The Dancehall Years Page 20

  Sit down, Mrs. Kerr.

  I should have explained to you about the baby, she says. My sitter didn’t turn up.

  It’s not that, Mrs. Kerr, although I must say I was taken aback. These parents are here because their children told them you’ve been teaching communism in your classroom.

  That’s not it, she says. I was trying to use drama as a technique for exploring themes in a novel on their curriculum.

  I’ve explained you’re only a sub, Mrs. Kerr. The regular teacher will be back tomorrow. Don’t worry, he says to the parents. There won’t be any more of these controversial methods in your children’s classroom.

  When she gets home, she stands by the sink and cries. Finishing the project mattered so much. René’s coming for dinner. They’re having roast lamb. We like it so rare it’s walking around, his mother says sitting on the kitchen stool as Eugene parboils the potatoes and marinates them in olive oil before putting them around the roast. He has Maya in one arm as if she’d grown there.

  After supper, Gwen takes a scarf that doesn’t go from the hook at the door and sets out for a walk. When she comes back, she sits at the bottom of the stairs. She’s having a hard time, Eugene’s saying as he sees René out the door. It’s not working, Mother. She’s trying but…

  Maybe she needs to be with her own people for a while, says René.

  She’s upset about not being able to finish what she was doing at that school.

  I’m here, dear, whenever you need me.

  Later, Eugene says he’s been having a hard time talking to her lately.

  You haven’t been able to talk to me? You think I’ve been able to talk to you?

  I know it’s difficult finding a place for yourself here, thrashing around wondering where you fit in.

  Thrashing? He wouldn’t be saying any of this if his mother hadn’t been there.

  It might be good for you to take a break, Gwen, go home and see your parents.

  Why’s he saying that? In one appalled moment, she realizes why he’s been so candid lately. Couples cut each other a lot of slack when they only have each other to accommodate. When one of them has found someone else and has a backup position, reckless truths get flung about like sprung garden hoses. He’d never be suggesting that she goes to visit her parents if he hadn’t met someone else. Don’t you work for that new antiques magazine? She can’t bear to know, so she doesn’t ask.

  After that, when he gets ready to leave in the morning, she sits at the window, convinced if she doesn’t keep her eyes on the spot on the building around which he’ll disappear, he’ll never come back. At first, he’s kind. Gwen, he says. Does Maya have to be left all alone in the bedroom? She could come in here if she wants, she says distractedly. It’s all cleaning and feeding, isn’t it?

  What happened to all the writing you were doing? You could get a job. We could get a permanent nanny.

  Yes, let’s do that. Her voice is completely flat.

  I hate seeing you like this. What’s happened to you? You’re searching for me out there, and I haven’t even left yet.

  Am I?

  At the supermarket, she pulls a shopping cart from the rack, puts Maya in the child container tray, takes Jenny by the hand and makes her way down through the produce section. Rumour has it some people actually begin at detergents and go backwards down and up the aisles. When she takes a tin of tomatoes from a shelf, an outline of three women appears in silhouette on the wall behind the tin. Odd. When she puts the tin back and takes it out again, they’re still there. Now they seem to be on the other side of a river talking to each other, but she can’t hear what they’re saying.

  In the cashier line-up, a neighbour says I was talking to your husband the other day. He sounds charming.

  Well, says Gwen. He’s not.

  It’s not the same, is it? Eugene says that night in bed. How could it be the same? she says. It’s going to take a while to get back to what we had. Too long, she could hear him thinking.

  In the bath, she’s so distracted, she reaches into a bowl of bath lozenges and starts to eat them. She looks up at him shaving.

  I’m afraid you’ve met someone else.

  Of course not.

  But one night, after she says that, he turns to the wall. There’s no one who could be what you are to me.

  Who is it?

  It doesn’t matter.

  She hurls herself at him pounding his chest; he lifts her two wrists with one hand and pushes them down on the mattress. When he lets go, she pulls over to the other side of the bed, never to return.

  If you hadn’t started the whole thing, he says. That man you went to San Francisco with. I was trying to get even.

  I didn’t go to San Francisco with any man. We’re in San Francisco.

  Then why didn’t you tell me you’d lost your suitcase? It was returned to me. By a woman in white shorts.

  Oh Jesus. Not her.

  I’d seen her before, in Monterey. Fancied her, actually. But it wasn’t until she told me that you’d taken off with him. You’d forgotten your bag in her car so she brought it over.

  That man, she says. They both offered a ride to San Francisco, and she bailed. I was stuck with that man. That man turned out to be a wanker. I was terrified.

  Why didn’t you say anything?

  I didn’t want to worry you. Why didn’t you say anything about the bag?

  I was waiting for an explanation.

  They both say what a comedy of errors, it’s ridiculous, we’ll look back and laugh at this. But the freezing no-man’s-land between them has opened like a crevice in a glacier. She’ll fall in if she moves over half an inch. She can’t bear to have him touch her, and she can’t bear not to have him touch her.

  It’s not only this, Gwen. It’s not working, is it?

  You’re the one who said this is love. This is what we do. We’ll get through it. We have to. We have children.

  I hope so.

  35.

  October, 1970

  Fine, take the car and go. No, no. Wait a minute. You don’t know the way.

  I’ll get a map.

  It’ll be cold.

  It’s only the end of September.

  It’s the beginning of October. Be accurate for once, Gwen.

  Are you angry at me?

  Gwen, if I were angry at you, the paint would be blistering on the walls. Is it?

  Aiming for the 101, she takes the wrong turn, ends up heading past the Civic Centre and has to circle back, the sea passing behind them and under the span as Jenny hunches beside her. Maya is in her car seat in the back. Careening around a curve, up a street in Marin County, pulling over, she sits with the car door open, Jenny on the ground leaning against her leg. Back on the road, the cars driving south appear to be heading directly at her, the ones behind are chasing her. The wind sweeps the pine in the opposite direction from the way it blew on their way down. Last year Eugene started down for a weekend trip to the cabin in Big Sur with Maya under his arm; came back to tell her he wanted to buy the cabin but it had to be in his name. Came back because he’d forgotten the baby hadn’t nursed, came in, arms around Maya like a log grate. Came in again, Maya in his mouth like a rabbit. The car stalls. The man in the next lane leans on his horn. What d’ya mean it won’t go forward or back lady? You’ve got it in neutral. Wide brown hills, dark splodges of green like patches on cows. Let’s talk about what we see, girls. There’s some horses in a horse camp. Leaving the fog behind, they pass San Raphael, the hills begin to stretch longer across the valleys. At the next rest stop, there’s no bathroom; Jenny doesn’t want to go down the slope by herself, so they all go with her. Back on the highway, Maya starts crying and won’t stop.

  She’s only two, Mom. She can’t help it.

  I know, honey. Look for a place for us to stay, Jenny, will you do that? A motel called the Skylark, curvy tiles on the roof, oh, they’ve passed that. The waves in the sea stiffen. One minute she’s on fire, the next minute she’s ice. A gantry
crane rears like a dinosaur. The steering wheel melts. The steering wheel hardens. Eugene’s heart is a cage where she’s trapped shaking the bars. She’s a thin chicken prancing its knees as if someone is hitting their backs with a towel. If she saw him on the sidewalk, she’d wrestle him to the pavement, kneel on his chest, draw a circle around his nipple with her pen knife, lift the piece of flesh like a manhole cover, remove his heart. When she tries to give his heart to a passerby, the passerby doesn’t want it. Crows caw trying to pull his carcass off the ground. She wants him on his knees with his arms around her waist; she wants to be eating him until her saliva and the tip of his penis are one. In her ear her eyes her navel, twitch it on her clitoris, between her toes. She wants him to come like a fountain until she’s coated from head to foot in semen. She wants to go to his office, rip out the telephone and sit on his face. She wants him to bite her, drown in his own tears and beg for her forgiveness. If you take animals away from their wilderness and put them in a zoo, they do nothing but copulate until exhaustion. When he doesn’t want to do it, it makes him feel like a machine when he’s past having any interest in it. Before she left, she dragged cardboard boxes into the living room, opened them like giant flowers, sweaters and toys as centres. Carried bowlfuls of water from the waterbed to empty in the sink. Never mind, she only took her half of the water.

  Here, Mom. Here’s a motel, says Jenny.

  How’d that happen? They seem to be in Oregon. A vacancy sign flashes on the highway. She manages the check-in, settles the two of them in the second double bed. The cheap bedside light won’t turn off, so she gives it a swat and it behaves.

  When they get to Vancouver, piles of leaves are darkening in the Blenheim St. gutter. Jenny runs down the laurel path straight into her grandmother’s arms. Gwen drags in plastic bags of dirty laundry.

  Hello, dear. You look, well you look… What’s happened? Who’s died?

  Sorry I phoned so late in the trip. I hope I haven’t…

  Of course you haven’t, says Ada.

  Sitting at the table, Percy anxiously exchanges the salt and pepper shakers with each other. He and Ada look much older because they’ve both gone completely grey. Maya’s fallen back asleep, but what can you do?

  Your room’s ready, Gwen. The girls are in the small room at the head of the stairs.

  Thanks, Mom. We won’t stay long.

  You stay as long as you like. This is your home whenever you need it.

  She looks terrible, she hears her father saying as she’s getting the girls to bed. I’m going down there, buttonhole that man and say what have you done to my daughter? Gwen goes downstairs, picks up a dish towel. I’m sorry to be arriving like this. It’s not him, it’s me. I’m a terrible wife.

  Is that what he said to you?

  She nods miserably.

  Maybe to someone else you’d be a perfect wife.

  I doubt it. I couldn’t keep up the, oh, I don’t know. I didn’t know what was what. And I’m jealous. These are his problems, not mine, Percy’s look says. I’ve fallen over enough tricycles. We’re just getting our lives back. We’re not going to stay and cramp your style, Dad. I don’t want you to think… Give me a day or two to get the laundry done. I’ll take the children over to the cottage for a while.

  Oh, you can’t do that, Gwen, says Ada in alarm.

  Why not? It would give me a chance to get my bearings.

  The cottage is closed for the season. The water’s turned off. You can’t go near the place. It’s not ours for the asking.

  But you bought it. You and Evvie and Isabelle bought it. You wrote to me.

  We’re doing a time-share on it. This is Isabelle’s time.

  Isabelle’s? Is she up there?

  I don’t think she goes. She can’t leave Jack. He won’t leave Birch Bay. They’ve moved down there, Stateside. She wants it left as it is.

  Why?

  It’s complicated. You don’t want to know.

  I do, actually.

  We don’t see Isabelle, says Percy slowly. She and Jack have a store.

  Gwen puts away a plate. Why didn’t we see Auntie when I was growing up? I’ve never understood that.

  You’re not to go near the place, young lady. Ada pushes the cupboard door under the sink closed. After our visit, you’ll go back and find a way to make your marriage work. Your girls need their father.

  Of course they need their father, Gwen says. The last thing I want to do is separate. But what if you beg and plead and say we have children, we have to work this out, and he says don’t think he doesn’t know that but he wants out.

  Then, says Ada, you’re sunk.

  That night in bed, when she phones Eugene to say they’ve arrived, she finds herself sitting over a five-dollar silence, so exhausted she falls asleep with the phone line open. In the morning, is there breathing at the other end? Maybe he fell asleep too. She’ll have to say the phone bill’s hers, maybe the phone company will understand. Downstairs, she spoons applesauce into Maya.

  So how are you both? she manages.

  We’re fine.

  How’s Leo?

  I think he’s well, don’t you, Perce? He’s at York. I hope he gets his tenure.

  I hope he gets his tenure too.

  She’d watched Leo lecture once; he followed the theorem he was outlining along the front blackboards and then down the sides, rubbing off his calculations and starting again as if he were afraid to turn and face the class. He’d written her that he and his colleagues were trying to find out why the atmosphere of Venus moves in the opposite direction from its slow rotation. Why the craters are so uniform. There’s a dark substance between observable heavenly bodies, but they don’t know what it is.

  Percy’s head looks smaller, beaky around the nose. Pouring over a portfolio of maps and charts, he doesn’t look at all faded. One exciting thing, he says. I got my pilot’s license.

  You did? Why didn’t you tell me?

  I wrote you, but my letter must have crossed with your trip.

  She reaches for his hand. Do you love it?

  I sure do.

  At last he’ll get to fly up and over the north shore mountains like he’s always wanted. People on Jericho don’t know they’re only looking at the fronts, he used to say when they were sitting on the beach. No idea we have mountains all the way to the North Pole. Up there he’d reconnect with the freedom he used to know on the Prairies, now that he didn’t have the responsibility of them.

  Only problem is, he says—Ada stiffens her back—your mother won’t have anything to do with flying. When she was sixteen, a callow youth whose name has long been forgotten, had taken her topside in an airplane with an open cockpit and turned the plane over. She said to herself that if she ever got back to solid ground, she’d never fly in another airplane as long as she lived. When Percy gets up from the table to go to Pitt Meadows, he comes to kiss Ada’s cheek.

  You can go anywhere up there, Gwen, he says. You know that joke about rich people looking down from their carriage and saying I wonder how the poor people are doing? Up there I wonder what the poor people are doing.

  You’re gods, eh?

  Yep.

  He loves it that she gets it.

  If you want to go with Dad, Mom, we’re fine, Gwen says. For the drive anyway.

  I’d like to but I can’t, Ada replies. That’s a good thing to say, Gwen, when you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. I’d like to but I can’t.

  I don’t understand about the cottage, Mom. If Isabelle’s not using it, couldn’t I get in touch with her and see if I could stay there?

  No, you could not, Gwen. You haven’t shown the slightest interest in the cottage and what’s been going on around here. All we’ve heard about are goings-on in San Francisco that, frankly, sound much too complicated for school children.

  I was trying to keep in touch, Mother, but if that’s the way you see it.

  I don’t see it any particular way, we’re just upset to see you like thi
s.

  I know. I’m sorry.

  If you want to go to camp, you should go and see your sister at Scarborough. Lily would be the first person to help you if you were in trouble. You know that.

  Oh, that’s right, she’s living there now. You said about Grandma Flora leaving half the place to her. With Derek Sycamore, right? What brought him back here? And Annabelle, there’s a little girl…?

  I guess so, Gwen. She’s your niece. What’s the matter with you two? You haven’t been writing each other?

  I heard from her once, something about some otters she said I should keep an eye on in Big Sur. You and dad own the other half, right?

  That’s right. I don’t know all what they’ve got going on over there. Some kind of what did Lily call it, gestalt workshops? Do you know what that is?

  Gestalt’s a kind of therapy, says Gwen. I heard about it in California.

  The girls could get to know their cousin, says Ada.

  How’s Grandpa Gallagher, Mom?

  Old.

  He’s still at Laburnum St., is he?

  Just.

  Gwen could call Isabelle and ask, says Percy at the door. As long as you leave the place the way you found it.

  Of course I’d leave it the way I found it.

  No, she could not, Perce. It’s not winterized. You could stay here. We could look after the children, and you could get your teacher training.

  Percy looks as if she’d announced that she was going to burn the house down.

  And the children would have no mother, says Gwen. I can’t do that. I couldn’t ask you.

  What about child support? he says. Alimony? This with his hand on the front doorknob, grave and disappointed.

  It hasn’t come to that. I can’t even call him right now without the telephone wires shorting out. Our clothes are on fire.

  Don’t be dramatic, Gwen, says Ada.

  This all sounds terrible to me, Percy says. I don’t know what you’re going to do, but what I’m going to do is get in an airplane and fly due north.

  BOOK IV