In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  In the pause between “Hey Lawdy Mama” and “Magic Carpet Ride,” there comes the sound of Samuel sobbing in his bedroom. Gordon leaps off her and goes down the hall. Joanna is left lying flat on her back in the middle of the damp rumpled bed. Her hips are still twitching, like the limbs of an animal still twitching after it’s been shot between the eyes. At least, she imagines they must twitch for a few minutes, she’s never seen such a thing, but she imagines they must twitch and twist for a while like chickens with their heads cut off, the life not draining out of them slowly and with grace but jerkily, angrily, mean, convulsively dancing but silent. There is lipstick smeared across the pillowcase and the tape howls foolishly into the dark.

  84. THIEF

  WHEN JOANNA WAS TWELVE years old, she stole a pair of earrings from Peoples Credit Jewellers on Sheppard Street downtown. They were two tiny silver peace signs and they were clip-ons because Esther didn’t believe in pierced ears.

  Joanna had walked all the way downtown that Saturday afternoon with Penny and Pamela. They often did this in the warm weather, especially when they could sneak away from Penny and Pamela’s little brother Billy, who was just a pest, always wanting to tag along and bug them.

  Once downtown, the girls went first to the record store, Jerome’s, where they flipped through the 45's and studied the weekly Top Ten posted on the wall. If they had enough money they bought one: “Summer in the City,” “I Am a Rock,” “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown,” “Wild Thing.”

  They went across the street to the new clothing boutique called Threads, where they breathed deeply of the incense-rich air and caressed the colourful geometrically patterned blouses and the psychedelic miniskirts with matching beaded headbands. Although they sometimes tried things on, Joanna had no hope of ever dressing this way in real life because Esther, she knew, would have a fit. Joanna had not yet seriously considered the possibility of ignoringher mother and doing whatever she wanted. Esther was too good at making her life miserable. Joanna was still too eager to please, too desperate to keep the peace. Besides, as she pirouetted in front of the change room mirror in this finery, she knew she’d never have the guts to go around like that in public anyway.

  With the scent of patchouli still clinging to their hair, they went next door to Peoples Credit Jewellers. They glanced through the costume jewellery displayed at the front of the store and then made their way to the back which was devoted to the display and dispensing of fine china, real silverware, and genuine Bohemian crystal. In the middle of all this was the Bridal Registry.

  The Bridal Registry was set up on a round table covered with a white linen cloth. Each of the eight place settings was different, marked with a little white card giving the bride-to-be’s name and listing the china, crystal, and silverware patterns she had chosen. The idea was that all prospective wedding guests would thus be able to buy a present the bride really wanted and not some dumb thing she would return right after the honeymoon. These elegant table settings, complete with matching linen napkins, were just like the pictures Joanna had cut out and pasted into her scrapbook. These were dream dishes, dream tables, and Joanna imagined them being presided over by a beautiful young woman in a frothy wedding gown and long white gloves. Around the table she would go, gracefully ladling perfect rich food on to the glowing plates of a handsome dark-suited man and two lovely children in white linen bibs and lacy bonnets. Before she poured the wine, she would remove her gloves and flick a perfectly manicured fingernail against the crystal glasses to make them sing. (The children, of course, had bubbly milk in theirs.) When she came to her own place, she paused and held the plate up to her face and admired her own reflection on its shiny surface. They said grace and then the sound of the silverware on the china was like music to their ears.

  The girls argued amiably over which patterns they would pick when their turns at bridehood came. Joanna was pretty sure she would have something by Royal Albert because it was the best and also the most expensive. At home they were still eating off those brown-and-white plaid plates which made her miserable just to think of them.

  On the way out of the store, she plucked the peace-sign earrings off the counter and put them in her pocket.

  Two blocks down the street she produced them with a magician’s flourish and showed them around like a prize. Penny and Pamela were bug-eyed and thrilled.

  She wore the earrings every day for a week, hiding them in her pencil case at home and then clipping them on in the girls’ bathroom after she got to school. When the bell rang at the end of the day, she slipped them off and into the pencil case again. She figured she had finally pulled one over on Esther. Finally she was daring and dangerous, one of those exciting and alluring girls living on the edge of trouble. The next thing you knew she might be wearing midnight blue mascara, a micro-mini, lime-green fishnet stockings, and a peace sign on a leather choker at her throat. The next thing you knew she might go wild and get her ears pierced. The next thing you knew she might try ironing her ugly curly hair.

  The next Monday afternoon when Joanna got home from school, Esther was sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of papers in her hand. Joanna deposited her schoolbooks on the other end of the table and said brightly, warily, “Hi, Mom!” At this time of the day Esther should have been in the living room ironing and watching “Another World.”

  Esther flung the papers at her. They fluttered down all over the floor, many sheets of parchment notepaper with a lacy gold design at the top. They were, Joanna realized with a jolt, a kind of diary she had been keeping, carefully hidden in a box behind the books on her middle shelf.

  These pages were a series of letters she had been writing to her dead cat, Daisy, who had been killed by a car six months before. As the speeding driver zoomed away, Joanna, who had seen the whole thing from the picture window, ran into the street and held Daisy’s bloody body in her arms. She laid her head against the matted fur that had been white and the cat’s warm blood smeared all over her. Even after Clarence had disposed of the body (what did he do with it?), she could not, would not, stop crying. Finally, after she had refused to eat her supper and was still sitting on the front stepcrying in the twilight, Esther lost all patience and said, “Oh stop it! She was only a cat. Don’t be such a baby!”

  Joanna vowed that she would never cry in front of her mother ever again and she would never tell her anything either, she would never be nice to her, she would never trust her, talk to her, or love her. Daisy, she decided, was the only living creature on the face of the whole stupid earth who had ever loved and understood her. That night she began writing her diary to Daisy. She told Daisy everything. She told Daisy about the stolen earrings.

  “How could you do this to me?” she cried now as she tried to gather the pages up off the floor.

  Esther said, “Now you’ll have to face the music. You will take those earrings back to the store and you will apologize. You’d better hope you don’t end up in jail. You are grounded for a month.”

  In bed later that night, Joanna could hear her parents talking in the living room, Clarence not saying much, Esther going on and on, getting herself more and more worked up, until suddenly Joanna’s bedroom door was flung open and there stood Esther framed in the yellow light from the kitchen. “You are a liar and a thief!” she cried. “How could you do this to me?”

  A month later Joanna stole a pair of black silk panties from Woolworth’s. Two weeks later Esther had to go into the hospital for a hysterectomy. Joanna could imagine her mother floundering up through the anaesthetic in the recovery room, whispering, “How could you do this to me?” She could imagine her mother dying on the operating table and as they covered her face with a sheet, she, Joanna, was crying and whispering, “How could you do this to me?” She got rid of the panties and was not caught. She did not steal anything ever again.

  85. LION

  IN HEROES OF THE BIBLE, which Joanna won at Sunday School, there was the very short story of Daniel who was put into a den of lions
because every day he worshipped God and this was againstthe law. But God sent his angel to close the lions’ mouths. Because he believed in God, Daniel was not harmed. In the picture there is Daniel on his knees, face uplifted to the Lord, hands folded, black beard curled up at the end like an elf’s shoe. There is a lion on either side of him, one frowning slightly in its sleep, the other smiling coyly.

  In Aesop’s Fables there were at least two stories about lions. First there was the one about the mouse and the lion, in which the unsuspecting mouse runs across the sleeping lion’s nose. The lion grabs the little mouse in his big dangerous paw but the mouse convinces the lion to spare her, promising that some day she will repay him. The lion is skeptical but agrees and lets the little mouse go free. Sometime later this same lion is caught in a hunter’s net. This same mouse hears his cries and runs to his rescue, gnawing through the ropes of the net and setting him free. The moral of this story was: Little friends may prove to be great friends.

  There was also the story of Androcles and the lion in which Androcles, a mistreated slave, escapes from his cruel master, but as he is running away he stops to remove a thorn from the paw of a lion. Sometime later Androcles is caught and sent into an arena before the emperor. He is to be thrown to the lions. As it turns out, the lion who charges into the arena is the same lion and, to the amazement of all assembled in the arena, it greets Androcles joyously. The moral of this story was: A noble soul never forgets a kindness.

  Joanna wondered if it was the same lion both times. Joanna wondered if there was a moral to every story. She was still attending Sunday School every week where, Esther said, she would be taught the necessary moral values. Were morals something to be found in stories, secrets to be discovered a bit at a time, story by story, and then assembled like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle so in the end you had a clear view of the whole picture? Were morals hidden in all stories or only in the ones she read in Heroes of the Bible and Aesop’s Fables? The fables were easy because they gave you the answer at the end. What about all the other stories? How could you ever know for sure what you were supposed to be getting out of them? How could you ever know for sure when you were right?

  86. JOY

  IN THE DREAM Joanna is reading a letter from Lewis. In real life she has, in fact, just received a letter from Lewis. It’s not a letter really, just a note jotted on the bottom of an invitation to the opening of his new show in two weeks. The note says, Hope you are well and happy now. I am happy enough.

  In real life Joanna is furious. Except for the deceptively simple words now and enough, this offhand sentiment might as well have been written by or sent to a total stranger, somebody met once or twice in passing, at a party, at an art show, on the crosstown bus. In real life Joanna wants to call him and ask, “Happy enough for what?” In real life she will not call him and she will not go to his show.

  It has been five years since they last slept together. Samuel has just had his second birthday. Gordon is working hard and wallpapering the bedroom in his spare time. Joanna is working hard too, on a collage called Landscape With Figures which involves many Chinese pictographs superimposed upon a mountainside, a small forest, a still lake, a cloudy threatening sky. On the lake there is a dock and on the dock she has drawn the Chinese characters for man, woman, child, and dog.

  Lewis has never sent her an invitation to anything before. Why start now? Perhaps he thinks enough time has passed to render their romance a distant, maybe even fond, memory, a nostalgically innocuous aberration, harmless (harmless enough), purged at long last of all reverberation, recrimination, and vestigial power, as if the pain it had engendered was a dairy product with the expiry date stamped on the bottom. Perhaps he imagines there has been an annulment. Perhaps he thinks they can be just friends. Perhaps he thinks the coast is clear, as if they have now safely passed the requisite statute of limitations.

  When Joanna first heard this phrase twenty years ago, it was in a conversation her parents were having about a scandalous tangled criminal trial which had rocked the whole community. Joanna cannot remember the details of the case but she does remember that Clarence and Esther discussed it over supper every night for weeks and this phrase was often repeated: “statute of limitations.” At first Joanna thought they were saying “statue of limitations.” which made her think of photographs she’d seen of classical statues, naked marble men and women with various parts of their bodies knocked off, arms, feet, sometimes their heads.

  Now in the dream Joanna is reading the letter from Lewis in a very large room filled with paintings. There is no furniture. Joanna is sitting on the hardwood floor and every inch of wall space is covered with Lewis’s paintings. They are not, she recognizes in the dream, paintings he has done yet in real life. They are paintings he will do in the future, paintings for which he will become famous (famous enough.) In this large room there is one large window out of which Joanna can see one large tree with the sun shining yellow through its dark green leaves. On the trunk of the tree there is a carving of the Chinese character for east, which is, she remembers in the dream, a combination of the characters for tree and sun, the east being that place where the sun can be seen shining through the trees. Joanna is delighted to see that this tree is labelled. She thinks in the dream that this is how it should be in real life: everything labelled clearly to avoid confusion and misunderstanding, the way it is in her collage.

  In the letter in the dream Lewis says that he is happy now (happy enough.) He writes to say that he has everything he deserves, if not everything he has hoped for. In the dream Joanna is a very mature and understanding woman. She reflects that Lewis is rather young to have settled for less than he had dreamed of. In the letter he says that he has stopped searching for happiness and is now looking for the meaning of life instead. He says that he is learning how to repair small motors in his spare time and he is never bored. At the bottom of the letter there is a single word in large black letters. The word is ENTRANCE.

  As Joanna puzzles over the significance of this word, its Roman letters begin to swirl like whirlpools or doves and it is transformed into a string of Chinese pictographs which Joanna struggles to decipher even as she feels herself beginning to wake up. The only character she recognizes is the one for happy which, she remembers from her research in real life, is a combination of the signs for wife and child.

  It is the kind of dream where the slide from sleeping to waking is virtually seamless and she is not sure whether she has made thisidentification in the dream or in real life. Either way her eyes are open and it is morning. She feels briefly guilty for having dreamt about Lewis while sleeping in bed beside Gordon but at least it wasn’t a sex dream. While waiting for the alarm to go off, she is just as mature and understanding as she was in the dream, and she thinks that she would like to tell Lewis that there is more to happiness than learning small-motor repair and never being bored. There is more to the meaning of life than looking for it. She hears Samuel down the hall stirring in his crib, talking to himself, and then calling out to her. She would like to tell Lewis that there is such a thing as joy, which he has neglected to mention.

  There are avenues in life, she is now convinced, which cannot be entered or navigated without joy.

  entrance vt. 1. to captivate and delight; put into a trance. 2. to fill with rapture or joy; enchant; enrapture.

  She would like to remind Lewis that when she told him about the statue of limitations, he nodded and said, “Yes, we’re all like that, whole chunks of ourselves lopped off. These are our limitations.” He was more depressed than usual that day. He went on to wonder why so many of our limitations are actually self-imposed, as we tremble at the brink of utter despair or absolute joy but then we pull back just in time. “We are as afraid of one as of the other,” he said gloomily. When he was this depressed, he tended to make pompous pronouncements on the nature of life as we know it. “Joy and despair, the dragons of extremity,” he mused. “All things in moderation. We are afraid to enter our own
extremes.”

  entrance n. 1. the action or point of entering. 2. a means of entering; door, gate, passage, etc. 3. opportunity, permission, or right to enter; admission.

  She would like to call Lewis and tell him that she has finally found the entrance to her own real life. She would like to tell him that she does not love him any more and she does not want to be his friendeither. In real life she will pluck up her courage and do nothing. As if her courage were a silky slip that has slid down from her waist when she wasn’t looking and lays now in a slinky puddle at her feet. As if she need only reach down swiftly and hook it up on one finger before anybody notices. As if doing nothing were the hardest thing of all.

  In real life, as the day unfolds, the dream will disappear, the Chinese characters will disengage and disperse like whirlpools and doves. In real life the dream will eventually evaporate as all dreams do, but with any luck the joy will not. In real life there will be another dream in which the statue of limitations will grow back its arms and feet, also its head, especially its head.

  87. BED

  JOANNA’S CHILDHOOD BED LOOKED like an ordinary bed but it was not. It was hinged on the backside so that it opened like a piano bench, the mattress part lifting up to reveal a storage space in which there were extra blankets, board games, old stuffed toys, a lace tablecloth stained but too expensive to throw away, a black velvet pillow with Niagara Falls painted on it, and a large needlepoint picture of poppies which Esther had started when she was pregnant but never finished. It was also where the Christmas presents were hidden until Joanna grew big enough to open the bed herself. There was just enough room between the bottom of the bed and the floor for the cookbook drawer.

  Trying to fall asleep at night, Joanna liked to picture all these things stored beneath her. The sense of their weight tucked away neatly under the mattress sometimes made her feel safe and securely attached to the floor. Sometimes she wished she could sleep inside the bed instead of on top of it.