Joanna is reminded of the fact that, although English and Art were her favourite subjects in high school, she often slid into her seat in Math class with relief. There she could believe that answers were not only possible but permanent: once you got the answer right, it would stay that way. It could not be changed by circumstance, experience, or emotional upheaval. You could have confidence in numbers, you could always count on them. Perhaps you could acquire blind faith through mathematics. Later she will learn that faith is one thing and what you put it in is quite another.
In the Math textbook all the right answers were given at the back just like a crossword puzzle book. There was also a set of mathematical tables taken from a source originally published in 1620. Joanna found it reassuring to know that almost three hundred andfifty years later, the square root of 79 was still 8.888 and 199 squared was still 39,601.
At the high school level anyway, mathematics would seem to involve a practical application of quite reasonable (although perhaps difficult) operations which then resulted in an answer. Even if getting to that answer involved an entire page or more of intricate calculations, and even if there might occasionally be more than one way to get there, still there was an answer. In making your way to that end, there was no danger of finding out along the way other things you didn’t want to know. These answers did not involve power, betrayal, or an untimely loss of innocence. These answers would not change your life when you weren’t looking.
She begins cutting perfect squares of different sizes from the large sheets of tissue paper. The colours are rich and deep. She measures carefully with a metal T-square and glues them to the illustration board. She covers the whole board with coloured squares. Then she lifts numbers from the sheet of Letraset and applies them at random on top of the squares. She thinks about the straight lines, the accurate angles, the luminous congenial colours. She thinks about purity and permanence. She lays more tissue paper over some of the numbers. She works on this piece all afternoon and by suppertime she is satisfied that she has circumnavigated her own compulsion to make meaning. She feels lighter (if not enlightened), clearer (if not translucid), calmer (if not downright serene).
That night in bed after she and Gordon have made love she makes the mistake of wondering how many times they’ve made love this month, this year, last year, how many times since they met? How many more times will they make love before they stop or die? She cannot do the calculations in either direction, backwards or forwards, past or future. She recalls those interminable twelve-year-old Sundays during which she tried to figure out how many more miserable seconds she was likely to live. The numbers were slippery, astronomical, out of this world.
Now, twenty years later, how many seconds does she have left? How many of those past seconds has she wasted feeling sorry for herself? How many more is she likely to waste? How many times has she told Gordon that she loves him? How many times has she told Samuel that she loves him? How many more chances to say it does she have left? There are other numbers, less momentous perhaps but equally intimidating, equally incalculable: how many times has she told Samuel to be careful, be quiet, be brave, eat your supper, wash your hands, brush your teeth, go to sleep, stop crying, don’t worry, everything will be all right, don’t worry, come here and I’ll hug you?
The insomnia has hold of her now. How many minutes till morning? How many times has she cooked supper, done the dishes, defrosted the fridge, cleaned the toilet, washed the floors, scrubbed the bathtub, cleaned the oven (not very many, not often enough)? If she were able to divine these numbers, all of them, would they tell the story of her life? For that matter, how many times has she had insomnia? How many times has she yet to have it?
For how many minutes exactly had she been so erroneously convinced of the comforting simplicity of numbers? How many times has she gone to bed believing something to be true, only to wake up again knowing, or at least suspicious, that it is not?
She gets up and goes to the living room, roams through the shelves until she comes up with a book called What Counts: The Complete Harper’s Index. There would appear to be ample proof that numbers are anything but simple:
Percentage of Pepsi drinkers who say they would switch to Coke if it contained oat bran: 74.
Percentage of American men who say they would not have sex with Madonna if she asked: 60.
Average number of days a West German man goes without changing his underwear: 7.
Barbie’s measurements if she were life-size: 39-23-33.
Melting point of Dippity-do: 122°F.
Number of hands Saeed Al-Sayyaf, a Saudi Arabian executioner, has chopped off since he was hired in 1954: 60. Number of heads: 600.
On the bottom shelf at the back she finds her old Math textbook. Like the Sunday School Bible, it has been carted around for years. It has a blue-grey cover with silver lettering that says: Functions, Relations, and Transformations. She realizes that she has forgotten to figure in the fact that numbers too are subject to manipulation, negotiation, and change. That numbers like words are open to interpretation. That mathematics, like any other language, can be used to obscure and complicate just as well as to clarify and simplify.
She has forgotten that even while he is learning to count, Samuel is also learning more questions for which there are no answers in the back of the book. How many is zero? How long would it take to count to a zillion? Why do the numbers look the same in French but you say them differently? She has forgotten that his favourite funny counting game has more to do with love than numbers.
He says, “I love you.”
She says, “I love you too.”
He giggles and says, “I love you three.”
She laughs and says, “I love you forty-seven.”
He throws his arms around her neck and says, “I love you a zillion and one.”
She has forgotten about the impossibility of squaring the circle. Even geometry presents insoluble problems. She has forgotten that if a square is a neat empty space, then you can put anything at all inside of it. She will have to rework the collage in the morning.
81. BUTTER
THERE WAS THE CHILDHOOD GAME played with buttercups plucked from the overgrown end of the back lane, then held under the chin, and if it showed yellow on your skin, it meant that you liked butter.
Joanna never wondered why everybody she tried it on turned out to really love butter, except on cloudy days when it was hard to tell. She loved butter, especially melted on hot popcorn, and so she supposed that everyone did. Penny and Pamela soon set her straight, explaining how the yellow under the chin was just a reflection from the flower and had nothing to do with butter at all.
Joanna still liked to gather buttercups anyway. She brought them home in bouquets to her mother who usually refrained from pointing out that they were nothing but straggly weeds.
Esther loved butter too. Although she complained bitterly about the ever-increasing price, she continued to buy it exclusively, regarding margarine with great disdain. This was in the days when margarine was called oleo and came in thick white unappetizing sticks with a packet of orange dye you had to mix in yourself. Joanna only knew this because Penny and Pamela’s mother used margarine. Whenever Joanna had lunch at their house, Esther interrogated her afterwards and sniffed when she heard they were still using margarine. Joanna, out of loyalty to Esther, always agreed that it was nowhere near as tasty as butter, although she did enjoy helping mix in the dye.
During one of these lunches at the Nystroms', Joanna overheard Mrs. Nystrom talking on the phone in the hallway while she and the twins ate their margarine-laden baloney sandwiches in the kitchen. Mrs. Nystrom was gossiping cheerfully with a friend, nodding and making satisfied sounds of agreement while the person on the other end went on and on, obviously relating a complicated story about somebody they both knew and disliked. Finally Mrs. Nystrom cried out joyfully, “Oh, isn’t that just like her? Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth!” Although surely Mrs. Nystrom was talking abo
ut somebody else, Joanna thought of her mother, pictured her sitting even now at the blue kitchen table across the street with her arms crossed and her mouth clamped shut around a large chunk of butter which perched whole and unmelting on her cold tongue while her own daughter sat over here gorging herself on cheap tasteless oleo, already reaching for more.
For a long time Joanna too bought real butter only, even when she could not afford it, could barely afford the bread to put it on. Thequality of margarine had been steadily improved and perfected over the years but still she would not buy it, was just as prideful as her mother had been about real butter only, lopping a block off the pound and placing it carefully in the handmade ceramic butter dish she had paid dearly for at a local pottery shop, rewrapping the remainder in its silver paper and storing it obediently in the labelled compartment in the fridge door.
It is not until after she is married to Gordon that she abandons butter and switches to margarine, the cheapest brand at that, a startling yellow in its thrifty turquoise tub. It is a matter of money and cholesterol. They are, like most people in their circumstances, newly and deeply involved in an intimate relationship with the mortgage company. They are also, like most people in their age group, becoming more health conscious. Because, as Gordon likes to say, they must now live long enough to pay off the damn mortgage.
Joanna supposes it is more or less neurotic to feel a thrill of guilt and rebellious satisfaction every time she plops a sixty-nine-cent tub of margarine into her shopping cart. In the fridge, she now keeps several rolls of film in the butter box. She imagines Esther rolling over in her tidy grave, still with that solid chunk of butter lodged in the back of her mouth, perhaps with a plate of shortbread cookies levitating above her outstretched scornful hands. Esther was proud of her shortbread, which she made only once a year, the week before Christmas, from an old family recipe, simply but seriously delicious. Esther could not bake or serve these cookies without commenting on the fact that it was the butter, real butter, a whole cup of real butter, that made them so delectable. They really did melt in your mouth.
Joanna does not mention her margarine mutiny to anyone. Until one Sunday morning on the phone when Clarence is telling her that he got groceries the day before. He often does this, describing in detail the items he bought, how much they cost, what time he went, and how long it took. Sometimes it takes him all afternoon and he seems pleased with this. He tells her of these shopping trips, she figures, to prove that he is managing well enough without Esther. But it makes her depressed to picture him just like the old men she seesin the grocery store here, clutching their carts with one hand and their list or a cane with the other, seriously studying shelf upon bewildering shelf of cereal, spaghetti sauce, toilet paper, or tea bags. She knows just by looking at these old men that they are widowers like Clarence, deserted by their dead wives, forced at this late date to learn the rudiments of domestic life, forced to feed themselves or starve, forced to eat alone every night facing a blank wall, a bad oil painting of green hills and blue water, or last year’s calendar still turned to November, facing a single plate of dry pork chops, mushy peas, lumpy mashed potatoes, and canned pears for dessert.
This morning Clarence mentions that he stocked up on margarine because it was on sale. Joanna laughs and admits that she too has made the switch. Clarence says, “What would your mother think?” They chuckle together like conspirators, like children caught in the act, caught, so to speak, with their hands in the cookie jar, proud of their own audacity but surprised by it too.
“Of course I still buy butter for the Christmas shortbread,” Joanna says, as if to lessen the blow of her betrayal.
“Well yes,” Clarence says soberly. “Yes, you would have to do that.”
82. DOCTOR
ESTHER SAID SHE’D NEVER had a single symptom of any kind until she went to the doctor and he told her she had cancer. “I felt fine, just fine,” she liked to say, darkly. “I was healthy as a horse until I went for a checkup and then the next thing you know I was on the table, cut open, and he was scooping out my insides.” Until that fateful visit, Esther had prided herself on the fact that she had not been to a doctor since Joanna was born thirteen years before.
Joanna saw no reason to doubt her mother’s version of the story. Esther had never seemed sick and she had certainly never complained. Secretly Joanna blamed her mother’s hysterectomy on herself, on the fact that two weeks before, she had stolen a pair of black silk panties from Woolworth’s. For two weeks she thought she’d got away with it. She never wore the panties but she liked to run them,cool and silky, through her fingers in her dark bedroom in the middle of the night. They made her feel excited, adult, and dangerous. Then Esther got cancer and Joanna threw the panties away, having cut them into tiny pieces and hidden them in an empty Kleenex box that was going out with the garbage in the morning.
Esther, who did not know about the panties, had no reason to blame Joanna. It seemed, by implication, that Esther considered it to be all the doctor’s fault. Somehow, if she hadn’t gone to see Dr. Pesetsky in the first place, then she wouldn’t have been sick. Could it be, Joanna wondered, that if you didn’t know you were sick, if nobody told you you were sick, then you weren’t?
Ten years later, when Joanna was twenty-three, she found a lump in her left breast. It was a year since she had moved away from home. It was at the time when breast self-examination was the subject of a national education campaign and illustrated pamphlets on how to do it correctly were available everywhere. Joanna and all her friends were conscientiously examining themselves, carefully following the detailed steps in these diagrams, proud to be taking such good care of their bodies, their selves. Joanna was the only one who ever found anything.
At the feel of the lump that morning in the bathtub, she was seized with terror. The lump itself, upon detection, filled instantly with pain and within minutes her whole breast was aching and aflame. It seemed to be swelling, engorged with evil malignant cells. When her hands stopped shaking, she called Dr. Millan and made an appointment for early the next morning.
She passed the rest of the day in a fever of anxiety, tormenting herself with half-remembered stories of young women having their breasts sliced right off and then dying anyway. She’d seen Before-and-After photographs of these women in the pamphlets. In the Before pictures, black lines had been drawn around their perky-looking breasts to indicate where the incisions would be made. In the After pictures, there were only flat spaces and scars where their breasts had been. There were no faces in any of them. These photographs were like the cookbook diagrams of animals she had coloured as a child, all of them divided into carefully labelled sections, all of them headless and legless except the pig.
All night long her left breast ached, also her right breast, her stomach, and her thighs, as if the disease were running rampant through her body. All night long she dreamed of doctors and breasts, bloody breasts held up by grinning doctors like dripping trophies dangling from the ends of long knives.
In the morning she arrived early at Dr. Millan’s office. Fidgeting around in the empty waiting room, shuffling through the pile of old magazines and dilapidated children’s books, she found a volume called The Bible Story. It was the same book she’d read as a child in Dr. Pesetsky’s waiting room (Dr. Pesetsky having taken over Dr. Graham’s practice after his death). It must, she thought, be a permanent fixture in medical offices everywhere. It was a large hardcover book, lavishly illustrated and written especially for children. Actually it was the first of a series you could order by mailing in the perforated card inside the front cover. After each visit to Dr. Pesetsky’s office, she had begged Esther to please, please, please send in the card but she wouldn’t.
The receptionist called her name. Dr. Millan examined her thoroughly. He congratulated her for having discovered the lump herself. He said it was probably nothing, we’ll just keep an eye on it, try not to worry, come back in a month, try not to worry yourself sick. He patted her hand an
d sent her on home.
That evening she called her mother and said, with little preamble, “I have a lump in my left breast.”
“Did you call the doctor?” Esther asked.
“Yes, I’ve already been to see him.”
“Good, good, now don’t cry, crying won’t help anything. What did the doctor say?”
Joanna told her.
“Well then, don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing, I’m sure the doctor is right.”
“But I thought you didn’t trust doctors,” Joanna wailed. “I thought you said you were fine, just fine, until you went to the doctor and he told you that you had cancer. I thought you said you had no symptoms at all until he said you were sick. I thought you said it was all his fault.”
“Well, of course I had symptoms. Why do you think I went to the doctor in the first place? Of course it wasn’t his fault. He saved my life. I haven’t been back to see him since, mind you, but then again I’m not sick.” She also said they should not say anything to Clarence until they knew for sure. Just in case.
Esther, it seemed, was as ambivalent about doctors as she was about God. In both cases, it seemed wiser to hedge your bets. God might be real, right, and omnipotent after all. Doctors too.
For a month Joanna tried not to worry and kept her hands well away from her breasts. All her prayers were promises: If you let me live, I will be a good person for the rest of my life. I will never again be selfish, greedy, quarrelsome, or cruel. She wasn’t sure if she was talking to God or Dr. Millan.
When she went back to Dr. Millan, he said the lump was gone. When she called her mother that evening, Esther said, “Good. He was right. Good for him.” Joanna, for the time being, was saved and she never performed breast self-examination again.
In the Language of Love Page 33