“Question. Question. Question.” The word went round the room.
Rosalyn gazed at the ceiling, waiting for that hush that fell when all had readied themselves at last. They sat motionless, all involuntary tics and habitual shrugs and nods stilled, all breathing as gently as possible, all focusing on the room’s possibilities: the room itself, or the air in the room, the very particles that made up the air. The pure spirit present in the room – always present, but rarely if ever felt, and never acknowledged – had begun to come through and past the wounds in the air – the pain, the anguish, the grief, even the rage – the very particles of hush crowding them all right out the door. Barbara could feel the heat rising in her pale cheeks, and see the cheeks of the others taking on a glow beginning to touch like tiny star-pins their faded, thin hair, and the darkness – oh, such welcome darkness – coming into their dulled eyes.
When all of them could feel that they had reached the required state – they could feel it but they could also hear it, or perhaps it was the absence of all other sounds that they heard now – Rosalyn cleared her throat, softly, and spoke.
“What was your greatest transgression?”
Was it Barbara’s imagination, or were some other unseen presences with soundless swishes ranging themselves around the sides of the room, hidden in the shadows? Or were these new presences themselves the very shadows? Did the others hear or feel it? She couldn’t tell.
Sonya gave a snort. Apparently it was her turn to start.
“When I was into my last week in my own house, I was deliberately profligate with the earth’s resources.” She emphasized “deliberately” and especially “profligate.” “I had a hot bath every single morning. I filled the tub. I used a whole bottle of bath soap that week. It was…”
“You savoured it,” Jessie-Marie whispered, and the shadows – were they giggling?
“Every second. I knew once I came here baths would be rare, not private, not pleasurable ever again. Just – necessary. Just – allowed.”
“Such a terrible crime,” Barbara said, smiling at her friend.
“But truly,” Jessie-Marie pointed out, “none of us are climate-change deniers. We know that even though individuals don’t have the power to make laws, in the end what will work will be when each of us takes responsibility for our actions.” She hesitated. She had once been a lawyer, many, many years ago. “Vis-à-vis our destruction of the planet.”
“And after all,” Sherry-Rosalyn pointed out, “what sensual pleasures are there left to old women? Of the raft of them there once were: holding a baby, smelling its sweet baby-smell, feeling its warmth and heft against your chest and neck; eating all sorts of delectable things like Christmas cake and lobster and crème caramel that would kill us now….”
“Making love,” Barbara said.
“Feeling the beauty of a male chest….”
“His back, his shoulders…”
“The orgasm itself,” Barbara said, knowing perfectly well that as usual she had gone too far.
“I think,” Sherry-Rosalyn said, “that it would be wise to stop this right now. All true…” she held up a hand to stay their objections, “but you know we have agreed that the purpose of these meetings isn’t to wallow in what we have lost.” Murmurs of agreement whispered around the shadowed room and the unseen presences rustled and murmured with them. Were they maybe only the dead of the nursing home? No, had to be more than that, Barbara insisted to herself.
“We had our time,” Sonya said. “We had it and it was…beyond precious…beyond beautiful. But…it…is…over.”
“Agreed.” They spoke as one voice.
“Your turn, Jessie-Marie.”
Jessie-Marie didn’t hesitate a second; this wrongdoing, whatever it would turn out to be, had to have been on her mind for a long time. “When my son Anders got his girlfriend Jane pregnant and they were so young, both only eighteen, I think it was, and her mother and father were pressuring Anders to marry Jane at once…” She paused to swallow and catch her breath. “And his dad, Gerald was dead set against them getting married and threatened to punch out Janie’s father if he didn’t shut up…” she paused again, “I did nothing. They came to me, alone, because I wasn’t offering advice or screaming at them, or demanding they do what I said. They came to me. ‘Mother,’ Anders said. ‘Jane and I don’t know what to do. What should we do? Should we get married? Should Jane have the baby and we not get married? Should we give the baby away? Should Jane have an abortion?’ We were Catholics, you know. And getting an abortion was very, very hard to do in those days. It would have to be illegal and it would cost. Or else we would have to send them to another province where things weren’t quite so backward. And that would be iffy.”
“Why didn’t they just get married?” Sherry-Rosalyn asked.
“At eighteen? They wanted college, they wanted adventure – oh, you don’t need me explaining it.”
“So what was your transgression in this?” Barbara asked briskly. They could all hear the lump that was the prelude to sobbing, which had risen into Jessie-Marie’s throat.
“I…said…nothing. I had nothing to say. I was…paralyzed. Everything I thought of seemed wrong; I had no idea how to help them. I just sat and stared at them. I could feel my face getting hot, there was buzzing in my ears, my heart was thumping away in my chest and I felt…I couldn’t breathe; I was afraid I was going to faint. Anders took my hand but I pulled it away from him.” She made a gesture with one hand, pulling it back as if it had touched something sharp or too hot. “We sat there, the three of us, staring at each other. Jane began to cry. Tears ran down her face, but she didn’t make a sound. Anders waited, but then, finally, he gave me such a look.” Jessie-Marie had dropped her head, her shoulders narrowed and her torso had slouched; she was diminished, smaller, so tiny. So old. “They got up and went out of the room. They hardly made a sound leaving. And neither of them looked back, once, at me.” For a moment, no one spoke, trying to absorb this.
“Don’t you get it?” Jessie-Marie said, looking around at each of them. “I took no responsibility. I refused to help them. I didn’t even talk with them about it. And Anders never came close to me again. That was my punishment. I have been punished for my cowardice, my selfishness, for as good as saying that it wasn’t my problem, for all these many years.”
“It sounds to me,” Sherry-Rosalyn offered, “that you were very angry with them for being so utterly stupid as to get pregnant and ruin their own chances. You didn’t feel that you should be cleaning up their mess.”
“What were you?” Barbara asked. “Maybe forty at the time? What the hell did you know?”
“Which is what?” Jessie-Marie asked, angry now.
“About life,” Sonya said, her voice gentle. “How could you know then that any one of the options would have been okay – unless you objected to abortion itself. We didn’t know then that women have such trouble….”
“Some women,” Barbara interjected, seeing where the conversation was going.
“…have trouble getting over abortions and even sometimes regret them terribly. You know, Jessie-Marie, as well as I do, that –”
“Things have a way of working themselves out?” Sherry-Rosalyn interrupted angrily. “As if they would have listened to that. Anyway, haven’t we agreed already more than once about that as a stupid platitude?”
“But things do,” Sonya pleaded. “They do.”
Barbara felt she could hear whispered assent coming from the shadowed corners. “They certainly do something,” she said. “So what happened that you are still troubled by this now?”
“What happened isn’t the point. Isn’t that another thing we’ve agreed on? That we would stick to the issue, not mix it up with other issues?”
“Do you feel any better for having told us this mistake?” Sherry-Rosalyn asked. She seemed genuinely curious.
“I’m not sure,” Jessie-Marie admitted. “I lost my youngest son over it, so I can’t just forg
ive myself as if it were nothing.”
“Look. Here’s the thing,” Barbara said, exasperated. “You can’t change it. You’ve suffered for fifty years over it. What do you think the gods require of us? We’re only human beings!”
“Take it easy, Barb,” Sherry-Rosalyn said. Once again the women fell into a listening silence, except for Barbara. “I guess it’s my turn now.”
“How did it get to be your turn?” Barbara inquired. She didn’t like it when people tried to be leaders, whether they were good at it or not. That wasn’t the point.
“Pay some bloody attention, Barbara,” Sonya said. “You’re always getting side-swiped by your own rage – or whatever it is – and thus, you are forever getting lost. It’s Sherry-Rosalyn’s turn because last time she was second and we work down the list. Next time she’ll be fourth.”
This explanation made little sense to Barbara (though she had to admit that Sonya was probably right; it was just that she never could be bothered with lists, and orderly arrangements, all that simply enraged her) and so she didn’t argue. But the rage she was feeling, it struck her, explained why she had once been such a hard drinker. Admit it, an alcoholic. It explained too, why her first husband (she always referred to him as What’s-His-Name) had left her and taken their little girl with him. She had been angry before he took their baby. And didn’t she turn out all right? Jessica, Jessica, Jessica. But I had other children after: Alana, Meredith, and last and best, Alan. The truth was, she couldn’t recall where Jessica lived now, although she had some vague memory of being told she was married and had children and lived in – was it Halifax?
“Okay,” Rosalyn said, a little too comfortably for Barbara’s taste. She couldn’t get a read on the unseen presences gathered around the walls and in the corners. “I’m ready.”
“Go,” Jessie-Marie said. They took a second to settle themselves again. Barbara had to admit, yet another thing she had to admit, that she tended to be a disquieting presence. Her own mother had always been accusing her of some such a thing: a bloody little demon. My demon daughter.
“Yes, I am the one who changed my last name a total of four times: I was born Bradstreet and had three husbands, whose surnames were: Bodley, Newhouse, and Knight.” She paused, smug as hell.
“We don’t need to know their names,” Sonya pointed out. Rosalyn, lost in her story, ignored her.
“I cheated on all of them.” There was a startled silence. “I was a serial philanderer.”
“But you had – how many children?” Jessie-Marie’s voice was thin and high.
“Yeah, well,” Rosalyn responded. She didn’t look a bit as if she felt guilty.
“That is quite a transgression,” Barbara said. “I mean, once, but –”
“Oh, I lost count,” Rosalyn said. “I was a pretty woman, as you know. In my youth people even said I was a beauty. Not that that had anything to do with it. I just liked men.”
“So why present this as a transgression then?”
“Wasn’t it?” The answer being obvious, nobody replied.
“But you’re not sorry,” from Sonya. She turned to the others. “Do we have to be sorry? We do, don’t we?”
Rosalyn said, “Nobody said anything about being sorry.”
“Are you sorry? Even a bit?” Barbara asked.
“I liked the excitement, the plan-making, the huge risk. I liked that. Getting into bed with a new man – oh, wow, what a thrill that was. I never got over it. Until I got so old no man would look at me.”
“So that’s what you’re sorry about?”
Rosalyn sighed heavily, turning her head away from them to gaze into the far corner of the room where the shadows were deepest. Suddenly Barbara understood that Rosalyn knew, just as she did, that the spirit-souls were there.
“You know I could say plenty of wise things to you: How I shattered any possibility of deeper relationships in my marriage; how I was distracted from my husbands, and also, I have to admit it, from my children. How I neglected things – the laundry, milk for the breakfast cereal, always being late for school pick-ups. All that… quotidian stuff.”
“Hah!” Barbara said in surprise. “You were searching for, I don’t know, immortality? “No, escape from our puny stupid suburban civilization.”
“I just liked new sex,” Rosalyn said, and everybody groaned at her, disgusted. “Oh, all right. What I feel isn’t so much guilt, as…puzzlement. I mean, where did I get such an idea in the first place? Why did I get addicted to it? What the hell is the matter with me that I still can’t honestly feel guilty? That’s the question.” She pointed a quivering forefinger at them as if they were the guilty ones.
“You felt superior to everybody else in your circle. It made you feel superior to everybody else caught in the daily meat-grinder of middle-class life.” Jessie-Marie sounded a little too certain.
“Was that my sin?” Rosalyn asked in wonderment. “Maybe it was.” She had begun to tremble, her grotesque little feet bounced gently on the flowered quilt.
“Is she having a stroke?” Barbara asked, and tried to get out of the big chair in which she had relaxed too deeply.
“I’m all right,” Rosalyn said. “I was just…some things came back to me. I…we’ll have to address this again another time when we need a new question.” Nobody argued.
Barbara was beginning to wonder if this attempting to come to terms with their biggest sins was such a good idea, remembering the time the question had been about their greatest sorrow, and dead babies came up, and lost loves and wasted or never-realized abilities…it was all so bloody, in the end, conformist, or if not conformist, then mun-effing-dane. Just mundane and – but, no, it wasn’t boring. But was it merely a spectator sport? She could feel the presences around the room waiting for her to come up with an answer. She made a disgusted, angry, unnameable sound that turned all heads toward her.
“Listen,” she said. “Listen, all of you. This is my transgression. Pay attention.” She didn’t wait for them to settle. “I killed my mother.” Everybody laughed, especially Jessie-Marie, who couldn’t stop for quite a few minutes, a choking sound, without merriment, as if – although it was impossible – she had always known this about Barbara.
“Honestly, Barb,” Rosalyn said. “We can always count on you to liven things up.”
“Or to make us all look like fools?” Jessie-Marie said, having regained her sobriety.
Sonya said, “Wait. I think…I’m thinking…she means it.”
“What? How?” Jessie-Marie asked.
“Or are we speaking in metaphors?” Rosalyn inquired in a conversational tone. Clearly, Barbara thought, she doesn’t intend to believe a word I say.
She knew then, that by saying this she had committed herself and having committed herself, the group would end this night, and I will die utterly alone. And soon. Around the room the fluttering increased, she could feel the breath of the presences being held and how such a thing lifted them, bodiless though they were, upward; were they moaning? Did she hear moaning from them? She was not afraid.
“I am not afraid,” she told them. Only then did she realize how terrified she was, how terrified she had been for sixty – no, seventy or more – years. Rosalyn’s hand had gone to her face, wiping across her mouth and her cheek, before she lowered it again to her lap. Tears were running down Jessie-Marie’s face, and losing themselves in the wrinkles and folds, but the light caught them and how they shone, like the miniscule jewels they were. Sonya, dear Sonya, how was it that she liked Sonya best? She did not know, but Sonya’s eyes were like two black pools in her pale visage, and for a second, Barbara thought that maybe Sonya had murdered someone, too.
Or were they, all of them, perhaps only one person? One soul? And what if all the tinkling sounds and the bells, and muted voices up and down the wide, bright hall from which they had isolated themselves were not even real? Could it be that the only reality left anywhere was right here in this room with the spirit-souls gathered around
them and the four of them speaking some kind, some version, of something that could be truth – to each other, out loud, into the suddenly stifling air.
“I killed my mother,” she repeated stubbornly.
She drew in her breath, listening, asking for help in telling this story and not knowing from whom she hoped to receive help, only believing that if she could get through the telling, help would be around her. “We had quarrelled; she had called me names again: putaine, whore, slut. Don’t get me wrong – I had earned every one of those names and she went out of my room and down the hall and it was as if I knew exactly how long it would take her to get to the top of the stairs, to lift her foot to take the first step down and I went in a rush. I rushed down the hall and I put both hands on her shoulder-blades – she was a little shorter than I was in those days – and I shoved as hard as I could. The minute I saw that she was toppling hard, over, couldn’t stop herself, beginning to go down, flailing, reaching out for the handrail, grabbing at the wallpaper, starting to scream – I rushed back to my own room and I shut the door. Very quietly.” She paused, breathing deeply through her nose, her breaths so shallow she was beginning to feel dizzy. “I could hear the thumps and crashes as she went down, and I opened my door and went out into the hall to see what the noise was and my sisters came from the kitchen and the front porch at her scream and the banging and my father from the living room where he had been reading the paper. I said as I hurried down the stairs, ‘I came as soon as I heard, but it was too late, I couldn’t quite catch her.’
Season of Fury and Wonder Page 9