by Joan Barfoot
With such exercises I refine myself.
When I brush my teeth, I draw an inch of toothpaste along the bristles. On a bad day, when someone else brushes my teeth, a little less is likely to be used. I brush before and after breakfast, and then not until bedtime. I used to smoke occasionally, but here they don’t permit matches; so my breath, I imagine, is better and there’s no great need to brush during the day. Is an inch of toothpaste every time wasteful? Or countered by only brushing three times a day?
Harry said, “You look great.” Or “How about the red dress Friday?” But he might have preferred me to have scars or birthmarks or wear more make-up or dress differently. He might have liked a change.
Sometimes he said, “Edna, are you okay?” and I didn’t know what he meant. “I mean,” he’d say, “you just stay home. Are you okay?” and he’d have a worried, puzzled look.
Did he not want me to vacuum every day or wipe the toaster? Did he want me to be the life of all the parties? People still complimented him, he told me, on his small dark quiet listening wife. I couldn’t be everything. He embraced the person I was, and yet there were those times when the person I was seemed to concern him.
But he wouldn’t have liked to have no clean shirts, or to see dirty dishes in the sink.
So just what did he want, anyway? What more did he want?
There are so many interruptions here. That’s a hard thing to get used to, after so many years of privacy.
They come in and say, “Come on now, it’s time for breakfast.” Or lunch, or dinner. “Okay, Edna, let’s have your bath now.” And “Time to go see the doctor,” which is one I don’t mind so much, although it’s sometimes inconvenient, sometimes I am in the middle of something here.
“Lights out, Edna,” they say at night. “Time to put the pen down now.”
It’s tiring, all this work, all this writing, all this picking apart of things. They only give me sleeping pills on the bad days. Otherwise I sleep quite well, except for waking up sometimes in the middle of the night and reaching for the missing warm part. All my habits have been broken here, except for that one drowsy one.
At the end of a day my eyes burn, and my right wrist, my fingers, feel all cramped and sore from the steady, tidy writing.
But it makes me uneasy to have the lights out, to go to sleep. I can’t write in the dark, so maybe I miss things? With the pen I might be able to follow falling asleep, for instance, to see how that happens.
Other times, too, the pen and the notebook are inaccessible. At meals they don’t let me have them and it’s hard to write the details from memory, hard to pay enough attention to remember adequately. How exactly it feels, moving a spoon to the mouth.
And in the bath, another place I can’t take the notebook, may there not be some sensation of water and soap and skin forgotten?
There are so many things to put down. Right here in this chair there are so many things. And then I drift off and write down other things as well. I still do not pay attention well enough. But I see a good deal better than I used to. I’m developing a better eye for detail than I ever had before.
24
I used to wonder sometimes why people like Harry were given holidays. Like money, I suppose, they represent reward, accomplishment. In the early days of our marriage we’d not had a great deal of money, but enough, and a couple of weeks’ vacation was not much but enough. Then, as the years went on, we had more and more money, more than enough, and the weeks of holiday expanded too and were also much more than enough.
Vacations are for doing. One is supposed to see new things, rest, and break patterns, and return refreshed to ordinary labours. But what is it one is supposed to do?
Go away, travel, leave home. But home was where my life was; leaving there, to drive across the country or to fly to Florida or California or some Caribbean island was to be nowhere at all. We ate different kinds of fruit and drank different kinds of drinks. We stayed in hotels where other people, maids, changed the sheets and cleaned the toilets and where there was likely a view of a beach from the balcony. We could rent cars to drive along rutted roads, or read books beside a hotel pool, stretched out on lounge chairs in our bathing suits and sunglasses. We could walk along sand at sunset. We could look like pictures on a travel poster.
But my hands were empty when we were away. They missed what they should be doing. They missed holding dishcloths and food. They lacked purpose, and didn’t know what to do with themselves.
Harry, too, may have felt that, because his fingers sometimes drummed on tables while we waited for drinks, and he would break into a run along a beach, leaving me behind, and at night would fling himself onto a hotel bed and sometimes sigh. He would wonder what was happening with some deal at the office, or how he ought to solve some problem. A holiday often seemed to be empty time, an uncomfortable pause.
We went together to Jamaica, Barbados, St. Lucia, Hawaii. Once we went to Mexico, and another time, daringly, on a package tour to Cuba, which we thought would be a stern and exotic place. But it did not seem so different. From hotels and beaches, the view is much the same.
We went to California and walked different kinds of streets and beaches and stared around for movie stars. And Florida. It was heat and water that attracted us, the antidote to winter cold and grey and snow. Like birds, we migrated south.
We drove, in summers, through New England and northern Ontario and to both coasts, planning itineraries, drawing lines on maps, scanning guides for good hotels. Mainly we were not drawn to big cities, although in the spring or fall Harry might take some extra days and we’d fly to New York, stay in some safe hotel, and journey out to dinner and the theatre. We did not walk there, of course. The dangers were too well known. North America in general seemed too familiar, because we were alert to what could happen. What could happen in other places, we could not be sure, so travelled there more freely.
It was nice to see the plays. In the dark, except for the coughing and some murmuring, it was almost private, like watching a drama from our living room. And in the dark I could see myself up on the stage.
They also gave us conversation. We could go back to our room and put up our feet and order from room service and talk about performances. When we got home, Harry liked telling people what we’d seen and done. The luxury of being able to do these things, fly to New York for a four-day weekend, appealed to both of us.
(Did she miss him when we went away? Did he miss her? There were meetings Harry went to out of town. Did she go with him, were those their holidays?)
We did not always go away though. Sometimes Harry took a week or two and stayed home, puttering around the house. He put in gardens and painted rooms and once sanded down a table and refinished it. Every day or so he’d call his office, or someone from there would call him, which both pleased him and kept his mind on work, which seemed to make him both more tense and more content.
Those holidays at home were odd for me, too. He came into the kitchen wanting a sandwich or a beer and it was midday, when he shouldn’t have been there at all. Sounds were disorienting—coughs and hammering, footsteps and his voice, when normally there would be silence. My treats were deferred. Certainly I could not put on records in the afternoon, lie down on the couch, close my eyes, and dance.
I could feel his body tightening as it came time to go back to work. On the morning of the first day back, he would be chattering and laughing, and he grinned back at me as he went out the door.
I did not grin, was not exactly happy; but closed the door behind him with some sense of peace restored.
The trouble when we went away was the tension of words between us. We spoke of what we saw and did, but had little other conversation. Even Harry, without his work, was a bit bereft of words. We said, “Look at that sunset,” and “Shall we drive around the island tomorrow?” and “Did you ever see anything like what that woman is wearing!”
What do other people talk about? Maybe much the same, except that they
don’t notice, or it’s enough, or it doesn’t seem important.
Maybe it was that we didn’t belong where we went, and knew that these places were only a space in our time, that endings were coming up. Surely, though, that would be the same for anyone on holiday? A vacation is mainly observation, there is no settling in. Our own lives were not led in sunshine or on sandy beaches, or even in the hotels that might have been anywhere. We watched the natives, the tanned Californians and the brown Caribbeans, but knew less of them than we would have watching television. It was somewhat like watching television, and even seemed as if we had already seen much of it and were still watching from behind a screen. We were fish out of our own waters and not sufficiently relaxed.
And too, not having children made a difference. Holidays must be so simple, if also perhaps more aggravating, for people with children. Then, there are always things to do and places to see. One goes, no doubt, to Disneyland instead of for a walk. A wax museum instead of a long dinner heavy with drinks. Children must provide some form to these things and a familiar structure. The vital part of home travelling right along with you, making its homelike demands. Harry and I never went to Disneyland or to wax museums. They were hardly to our tastes.
Maybe we should have talked about it; discussed our discomfort at having so little to discuss. Maybe we should have said, “Gosh, three weeks together is really a long time, isn’t it?”
Instead, we touched a great deal more than usual, and made love more often. We reassured each other with our bodies.
There was never a lack of fondness between us; just that there were limited ways of telling our fondness. And with only the two of us for days and days, this was drawn to our attention.
But when I viewed us as a picture, if I observed us as some other person might, Harry’s arm around me when we walked, or bent together over a map on the hood of our rented car, or lying side by side tanning by a pool, reading bits of books or papers to each other—it was a charming picture. We looked so happy.
We were happy. It was only odd, that’s all.
In my head I counted off the days until we would be going home. And Harry, also aware of diminishing moments, said things like, “We only have six days left, we should try to hit the market tomorrow, time’s running out.” The night before we left wherever we had gone, we achieved some gaiety, laughed easily and drank more and talked eagerly about the holiday now gone. In those nights of retrospect, the time away could safely glitter.
When we came home, drove up that street and in that driveway, when I saw our ordinary house, I could have embraced it. Put my arms around it and kissed its doors and windows. As soon as Harry went back to work, I set about making it fresh and clean again, because in our absence it would have become a bit unused-smelling; not quite musty, but not quite familiar or ours. I did not like it that when we walked out the door, the house could forget us and set about gathering dust and different smells.
Our holidays felt strange, but not disastrous. Unless muteness is a tragedy. But beforehand we were not mute, and I think our true vacations were in the planning of them. Each year we looked ahead as if the weeks away would be perfect, and were as entertained and as excited as the vacations themselves were probably meant to make us.
“I’ve got six weeks this year,” Harry said. “What do you think we should do with them?”
And we would talk about places maybe read about or for which there’d been advertisements on television, where we had already been, and if new places would be much different. Harry would go to travel agents (or send her out to them?) and bring home brochures and schedules of flights and lists of prices. We would stare at the pictures of high-rise hotels and judge their proximity to beaches and imagine ourselves in one of the rooms, standing at one of the tiny windows in the photographs.
People at work told Harry about their holidays, which islands in the Caribbean might be unpleasant this year, with relations strained between natives and tourists, or dangerous, or too dull. For people who wanted more than tans, who liked to keep busy, as we did, some places should be avoided. The Caribbean seemed the natural area to go to, however. There were formulas for the islands, one knew more or less what to expect, and yet they were quite different from home. We hugged ourselves in December, contemplating February on a beach, or buying shirts and straw hats in a market.
“I can’t wait,” Harry would say. “I can’t wait to get away from that damned office.”
Our enthusiasm beforehand never faltered.
Like children, we stared out airplane windows and pointed down, excited, at the clouds.
I was only frightened taking off and landing.
In the little buses that took us to our hotels we looked out windows and judged how interesting this place might be.
I think it was not until we were checked in, unpacking in our room, and just the two of us, that the weariness set in.
I would, I think, have liked to go to Europe. To see castles in Britain and old wineries in France. In Spain, we could even have lain on beaches. But the time of year was never right, it was harder to count on sunshine. And Harry said, “It’s all old there, it’s dying. They’ve only got the past. Who wants to go trailing through museums and old ruins? Nothing’s moving over there.” He said it would be boring, and they were his holidays after all, he earned them, and it was he who needed the rest, the break, the change of pace.
Now, though, if I could travel, that’s where I’d go. To cool places: Scotland in autumn, even if it rained, or the mountains in Spain in the spring. I would walk by myself through big cities like Paris and stare at all the old things: buildings and paintings and monuments. I don’t think those things are dying at all. I think I would be reassured to see that some things do survive centuries, they last. Unlike snow or leaves or houses or days.
Or that there have been so many people and events in so many years—the past is huge—that two people in a moment now have no great significance. They may be something only tiny, and all this very little, really.
25
“Talk to me, Edna,” he said, although not, I admit, so often in the last few years. It would not be fair to say he didn’t pay attention. (Strange to worry about being fair, which would seem the least of it.)
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you okay home alone like this?” What did he think was happening?
Maybe if something was happening to him, he needed to search out some strangeness in me.
He began to leave for work earlier in the mornings because, he said, “I beat the worst of the traffic this way. I wish I’d thought of it before.” I still woke him gently; just earlier.
It meant going to bed at nights earlier, so our evenings together were shorter.
They were also shorter because he began often to come home later, too. Again, he said, avoiding the rush hour. Or working late. Sometimes he stayed downtown overnight. “It’s this damn job,” he told me, and of course he had been promoted again, to manager of marketing, so it was reasonable to imagine him working still harder. She was promoted along with him. He told me and laughed because he said it was called rug-ranking, and wasn’t that an odd expression.
We still had most of our evenings, though, even if they became briefer. And our weekends, we had those. There were only small incursions into our time, so subtle and so reasonable. “Of course,” I said. “I understand.” And thought I did.
I leaped and slid past thirty to forty. It went so fast; oddly, because each day was long and full of hours.
Forty. I woke up the morning of that birthday and remembered it was that day and felt the oddest sense of doom. It was, and this was rare, really, hard to get out of bed.
I seem to have had common crises. It must be just that I never learned to deal with them in common ways, that’s it, I guess.
Really a birthday is just a number. But to shift a decade and not merely a year is something; although I imagine the next move, into fifties, won’t be so much now. I lack a sense of futu
re.
Hormones, possibly. My doctor once said shifting moods could usually be traced to shifting hormones. It gave me a particularly helpless feeling: that nothing, it seemed, not even a mood, was just my own.
But that morning, my birthday, was more than hormones. They may have sunk, but everything else was dragged down also.
Because there ought to be a clear view here. A little peak from which one can look back and see forty years in a bundle and look forward and see how it will go and the clarity alone should be satisfying. One ought to have things in place. One ought to be able to say, “I have done that,” and “I will do this.” There should be something like an A on a report card, even a B would be satisfactory. What about Harry? He would, I suppose, have his promotions and his pay cheques. A steady progress; piles of accomplishments like steps behind him.
But for me? If one does the same thing over and over again, each time properly, each time to the best of one’s ability, still what one seems to have is a handful of endless identical tasks. It’s not like getting anywhere.
There was a purpose, of course. I had my reasons. Just that on this day the vision slipped. Instead of the larger purpose, I saw the tiny tasks. They crowded my head, jumbling into each other, a tumbling of dishes and laundry and dusting and scrubbing and exercises and make-up, of watching the clock to see when Harry would be home. And the second, secret closed-eyed life of being someone else up on a stage, and all the music. In this fortieth birthday light, all that was absurd and sad, and I thought I might not now be able to return to it, having seen it this way.
I stood stock still in the kitchen, a frying pan in one hand, an egg in the other, struck with a thought, not a blow: “This is nothing. This is not anything at all.”