasy she had one day walking downtown to this very same restaurant six months after Lewis had dumped her. She had imagined their mutual acquaintance, Mark Halliday, rushing up to her on the street, saying, “Have you heard the news?” obviously bursting with the hope that she hadn’t so he could be the one to tell her, because although he had no proof of their affair, he had his suspicions. When Joanna answered innocently, “No, what?” Mark would say, “There’s been a terrible car accident. Wanda has been killed. Lewis is in the hospital in critical condition asking for you.” This was not an active fantasy, not a scene premeditated or constructed carefully over time. It had come to her that day like a waking dream, fully formed, precisely detailed, and deeply satisfying.

  Now, five years later, it would not surprise her to find that God has just got wind of this blasphemy. He is, of course, extremely busy with world affairs, wars, famines, the environment, and so is likely to be behind in cleaning up the backlog of the many adulterous affairs committed by good-looking upwardly mobile fairly youngmen and women in this relatively stable corner of the world. It would not surprise her to discover that she is about to die a disgustingly flashy death right in the middle of this trendy restaurant, filled as it is in the afternoon with self-employed unusually dressed artists, musicians, and writers. The woman at the next table is writing a long letter on pink fluorescent paper. Farther over another woman is telling her whole life story to a total stranger with a Russian accent. Near the door another woman with striking red hair and charming freckles is having lunch with three handsome men while her puppy is tied to the parking meter out front and everyone who walks by stops to pat it and coo doggy-talk into its floppy black ears. The red-haired woman grins proudly. Joanna supposes that she too looks ordinary enough sitting here sipping her cappuccino. Boy, will they ever be surprised when that lightning bolt strikes.

  Sometimes in the morning after Gordon has gone to work and she is doing the breakfast dishes—the sun is flitting through the window and into the soap suds; Samuel, still in his pyjamas, is trying to feed the rest of his soggy cereal to his teddy bear—sometimes then her happiness hits her like a hammer. She realizes that somewhere along the line she has taught herself (or been taught) to trust pain, suffering, anguish, catastrophe, sadness, and all types of tragedy, trial, and tribulation. Such difficulties are something you can count on, something you can master or, at least, make your way through. But you can’t really do anything with happiness except enjoy it and hope it will last forever. Even now Joanna is reluctant to put her faith in happiness for fear of jinxing it. She feels burdened by the prospect of its potential loss and the pressure put upon her (or upon God or the untrustworthy fates) to prolong and protect it.

  She finds herself praying a lot more than she used to. Her prayers now are about warding off loss. She is no longer dealing with God for gain. She is no longer worried about how to get more but how to keep from losing all that she has got.

  Much as she doesn’t trust her own happiness, she also feels guilty when she isn’t happy. She prays, God, please forgive me for being unhappy, as if unhappiness were a personality defect she knows better than to indulge but sometimes she has relapses. She knows she hasa great deal to be thankful for. She knows there are a great many people far worse off than she is. So what right does she have to be unhappy, even a tiny bit? Where can she go to confess these recurring crimes of discontent, hubris, self-satisfaction, and greed? What if the punishment for not being happy with what you’ve got is to lose everything? What if God is like those frustrated mothers in the A&P who bend down and hiss at their cranky children, “You stop that right now or I’ll give you something to cry about!"?

  She finds herself praying a lot more than she used to. She finds herself chanting silently, Please God, please God, please. It is an unfinished, perhaps ineffectual, plea, she realizes, for paradise.

  74. WHISKY

  AS A YOUNG CHILD, Joanna associated the smell of whisky with her father’s good-night kisses, her father leanin
g gently over her, her father’s eyes gone soft and shiny, her father’s lips moist on her cheek. When he was getting a lot of overtime at the mill and money was good, Clarence sometimes splurged and bought himself a bottle of Seagram’s Crown Royal instead of the regular “rotgut rye,” as he called it. The Crown Royal came in a velvety purple bag with gold lettering and a golden drawstring. Joanna was given these bags to keep her marbles and other small treasures in. The smell of whisky on her father’s breath always made her hope that he’d splurged again and she would be getting another bag for her collection. For a time the smell of whisky made Joanna feel safe and loved and hopeful.

  But soon enough she noticed that while her father’s eyes were going soft and shiny over his third glass of whisky, her mother’s were going cold and hard. Esther did not approve of alcohol in any form or quantity. Esther said she had watched her father drink himself to death and she did not intend to witness such degeneracy again. Joanna could not imagine how a person went about drinking themselves to death. Was it something like drowning from the inside out, your body filling up with whisky over the years until finally yousuffocated and it went bubbling up your nose the way Coca-Cola did if you drank it too fast? “He was a man stuck in a bottle,” Esther once said of her father and Joanna imagined him like one of those ships in a bottle you could buy downtown.

  Joanna began to see the tension rising in her mother every time her father opened the cupboard over the fridge where the liquor was kept. She began to feel it herself, a knot in her stomach at the sound of her father dropping more ice cubes into his glass. She wished he would stop. She wished her mother would stop him. She did not understand why her mother, who had no problem expressing her disapproval about other things, could not seem to bring herself to say anything directly about this. Instead she would bring up her own father again. Or she would just go silent and tense. Joanna too got to the point where she could not look at her father when he had a drink in his hand. She too had the sense that something terrible was going to come of it. But nothing ever did. Clarence did not get cirrhosis of the liver. He did not lose his job. He did not end up dead or in jail for drunk driving. He did not get miserable and mean. He did not beat them in a drunken rage. When Clarence drank, he just got quieter and quieter, usually sitting in front of the TV watching hockey or football with his glass on the floor beside him. He seemed with each drink to travel further and further into himself until Joanna felt that no one could reach him at all. He drank until he became invisible and then he went to bed.

  When Clarence comes to visit now, Gordon, who seldom drinks, buys a bottle of Crown Royal so they can have a drink or two together in the evenings. “Just to keep him company,” Gordon explains. “I don’t like to think of him drinking alone.”

  Joanna is angry but she’s not sure at what or who or when it began. She says he probably does it all the time at home.

  Gordon says, “Then he shouldn’t have to do it here.” The smell of whisky or sympathy is pungent on his breath.

  75. CHILD

  child n. 1. a baby; infant. 2. a fetus. 3. a boy or girl before puberty. 4. an offspring; son or daughter. 5. a descendant. 6. a person like a child in character, manners, interests, etc.; a person regarded as immature. 7. a person regarded as a product of a specific time or place [a child of the future]. 8. a product; something that springs from a specific source [a child of the imagination]. See also CHILD-BEARING, CHILDBED, CHILDBIRTH, CHILDHOOD, CHILDISH, CHILDLIKE, CHILD’S PLAY.

  76. BITTER

  “YOUR MOTHER,” Clarence says suddenly during one of their Sunday morning phone calls, “your mother was a bitter woman.” Esther has been dead for seven years.

  Joanna says, “What?” They have been talking about gardening. The garden was Esther’s domain, filled with flowers only, no vegetables, a few strawberries and a small rhubarb patch in the back corner. The annual spring trip to the nursery for bedding plants was a sacred ritual, a pilgrimage. She planted carefully so there were abundant blooms all summer long. She cultivated and weeded so meticulously you’d have thought the soil had been vacuumed. She was also partial to lawn ornaments.

  In those days neither Clarence nor Joanna was much interested in Esther’s garden. They helped her only grudgingly when pressed. They rolled their eyes at each other while she ranted on about the neighbours’ damn cats digging up her precious plants. They laughed behind her back as she tried one thing after another to keep the cats away, spreading mothballs or hot chili pepper flakes all over the dirt.

  Since Esther’s death though, Clarence has taken on the garden with enthusiasm. He brags about the size of his gladioli, the number of blooms on the rosebushes, the abundant beauty of the window boxes out front. He sends photographs of the begonias, the hydrangea, the yellow tea roses, and the honeysuckle hedge. He complains aboutthe sabotage of slugs, cutworms, birds, the neighbours’ damn cats, and the weather (which is always too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry). He mutters unkindly about Mother Nature. He has even added a few new lawn ornaments to the menagerie: a blue jay on a metal spike, two dwarves, and a white cat. “Remember that cat you had?” he asks. “That cat that got hit by a car?”

  Joanna is glad he has kept up the garden, partly because it keeps him occupied and partly because, through the revisionist vagaries of memory, it has become a fond and comforting piece of her past despite the fact that at the time she wasn’t interested. She is happy enough that it never seems to have occurred to Clarence that he could have just let Esther’s garden go wild.

  But she cannot tell in exactly what spirit he has entered into this horticultural activity. Does he do it perhaps to appease his own guilt? Guilt for not having helped Esther more when he could have. Guilt for not having shared or encouraged her pride in those flowers she so lovingly fussed over all summer long. Guilt for having only grunted when she pointed to the dahlias, the geraniums, the purple phlox, the peonies so heavy with blooms that they drooped nearly down to the ground, when she pointed and cried, “Look, aren’t they beautiful? Aren’t they just gorgeous? Look, look!” Or could he have embraced gardening now just to show her he could do it if he wanted to? Or is he hoping, better late than never, to finally make her happy? Does he believe that she is up there in heaven smiling benevolently down upon him as he babies the begonias, fertilizes the bleeding hearts, and prunes the rosebushes perfectly? Does he believe in heaven? Does he believe she has gone there?

  Now on the phone Joanna says, “What?” and Clarence says it again: “Your mother was a bitter unhappy woman.”

  He says it clearly and firmly. Either this notion is something that has just come to him or else it is something he has known all along and has only now found the courage to say out loud.

  Joanna says, in a question, “Yes?” She is hoping he will elaborate.

  He does, but not much. He says that Esther used to be happy, she used to be a lot of fun. He says, “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know when it started, the bitterness. I don’t even know what she wasso bitter about. For years I tried to figure her out. I guess I never will now. I guess you don’t remember how she was when she was happy.”

  Joanna says, “No, I don’t.”

  “I wish you could,” Clarence says. “I wish you could think of her that way. Not bitter. But bittersweet.” Then he goes back to talking about the garden.

  Joanna pretends to listen but really she is thinking that it is not like Clarence to wax poetic. She is thinking about bittersweet, the only kind of chocolate she ever craved as a child, a big block of it for baking that Esther thought she kept well-hidden in the fridge but sometimes Joanna sneaked it out and broke off a chunk, sucked it so quietly that nobody noticed. Bittersweet, also a plant she now knows, another name for garden nightshade, a poisonous plant with purple star-shaped flowers and bitter scarlet berries, a plant symbolic, like many, of truth.

  No, she does not remember her mother when she was happy. Often she wonders why all her memories of Esther are still so unpleasant. Shou
ldn’t time by now have softened her brain (or her heart or whatever part of the human anatomy it is that memory actually inhabits) and worked its reputed wound-healing magic? Shouldn’t she by now be able to romanticize her mother a bit so that Esther too, like all the other dead people she knows, could be purified by passing on, her faults having fallen away like dead leaves and been replaced by a new growth of virtues, tenderness, and charming nostalgic anecdotes?

  Joanna worries that she too is becoming bitter. Why is she still nursing her unhappy memories? Why does she still remember in vivid detail those Thursday nights when Esther made her sit at the table with lumps of casserole and jellied salad stuck in her throat until bedtime? Why does she still get mad when she thinks of the first time a boy (what was his name?) tried to feel her up and she was so outraged and frightened and thrilled that she confided in Esther but Esther said, “I don’t want to hear about it,” and walked out of the room? She can still hear Esther’s voice telling her that she was lazy, sloppy, cheeky, silly, foolish, irresponsible, ungrateful, too thin, too smart, too deep, too honest, too trusting for her own damn good. There must have been times when Esther praised her. Why can’t she rememberany of them now? She does remember her mother often saying, whenever Joanna had a new blouse or dress or hairdo, “Well, anything looks good on a model.” But she said it so often and so sarcastically, that Joanna soon realized this too was another reminder that she was not supposed to think well of herself. Esther did not believe in getting too big for your britches. Esther believed in comeuppance.