In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Samuel is a week overdue. Joanna waits impatiently, although she does not know that it is Samuel she is waiting for. She waits and worries. She is afraid about it in all the ordinary ways. She has never held a newborn baby. She is afraid she will do it all wrong, afraid she will hurt him (she and Gordon have always referred to the unborn baby as “him,” which turns out to be true). She is afraid she will drop him, the way Esther said her distant cousin Jimmy was retarded not because he’d been born that way, but because his stupid clumsy mother had dropped him on his head.

  She is also afraid that she will look so awkward when she holds her baby that everyone will know she doesn’t know what she’s doing and then they won’t let her keep him.

  She is afraid he won’t like her. She is afraid he won’t like her holding him. She is afraid he will cry in her arms. She is afraid she has no maternal instinct whatsoever. She is afraid that she will not be a good mother.

  When the labour pains finally start, she feels, despite the many weeks of prenatal classes, completely unprepared. What if she cannot remember all the stages of labour? What if she does the wrong breathing at the wrong times? What if she cannot give birth at all? What if she is going to be pregnant forever?

  She can hardly believe that this big belly is about to translate itself into a baby. She cannot imagine all the ways in which she too is about to be transformed. Afterwards she will think that it was probably just as well.

  When Dr. Millan places the bloody, wet, crying baby on her chest (after twenty-four hours of labour, eleven of them in the delivery room), Joanna is speechless, besieged with tenderness and panic. It will prove to be untrue what everyone says about not being able to remember the pain of giving birth afterwards. She remembers, oh yes, she does remember. What she does not, cannot, will never be able to remember, is exactly how she feels at that moment of first cradling between her sore breasts his small head, soft and hard at the same time, covered with thick black hair.

  Although it is hard, as a new mother, to believe that major world events are still occurring, indeed they are. She sees them on the TV news and reads about them in the newspaper.

  In Red Deer, Alberta, Jim Keegstra, former teacher and mayor of Eckville, is convicted of wilfully promoting hatred against Jews.

  A Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 slams into a mountain in Central Japan, killing five hundred and twenty people. It is the worst singleplane disaster in aviation history. Four passengers survive.

  An earthquake measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale devastates Mexico City, killing up to 20,000 people, leaving another 30,000 homeless. On television Joanna watches over and over and over again the miraculous rescue of a baby girl who has been trapped in the rubble for seven days. The baby is seriously dehydrated but otherwise okay.

  Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meet for three days in Geneva, the first American-Soviet summit since Jimmy Carter met Leonid Brezhnev in Vienna in 1979. Both countries vow to work for peace and the reduction of nuclear armaments.

  The space shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after lift-off from Cape Kennedy, killing all seven astronauts aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, a school teacher from New Hampshire who was the first ordinary citizen chosen to go into space.

  In response to the bombing of a disco in Germany and various other acts of terrorism, the U.S. bombs Libya. Eleven days later the world’s worst nuclear accident occurs when a reactor blows up at Chernobyl power plant, near Kiev, U.S.S.R. Between these two incidents, the first test-tube baby is delivered from a surrogate mother at Mount Sinai Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.

  As the world goes through its historical convulsions, Joanna feeds the baby, burps the baby, changes the baby, bathes the baby, walks the baby, rocks the baby, talks to the baby, and often cries. Dr. Millan assures her that crying is a natural response to motherhood. He says her hormones are to blame and they will not return entirely to normal levels for a whole year.

  The baby grows into himself by increments, living solely in the present tense. The world unfolds. History happens. Time passes. Slowly or suddenly. Through no fault of its own.

  It occurs to Joanna (with her arms full of freshly washed diapers, her mouth full of clothespins, her head full of baby lore, out in the backyard in the sunshine, Samuel snoozing in the stroller in the shade) that there is no turning back now. Not that there ever was, not really. The possibility of retreat has always been an illusion, never a viable option. But it is only now that she truly understands that there is nowhere else to go but forward. The baby will grow. The world will unfold. History will happen. Time will continue to flow in one direction only. This revelation will produce within her alternate episodes of liberation and despair.

  91. MOON

  JOANNA, LIKE ALL YOUNG CHILDREN, accepted nursery rhymes at face value. Her elastic imagination easily accommodated the stories of an old woman who lived in a shoe, a giant egg who fell off a wall, a pie full of blackbirds, and a cat who played the fiddle while the cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed/To see such sport,/And the dish ran away with the spoon. The rumours that said moon, in addition to being frequently jumped over by said cow, was made of green cheese and contained a man were no harder to reconcile than the idea that Santa Claus flew through the sky in a sled drawn by eight tiny reindeer and then came down the chimney to deliver her presents while she slept. There was no fireplace in their house. Their chimney led directly to the furnace. She did not consider this a problem any more than she questioned the notion that the Easter Bunny hopped from house to house delivering eggs when everybody knew it was chickens, not rabbits, that laid eggs. To Joanna these were not stories, rumours, or notions at all. These were facts.

  It was only when the moon was visible during the day that she was confused. The moon was supposed to be shining at night. What was it doing out in the daytime looking so ghostly, flat and pale, nearly see-through against the bright blue sky? Maybe it was lost, wandering around in the puffy white clouds, feeling frightened, sad, and small the way she imagined she would feel if she ever got lost in the woods. (She had never actually been in the woods herself, but it happened to children in fairy tales all the time.)

  By the time Joanna reached adolescence, the moon, like many formerly frivolous things, had acquired several new disturbing dimensions.

  “Quit your mooning around,” Esther often said, so often in fact that Joanna began to imagine her own face as possessing the same white flat roundness as the moon: bland, vague, airless, reflecting all and sundry, rotating through no fault of its own, idle and dreaming, magical perhaps, but misunderstood.

  Then she heard about the moon’s power. She liked to gaze up at it through her bedroom window and imagine herself being slowly transformed by its milky light as it shed its mysterious pull downupon her upturned face. She’d heard that in some countries they believed the moon incited their women to orgies and so the women were not permitted to go gazing for long. When the moon was full, the German shepherd at the end of the block howled plaintively all night long. Joanna sympathized but never had the nerve to try it herself. She’d heard there were more crimes committed under the full moon, crimes of passion, no doubt, crimes of anguish and despair. Better to stay inside and admire the moon from afar.

  She’d heard how the power of the moon and its monthly resurrection influenced the tides of the ocean and the menstrual cycles of women. She’d never been to the ocean but she had started her period two years before. Although she hated it every time (the cramps, the pads, the chafing, the indignity of it all), still she liked to imagine that it was the moon pulling the blood out of her, growing her up like a seedling planted, according to horticultural superstition, under the waxing moon for the best results. She liked to imagine that it was the moon in her own belly, fertile and feminine, quietly changing everything from the inside out.

  Having witnessed the American moon landing on TV might well have dispelled or at least diminished some of the romantic notions she had embroidered around the moon. Bu
t it did not. She had more faith in the moon than in the astronauts. She’d heard about the dark side of the moon, the moon as receptacle for everything wasted on earth: time and money squandered, promises broken, prayers unanswered, tears shed fruitlessly, dreams and desires forever unfulfilled. She’d heard about the moon as shelter for the dead and the unborn.

  Later she will appreciate the irony of the astronauts (male) tramping around the surface of the moon (female), planting their flag, staking out their territory like dogs pissing on a tree, believing that they had claimed and conquered, having apparently not noticed the dead or the unborn or the billions of Fallopian tubes down below waving their fronds in time to the potent bloody rhythm of the moon.

  Later she will learn more about the landscape of the moon. That in addition to the Seas of Tranquillity, Serenity, and Fertility, the Bay of Rainbows, and the Lake of Dreams, there are also the Marshes of Disease, Decay, and Sleep, the Ocean of Storms, the Sea of Crises,and the Lake of Death, all of these watery fates discovered on a heavenly body found to be without air, without water, without life. In the south there is a small crater called Hell.

  Later she will learn that even during a total eclipse of the moon, the boundary between dark and light is never clearly defined. Later she will learn that librations are irregularities in the moon’s movement which cause its edges to be alternately visible and invisible. Libration. Liberation. Visible. Invisible. This knowledge may or may not prove useful. This knowledge, like all knowledge, may be remembered or forgotten when necessary. Later she will learn about lunacy in all its moon-fed splendour. Later she will imagine that the man in the moon was a woman all along.

  92. SCISSORS

  THE SUPPER DISHES HAVE BEEN CLEARED away. Joanna and Samuel are sitting at the kitchen table with their chairs pulled side by side. It is early evening, already dark, a windy night in late October. Hallowe’en is in the air. They have put the clocks back for the winter. Spring forward, fall back. Joanna has been unable to explain satisfactorily to Samuel where that extra hour comes from and where it will go again in the spring. He has an unreliable sense of time at the best of times and this peripatetic single hour is a metaphysical mystery which escapes him. What if you were in that hour, he wants to know, when it disappeared? Where would you go? How would you get back again? His concept of time as a place you can physically inhabit is unshakable. Joanna has to admit there is something to be said for this idea but does not encourage him to contemplate further the vagaries of the time-space continuum. He would have nightmares for sure.

  The kitchen windows face the street and the blinds are still up. They can hear their neighbour calling her cat. She is an eccentric elderly woman who has named her cat after herself: Geraldine. Often after dark she can be seen in her nightgown in her driveway, calling her own name, coaxing, clucking, scolding, sometimes growing impatient and yelling, “Geraldine, you stupid bitch! You get homehere right this minute!” Tonight it is still early enough, she is still feeling friendly, she is calling, “Geraldine, Geraldine, where have you been? Have you been to London to visit the Queen?” Samuel and Joanna giggle and roll their eyes.

  On the table there are coloured markers, glue sticks, a thick pad of construction paper, and two pairs of scissors. Samuel has his own special scissors, green plastic over the metal, rounded tips for safety. So Joanna doesn’t really have to say, “Keep those scissors away from your face! You’ll poke your eye out!” But she says it anyway just to hear the sound of her own voice amidst the chorus of other mothers’ voices in her head, good mothers, model mothers, real mothers.

  Gordon has gone to a meeting of the Historical Society which he has belonged to for several years. He would like Joanna to join too but she hates meetings. Theoretically she believes in the democratic process but in practice she finds it horribly inefficient. She simply cannot bear to sit in a stuffy room with ten or twenty other people taking an hour and a half to decide which refreshments should be served at the next public information session and then deciding to elect a refreshments committee to look into it first. She would rather stay home.

  Tonight, in a wave of maternal selfishness, she is happy to have Samuel all to herself. They are going to make their own Hallowe’en decorations. While Samuel pulls sheets of paper from the thick pad, Joanna cannot help but admire the picture they make: picture-perfect mom doing crafts with her charming clever child. They are happy, they are good. More to the point: she is happy, she is good. She is a real mother after all. She imagines real mothers everywhere, those mothers she has seen in the park, those mothers who have all afternoon to push their children on the swings and actually enjoy it. They go home singing afterwards, home to their picture-perfect houses for a nutritious snack of carrot sticks, oat bran muffins, and homemade granola. These mothers who, all evening every evening, read stories, draw pictures, and make elaborate animals out of Play-Doh or (better yet) papier maché. These mothers who do not believe in TV, synthetic fabric, or junk food of any kind. These mothers who are never impatient, irritable, bored, or too tired to play. These mothers whom she admires, envies, resents and is, more often than not, afraid tospeak to for fear of being found wanting, wicked, negligent, selfish, incompetent, inadequate, inferior, and unfit, with a bag of Cheezies in one hand and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle in the other.

  Tonight she wants to be one of them. Tonight she is one of them. Or at least, tonight she could be mistaken for one of them. She is, after all, spending quality time with her child. Lucky child. Good mother. What are the qualities of time?

  Samuel interrupts her thoughts. “I love paper, don’t you?” he says.

  “Why yes,” she says, “as a matter of fact, I do.”

  She remembers going to the art supply store as a teenager, wandering through the aisles filled with paper, pencils, sketchbooks, huge rolls of canvas, tiny tubes of paint. She got a knot in her stomach, a lump in her throat, not of tears, but of longing and excitement. She cruised the store with her head down, eyes averted, avoiding the sales-clerk who seemed to be following her, who was following her. When the clerk finally cornered her near the drafting tables at the back, when the clerk finally asked, triumphant, too loudly, “May I help you?” Joanna could only mumble, “Just looking, thanks,” and walk away. Guilty, guilty, caught in the act, as if she had been caught shoplifting, drinking, smoking, necking, or masturbating. As if she had been arrested while pursuing some illicit, illegal, immoral pleasure. Had she not been taught that all pleasure was suspect? When she came home with another set of oil pastels, another spiral-bound sketchpad, another pair of scissors, another art book (another book, God help her if she came home with another book), Esther was bound to say, “Why do you keep buying this stuff? How many sketchpads do you think you need? You’ve got enough books. Why did you buy another book? How much did it cost? Paper? More paper? What’s wrong with the paper you’ve already got? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?”

  Although Clarence worked at the mill and came home smelling of paper, he could not make sense of Joanna and her obsessions either.

  Even now, she cannot help but wonder what her life would have been like if she’d had parents of a different sort altogether, parents who were well-educated, creative, sophisticated, and supportive of her artistic inclinations. She knows this is a contemptible (althoughnot uncommon) blasphemy. But what if? What if she had actually had parents like Gordon’s, parents who listened to Mozart, admired Picasso, understood Dali, read Camus in the original French, and went to museums in their spare time? She remembers wishing for a father who wore a suit every day, instead of only to funerals and weddings, to the doctor, to fly. A father with a briefcase. She remembers wishing for another mother sometimes too. But before she’d had time to redo Esther in detail, before she’d got past imagining a tall slender woman in a white silk dress reading a book in a large chair by a sunny window, she was bludgeoned by guilt and the fear that either Esther would die or she would die or maybe they
would both die because of her ungrateful, traitorous betrayal.

  What if she had known all along that the things she loved were indeed valuable, that the pursuit of them was as important as she thought it was, and that she too was valuable and important? What if she had had parents who believed in her? What if she had not had to spend most of her adult life struggling to believe in herself?

  Even now, as a practising, fairly successful, professional artist, even now, when accosted in the art supply store by the over-eager salesclerk (May I help you? May I help you? May I help you?), she feels instantly guilty (Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa!), as if she had been exposed as a pervert who loves paint, glue, canvas, paper. Especially paper. The look of it. The feel of it. The smell of it. The taste of it. Had she not repeatedly chewed up and swallowed parts of her Sunday School program as a child? Had she not once, in a hardware store on the edge of town, licked a huge blue block of salt meant for cows? Some day she might lose control and lick a forty-dollar sheet of handmade Japanese watercolour paper and then, for sure, they would have her taken away. Better that perhaps than the humiliation of having to explain yet again to the irreverent slack-jawed gum-chewing vacant-eyed clerk that she is just looking, thanks, just loves to look. When all else fails (all strength, hope, ideas, hope, love, hope), she just loves to look. How could she possibly explain the comfort to be drawn from a piece of blank paper, unsullied, unsuspecting, fragrant, expectant, and pure?

  “Yes,” she says again to Samuel. “I do love paper, I truly do. I’m glad you love it too.”

  She resists the prideful urge to point out to him how lucky he is to have a mother like her, a mother who loves paper and is not afraid any more to admit it, a mother who not only loves him but who also likes every little thing about him, a mother who loves him just the way he is, and if he wants to love the feel, the smell, even the taste of paper, she will not get mad at him or even laugh. She will just go along with him, loving paper too.