Grey runs all the errands so I try to at least keep the dust off the bookshelves, cook nice meals, lug the heavy laundry basket down to the basement. I don’t like the basement, even though we had it finished years ago, with bright yellow walls and pine-coloured laminate flooring, soft corduroy furniture. It’s a den, a playroom for the children we haven’t had yet—nothing like Dex’s cinderblock cellar where I thought I would die every day. But something about the light slanting in from the high windows, the faintest damp…I don’t like being down there.
Sometimes I think I should go out shopping on my own—buy new shoes, a package of dishcloths, be a little more independent instead of waiting for Grey to come home and do things for me. That’s when I find myself standing outside on the front lawn. The sidewalk is a hem, an end to our property, our home—I can’t seem to cross over without Grey being right there to ward off evil. Pathetic. The lawn isn’t really any safer than the curb. Dex took me from a parking lot, and it was scarcely dusk. Even with a restaurant full of people on the other side of the lot, it turned out I had no defences.
But I used to leave the house every day and for years nothing terrible happened to me, until one day it did. So I could do it again. I could stride past men strong enough to throw me down, I could talk to strangers. I could go back to school. I think about the number of people I used to sit beside in class or at the library or chat with in the caf, who never tried to do anything to my body, never hurt me. And I convince myself to go outside.
The first breath of fresh air is always a jolt—cold and clean and alive with wind. I walk down the three shallow cement steps and onto the lawn. The problem is all the space. I should like things being open, bright, so unlike the clammy closeness of the basement. But the yard is so exposed and empty, someone could come at me from any direction. The ground is soft and brown from being hidden under snow all winter. Spring is coming early, and all the melt has gone into the lawn. I can feel it seeping through my tennis shoes as I walk over to what’s left of our flowerbed. Mostly it’s all wet black twigs and leaves on their way to mulch, but there are stalks and twisted yellow leaves in the spongy dirt, and I see a few dead flowers still standing up straight. Grey grew flowers the summer I was gone. I crouch down to look closer.
I’m still there when Grey’s navy Corolla rolls into the driveway. I watch him get out, lock the car, then turn to see me. I want him to be pleased—he’s been encouraging me to go out more, but he probably didn’t mean crouching in the flowerbed. He touches his lip nervously as he strides over—not pleased to find me outside. Worried.
He comes to stand beside me. “Hey, Catherine. You okay?”
That’s all he ever asks me. Maybe the problem is that I’m not but always say I am. I wish he’d stop asking—it’s easier to pretend if he doesn’t keep asking. Just once, I want to have a conversation where I am not a damaged person fumbling with life. Just to be the old Catherine, for a while—smart but not that smart, kind of pretty, a good waitress, married to Grey—that would be so nice. Even though I’m huddled on my sodden lawn like a crazy person, I want that normalcy.
So I try: “Sure. How was your day?”
“Good. Good day. I went out at lunch and got you a cellphone.” He rummages in his briefcase and pulls out a flat white box. “I got another Android, ’cause I know you don’t like the fancy ones.”
“I don’t not like them. I just don’t see the point.” That sounds like such a normal thing for me to say that Grey stares as if he’s seen a ghost. “Thank you.”
He bends down and hands me the box. “The number’s on a card inside. I already put it in my contacts, and I put my number in yours.”
I guess he’s waiting for me to stand, but I don’t. “Did you plant flowers last spring? While I was away?”
“What flowers?”
I point and he leans over to peer into the dead weeds and sumac. “Those are tulips, Catherine.”
I say, “Oh” like the word tulip means something to me, but it doesn’t.
He shakes his head, eyebrows pressing low. He looks ridiculous from this vantage, peering down over the curve of his tummy. “They’re perennials—you planted them, when we moved in. They just come up every year on their own. Remember?”
“Oh,” I say for real this time. The past has retreated to the blue line of the horizon. If I planted tulips once, or knew how to cross the street without my heart becoming a pulsing beat in my chest, it was a lifetime ago. I clutch the phone box in my hand, the corners digging into the soft pads of my fingers. “Of course I do.”
The time before Dex took me seems like a thousand years ago now. Everything blurs together. Most of the classes I was in at the university blend into the ones from the year before or after, all the way back into high school. Professor Altaris’s class stands out, maybe because it was my favourite, or maybe just the most recent. And waitressing doesn’t change that much over time—the customers and the dinner specials might change, but what happens every day is always the same. And Grey has always been Grey.
If I try, I can remember specific things, get beyond that general sense of before. We used to touch a lot, Grey and I. Probably most young marrieds do. But not just a kiss at the door and a snuggle in bed, I mean hugging while we did the dishes, leaning over to kiss each other across the table in restaurants, his hand on my thigh in the car. It wasn’t anything I really thought about unless someone pointed it out—he was just always close by and I liked to touch him. Donny and I were always touching too. We’d hug each other so tightly for warmth and comfort, the hard brass button of his denim jacket would dig into my soft upper arms. When he was dying I stroked his face, the small soft patches of beard mixed with the scruff of stubble—he wasn’t old enough to grow a proper beard. Now I never touch anyone on purpose, and something in me almost leaps out my throat if someone puts a hand on my back when I don’t see it coming.
Everything comes back to Dex, those months when he devoured me, when I was nothing. Dr. D wants me to keep thinking back further, to my real life. And I do try. I remember sex with Grey. We were together eight years, long enough to have our own sexual vocabulary: making love on a Sunday morning versus fucking on a Saturday night. I imagine every couple is like that, but I don’t really know. I was so young when we first got together; my teenage romances hardly count. I remember my breasts against his hairy chest, his rough fingers rubbing up my spine, but overtop these memories is a closed-off feeling, as if I were watching my past through a sheet of plastic wrap. Sometimes it’s like déjà vu looking at him across the table or the couch or the pillows. We are the same people in the same space, yet all the ways we used to be together are warped and corrupted now. I want to tell Grey I’ll come back to him eventually, really back, but I don’t know if it’s true.
I remember other things, from before, some of them not as sealed off—I feel like I could go back to certain places if I were just brave enough. The semester Dex took me, I was reading Sometimes the Door Sticks for Professor Altaris’s class. That was how I found out about Julianna; her book wasn’t the sort of thing I would have chosen for myself. At first, all the poems seemed too familiar, rusty car doors and greasy hair—I didn’t go to school for more of what I already knew. I liked reading for the way it took me away from myself, even before there was so much I needed to get away from.
Right before I was taken, I was working on my final essay and trying to figure out how she made her poems sing when the words were so ordinary. Then I was trapped and hurt and terrified, and I realized that everything ordinary was what I loved. And so I tried to escape in my mind back to those ordinary things by remembering her poems. When I really concentrated I could recall whole stanzas, whole poems, even though they kept changing over time. I kept telling Donny that one about the beige dishcloth—the poet didn’t know if it was beige to start with or had faded from a brighter colour—but the lines were a little different every time. I wanted to write it down, make the words stay still, but in the basement
we didn’t have anything to write with, so the poem skittered around in my mind and wouldn’t leave me alone.
When he was in front of the class, Professor Altaris moved like he had just beamed in from another planet and was testing the gravity, afraid to crash through the floor or float away. He would have made an awful waiter: always dropping things, striding into the projector beam and blocking the picture. A bad server but a good professor—I liked him anyway. I wish I could remember more of his lecture on Julianna’s poems. I don’t think we covered many of them in class, actually; the lecture was mainly about her murder. He thought it was tragic that she was deprived of the chance to keep writing and develop into an even better poet, tragic that we will never read those later poems. He sounded like he was a little in love with her, really, which I think everyone in the class found embarrassing. Of course it was sad she died, but we were studying literature, not history. Besides, what I suspected then I now know is true—a lot of the worst things happen for no reason. Life isn’t written by an author who is carefully considering her words. Sometimes there is no hidden meaning, or meaning at all. The poems, though, we could read and maybe someday understand.
During my last class (though I didn’t know it would be at the time), I went down to the lectern afterwards to ask Professor Altaris about my essay topic, and he seemed so delighted to be talking to a student I felt sorry for him. He kept losing track of the things he was trying to put in his briefcase because he never took his eyes off my face.
“So what intrigued you about Ohlin’s work?” He was shuffling papers into folders. A few drifted to the floor. “If you start with what you find most compelling, you can often find a thesis there and then expand out to some of the other poems.”
“I don’t know if I’m intrigued.” I shrugged, which made my heavy backpack drag up my spine. “I just feel like I could write a good essay about some of the poems. I think I understand them because—”
He crouched for the papers, still looking up at me. “Are you sure that’s wise? Your final paper is an awful lot of brain space to devote to something that you don’t really enjoy.”
“Her poems are like my actual life—she writes about waitressing and I’m a waitress, she writes about plugged sinks and so is mine.”
“So you can relate?”
“No, I don’t care about that. What the poems are actually about is boring. It’s the voice that I like. I like seeing where she keeps her distance and where she is closer to the reader. Sometimes she seems to be right there inside the poem, you know?”
Clearly that wasn’t the right answer—Professor Altaris looked even more oxygenless and gulpy than usual. Thinking back, I wish I had asked him more about the poems line by line: Why was the goldfish flag of the mailbox so easy to see in the mind even though it didn’t really make sense? What did the red wail of last call mean? Did he think describing the men too tired to be kind implied anger, or just sadness? Even still, despite my nonsense question, he tried to answer with something useful.
“Well, don’t forget that the poet chooses her subjects.” The papers were a messy fan in his hands as he rose toward me. “I feel like there’s romance there too—in the voice, sure, but in the action too. That hope that after the dishes are done there will be something more. The actual words she uses are her subject in a way. The beauty of the language imbues the object, don’t you think? Kitchen-sink realism but also…more?”
I wasn’t sure about the question marks. Was he really asking me? I paused to think. I was doing well in the course; I thought I could say something intelligent, if I tried. I shrugged again. It wasn’t like I didn’t find my own kitchen sink—double-sided and stainless steel, with the dishcloth Grey’s mom had crocheted draped over the centre—romantic. I loved it passionately because it was ours, in the home we’d bought together. But that sink was too personal, not intimate exactly, but only ours. I didn’t care about other people’s sinks. And yet I could see Julianna’s kitchen clearly in my mind, and when the poem described “a foamy baptism” I knew just how she felt, tired and scrubbing but not at all unhappy. How did she do that—import her vision into mine? But I didn’t say any of this to Professor Altaris.
“Maybe come back to them in a couple years, when you’re a bit older and—”
“I’m a mature student. I’m already much older than most of the kids here. You can’t get me on an age technicality… ”
He tried tapping the edge of the papers against the lectern to get them to line up but they buckled and slid. He wound up just stuffing them into his briefcase, crumpling and folding to get them to fit. “And how old are you, exactly?”
“I’m twenty-seven.”
“Ha!” The crack of laughter echoed in the empty room. “You’re not old enough to have perspective on how old you are.” The briefcase finally clasped shut and he appeared prepared to leave, but he didn’t. “You could mature yet. Some do, some don’t, at this point.”
“And what makes it happen—maturing?” I wasn’t flirting, I don’t think.
He tipped his head left all the way to his shoulder, like he was stretching his neck. “Well, life. Any move forward is good, right?”
Now I know that isn’t true. Some experiences aren’t worth learning from.
“Julianna was twenty-seven too,” I reminded him. “She had some wisdom.” I believed that, but I wasn’t sure if I could prove it. Maybe you can never prove wisdom.
He gave a wobbly nod, like he was not 100 per cent convinced. “Yes, she did.”
“I wonder how she found the words, found the poems. I mean, how do you know where to start, what will make sense to people?”
“Catherine, I’d give a lot to know the answer to that. It’s that gift that the poets have and the rest of us try to learn.” He shrugged, his jacket crumpling around his neck. “I think maybe you just start, and then keep going after that.”
When I was ten, my mother gave me a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which I read quickly and then gave back. I wasn’t happy to learn that sex existed. Of course I’d heard rumours: at recess, out toward the farthest soccer field that no one played on, boys would yell, “Do you want to HUMP?” and then run off punching each other. But until I read the book I didn’t know about the mechanics of sexuality and it turned out that was how I preferred it. I gave the book back, but I couldn’t stop seeing those diagrams of bodies inserting themselves into each other. Once you know, you can’t unknow. What a penis looked like and how one could shoot goo into you. How people apparently did this a lot—even people I knew. Even if not recently, most grown-ups had done it at some point.
It was too much information, and that information imprinted itself in some very active part of my brain. Every time I saw an adult or semi-adult—my parents, my friends’ parents, our neighbours, my babysitter—the thought would balloon before I could stop it: You had sex. You, Stephanie, forbidding me to eat Cheetos and sending me into the yard to play, you opened your pale legs and let your boyfriend shove a pink elephant trunk into your hole and pump up and down until he squirted clear snot. Everyone became only their ugly hairy parts and icky urges.
I learned to like sex around the time the teen movies think you’re supposed to, sixteen, seventeen. Sex with Grey was my favourite, which is also what a screenwriter would want. Partly it was being in love and partly we learned each other’s bodies as well as our own. I loved his hands, his chest, running my fingers through the soft hair at the nape of his neck while he went down on me. I loved the pressure of his body on top of me, the smile against my neck after. I had had sex before Grey, but I hadn’t had time to get it right. But I knew from the start Grey and I were going to give each other all the time in the world.
Even though I knew from my grade-school health classes that someone could use sex to hurt me, I never saw it happening in my mind like I did with all those grown-ups humping away that one summer. Now it’s an image I can’t stop seeing. It’s always possible. Any man could make me feel small and us
eless and like a bag of skin to be tossed down and fucked. Any man—the cops that took me in, the doctors, my cousin standing weeping in the doorway of my hospital room, even my husband. Those big hands with the long wiry hairs above the knuckles could always grip my shoulder, wrench back and down, make me fall to the floor, sprawl. It isn’t a thought, that’s the problem; it isn’t something that comes from the part of the brain I can control. It’s just a flash, a twitch of being pushed down, forced open. With all I learned in my twenties about loving sex—the pleasure of my husband and the softness of his touch and the warmth of it all—that scared-kid disgust at the nakedness, the spurt of mucus, it all came back the first time Dex knocked me down and opened me up.
To catch the bus to the university, I used to go out the front door, down the driveway, turn right, and walk about two blocks. It was pretty quick no matter what time of day I had a class. For the bus to work and to my mom’s, I had to walk about six blocks, then turn left and walk a block more—way more hassle, and that route was infrequent too. Those were the three main places I used to go. All are safely familiar, in that way my therapist singsongs it: “SAYflea faMILyar!” But my mom is so close to tears every time I see her that I can’t be near her for too long. And the restaurant, filled with people who know me but not well, who would want to talk but wouldn’t know what to say, seems too miserable to bear.
The university campus is big enough that no one notices you if you don’t want to be noticed, and I loved it there. Loved the library, loved the sprawling green fields, loved the nineteen-year-olds in their sport sandals and hoodies, the poetry readings, the profs with their briefcases rushing through crowds of students. I loved all my classes, even the ones that weren’t actually that great. My favourite idea of myself is sitting on the steps of the Humanities building, reading and eating a sandwich, occasionally saying hi to people I knew from class as they drift by.
So Much Love Page 22