In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  She would like to mention what a good memory this evening will make if only he takes the time to treasure it now. Then he will be able to carry it forward with him forever. Please remember this. As if she could possibly control the contents of his mind five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. As if she can control them now. As if she can ensure that he will never wish for another mother. Of course he will. Yes he will. And her heart will be temporarily broken or turned to stone. But that mother-hating phase is still in the future which they are moving towards, yes, but slowly, so slowly that it is still possible to forget how much pain they may inflict upon each other when they finally get there.

  For now, Samuel still loves her. For now, he wants a pumpkin, a bat, a witch, a ghost, and a monster, a purple monster. Joanna starts cutting and singing “The Purple People Eater.” Samuel wants to trade scissors. His are not sharp enough. Gently she reminds him that he will poke his eyes out.

  The wind is rising. The branches of the large fir tree in front are waving. Samuel says, “It looks like the wind is singing too.” He wonders what it would be like to be a tree. Joanna reminds him that when he was a year old, he was afraid of trees. Samuel does not believe her. He says he can’t remember that, so how can it be true?

  They debate the pros and cons of treeness. It would be good, they decide, to be outside all summer long. It would be fun to have birds in your branches. This, Samuel figures, would probably tickle. It would be great to be taller than the house, to never have to eat, sleep, or brush your teeth. It would be interesting, Samuel says, to be green.

  But trees have troubles too. It would be awful to be outside in athunderstorm, a windstorm, or a blizzard. All that snow on your branches would be heavy and cold. It would be disgusting to have every dog in the neighbourhood pee on your feet. And cats would climb up you with their claws out. It would be awful not to be able to talk, laugh, kiss, or hug. Joanna points out that some people are fond of hugging trees. Samuel says yes, but the trees can’t hug back. Worst of all, a bad guy might come along and chop you down with an axe.

  Samuel decides he would rather make a tree than all that Hallowe’en stuff. He wants a happy tree, a summer tree, with birds and flowers in its branches. Joanna sets aside the witch hat she has been working on and cuts out a thick brown trunk with roots like giant feet. To the top she glues large overlapping circles of emerald and lime green. To these green circles she glues many smaller circles in all colours: pink, blue, red, yellow, orange, purple, black. She continues gluing small circles until they hang down from the tree like strings of pearls or other equally precious stones.

  Samuel is very pleased with his beautiful bejewelled paper tree. He says she looks beautiful too, when she’s making trees.

  An hour later she tucks him into bed. He has carefully placed the paper tree on the chair beside him, the chair which is pulled into place every night so he doesn’t roll over and fall on to the floor. There are sirens in the distance, the sound whipped around on the wind so they cannot tell where they’re coming from or going to. Joanna shivers. This sound always makes her feel frightened, acutely aware of the dangers which might befall anybody anywhere anytime. Her. But when the sirens have faded away, she feels relieved that this time they have passed her by, as if there were only so many catastrophes to go around and this is one more that hasn’t happened to her.

  Samuel is listening to the sirens too. He says maybe it’s a fire truck, an ambulance, maybe it’s a police car chasing down the bad guys. He says he would like to have the scissors on the chair too, the real scissors, the sharp scissors. He says, “Then if a bad guy comes after you, I will cut his heart out!”

  Joanna knows she should remind him that such bloodthirsty fantasies are inappropriate, that murder and mayhem are generally unacceptable, that violence is altogether politically incorrect. A good mother would, a model mother would, a real mother would. Instead she lies down beside him on the narrow bed. Instead she rests her head next to his on the soft cool pillow. Instead she whispers, “Please remember this,” which of course makes no sense to Samuel at all.

  93. QUIET

  JOANNA WAS ALWAYS LONGING for peace and quiet. After school, on weekends and holidays, she spent as much time as she could in her bedroom with the door shut, reading and writing and sketching at the small white desk Clarence had made for her.

  Esther and Clarence did not actively discourage her interest in art. Rather it was something they seemed to prefer not to notice or dwell on, as if acknowledging it might make it worse. They seemed to view her artistic inclination as just another phase she was going through, like that summer she’d been swept up by religious fever and wished to become a nun although she was not Catholic. That had passed quickly enough. Perhaps this would too. After all she was only a teenager. Perhaps this was just another form of adolescent rebellion.

  What seemed to bother Esther the most was Joanna’s closed bedroom door. She took that expanse of varnished blond wood personally. Its very appearance seemed to fill her with resentment, anxiety, and intense curiosity. Whenever Joanna was safely ensconced on the other side of that door, sinking down gratefully into the precious peace and quiet, Esther could always find a reason to barge right in. She never knocked. Most often, when the door swung open, there was Esther with a cookbook in her hand, saying, “Now listen to this one, this sounds good.” Then she would read aloud with such dramatic flourish she might have been reading illuminated scripture. She especially favoured those recipes which featured canned goods in innovative combinations. She was a great believer in canned goods and always kept a plentiful store on hand.

  “Now doesn’t that just sound delicious?” she would ask after reading it.

  “Yes,” Joanna would say.

  “Well, I think I’ll just try that tomorrow night.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father will just love it.”

  “Yes.” Joanna thought she would go crazy with anger.

  “What are you doing in here, dear?”

  Joanna would go crazy with anger. What did Esther think she was doing in here? Smoking? Drinking? Playing with herself or slitting her wrists?

  “Oh nothing.”

  “Oh well then,” Esther sniffed and sailed back into the kitchen to rummage in the cupboard for canned carrots, onions, pickled beets, and Campbell’s tomato soup. She left Joanna’s bedroom door half-open. Just to be on the safe side. She was not a great believer in privacy.

  Towards the end of high school Esther and Clarence began to circle around this persistent and problematic issue of art. They were always mentioning how Ginny Lacosta from down the street had decided to become a pharmacist. Now that would be a good job: steady work, good pay, and interesting too. And had they already mentioned that Susan Shanks was going applying to veterinary school? Which of course wasn’t as good as being a real doctor, but still.

  Joanna wondered how her parents knew all the plans of these girls who would become dermatologists, chartered accountants, florists, dentists, bank managers, nuclear physicists, advertising executives, and astronauts, yes, probably astronauts too. How did they know and why should she care?

  Then Esther and Clarence changed tactics. They talked a lot about Pamela and her boyfriend Bob who worked at the paper mill with Clarence and they were going to get married three days after graduation and they were saving for a honeymoon in Hawaii. Penny had started her hope chest. Debbie Lipinski got a diamond ring for Christmas. Angela Dolcetti was engaged too but she was going to go to hairdressing school anyway and she’d work at her aunt’s beauty parlour until she got pregnant.

  By this time Joanna had a part-time job in Ladies Wear at Simpsons-Sears, two nights a week and all day Saturday. She would work there all summer too, this last summer between high school and university. She didn’t really want to work all summer: she wanted to stay home and read and write and draw all day. Esther said she was just lazy. Joanna kept working at the store.

  She could just imagine her mother r
unning into other mothers at the store some Saturday afternoon, the bunch of them chatting merrily in their polyester pantsuits between tableware and towels, clogging up the aisle with their carts full of shampoo and bubble bath on sale half-price, woolly work socks for their husbands, white brassieres and briefs for their daughters, and plastic placemats for themselves. She could just imagine them gossiping joyfully about their marvellous daughters and the forthcoming brilliant rest of their lives. She could just imagine her mother dragging these other mothers over to have a look at her in Ladies Wear brushing lint off blazers, Esther proudly proclaiming that if she kept at it, she’d probably get promoted, she’d probably be head of the department by the end of the summer, and she got a staff discount now too.

  When Joanna was well into university, enrolled in a general program, studying fine arts, literature, and philosophy, Clarence and Esther were vaguely pleased with her good grades but were not generally willing to discuss the details of her education in any depth. Neither of them had even finished high school.

  Everything Joanna studied was falling into place. For whole weeks every idea she encountered was connected in an elaborate and infinite conjugation of knowledge. Perhaps the whole world could be conjugated inside this polymorphic synergy. Perhaps all knowledge was a feat of association. Sometimes she thought her head would explode with the sheer multifarious energy of ideas.

  Sometimes, flushed and sparking with a new enthusiasm, she would blurt it all out without thinking. Usually her ecstatic outbursts occurred around suppertime, when she was just home from classes, Esther was in the kitchen in her apron, whipping up a tuna casserole, opening a can of peas, and Clarence was just cominghome from the mill, dropping his lunch pail and boots at the back door, stripping off his dirty green work shirt, fixing himself a whisky and Coke in his undershirt. It was no longer Esther bursting into the bedroom reading recipes. Now it was Joanna bursting out of the bedroom reading aloud from Kant’s Critique of Judgement or the Code of Hammurabi.

  To which Esther would smile and nod nicely enough. But then she would seem to be seized by a rising bubble of panic which caused her to duck her head slightly, purse her lips tightly, and start slapping the brown plaid plates down upon the yellow placemats on the blue tabletop.

  Clarence usually said nothing, just kept on rattling his newspaper, tinkling the ice in his drink, tapping his bare bony feet on the tile. Of course there was that one time when Joanna was gushing on at supper about the essay she’d just finished, “Pablo Picasso and Plato’s Theory of Art,” and Clarence choked on a mushroom cap. They were trying Esther’s latest discovery, Chicken and Mushroom Pie. Gasping and gagging, he leapt up from the table and rushed for the bathroom with Esther right behind him, thumping his back until he brought the mushroom up again, still whole. He came back to the table with his eyes watering, wiping his mouth with a white handkerchief, still heaving a bit.

  Esther, back at the table, said, “That Picasso, why can’t he just draw like a normal person? These modern artists don’t know how to draw so they just do it however they like. Maybe they all need glasses. Either that or they all need their heads examined.”

  Joanna said nothing. Clarence dug back into his dinner, wary now of the mushrooms, picking them out with his fork and placing them in a tidy pile on the side of his plate.

  Surely this incident was just an accident, an unfortunate coincidence which should not be dwelled upon unduly.

  Joanna came to spend a lot of time and energy feeling unappreciated and misunderstood, which alternately propelled her with anger and a secret belief in her own superiority, or paralysed her with anxiety and depression, as she dripped down into loneliness and paranoia. Sometimes it prompted her to think with despair that shewould never be happy. Perhaps she’d never get the hang of it. Perhaps she didn’t know the meaning of the word.

  happy adj. 1. of a person favoured by circumstances; fortunate; successful; lucky. 2. showing or causing great pleasure, contentment, joy, etc.; pleased; glad; satisfied; joyous. 3. [Slang] mildly drunk, or irresponsibly quick to action, as if intoxicated. See also HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, SLAP-HAPPY, TRIGGER HAPPY, HAPPY AS A PIG IN SHIT.

  Sometimes she thought she was crazy. Sometimes she wished she was normal. Mostly she just wanted peace and quiet. She was working in her bedroom for hours, carefully noting ideas and quotes on blue-lined index cards which she then spread all over the floor. She pieced her essays together this way like puzzles. She worked hard and got straight A’s in everything.

  Joanna has been rereading these essays which she found in a box in the basement. She is impressed by how nimble her brain used to be, how clever she was, how serious, how smart, how sure of her own intelligence. She suspects that motherhood has softened her brain. She could not write these essays now. Rereading them, she can hardly even figure out what she was talking about. She imagines that if she heard the word “Plato” these days (and where do you suppose she might hear it? At the day care? In the park beside the monkey bars? In the grocery store while browsing through the dairy case?), she would think she was hearing a conversation about Play-Doh (how quickly it dries out if you don’t put the lid on, how it gets ground into the rug and cannot ever be removed, how all the colours get mixed together and end up a mottled murky brown, how it, like many things, is always a big disappointment because it’s not nearly as good in real life as on TV).

  It is early Sunday afternoon. Joanna is working in her studio. Gordon is keeping an eye on Samuel, doing the laundry, defrosting the fridge, making grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken noodle soup for lunch. After lunch he and Samuel are going to bake chocolate chipcookies. This was all Gordon’s idea. After breakfast he said, “You need some peace and quiet. Go and work, I can do the rest.” Joanna is pleased and secretly proud of Gordon for beginning to disprove one of her theories about the difference between men and women.

  Men, she has observed since Samuel was born, can only do one thing at a time. They graciously offer, for instance, to watch the children one evening while you go out for a drink with your friends. You are very grateful because you need a break. You dress up a little, put some makeup on even, and those new earrings you’ve been waiting for a special occasion to wear. You are humming as you leave. Husband and children wave happily as you back out of the driveway. You have a splendid time and are home by ten o’clock, just as you promised. Husband too has done exactly what he promised: he has looked after the children. He has not done the dinner dishes, put away the toys, taken out the garbage, swept the kitchen, wiped the toothpaste blobs out of the bathroom sink, or picked up the newspaper which is spread all over the house. He has certainly not cleaned the oven, baked banana bread, or put in a quick load of laundry. He has not even put away the milk. He is sitting in front of the TV watching the news and drinking a beer with his bare feet propped up on the coffee table. To get comfortable, he has had to wedge them around a pile of comic books, three dirty juice glasses, a soggy bowl of Fruit Loops, and a blue teddy bear. He is pleased as punch. He says he does not understand what you’re mad about as you fling your fancy earrings on to the windowsill and run the hot water into the sink as hard as it will go. You know you are being difficult. He is muttering about PMS. You know you are being childish and ungrateful. He says he does not understand. You wonder how such a sensitive and generally enlightened man can be so stupid. He says he is trying to please you but you are never satisfied. You know you are being just like your mother. He says he just does not understand women. This is the story of his life. What is the story of yours?

  He does not understand that women are ambidextrous. No. He does not understand that women are multi-dextrous. He has never noticed that you can cook dinner, pour apple juice, feed the cat, drink coffee, talk on the phone to your best friend who is depressedand needs you, set the table, stop the crying over a bumped elbow, wipe up the spilled apple juice, break a red popsicle perfectly in half, and pay the paperboy all at the same time. He has never noticed that you are miraculous and
without you he would die.

  But Gordon is trying and Joanna is working. Or trying to. She is at her drafting table with the studio door open because, despite or due to all those years with Esther, she too has developed an aversion to closed doors. She cannot help but listen to the sounds of Gordon and Samuel in the basement, laughing over the laundry, then the two of them traipsing up the stairs and rummaging around the kitchen for lunch. Why do they have to be so noisy? Why are they always singing? She is happy that they are happy together but why can’t they do it quietly?

  She grits her teeth and peers at her new collage which is called A Fashion Statement. She has cut out a series of anatomical engravings from the nineteenth century, medical drawings of body parts (heads, hands, arms, legs, feet) and skeletons (skulls, spinal columns, rib cages, breastbones, clavicles, femurs, scapulae). She has also clipped various articles of clothing from Vogue and other fancy fashion magazines. She has cut all of these illustrations into their individual parts. She is just starting the final assembly on a large black sheet of illustration board. She will do the accessories last, real earrings, a necklace, a small embroidered handkerchief tucked behind a rib bone. Gordon and Samuel are singing “Frère Jacques.”

  She grits her teeth harder and tries to concentrate. She will paste that pink silk jacket right beside that rib cage. Gordon stands in the doorway wanting to know how much fabric softener he’s supposed to put in.

  She will paste that bowler hat right beside that skull. Samuel needs some calamine lotion for his mosquito bites.

  She will paste that lime-green velvet catsuit right beside that full-length front-view skeleton. Gordon can’t find the cheese.

  She will paste those paisley boxer shorts right between those two femurs. Samuel is in the doorway again, doing his Dracula imitation.