In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Afterwards they got back into the car and went for a long drive in the country with all the windows open.

  “Say cheese!”

  Joanna was taking a picture of Henry and his friend Eddie from the band. They were all at a Sunday afternoon barbecue at Eddie’s house. Actually Eddie did not live in a house. He lived in a converted garage behind a house. Actually they were not eating much although there were salads on the picnic table and burgers on the grill. Mostly they were drinking beer and horsing around. Henry and Eddie are posing in the middle of a very large mud puddle. They are both wearing mirrored sunglasses. Henry is holding his bass guitar. Eddie is holding an axe, a real axe, strumming the silver blade which rests on his right thigh. He is twisting his face out of shape and making heavy-metal guitar sounds. Henry is yelling, “An axe! It’s an axe! Do you get it?”

  Then Henry hands his guitar and his glasses to Eddie and throws himself facedown spread-eagled into the puddle.

  “Say cheese!”

  He comes up with his fists raised. Muddy water streams from his long beard, his forehead, his nose. Everyone is roaring and applauding and handing him more beer. There is no telling what Henry might do next.

  “Say cheese!”

  Joanna was trying to take a picture of Lewis. She had only one other picture of him, taken before they fell in love, taken when he was playing baseball in the park. In this picture he is a barely recognizable person in a white baseball cap, navy T-shirt and cutoffs, standing in left field squinting at the sky where presumably there is a baseball. Now she was trying to get a picture of him lying naked after sex, reading a magazine in her bed. But the floor creaks, he hears her coming and throws the sheet over his head.

  “Say cheese!”

  He refuses to be photographed, he says, in such a compromising position. She says what does he think she’s going to do with it—blackmail him? Send it to the newspaper? Have it blown up and framed to hang over the couch? She only wanted the picture to look at privately after he had gone home to Wanda. They argued until she put the camera away.

  Later he gave her an old passport photo in which he looked like a terrorist or someone being hunted by a terrorist. She wore it in a locket around her neck. Until one day he said what if she got in a car accident? What if the locket sprang open and the doctors and nurses saw the picture? She did not argue. She took off the locket, took out the picture, and dropped it in the bathroom garbage can. He was hurt.

  Afterwards she regretted it and picked the picture out from among the dirty tissues, waxy Q-tips, and one semen-filled condom. She put it back in the locket but did not wear it. She kept it in her jewellery box but did not tell him.

  “Say cheese!”

  Gordon is taking a picture of Joanna and Samuel. Samuel is one day old. Joanna is exhausted, sore, sweaty, and her hair is a mess. She has just returned from the room where she has to have a sitz bath four times a day. She has just seen herself in a full-length mirror and wept. She does not want to have her picture taken. But Gordon has bought an expensive new camera and loaded it with fast film so he doesn’t have to use the flash which might hurt the baby’s eyes or scare the hell out of him. She arranges herself in the rumpled hospital bed. She holds Samuel in her hands and smiles down at him. He yawns. Her flabby belly and her big hard breasts are not in the picture. Neither are the small red forceps marks on Samuel’s temples.

  “Say cheese!”

  “Say cheese!”

  “Say cheese!”

  Joanna takes many pictures of Samuel with the expensive new camera. In the first few months it seems that every day he does something new and notable. She even takes pictures of him when he’s sleeping, the way he sprawls, curls, smiles, frowns, covers his little face with his little hands. It is as if she would like to take pictures of his dreams. She spends a fortune on film and processing. Often she takes sequences of photographs, four, five, or six shots of one movement. From frame to frame, the differences are minuscule: left armup, right arm down, eyes open, eyes closed, mouth smiling, mouth frowning, mouth working up to a full-scale howl. Afterwards, in the photo album, these are like stills lifted from a never-ending film. She does not make the mistake of thinking that she will remember this. Instead she documents every detail of his development. She knows that these are things she will some day need to know.

  “Say cheese!”

  Joanna is taking a picture of Samuel on his first day of school. Gordon has already gone to work. Samuel is posing shyly in front of the house. He is wearing light grey pants and a red T-shirt. He is carrying a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles backpack. He has recently had his first professional haircut. His luxurious curls are now in an envelope in Joanna’s studio. She has thought about using them in a collage but the idea seems somehow barbaric, cannibalistic. With his hair short and neatly combed, he looks like a real boy, sturdy, stalwart, and brave. He also looks too little to be going anywhere.

  Afterwards Joanna will walk him the three blocks to the school and leave him there crying in the classroom with twenty other four-and five-year-olds also crying or wanting to.

  Afterwards she will spend the morning on the front step drinking too much coffee, watching the clock, and worrying. She will get out the old photo album where there is a picture of her on her first day of school in 1959.

  “Say cheese!”

  Esther took this picture. Clarence had already gone to work. Joanna is posing shyly on the front step. She is wearing a flowered sleeveless short summer dress, white ankle socks, and black patent leather shoes which she loves because they have straps and gold buckles and they click on the concrete. She has a barrette in her hair and a small book in her right hand. Looking at this photograph, her eyes automatically compensate for the fact that it is black and white. As she sees it, the book is red, the barrette is blue, the front step is green, and her dress is mostly pink.

  She does not remember what happened next: the walk, the school,the classroom, the crying or not. She cannot imagine what Esther did afterwards. It would seem that the photographs you would most like to look at, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, now thirty years later, are those which no one thought to take at the time.

  99. BLOSSOM

  GETTING OUT OF THE YARD in the morning to go to school and back into it at four o’clock when she came home meant Joanna had to run the delphinium gauntlet. They grew tall on either side of the front gate, their hooded blossoms purple, blue, and white, bobbing and humming with full-bodied bumblebees deep inside. The bees buzzed out fat and furious as Joanna ran past waving her arms and hollering and the white picket gate snapped shut behind her. She was never stung, not even once. Later she will learn that although Esther called them delphiniums, in fact these living beehives were really monkshoods.

  Esther loved flowers of all kinds, no matter what they were called. There were begonias in pots on the front step, tiger lilies and baby’s breath in beds along the side of the house, hollyhocks, dahlias, irises, chrysanthemums, peonies, phlox, and gladioli in the garden at the back. At one corner of the house there was a large bleeding heart. Penny and Pamela showed Joanna how to open one of the hearts to reveal the upright stamen so that it looked, they said, like a naked lady in the bathtub.

  Each spring there was the ritual of the bedding plants to be performed. Clarence drove Esther to the nursery east of town where she spent hours browsing and choosing and browsing some more while he paced and Joanna waited, reading, in the car. They drove back home with the trunk open to make room for many wooden flats of small but sturdy plants: forget-me-nots, impatiens, marigolds, nasturtiums, bachelor’s buttons, portulaca, petunias, snapdragons, and salvia. Which always made Joanna think of saliva (how gross) and Sally Delvecchio in her Grade Six class who always spit when she talked and so they called her “Sally Saliva” behind her back.

  Esther put the plants into the well-prepared earth immediately, nomatter how long it took, no matter how late it was, so that some years she was still down on her knees in the dirt as the dus
k fell upon her.

  Although Esther tended all her flowers with equal and ardent dedication, the roses were her special favourites. “I have to admit it,” she often said, “I love the roses more than the rest.” As if they were children and she were finally confessing to a shameful favouritism, loving one more than the others. Each year she added at least one new variety to the bed in front.

  Thanks to her mother’s insistent coaching, even Joanna knew their curious names by heart: Circus, Fashion, Mischief, Ballerina, Prosperity, Vanity, King’s Ransom, Joseph’s Coat, Blue Girl, Red Devil, Lavender Lassie. Some were named after famous people: Queen Elizabeth, Don Juan, Mister Lincoln, Maria Callas, and John F. Kennedy. Others were named after people she had never heard of: Constance Spry, Marjorie Fair, Adolph Horstmann, Wendy Cussons, Grandpa Dickson, and Just Joey. Joanna could only imagine who these people might have been and what they might have done to warrant having a rose named after them. Her mother, she suspected, would have given anything to be so honoured.

  All summer long Esther babied them, fed them, fertilized them, and waged war against the aphids, leafhoppers, spider mites, thrips, black spot, cankers, mildew, rust, and root-knot nematodes which threatened them. She was always watering them, spraying them, deadheading or disbudding them, removing suckers and pruning precisely. In the fall she prepared them for winter by mounding soil and leaves around the crowns. Once they were safely tucked in, she let the snow pile up on top of them because, despite what you might think, it provided the best insulation. So she told Joanna every time they walked past them and she had to resist yet again the urge to clear the snow away even though she knew better. Joanna came to think of the wintering roses as little babies sleeping under the snow.

  Esther knew the hardiness zones of the whole country the way other people knew the time zones. There was a coloured map in each of her gardening books, the country divided into nine zones according to climatic conditions. Esther often bemoaned the difficulty of living in Zone 2 (or 3, depending on which map she consulted). Dueto very cold winters and a very short growing season, many of the flowers she longed to grow remained forever out of reach.

  One April Sunday afternoon when Esther had her gardening books spread all over the kitchen table, Joanna suggested they try a plant she had spotted in the current seed catalogue. She was only looking over Esther’s shoulder because she was bored. The flower was called Bird of Paradise, an exotic orange, blue, purple, and white blossom on the end of a three-foot straight stem. Esther pointed out that it would not grow in their zone. Joanna thought they could try it anyway, just for fun. Esther scoffed. Whether at the notion of paradise or fun or the naivety of believing in the possibility of either, Joanna was not sure. Esther put the books and the catalogues back in the bottom of Clarence’s closet and went on with preparing the roast beef for supper.

  Looking through the pile of gardening books later (looking perhaps for some proof that living in Zone 2 was not as hopeless as it seemed), Joanna found a small slim volume called The Language of Flowers. It was a modern reissue of a book originally published in 1884 by a woman named Kate Greenaway. It contained many delicate drawings in pastel colours of cherubic children in straw hats and white tunics. These androgynous children were dancing and singing with flowers in their hair and hands. Some of them had wings. On other pages there were drawings of white-skinned women in bonnets and long dresses, also white. These women were portrayed in various limp poses beside a stream, at the seashore, by the garden gate. There were no men in this book, only women and children and many fine flowers.

  Joanna could not imagine how her practical hard-hearted mother had come to own such a book. There was no inscription but perhaps it had been a gift. From who? From Clarence? Not likely.

  The text was an alphabetical list of flowers and what they symbolized, the messages they carried. Marigolds meant grief, nasturtiums meant patriotism, peonies meant bashfulness, and there was something called Love-lies-bleeding which meant Hopeless, not heartless. Esther’s favourite, the rose, in general symbolized love. But there were variations within the theme. Particular types of roses carried particular messages. Grace. Variety. Simplicity. Capricious beauty.

  Tranquillize my anxiety. Winter. Age. Pride. Pleasure and pain. Jealousy. War. Secrecy. Love is dangerous. War of Roses. Crown of Roses. Crown of Thorns. Death is preferable to loss of innocence.

  Later Joanna will come to appreciate the treachery of flowers, grown out of love, no doubt, yes, usually by women. But most often given by men out of a desire to exorcize guilt, to exercise power, to expedite attraction, to extol their virtues and insist upon themselves, to apologize for any indiscretion, major or minor, as if a dozen red roses (long-stemmed, hot-house, over-priced) could as well expunge an illicit affair as having forgotten to take out the garbage again. Flowers as extortion, exculpation, expectorant. For a time all flowers will strike her as funereal.

  Later still she will plant and grow her own flowers at her own house with her own husband and child beside her. At first every time she kneels down in the dirt she will hear her mother’s voice in her head, telling her that she is not a gardener, she is doing it all wrong, she is a fool to think she can grow those flowers even here in Zone 5. Just who does she think she is?

  But soon enough the flowers do grow. Their brilliant blossoms fill the beds and the boxes at the kitchen window. Sitting inside at the kitchen table early in the morning, she watches the flowers in the window boxes as if they were fish in an aquarium or flames in a fireplace. Esther always said she would be a late bloomer, meaning her small breasts, her slim hips, her fear that she would always look like a boy.

  At last she can appreciate these blossoms for what they are: pretty, fragrant, voiceless gifts. At last she can extract the excellent comfort to be found in their beauty, which is mindless, indifferent, stubborn, and still.

  100. AFRAID

  IT IS ONE OF THOSE DAYS when Joanna finds herself repeatedly moved to the sharp verge of hot tears. A radio news story about a crippled woman in a car accident dragged from the wreckage to safety by her Labrador Retriever, Blue, sets her eyes stinging. She is waiting forthe major winter storm which has allegedly been on its way for two days. Toronto (that evil city) has come to a snowbound standstill. The highways to and from are closed. Tractor-trailers are jack-knifing all over the place, spilling citrus fruit, TV sets, and half-dead chickens into the snow. People are abandoning their cars on the roadsides. What do they do next? Where do they go? Do they just strike out on foot into the blizzard like a scene from Doctor Zhivago? Where do they end up? You never get to hear the end of these adventure stories. It’s like hearing sirens raging through the city in the middle of the night and then you never hear what happened or to whom, unless they died. Anything less than death is left to your aggravated imagination.

  Now the radio announcer’s voice thrills with the prospect of bad weather. Joanna too is energized by the possibility of being snowed in. Perhaps this is the true mark of a Canadian: that only a good old-fashioned blizzard, with freezing rain, gale-force winds, and three feet of snow, can really get your adrenaline going. Perhaps it is bad weather that keeps the country together. Clarence is bound to call later—he will have seen their storm on the weather channel. He will be calling to see if they’re all right.

  Joanna is searching for the candles in case the power goes off. Samuel is curled up on the couch with the Walkman on. He looks rapt and angelic, transported.

  Everything is closing early in anticipation of the storm. Gordon will be home soon. Joanna remembers early school closures when she was a child, the excitement of being home in the middle of a weekday afternoon, and sometimes Esther let her put on her pyjamas and then made her a big bowl of buttered popcorn while Joanna knelt at the picture window and watched the weather like a movie. Once when Clarence got off work early, he stopped for chocolate milk shakes on his way home. Apparently the Dairy Queen intended to weather the storm. They sucked on their shakes while the snow pi
led up in the street. When the power went off just at suppertime, Esther got out the candles and Joanna and her father stood on the front step peering through the snow to see how far the blackout stretched. People skimmed by on Skidoos, waving. Then they had baloney sandwiches, potato chips, and carrot sticks by candlelight. When the lights came back on, they wereall deflated somehow and the party just leaked away. Esther did the dishes, Clarence did the cryptogram, and Joanna did her homework.

  Suddenly, in the midst of this memory, she misses her mother intensely. Her throat is swollen and tender with unshed tears.

  The snow is finally starting. Samuel abandons the Walkman and peers out the kitchen window. The flakes are falling straight down, slowly, like weightless white coins. “How deep will it get? How long will it last?” he asks. “Will it cover the windows, the whole house, the world?”

  He wants to go outside and stand in it. He wants to build a snowman, a castle, a fort. Joanna likes snow too, but as she helps him pull on his snow pants and zip up his parka, she thinks about having to shovel out tomorrow and she groans. Perhaps this is a true sign of having become a grown-up: she now sees snow as another chore instead of as an adventure, a treasure, a gift from the sky.

  Samuel is out the door ahead of her. The snow falls into the porch. The whole neighbourhood is muffled, breathless, still. All the windows are yellow squares in the sturdy warm houses in the early winter twilight. Joanna is on the verge of tears again, at the sight of Samuel’s face turned up to the sky, his mouth open, catching snowflakes on his tongue. He sees her stricken face and asks, “What’s the matter, Mommy? Are you scared? Don’t you like the snow?”

  She says, “Of course I do, I love it, I’m not scared at all,” laughing, lying, and the snowflakes fall into her mouth.

  Joanna is an optimist, generally hopeful about the future, despite all evidence to the contrary. Often it is this stubborn optimism which sends her to the shimmering brink of tears. Some days she is propelled by a sense that any minute now everything will be all right. Some days she is scared to death.