The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  The image of her own childhood dissolved and reformed in the remembrance of such learned street inscriptions, especially the game of hopscotch, with its magic numbered squares and its wide empty arc of heaven. Every winter the rules were forgotten, and in the spring they were relearned. As the summer wore on, the squares grew larger, the lines straighter, and the rules more stringent or fanciful. The smoothest piece of pavement would be sought out and its location memorized, and it would be remembered one day that real chalk was not needed, since a common piece of stone dug out of a garden might do almost as well. Most of Fay’s notions of fairness and improvisation, she believes, were learned in the quiet streets of this city on evenings such as this, learned and relearned, rehearsed and perfected, but then, oddly, forgotten.

  She can’t remember at this moment exactly how the game of hopscotch progresses, what is required of a player in order to win or lose or get to heaven. The intricacies of play and penalty have eroded, forming part of a larger ebbing of memory, and that worries her. The weave of her life is growing thinner, plainer, and she sees she may be in danger of losing what she has unconsciously assembled.

  At the same time, new possibilities present themselves. A month ago she might have stopped under the cone of street light and pronounced the word “hopscotch” aloud, asking Peter if he had ever played this game on the streets of Sheffield, and pressing on him – never mind his sigh of exasperation – her set of rules, her sense of the game, going on and on and demanding a corresponding account from him.

  But not tonight. Tonight she says nothing, and inside her head she offers up congratulations. A certain amount of silence might be useful at this point. She hopes it will be the kind of silence that mends its own tissues, and that maybe she’s learning something out of all this difficulty.

  IT WAS LATE on a dark night, Thursday. Peter’s mouth came down on hers awkwardly, almost missing, like a kiss in a silent movie, and she heard an eruption in his throat that might have been laughter or else surprise at his own clumsiness.

  We’ve lost our ear for love, Fay thought sadly, our touch. But the next minute Peter was moving lightly above her, striking shocks off her slicked body. Her skin was only half dry. A damp bath towel lay under them.

  After three years the absolute length of his thigh bones still came as a shock, and also those long covering stretches of surprisingly tender skin.

  She shivered, reading the lower edge of his rib cage with her fingers, willing herself to be engulfed, feeling a passionate, frantic sense of loss, and wondering, a minute later, how it was possible to be so simultaneously bored and excited. Was this a trance she was entering or a period of illness? What are we doing? she imagined her own voice saying.

  ∼ CHAPTER 4 ∼

  I Believe in One Thing

  LAST WEEK WHEN TOM WENT FOR SUNDAY LUNCH AT LIZ AND GENE Chandler’s, Liz turned to him and said: “I believe in one thing, and that one thing is routine. I didn’t always. I used to look at my mother with her Monday wash and her Tuesday ironing and think, Oh my God, spare me. My parents sat down to lunch every day at 12:15. They even had the same things on certain days, like lamb on Wednesday, beef-and-vegetable stew on Thursday, and so on. Imagine! I used to look at their narrow throttled lives and say, hey, is this ever pathetic. A twentieth-century form of slavery, and they don’t even realize it. But do you know what? My mother and dad are in their eighties and they’re in perfect health. Perfect. They live in their own house, and my father does all the gardening and repairs and my mother still does all her own housework. They’re never sick. They hardly ever complain. They’re happy. They’re happy because of their routines. They watch the news at ten. They turn out the light at eleven and go straight to sleep, presto. It’s taken me years to get a perspective on this thing, why we need certain fixed patterns in our lives. And I’ve figured it out. Routine is liberating, It makes you feel in control. A paradox, isn’t it? You think your routines are controlling you, but in fact you’re using the routine to give you power. Like, for example, we have waffles every Sunday, Gene and I, and that might sound boring to certain people, but it soothes me. I need it, dumb as it sounds. And Tom, listen, I know the last thing you need is advice, but has it occurred to you that you need, maybe, an element of routine in your life?”

  Tom protests. He does have routines. Besides his Saturday-morning jogs he has his Friday-night meetings at the Fort Rouge Community Center, the Newly Single Club.

  “Yeah, well,” says Liz, who more and more assumes the right to scold and who now, sitting across the table from Tom, dramatically rolls her eyes. “But where is that getting you exactly? I mean, you’re not newly single anymore, Tom, are you?” She shifts her weight. “You’ve been going to those meetings for two years now. Could it be you’re just a bit of a newly single junkie, if you don’t mind my saying so? Just where is it getting you?”

  He wonders himself. The program at the Community Center rotates every six months or so, and by now he’s heard all the speakers. Some of them he’s heard several times. The one he’s heard the most often is a woman called Jennifer Keeley Harvath from the psych department at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Harvath has a set piece she does on Divorce Guilt. Her long Mexican earrings shake with fervor when she outlines on the blackboard the four separate stages of guilt, which are: realization, responsibility, reconciliation, and realignment. Her whole body shakes, trembling inside the strong folds of her trim professorial clothes – short skirts, long jackets, blouses that seem to spill and froth and confuse. “If you deny your guilt now,” she tells the pale faces before her – faces that make Tom think of cauliflowers, so outspread and porous are they – “then you’ll pay later.”

  Tom once invited her out to dinner. He made reservations at a new place across the river, expensive, advertised as French, thinking that if the two of them were going to get acquainted they would have to travel as far as possible from the beige and blue floor tiles and folding chairs of the Fort Rouge Community Center.

  She had ordered roughly in American-accented French, though the waiter protested that he spoke no French at all, only English, Portuguese, and a few words of Filipino.

  “About your divorce,” she asked Tom directly over the first course, which was scallops in beurre blanc.

  “Which one?” he said, already convinced the evening was lost.

  “You’ve had more than one divorce?” Her head jerked forward, releasing fragrance.

  “Three.” He made separate syllables of it – thuh-ree-ee – made it a gift, just handed it over.

  She chewed the tender fish, chewed and chewed, using her molars in long circular thoughtful grindings. Watching her, he felt his guilt turn into a spray of brilliant colors and fan out over the dull white tablecloth.

  “So,” she said, and at last laid down her knife and fork. “Three.”

  He watched her crumple. He was amazed that he had been able to bring this crumpling about so easily, by uttering a single word. The collar of her suit jacket had by now collapsed, and her blouse, too, and the tender upper parts of her mouth. It was painful to see, but it also brought him a thrill of excitement. The room felt anchored with the force of declaration. Cutlery plinked, a kind of foolish incidental music. Jennifer Harvath’s long silver earrings brushed close to her plate. The part in her dark blond hair caught the light harshly.

  He decided to fake a laugh. “I tell myself,” he said loudly to her, to the earrings, to the wallpaper, “that I’ve been unlucky.”

  THERE IS SOMETHING, Tom knows, called learned dependency, and there’s a lot of it around, more than there used to be. He hears it mentioned all the time. Its victims send out subliminal pleas for help, wringing from their family and friends advice about how to conduct their lives.

  Tom’s mother, Betty Avery Barbour, in Duck River telephoned recently and said: “Tom? Is that you? Well, what do you know! I didn’t know if I’d find you home, on a Saturday night. Sitting at home. You watching the game? Mike’s watching th
e game, we’re just taking a breather here, I’m about to fix us a sandwich and put some coffee on and I thought I’d give you a call, see what you were up to. But I said to Mike, knowing you, you’d be out probably, out to a show, or someplace dancing. The way you used to dance. “Rock Around the Clock,” that was your middle name, remember those days? You alone? Right now, I mean. I don’t know for the life of me why you don’t come up here for the weekend. It beats me why you want to stay in the city. On a Saturday night. That Suzanne isn’t the only fish in the lake, you know, at least I hope you know. There’s plenty more, all kinds. Nice gals just looking for a real man to settle down with, raise a family. Look at all those years I was on my own, footloose and fancy free. I was looking, let me tell you, I had my eyes peeled. But you’re not going to find someone just sitting home moping. On your own. Oh sweetie, on a Saturday night.”

  THIS BUSINESS OF being a guy, it never let up. In the morning, getting out of bed, he left his pajama tops buttoned, just yanked them over his head, balled them up, rammed them under his pillow. Was that being a guy? Or did guys buy those knitted pullover pajamas? Or sleep in their underwear like his stepfather, Mike? Or in nothing at all, damp skin, sweaty genitals, and chest hair, like Burt Reynolds?

  He looked hard in the bathroom mirror and said to himself: All I have is this self. Not another thing. Just this irreducible droning self.

  But a guy has to eat. Hey, protein, carbohydrates! He considered lunching on a handful of cereal, but decided instead to walk down to the A & W for a Papa Burger, maybe some fries and a milkshake. Guy food. Gut food.

  The girl who plunked down his plate verged on pretty. A boil-in-a-bag kind of pretty, someone who looked like she’d just grown into her bones. He would have bet money that two years ago she was having trouble with her skin, but now she’d got it under control. Nice hair, too, clean, yellowish, long. Guys liked long hair.

  Oh Christ, he was boring himself stiff.

  And it was only two in the afternoon. No invitations to waffle lunches today, no phone calls either. No plans. Well, he was going to have to do something about his life. Smarten up, big fella. These loops of time had a way of widening out if you weren’t careful.

  “Look,” the waitress said, waving at the window. “It’s a parade.”

  Hey, that was more like it. He bolted his coffee, paid his bill (leaving a guy’s kind of tip, twenty percent), and went out into the sunshine, directly into a holiday crowd strung thinly along the roadway, breathing in immaculate air.

  But what was this? The parade that bumped along Osborne Street had too much sweetness and fancy to be a military parade. Its marchers were dancing and skipping on the wide cleared pavement, and singing some high light hymn with a floating descant that rose straight up on a current of air, and scattering love behind them like a kind of rarefied mulch. They carried one banner that read “Jesus Our Lord and Master” and another that said “Hope and Glory.” A squadron of slender girls, so freshly skirted and sandaled and garlanded with paper flowers that they seemed like flowers themselves, circled as they moved along, and swirled over their heads long colored ribbons for Jesus. Close behind them walked a small brass band, a dozen men with bugles, trumpets, trombones, and drums. Such manly, non-guy men – Tom’s breath wheezed in his chest – so closely barbered, so clean and beefy and calm and beating their drums for their Lord Jesus.

  It was over almost before it had begun, and Tom, stricken by a sharp, sweet craving for godly forgetfulness and unwilling to let the paraders pass out of sight, strolled along beside them for a while as they made their way over the Osborne Bridge to the Legislative grounds. He felt his feet obeying their light drifting holy contagion of music and gaiety. Behind, around and in front of Tom, were women in summer dresses, some of them holding children by the hand. Other children ran past him shouting. The sunlight falling down around him seemed made of little grains, and the air was milder than it had been in many months, so clear and blue he wanted to blubber with the beauty of it. O spring, he thought. O longing. O love.

  MONDAY NIGHT down at CHOL is survey night. Listeners call in between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. to answer the question of the week. Tonight’s question is: What do you think about when you’re in the shower?

  One caller says, “Well” – his voice is old, webby, androgynous – “we don’t have a shower, but if you want to know what I think about in the bathtub, I’ll tell you. I think about the condition of the world. The Chinese, the Russians. Even these Romanians. How all of a sudden the Russians are good guys, after all these years of being bad guys, wanting to drop bombs on us. Well, I think we had the wool pulled over our eyes. People don’t change overnight, you know.”

  “What worries me,” a woman says, “is how a shower wastes water. This really comes from when I was a kid and lived on a farm. Up near Amiota? We had a well, but not a very reliable one, and so we were darned careful about wasting water. I think of that when I’m standing in the shower, all that water just running down the drain. I’m forty-six now, and I’ve got my own family, with all the running water in the world, but I still think every single time I’m in the shower that I shouldn’t be so wasteful, and that takes all the fun out of it.”

  “I feel like a jerk in the shower,” a man says. He has a youthful voice with tenor margins to it. “I feel dumb or drunk or something. It’s the steam. I’ve got this head of naturally curly hair, but in the shower it gets all slicked down so I look like a nerd. Looks are kind of like a priority, and with me, priorities come first.”

  Another caller says: “When I’m in the shower I get this compulsion to count. Like how many showers I’ve had in my life? And how many more I’m going to have, all those showers stretching out into the future, three hundred and sixty-five a year, and on and on. I try to keep my shower time down to ninety seconds.”

  “I find,” a woman says, “that I have a very hard time getting out of the shower. I favor very hot water, probably too hot for most people, I must have some Japanese blood in me, and I keep thinking, Oh God, now I have to get out and be cold again. I’d like to stay in there, just prolong and prolong it and never get out.”

  “I study my shower curtains,” an out-of-town caller reports. “I’ve got one of those map-of-the-world shower curtains and I would recommend it to any listener. It’s supposed to be accurate, and I’m telling you, the stuff I’ve learned. South America. Africa, too.”

  “You want me to be honest?” a young male voice says. “Taking a shower makes me feel sexy. I think of all the great girls I’ve known lately. I like to take a shower with a girl. Hey, can I say this on the air? Well, it’s a great way to go. And at the same time you’re getting clean.”

  “The thing about a shower,” the final caller says, “is not just getting clean. A shower takes you down memory lane. You go under the nozzle and it’s like a time machine. Taking a shower, it’s like being back in the ocean or back in your mother’s womb. Safe and full of these far-out thoughts. When I’m in the shower I feel powerful, but also like I’m a better person.”

  TOM HAS TO ADMIT he was touched by all the birthday cards he got for his fortieth.

  Most of them, to be sure, came from listeners, mailed in to the station on Pembina Highway, and quite a lot of them were anonymous, signed simply “from a grateful listener” or “from your late-night comrade in arms.” Why would anyone go to the bother, he wonders, but his wondering is colored with gratitude. I want to thank you folks out there for all your …

  And yet, here he is bundling these same cards into a green garbage bag. It’s house-cleaning time, a Tuesday morning. This is a pigsty he’s living in, and he’s determined to do something about it, to get some order into his life. Into the garbage bag with three half-rotted apples, two empty wine bottles, the crushed cornflakes box, last week’s newspapers, a ripped T-shirt, some slivers of soap, and an unidentifiable toothbrush, and all one hundred sixty birthday cards, plus a box of homemade oatmeal cookies (uneaten – why risk it? says Big Bruce)
from a listener who wrote in hot-pink ink, “To the man who lights up my life and who I love most in the world after my husband. Hang in there, Tom, forty is just the beginning.”

  “AH, TOM,” said Tom’s first wife, Sheila. “How could I forget your birthday, and especially this birthday! Anyway, it all of a sudden hit me, wham, and I thought the least I could do was take you to lunch, better late than never, and I remembered you used to love coming to this place. I can remember sitting at this very table. A million years ago. You had a seafood crepe, I think. Crepes were just coming into their own, crepes, not pancakes. Why do I always remember things like that? It’s insane the stuff I store in this brain of mine. Anyway, I’m glad you were free today, I know how busy you are, but listen, you look great. I’m serious, you do not look forty. Now tell me, what’s new, what’s happening in your life. It’s been weeks since I’ve seen you. Where’ve you been hiding out?”

  Almost immediately after Tom and Sheila were divorced in 1979 Sheila made two decisions, one bad, one good. The bad decision was to marry a man called Sammy Sweet, a real estate agent. The marriage lasted exactly eighteen months, and then Sammy left her, saying he had fallen desperately in love with a woman called Fritzi Knightly. Sheila went around telling people this. “He says he’s ‘desperately’ in love and ‘can’t live without her,’ and her name is Fritzi, if you can believe it. Fritzi!”

  Her good decision was to leave her secretarial job and enter law school. She was in the middle of her second year when Sammy Sweet left her, and so busy studying and working on the Law Review and volunteering for the legal-aid program that the shock of his betrayal, she said, was like a bomb dropping in another country, though it cured her forever of the idea of marriage. “It’s clear I’m lousy marriage material,” she announced at the time, and since the divorce she’s lived with three other women, two lawyers, one accountant, in a large modern house in a new subdivision. Tom is invited there now and then when they need an extra man for parties, and he’s reasonably fond of Patricia and Sandra and Dru, though somewhat guarded, never sure how thoroughly Sheila has described their old intimacies.