In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Joanna was an uneasy sleeper, afraid of the dark and all it was likely to conceal or contain, coming instantly alert not only to things that went bump in the night, but also to anything that hummed, rattled, creaked, or possibly groaned. She would lie awake rigid and sweating, alternately hot and cold, trembling, unable to cover her head orclose her eyes for fear that even these minuscule movements would give her away. Partly too she wanted to see whatever it was before it got her. The bedroom in the dark was filled with the sound of breathing, coming closer and closer, growing hotter and hotter, until she could hear the blood in her head like the ocean in a seashell. Until she would have screamed if she hadn’t been paralysed. Until she realized that the breathing she could hear was her own.

  Esther was impatient with such foolishness. “You’re imagining things,” she said after yet another night of terror. “There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.” Even as a young child Joanna recognized this statement as patently untrue, a lie akin to “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit,” uttered by the doctor wielding his hypodermic needle or the dentist revving up his drill. Esther said, “Don’t be such a baby.”

  Clarence was more sympathetic. It was always Clarence who came to her when she called out in the night. Esther would not allow her to crawl into their bed for comfort (in fact, Joanna would have been too scared to creep through the kitchen to get to their bedroom anyway). So Clarence came to her room and lay down gingerly beside her on the very edge of the narrow bed. “It’s all right,” he said softly. “It’s all right, I’m here now,” and he stayed there, lying flat on his back, perfectly still, until she fell back to sleep.

  One night there was a sound so loud that Joanna leapt out of her bed, ran through the kitchen, and landed headfirst gasping between Esther and Clarence. To her surprise they were sitting straight up in their bed, wide-eyed and confused. This was nobody’s imagination. They all got up and went into the living room to look out the front window. There were lights on all up and down the street, their sleepy neighbours in their pyjamas peering into the darkness. But there was nothing to see, no evidence of a thunderstorm, an explosion, an earthquake, a plane crash, a bomb, or a full-scale nuclear war. They could not explain it. They went back to their beds shaking their heads, Esther to her own room, Joanna and Clarence to hers, where this time he lay down beside her and stayed until morning.

  At breakfast on the radio the announcer said it had been a sonicboom. They were all relieved, Joanna mostly because this time Esther could not possibly say she was making it up. She had no idea, however, what a sonic boom actually was. Clarence explained that an airplane had broken the sound barrier. Joanna did not understand. Clarence said he was not all that clear on it either but on the radio they said it had something to do with a plane flying faster than the speed of sound. This caused high-pressure shock waves to hit the ground and that was what made the boom.

  Esther said, “It doesn’t really matter. At least now we know what it was.”

  But Joanna was not satisfied. It was too hard to imagine. In the first place, she had never thought of sound as a thing, as something moving at a certain speed like a car. She had never thought of sound as having waves like a lake. She had never thought of sound as having a barrier like those yellow wooden barriers they put up when they worked on the street. How could sound, which was invisible and everywhere all around them all the time (even or especially in the dark) be like any or all of these things?

  Joanna had heard of opera singers who could break glasses when they hit the high notes. Could the sonic boom be like that? What then had happened to the people in the plane? What about the pilot? Were they all dead now, or gone deaf, or just gone? What about the shock waves? Where did they hit the ground? Did they leave a hole where they hit, a big hole shooting flames like a volcano? Did they go right through and come out the other side like bullets? What if they’d hit somebody’s house? Were those people dead now too?

  Esther said, “Don’t worry about it any more. Nothing happened. We’re all still here safe and sound.” What kind of sound was this then, Joanna wondered, that meant you were safe? What speed did it travel at? When would it get here? How would she know? She had always imagined that safety would be soundless like a blanket, snow, or a small yellow flower blooming in the sun.

  88. HEAVY

  Joanna genuinely enjoys being pregnant. Having gained nearly forty pounds, she truly is heavy with child.

  heavy adj. 1. weighty; hard to lift or move because of great weight. 2. larger or more intense than usual. 3. of weighty importance; grave; serious; solemn; profound.

  She likes to think of herself this way. She enjoys her blooming belly. She pats it often as if it were a large cat on her lap. She lies flat on her back in bed at night and admires the mound it makes in the blankets. She loves it when the baby kicks or rolls over so that her whole belly goes lopsided left or right. She is always grabbing Gordon’s hands and placing them upon her. She loves to imagine those pockets inside her filling up with the heavy weight of the baby, her muscles stretching to accommodate him, her blood flowing warmer and thicker through him.

  It is only towards the end that she comes to resent having to manoeuvre her belly around whenever she stands up, sits down, or needs to roll over in bed. It is only towards the end that she begins to feel like a whale, an elephant, a hippopotamus, or a Mack truck.

  heavy adj. 4. hard to endure; oppressive; distressing; troublesome; burdensome. 5. strained, dull, or tedious. 6. coarse; thick; lacking grace or elegance. 7. clumsy; awkward; unwieldy. See also HEAVY-DUTY, HEAVY-FOOTED, HEAVY-HANDED, HEAVYHEARTED, HEAVYWEIGHT.

  She gets used to the fact that people she hardly knows will reach out and touch her belly by way of greeting when they meet her on the street. Perhaps they too are pleased by how hard it is. She had never touched a pregnant belly before she touched her own. She is happy to discover that it is not puffy like fat, not spongy like a swelling, but solid, hard, and tight. Once a total stranger in the grocery store, an elderly woman in a jogging suit, patted her belly in front of a bin ofapples and commended her for eating right. No one would ever presume to do this to a non-pregnant woman. With a non-pregnant woman they would just shake hands.

  She also gets used to all the examinations at Dr. Millan’s office. Sometimes he has an intern doing practical training with him and Joanna generously lets the intern examine her too. She says that by the time this baby is born, she’ll spread her legs to anyone who wants to have a look.

  She is aroused all the time now. Between her legs she is always wet and tender, engorged. Gordon at first is nervous about making love. He is afraid he’ll hurt the baby. But she convinces him, she insists, every night she insists. Often during the day she masturbates, in the bathtub, in the bedroom, once in the kitchen with the blinds closed. She is never satisfied. This is one of the many things they do not mention in prenatal class. She does not know any of the other expectant mothers well enough to ask them if they are horny all the time too.

  In the class, she receives detailed chronological information about the physical changes she will go through week by burgeoning week. The prenatal teacher, Mrs. Irene Harper, herself an RN and mother of six, warns the expectant mothers that their raging hormones will wreak havoc with their emotions, producing unpredictable, sometimes violent, mood swings. Joanna is gently prepared for the fact that the hitherto trivial frustrations of daily life (a broken vacuum cleaner, a dead car battery, an unkind word from an unhappy waitress, even a broken fingernail for that matter) will now reduce her repeatedly to tears. She is informed with insouciant good humour that, during the course of her pregnancy, especially in the last trimester, she will be frequently overwhelmed with sheer terror at the prospect of the course she has so naively embarked upon. This fear of impending motherhood may occasion a full-scale bout of existential despair and an unnatural preoccupation with the meaning-lessness of life as we know it. Mrs. Harper assures the class that this is just a phase which will pass quick
ly enough. She says that on the fourth day after giving birth all new mothers cry, usually for the whole day. With any luck, this crying jag will not blossom into an all-out case of post-partum depression.

  Mrs. Harper does not mention what pregnancy does to the brain. Joanna is unprepared for how stupid she is. She cannot read a simple story without losing track of the characters and the plot. Words apparently strung together quite logically across the page make no sense at all any more. She must reread everything three or four times, even recipes, her horoscope, letters from Clarence, the phone bill. The only books she can concentrate on now are about pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding.

  She is also unprepared for the way her brain sometimes hooks on to something and will not let go. She can become utterly obsessed with the least little thing. It is as if, on the brink of motherhood, she cannot take anything for granted any more. The look of the rain on the windowpane. The sound of a dog barking mournfully in the distance. The look of her own fingers clenched around a coffee cup, a frying pan, a tear-filled Kleenex. The cool pillow under her head in the night, the sound and the feel of her own heart pulsing in her left ear. Perhaps this is where the old wives’ tales come from: expectant mothers obsessing about giraffes, ducks, elephants, passing these obsessions through the placenta along with the other essential nutrients, and then giving birth to babies with long necks, webbed toes, floppy ears.

  The baby is due in a week. She has a twinge. She grits her teeth. Gordon asks, “What’s the matter?” The cramp passes.

  “Nothing,” she says, “it was nothing.” She sits for half an hour staring out the window and thinking about the question.

  Matter, matter, what’s the matter, it doesn’t matter, it matters, it does matter, it does, it just does, yes, it matters, it all matters.

  Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. Matter, matter, oh dear, what can the matter be?

  The weight of the matter. The truth of the matter. The heart of the matter. In her heart of hearts she cannot imagine herself as a mother. Beyond a soft romantic picture (the kind they take with Vaseline on the lens) of herself thin again and beaming down at a pink or blue bundle in her arms, she does not know what will happen next.

  The baby, if that’s what’s in there, is due in a week. It is impossible to imagine. Perhaps she will be pregnant forever. Perhaps she’s not really pregnant at all. Perhaps the doctor will give her big belly agood hard squeeze and pus will spurt out, pus and blood and other subcutaneous somatic matter.

  Her head is heavy with enormous thoughts. Her blood is thick with oxygen and obsessions. Her belly is heavy with another being’s body parts: arms, legs, skull, ribs, toes, fingernails, heart. Heart of her heart. Heart of his heart. Heart of your heart. Heart of my heart. Here is the heart of the matter.

  heart n. 1. the hollow, muscular organ in vertebrate animals that receives blood through the veins and pumps it through the arteries by rhythmic contraction and dilatation. 2. the central, vital, or essential part; real meaning; core. 3. the source or seat of emotions, personality, etc., specif., a) inmost thoughts and secret feelings; consciousness; the soul, b) the source of emotions: contrasted with HEAD, the source of intellect and reason, c) one’s emotional disposition or temperament, d) any of various humane feelings, such as sympathy, devotion, love, kindness, compassion, etc., e) courage, spirit, energy, enthusiasm, or ardour. See also HEARTACHE, HEARTBEAT, HEARTBREAK, HEARTBURN, HEARTSICK, HEARTSORE, HEARTSTRINGS.

  89. TOBACCO

  JOANNA, PENNY, AND PAMELA smoked menthol cigarettes in the dugout of the baseball diamond at Branding Park. They smoked a brand called Alpine with green and white mountains on the paper package. Even in the winter they went there after school and huddled together, striking a dozen matches to light one cigarette, passing it around, complaining that someone was putting a heater on it, smoking right down to the filter, so sometimes their mittens got singed. When it rained, Joanna sometimes smoked at home in the bathroom, blowing the smoke out the open screen window, imagining that her mother would never know.

  By the time she got to university she was smoking openly at home. Her mother, as it turned out, had of course known all along. Joannacouldn’t figure out why Esther, who had no trouble expressing her disapproval about all manner of other questionable, possibly immoral behaviours, had said nothing.

  “There are a lot worse things you could be doing,” Esther said by way of explanation. Joanna supposed she meant drinking, doing drugs, and having sex.

  “At least you’re not pregnant. At least you’re not in jail,” Esther said. As if allowing yourself one bad habit would render you immune to acquiring others.

  “It’s your life,” Esther said. “You can do what you want, you’re an adult now.” Which Joanna did not believe for one minute.

  That year she and Clarence made a New Year’s resolution pact to quit. She lasted for three days. Clarence never smoked again.

  Joanna finally quits when she finds out she is pregnant. She has been smoking steadily for fifteen years. As she lies in bed at night admiring the mound of her belly under the blankets, she concentrates on either the baby stretching in her womb or her lungs gratefully going pink again. She is filled now with virtue and self-love instead of tar and nicotine.

  90. BABY

  JOANNA, LIKE MOST PEOPLE, has no recollection of her own birth. All she knows for sure is the precise time of her arrival: 9:50 A.M. Esther, like most mothers of the time, had no recollection of the birth either. She was out cold. She was fond, however, of mentioning that three months later Hurricane Hazel hit Toronto (that evil city), killing eighty-three people and causing extensive property damage.

  Later Joanna will learn that several other memorable events took place in 1954 besides Hurricane Hazel and her own birth.

  In India three hundred and forty pilgrims were killed in a stampede while bathing in the Ganges River.

  The United States set off its second H-bomb in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean between the Philippines and Hawaii. Tothe scientists’ surprise, this bomb was six or seven hundred times as powerful as that which destroyed Hiroshima.

  Also in the United States, President Eisenhower signed the Communist Control Act outlawing the Communist Party, the Supreme Court voted unanimously for school integration, Elvis Presley made his first record, work began on the St. Lawrence Seaway, and ground was broken at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, for the world’s first nuclear power plant.

  Roger Bannister became the first person to break the four-minute mile with a run of three minutes and 59.4 seconds. Sixteen-year-old Marilyn Bell became the first person to swim across Lake Ontario. Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye starred in the movie, White Christmas. Alex Colville completed his famous painting, Horse and Train.

  But Esther never mentioned any of these events. Consequently Joanna identified heavily with Hurricane Hazel and liked to quip in later years that everything since then had been all her fault. Years later still, she will realize this is not funny.

  When Joanna became curious about her own existence as a baby, she liked to look at the photographs in the album. Although she knew these were indeed pictures of her, she also knew that in some mysterious way they were not. Since she could not remember having been a baby, she had a sense of her life being rolled up behind her like a rug as she grew older. On the first page there were four blurry black-and-white shots. Herself in her crib laughing. Herself propped against the arm of a large flowered chair. Herself staring bug-eyed at a teddy bear twice her size. Herself naked on her stomach looking stunned.

  On the second page there were another four pictures, clearly in focus this time, Clarence apparently having mastered the new camera. Herself in a snowsuit in a sled in the snow. Herself on a blanket on the front room floor with a stuffed yellow dog she called Wyatt Earp. Herself on Esther’s knee: they are both smiling, there are white lace doilies carefully arranged on the back and arms of the large chair, not flowered now, but some dark solid colour, perhaps reupholst
ered in burgundy or brown. Herself on Clarence’s knee: he is wearing a grey suit, white shirt, dark tie, Esther beside him is bright-eyed in a sheer white blouse through which her brassiere is visible.

  When Joanna was old enough to know the facts of life (more or less), she could not imagine that she had been conceived in the regular way. She’d never even seen her parents really kiss each other. She’d never heard them having sex. Penny and Pamela said they heard their parents doing it every Saturday night and it was just disgusting. They said they put their pillows over their heads and their fingers in their ears. What was even more disgusting, they said, was the way their parents acted the next morning at Sunday breakfast: as if nothing had happened. They acted just like normal parents again, drinking their coffee, eating their eggs, getting ready for church, and then actually sitting through the service, singing, praying, pious and purified, as if nothing dirty had happened at all.

  Joanna had seen Clarence in his underwear once by accident and that was disgusting enough. She had also seen Esther’s left breast once when her housecoat slipped open. It was just hanging there, flabby white flesh marbled with blue veins. The brown nipple was puckered and chapped-looking, much bigger than Joanna could have imagined, if she had ever been sick enough to imagine such a thing, that her mother had nipples that she might have sucked on when she was a baby (thank God Esther had not believed in breast-feeding), that her mother had nipples that her father might have licked and kissed and sucked on in the disgusting depths of passion. The nipple was the size of one of those cork coasters Esther was forever slipping under drinks on the coffee table.