by Joan Barfoot
But he was so proud and pleased with himself when he did come home. I would certainly not want to cloud that, I would not complain.
I thought I was wise.
Now I remember him coming home happy from an evening at work, and I recall his pride, and now I know what he was proud of. How could he look at me then and smile and say, “Hi, Edna,” and bend to give me a quick hello kiss and say, “Sorry I’m so late. I got tied up”?
It was comforting to have such familiar days. Having found my life, I would not have liked changes or surprises. And if the days were sometimes dull, or if sometimes I would have liked to avoid the work, put it off for some other time, I was proud to overcome that and steel myself and go ahead, plunging through it all. The more I did on such a day, the better, more virtuous I felt. And the closer I felt to Harry, because it was done for him, for us.
At the end of a day I was warm with satisfaction.
I seem to have had a great deal of pride, after all.
It is strange now to see those twenty years. A great long chunk of life in the past, it’s like a package. And not, as I might have expected, all ribbons and pretty wrapping; from a distance, stripped of what I thought it meant, brown paper tied with string. And although I know it seemed right at the time, from a distance it weighs a ton. It was made up of such light small things, too—it’s a puzzle.
It also seems primitive, superstitious, and innocent. Each task a kind of ritual abasement, an appeasing of unknown, threatening gods, a sacrifice like slaughtering goats on altars to fool the gods. They are offered gifts and are diverted. Or like saying prayers on beads, or making certain movements in particular ways, a form of worship and of fear. Holding up the cross to a vampire?
And somehow I missed a step, a sacrifice, a bead. I missed something.
I would like not to know. I would take all that weight back if I could be given not knowing again. I could go back and find out what I missed and I could take care of it and none of this would happen. I would be content. And I would work much, much harder to make it perfect.
18
I see I still try to hold onto secrets, even when there is no one to keep them from any more except myself, and what’s the point of that?
If Harry had secrets, I had one, too. My addiction, my single lapse from duty. A hidden sweet in the afternoon.
I remain guilty and embarrassed about it. Because it was a self-indulgence? Perhaps because it may have been the flaw.
It was that at some point (when, exactly?) I returned, with a mixture of reluctance and unease and pleasure, to that old habit, my comfort going back to childhood, of lying silent and eyes closed, separated by blindness from where I was, listening to the music and stealing it for myself. I sang on the stage again, and danced around the same old polished floors, this time with an elegant Harry, a face to the figure now, while other people watched admiringly.
I stole to the couch in the afternoon and put albums on the record player and turned up the volume. A grown woman doing this, the same as she had in that old university apartment before Harry arrived to take up the evenings with his hard lean words and body.
But my body and voice were so free and loud in someone else’s body and voice. I might ask, “Why do I do this?” and say, “I won’t do it again, there’s something wrong about it,” as if it were a kind of masturbation, but would be lured back another day by how it felt. Blood rejoicing, muscles shifting beneath the skin as it went on before my eyes.
Oh, I was important: I sang for my family and danced in front of Harry’s friends. Sometimes in a concert, sometimes on a small club stage. Wherever, they looked and admired. I was someone. I was anyone: from Streisand to Baez I could claim anyone’s voice I chose, for my own small neat body. Musicals were best, from the South Pacific and Oklahoma of the early days to Hair and Jacques Brel, because I could dance in them as well as sing. Sometimes, when musicals were out of fashion, they were difficult to find and I fell back on the old favourites. Sometimes, as in the dancing, Harry became a voice with mine, because after all, with my eyes closed I could do anything, even make him someone else.
He used to say, flipping through the albums, “Jesus, we have a lot of stuff by women here,” and it was true. I fed my cravings with occasional new albums, and if there was no musical that appealed, I chose something with a woman’s voice that I could transform into mine.
Most often I placed him in the audience, where he sat watching proudly and with amazement, like the others.
Sometimes I found myself smiling. The trick has always been to keep the eyes closed. If they flickered open in the middle of a song, before the time was right, there was a flash of startled pain. It was a shock to see my clean cool living room when I was sweating from the dance inside.
It was never for very long. When an album ended, I resumed my day. The feeling was odd, though, when it was done: both satisfied and a bit dissatisfied, a little shaken and bewildered and uneasy. But by then it didn’t matter much because there were only easy things left to do: exercise and take a bath and change my clothes, greet Harry. The music was for when the work was done. And maybe it wasn’t so awful a weakness, nothing as bad as drinking or eating a bag of cookies all at once. It wasn’t anything that showed. Just an old familiar dream that gave me, for a little time, my old familiar second life. It was enough; I always knew I wouldn’t like it to be real, all those people staring, and certainly knew that the life I had was the one I wanted.
Still, it may have been the flaw: that for a half-hour or so in a day I was someone else and had those longings. Maybe it was far too often and for far too long. Maybe, most of all, it was a secret.
I wonder if Harry also had some hidden life inside his head. What did he see when he closed his eyes and listened?
And I wonder if she also had dreams of being someone else, just for a little while. Maybe she even dreamed of being me.
19
The magazines said, “Rate your marriage—how close are you really?” Or, “The women in his office—what you have that they don’t.”
They had quizzes, which were irresistible: “When your husband comes home from work, do you a) greet him at the door with a smile; b) call hello to him but leave the vacuum cleaner running; c) greet him at the door by telling him what a terrible day you’ve had?”
I scored well on all the quizzes. “How to be more attractive for your man,” I read. “How to be sure he’ll always come home.”
“Men fear age,” they said. “They fear a loss of power, question waste and futility, and may go through phases. Be patient,” they said.
But I was frightened, too. I didn’t want to be old either. What phases did I have? How would his aging be different or worse than mine?
They didn’t say.
When I was not quite thirty, I looked in the bathroom mirror one day and saw suddenly, as if they’d appeared overnight or had had a special light thrown on them, that my hair now included a few distinct grey slivers. My shining hair already dying.
I leaned over the spotless sink, staring; chose one and plucked it from the surrounding brown. It came out painlessly: a sign of dead hair, death, to be able to pull it without pain. It was a perfect total gleaming silver. I was surely not so old. So much of my time couldn’t be gone. My days were all the same, what had happened, what event, that could make some hair turn silver? Nothing that I could see. I should be perfectly preserved and young.
That curling silver hair clung to my fingers like a prophecy. It didn’t seem right to drop it in the trash as if it could be dismissed. Dangerous, even, to fail to see. Ten years with Harry gone. What did that mean, that there was so little to remember?
I looked at my face and it seemed to have melted somehow; features indistinct, a sort of pudding.
I would have to fix that; start exercising, the pat-patting beneath the chin and all the rest.
When I did turn thirty, Harry, two years older, said, “Don’t worry, it’s a snap.” For him, it had been. He
was still gaining power, not yet near the stage when he might fear losing it.
For me, that birthday came at a time when people ten years younger were saying things like, “Don’t trust anybody over thirty.” A dividing line established, a dividing line between me and young. And between me and these strange people coming up behind with their cold and revolutionary eyes.
“Of course,” said Harry, “these kids have a lot to learn. They’ll see.”
Was it not what he’d expected when he was twenty, then?
(That woman, that girl, she would have been only what, thirteen or so, when I turned thirty. A baby, a child. An entirely different world, hers, I suppose.)
No one came to my home with lights and television cameras to see how I lived. No writers came with pads and pens to ask me my principles, what my solutions were.
No, they all talked to those younger ones, who were so sure. Even at their age I had not been sure, and I watched them on television and read their words in magazines with amazement. They marched, those girls, young women, in demonstrations, and some were even wanted by the police. They were terrifying. Some of them were also beautiful.
Their words, the things they did—they were saying I did not exist. They threatened my life with their demands.
And my magazines were altering, and there were new ones besides, entirely foreign. My mother, now, she might have liked them.
Unsettling enough turning thirty, without the rules changing also.
It was odd not to be young. Not old, of course, but also no longer young. I woke up in the mornings sometimes assuming an enormous future, and realized it was not so enormous any more. My body still seemed young, grey hairs or no. It was trim and firm. But there I was, thirty, a contradiction. I must have assumed that body and mind and time and everything would move together, synchronized. It was a shock to find one leaping ahead of the others.
I found myself thinking, “So this is it.” But where did that thought come from? I had what I wanted. It was not as if I’d had dreams of anything so very different, or ambitions to be something else. I had never considered seriously other possibilities. But it was still unsettling, disquieting, to think that now there would not be any.
Why did I think thirty was so old? Now it seems quite young.
I can still be surprised when I wake up some mornings wondering who I’ll be. Now, of course, it’s a fair question: who will I be?
I can’t apologize, although it seems one is expected to these days, for spending twenty years caring for my husband and my home. Could I explain that was just my way of caring for myself?
My cause was not as spectacular as the ones of those people on television parading for civil rights and against war, for equal rights and against killing seals. My cause did not make for parades in the streets.
But if a civil-rights marcher is assaulted by a black, if an animal-lover is bitten by a dog, or an equal-rights demonstrator attacked by a woman, what does that mean? That all those efforts, those fair feelings, have gone to waste? In the victim, is there a sense of betrayal, a resentment that one’s energy was stolen, one’s caring disregarded?
Whose fault is it? Some ultimate uncaring selfishness in the attacker, a blindness? Or a flaw in the giver, who gives not quite enough. Who fails to give quite everything. Whose fault are these breakdowns, anyway?
“Look,” I said to Harry, “if you want to work this weekend, go ahead. I’ll find things to do.” He’d spread out his papers on the glass-topped coffee table in the living room. I took him tea and sandwiches and opened his beer for him. He had to concentrate, so I read quietly in the kitchen, or did some baking. I wanted to let him be, when that was what he wanted.
But I never meant him to assume I wasn’t there. I didn’t mean to disappear.
My magazines, the ones I liked and was raised on, made it seem so clear. If one did this, that would result. Did I not follow the instructions carefully enough? I never could put things together. Harry bought kits for building things: a worktable or a set of shelves, and he could fit piece A into slot B with no difficulty at all, perceiving the logic of the thing. Me, I would have been left with a pile of unconnected pieces.
I thought—what did I think? That I had a home and Harry and so I was safe. I would be terrified without them.
I am terrified.
I didn’t lie. If I turned my efforts into making him important, that was true. What I demonstrated to him of devotion was a mere glimmer of the truth.
When did the lie begin? His lie. Certainly not from the beginning. Perhaps only quite lately, which means that for most of those years there was no lie, those years are genuine. Maybe he just got tired. Or bored. I knew how easily bored he was in other ways.
Oh, I want him here. I have so many questions and he’s the only one who knows. Why? I would say. What did I do wrong? What were you looking for? What more could I have done? When did it start?
Lunch is scalloped potatoes, thawed peas, a slice of ham, a dish of custard. Coffee, too, or tea. The potatoes are a little soggy, the peas wrinkled, the ham somewhat overcooked, the custard bland, the coffee bitter. It’s not an awful meal, just not a good one.
What I miss about it is not taste. What is lacking is a complete meal on my table. What I would like to see is a whole dish of potatoes from which to scoop my own, an entire ham or turkey or roast sitting there waiting to be carved.
What we are served are individual plates of food, each as if it has come from nowhere, has no origins. A little inhuman, to have it presented this way. Food should be part of a whole, a ceremony of care.
I wonder what’s happened to all my recipes. All those clippings from magazines, pasted or copied so carefully onto file cards. And the recipe books that I used to read, thumbing through the pages and pictures, selecting, balancing, visualizing the combinations of possibilities on our plates.
I wonder what’s happened to all my things. The house? Can it just be sold, without my ever seeing it again? Because I don’t want to go back. I do not ever want to be inside that yellow kitchen with the white and yellow daisy clock. I do not want to see that living room with its wall of white gold-flecked paper, and I do not want to be upstairs. The pillows alone would break my heart.
Is someone looking after it? If not, will the pipes freeze this winter, or the furnace break down? By now dust must be gathered on the windowsills, and there will be bits of fluff and dirt settled in the carpets.
It seems it should be wrong, after a twenty-year investment of effort and work and attention, not to care. But I do not care. Let the place fall down.
I can think of only one thing about it that might give me pleasure now. I think that if I were out of here I might drive a bulldozer to that house and smash it into splinters. That, I think, might give me joy.
I see that for all this tidy writing, following so carefully the lines, the rage is still there, in the ink and in the movements of the tendons of my hands.
20
“Talk to me, Edna,” he’d say. “What did you do today?” Well, I felt contented, and pleased with myself. But to tell him what I had done—I could do these things an infinite number of times, it seemed, but I could hardly describe them an infinite number of times.
The trick with housework is to make one’s labours invisible, so that the other person does not observe them, but would observe their absence.
We talked about vacation plans, food we liked, a new restaurant to try or a movie to see, articles in newspapers, and programs on TV. He said, “Okay to have the Baxters over Saturday? Could you maybe make those little quiches?”
“What about your day?” I asked. “How did it go?”
He was in the marketing department of a drug firm. He ended up head of it. Was he pleased with that? Might he have concluded he wasted his gifts on so small a stage?
A stage, yes. I can see him as an actor, someone striding and declaiming, or hunched and whispering to the farthest rows. Laughing, head thrown back, or weeping, face in han
ds.
This is no criticism, that he was alert to the effects of alterations in tone of voice or sudden movements. It was a skill he had, a gift, an offshoot of the intensity with which he saw his life, himself, and of his wish to be in charge. If someone had said, “What a liar he is,” instead of “What a performer,” I would not have understood.
I’m sure that for him it felt quite different to act than to lie. One for his pleasure, the other for his preservation.
But the skill in lies must have been cultivated in the acting.
What if he had truly been an actor? Would that have satisfied his desire to play out roles? Would he have known the difference between the play and all the rest?
I see him furious; dismissive; amused; bored. He could be all those things in our living room, with our company. I could watch the people watching him and listen to the changes in their words and voices. He changed topics with just a sigh and a shifting of his weight.
I thought I could appreciate his performances and still see the husband Harry underneath.
I thought he spoke to me in different ways. For one thing, I never heard tenderness except with me. He could be gentle and kind with others, but not tender. To me he might say, “Edna, you’re perfect,” although that might be in connection with a special meal for guests or in a quiet moment in our bedroom.
We could spend evenings doing very little except reading or watching television. He stretched out on the couch. He didn’t need to speak unless he wanted to. It was a sign of trust, that he could relax so far with me. He trusted me, and therefore no performance.