In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  There must have been good times too. There must be sweet memories in there somewhere. There must have been a time when Esther held her, comforted her, brushed her hair, rubbed her back. Surely when she was a baby her mother must have touched her, sang to her, cuddled her, and loved her just like other mothers do. But neither her memory nor her imagination will stretch that far.

  Joanna realizes that this is the first time her father has said one remotely unkind word about her mother since she died. In fact, Joanna realizes in retrospect, he has not said much about her at all. Joanna does not mention her very often either. It is as if they are both afraid of starting a conversation they don’t want to have, a conversation they will never be able to finish. It is as if they are both hiding something, some secret knowledge about Esther that would change everything they ever thought they knew about her when she was alive.

  Once, shortly after Esther’s death, Clarence asked on the phone, “Where does the garden hose go in the winter?” This was like Samuel asking, “Where do the butterflies go in the winter? And the ants? Where do the ants go when it snows?”

  To Clarence, Joanna said impatiently, “How am I supposed to know? I haven’t lived in your house for nearly seven years.”

  “But your mother,” Clarence said, “your mother had a special place for everything.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Joanna said. “Put it wherever you want.” By his silence she knew she had hurt him.

  Another time on the phone Clarence said, “Since your mother left, I haven’t been able to find the roasting pan.” As if Esther had run off with another man and taken the roasting pan with her.

  Sometimes, when he had figured out how to cook a new dish, iron a shirt, or wash the living-room drapes, he said, “I did it! Your mother sure would be surprised.”

  He has never said anything about missing her. The closest he has come to this was in a letter written on the third anniversary of Esther’s death in which he said, It is three years today since your mother died and I hope things get better soon. I’m going out to the cemetery after lunch. He goes to the cemetery often and takes good care of the peonies and geraniums he has planted at her headstone. He complains that the groundskeepers are lazy and sloppy. If he didn’t look after her grave himself, he says, the whole thing would be overgrown with dandelions and ragweed. He says this with such resentment that Joanna feels guilty for not being there to help him. When she suggested once in passing that he might consider selling the house and finding a place here near them, he said, “But what about the grave? Who would look after the grave?”

  Now, just as they are hanging up, Clarence says, “It wasn’t your fault, you know, her being so bitter. I don’t know what it was but I know it wasn’t your fault.”

  As she puts the receiver down gently, Joanna realizes that for all of her life she has thought it was.

  When she went back home for the funeral, the job of going through her mother’s things had fallen, naturally enough, to her. She realizes now that she had been hoping to find something that would explain her mother’s bitterness, something that would let her, Joanna, off the hook. But there were no secrets, at least none that she could unearth. There were no love letters, no secret scandalous diaries, no photographs of mysterious men. The letters she did find were the ones she herself had written to her parents since she left home. She could not bear to read them and so she threw them out. The photographs she did find were those which Esther had taken of her flowers over the years. What she thought at first were diaries were in fact lists of the flowers Esther had planted each year, annotated with fertilizing schedules and occasional comments on successes, failures, and the weather. These were all in a small box in the cedar chest in her parents’ bedroom. In this fragrant polished chest she also found a whole set of yellow towels, unopened, a box of twelve tiny cocktail forks with coloured plastic handles, a white linen tablecloth stained in several places, a paddedpush-up bra with rusted underwires, and a blue douche bag.

  There were no skeletons in the closet either. Only dozens of the polyester pantsuits which Esther had favoured in her later years, many sleeveless shiny blouses in various floral patterns, a green velour housecoat she had never worn, and one floor-length black skirt which she wore to weddings and the annual paper mill party. In the bottom of the closet there were plastic boxes filled with scarves, hats, and purses.

  It would seem there had been no central act, no pivotal event, no murder, no mayhem, no mystery. Perhaps it had been merely the ineffable sadness of daily life that had made her mother so bitter and angry. It would seem there was no one to blame after all.

  Just as she had never known why her mother was always so angry, now she will never know why she was so bitter either, and she has not craved a chunk of that bittersweet baking chocolate since her mother left.

  77. HAMMER

  WHEN CLARENCE WAS RENOVATING the house, it was filled all summer with the sounds of hammers and saws. Joanna tried with all her might to keep her eyes from blinking shut at every hammer blow. She asked Esther why the noise made her eyes close and Esther said it was just a reflex, like when Dr. Graham tapped her kneecap with his little silver hammer and her leg jerked up all by itself. (And, Joanna will think much later, like every time she sees Lewis on the street or hears his voice on the phone and her heart jumps up.)

  When occasionally Joanna managed to master the reflex and hold her eyes still against the hammer blow, they filled then with tears like Esther’s always did chopping onions. They filled with stinging swimming tears as if someone had called her a bad name or slapped her hard across the face.

  Which had only happened once so far, that time in the car when Clarence said she was a bad girl for sticking her tongue out at him when he said they couldn’t stop for ice cream and then she said hewas stupid poop and his hand from the steering wheel flashed across and slapped her. While she howled with outrage, he stared at her as if he’d never seen her before, stared at his hand too and then wiped the back of it across his mouth, stopped for the red light, turned on the radio to listen to the news.

  They were all in the front seat, Joanna in the middle, her mother on the other side saying nothing, looking out the window, a muscle twitching in her jaw. Joanna could feel her own heart throbbing in her throat, pounding in her left ear.

  Later in school she will learn about the working parts of the ear, all of them confusing. The canals which could not be like the ones that boats went through. The drum which could not be like the one in the marching band in the Santa Claus parade. The anvil which could not be like the iron block they made horseshoes on in Black Beauty. The stirrups which could not be like the ones they put their feet in when riding Black Beauty. The hammer which could not be like the one her father used but which could maybe explain the occasional pounding in her head.

  78. THIRSTY

  IN THE DREAM JOANNA IS SAYING, “You have always been unhappy. The more you talk about being unhappy, the more unhappy you get. Maybe you’ll never be happy. Maybe you’ve lost your happiness plug.” She is sitting at a table, and after she says this in a calm quiet voice she drinks a large glass of cold water. She drains the glass and puts it down on the table. It is a trick glass. When she looks at it, it is full of water again. She drains it and puts it down. It fills up again. She drains it and puts it down. It fills up again. She feels hot and panicky. Both the glass and her thirst are bottomless. It is a liquid version of the myth of Sisyphus.

  She awakens so thirsty that her throat hurts. She cannot remember who she was talking to in the dream. She does remember that this notion of the happiness plug came from a self-help book she’d read once, probably when she was trying to get over Lewis. The book saidthat some people have indeed lost their ability to be happy, as if they were like the Dutch dikes come unplugged, having popped the cork that held them together, and so all happiness, satisfaction, and contentment which they might have been harbouring just leaked away. This book said that being happy was largely a matter
of deciding to be happy.

  She gets out of bed without waking Gordon and pours herself a glass of cold water in the kitchen. She pads around the dark house in her bare feet sipping the water. Each room at this hour seems to have drawn into itself, perfectly quiet and self-contained. Tiptoeing into the living room, she would not be surprised to find it empty or all the furniture covered in white sheets as if vacated years ago. Through the blinds, the streetlight casts pinkish stripes across the hardwood floor. A car passes like a barge. A light goes on in an apartment on the top floor of a building three blocks over. It is early December. There is no snow yet. In three weeks Clarence will be here for Christmas. Smoke rises from the chimney of the house across the street. A train whistles. A dog barks once. The night is not ominous.

  She puts the empty glass down on the coffee table. Nothing happens. She goes back to bed. Just as she is getting back to sleep, Samuel calls out for a glass of water. When she takes it in to him, he says, “I’m thirsty. I’m so thirsty I feel like I’m going to faint.”

  She wonders if dreams can be a contagion. Do they move from room to room, turning sideways like cartoon ghosts and slipping through walls? Do they possibly go from house to house so that even now all her neighbours are waking up thirsty and running large glasses of very cold water? Perhaps dreaming is like yawning, the way you just can’t help yourself if another person yawns, even if you’re not tired. Perhaps dreaming is like sadness, the way it dribbles off the sad person and oozes through the whole room, until even the happy people are left feeling ragged and eroded, smiling precariously.

  Later in the day, while pouring herself a large glass of cold water she remembers the dream again. This time she sees a fur coat, a green café table, a woman’s bowed head, a folded newspaper. She is saying, or the other woman is saying, “I’m always so thirsty, why am I always so thirsty? It’s as if I can never be sure I’ve had enough.”

  79. CITY

  JOANNA ALWAYS HEARD TORONTO referred to as “that evil city.” This descriptive phrase was seldom actually uttered aloud. Rather, it was implied by her parents’ tone of voice, tacked on in judgemental parentheses whenever the name of the city came up in the news or casual conversation. Neither Clarence nor Esther had ever actually been to Toronto. Except for Clarence passing through on his way home from the war, spending a weekend in Toronto courtesy of the Canadian Army. It was in Toronto that he’d had the steak and couldn’t finish it because his stomach had shrunk. Other than that, he did not have much recollection of the place except that it had rained. It was a wonder that it had been ordinary rain and not the fire and brimstone which had poured down upon Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Clarence and Esther disliked Toronto in the way that people dislike books they’ve never read, movies they’ve never seen, foods they’ve never tasted, and people they’ve never met. Perhaps their dislike of big cities in general stemmed from some innate misanthropic mistrust of people in large groups. They just naturally assumed that so many people amassed in one place was bound to lead to trouble. Big trouble. Murder, mayhem, and communicable disease on an epidemic scale.

  Toronto, according to Esther and Clarence, was dirty, noisy, smelly, and dangerous. So, no doubt, were each and every one of its inhabitants. Except for Esther’s sister Florence who, the implication was, did not know any better or was being held there against her will. Children born and raised in Toronto were destined to fall into lives of crime and dissipation at a very early age. If they did not become criminals themselves, they were bound to become the victims of crime.

  Joanna could not imagine going to Toronto or wanting to. She was mystified when Penny and Pamela spoke of it as a glamorous, exciting place filled with beautiful women, handsome men, expensive cars, huge mansions, and exotic animals (lions, tigers, elephants, and swans) who lived at the Toronto zoo. They said there was a castle too. They got their information from their cousin Doreen who had moved there after high school and lived now with her husband, Donny, and their four-year-old daughter, Mary Jane, on the twenty-first floor of a high-rise apartment building. Joanna had never been inside an apartment building of any height and could not imagine what it was like to live that far from the ground. When she asked where Mary Jane played, they said, “On the balcony, silly.” Joanna was not sure what a balcony was. They drew her a picture of a shelf sticking out of the side of a tall building. Around it they drew vertical bars. When she worried that Mary Jane would fall off, they said, “Of course not. Look at the bars, silly.” She looked at the bars. The balcony looked like a little jail in the air. That night she prayed that she would never have to go to Toronto.

  For years she never did. For years whenever she thought of Toronto what came to mind was a string of stereotypical images: buildings so tall you could not see the tops of them, homeless people sleeping in doorways or boxes under bridges, zooming taxis, sirens in the night, pawnshops, strip joints, skinheads, motorcycle gangs, no trees, no gardens, no sanctuary anywhere. Over the years she knew a few people who moved to Toronto and were never heard from again. Henry was one of them.

  Later she will have occasion to go there and she will like it. She will stay for three nights alone on the twelfth floor of a fancy hotel on Bloor Street. Everything about her hotel room is soft: the colours, the carpet, the bedsheets, the toilet paper. She happily spends a lot of money to do, see, and buy things she cannot get at home. She goes to an elegant reception in an even fancier hotel. As she nibbles hors d’oeuvres and sips champagne by the window, she watches black and white limousines passing down the busy street like cruise ships, bearing royalty, rock stars, and mysterious multi-millionaires behind their tinted windows. She knows she is supposed to either ignore them or be appalled by their decadence. But in fact she is impressed.

  She attends an artists’ conference by day and curls up in her pastel hotel room at night, feeling safe and sound above the busy street. She calls home each night and Gordon and Samuel are missing her very much. She checks once to see if Henry is listed in the phone book but he is not. He has well and truly vanished. Her relatives who might possibly live here cannot be reached either: poor Aunt Florence diedyears ago and she does not know her cousins’ married names.

  Standing in her darkened room she can see straight into the apartments of the high-rise across the street. In one apartment she can see two people, a man and a woman, who appear to be upside-down, walking on the ceiling as they move from room to room. She feels for a minute as if she is in a science fiction movie. Then she remembers that she is in Toronto. Where, it would seem, anything is possible. Perhaps they do it with mirrors. But why?

  Nevertheless she feels energized by this and other absurdities as the whole city teems around her like a massive kinetic collage animated by a perpetual motion machine.

  She travels home by train. The ceiling is painted to look like the sky, pale blue with fluffy summer clouds. Outside the train windows, the fields are snow-covered and the morning sky is grey. The trees without leaves in the distance look black as if they’ve been burnt in a forest fire. The men seated directly behind Joanna are discussing animal husbandry: slow sperm, fresher semen, cows who are all calved out. She has had enough of absurdity. She wants to go home. By eleven o’clock the businessmen in front and to the left have put away their briefcases, calculators, and cellular phones and are drinking rum and Coke greedily. The porter can hardly bring them fast enough. Joanna reads Madame Bovary and drinks bad coffee out of a leaky cardboard cup.

  Samuel and Gordon are waiting at the station when she arrives. Samuel says, “I missed you. What did you buy me?”

  That night she calls Clarence to assure him that she has been to Toronto and survived. Clarence says, “How was the weather?”

  Joanna says, “Fine.” In truth she cannot much remember the weather.

  Clarence says, “Well, at least it didn’t rain. That’s something.”

  80. SQUARE

  JOANNA SITS IN FRONT OF A large white piece of illustration board on her dr
afting table. To the left is a pile of tissue paper in all colours of the rainbow and then some. To the right are a pair of sharp scissors,a pot of glue, and several sheets of Letraset numbers in various sizes. She is about to begin a new collage. She is tired of making meaning, telling stories, trying to transform complex abstract concepts into concrete visual acts of embodiment. Every picture tells a story. So they say. What she wants to make now is a picture that does not: a picture that is pleasing to the eye and nothing else. She aspires to the graceful symmetry of squares, the sensible, dependable, irrefutable balance of four equal sides and four right angles. She is inspired by the orderliness of geometry, the cleanliness of numbers, the luxurious conclusiveness of mathematics.

  Mostly she got the idea from Samuel who is learning how to count. He counts his fingers. He counts his toes. He counts his eyes. He counts his nose. He counts wooden blocks. He counts teddy bears. He counts cars. He counts trees. He counts food. His apple, his toast, his hot dog are cut into pieces so he can count them while he eats. One two three four, yes. One two three five, no.

  He is also learning colours. The grass is green. The car is red. The driveway is black. The toilet is white. The balloon is yellow. The balloon is not blue. If this balloon is yellow, it cannot be blue.

  Yes, no. Black, white. True, false. Right, wrong. Joanna admires the clarity of colours, the logic of numbers, and Samuel’s innocent certainty that this morning’s right answers will still hold true tomorrow afternoon.