I know that these things must be memories, but they do not have the quality of memories. They are not hazy around the edges, but sharp and clear. They arrive detached from any context; they are simply there, in isolation, as an object glimpsed on the street is there.
I have no image of myself in relation to them. They are suffused with anxiety, but it’s not my own anxiety. The anxiety is in the things themselves.
I paint three sofas. One of them is chintz, in dirty rose; one is maroon velvet, with doilies. The one in the middle is apple-green. On the middle cushion of the middle sofa is an egg cup, five times life-size, with a broken eggshell in it.
I paint a glass jar, with a bouquet of nightshade rising out or it like smoke, like the darkness from a genie’s bottle. The stems twist and intertwine, the branches cluster with red berries, purple flowers. Scarcely visible, far back in the dense tangle of the glossy leaves, are the eyes of cats. In the daytime I go to work, come back, talk, and eat. Jon comes over, eats, sleeps, and goes away. I watch him with detachment; he notices nothing. Every move I make is sodden with unreality. When no one is around, I bite my fingers. I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life. My body is a separate thing. It ticks like a clock; time is inside it. It has betrayed me, and I am disgusted with it. I paint Mrs. Smeath. She floats up without warning, like a dead fish, materializing on a sofa I am drawing: first her white, sparsely haired legs without ankles, then her thick waist and potato face, her eyes in their steel rims. The afghan is draped across her thighs, the rubber plant rises behind her like a fan. On her head is the felt hat like a badly done-up package that she used to wear on Sundays. She looks out at me from the flat surface of paint, three-dimensional now, smiling her closed half-smile, smug and accusing. Whatever has happened to me is my own fault, the fault of what is wrong with me. Mrs. Smeath knows what it is. She isn’t telling.
One picture of Mrs. Smeath leads to another. She multiplies on the walls like bacteria, standing, sitting, flying, with clothes, without clothes, following me around with her many eyes like those 3-D postcards of Jesus you can get in the cheesier corner stores. Sometimes I turn her faces to the wall.
Chapter 61
I wheel Sarah along the street in her stroller, avoiding the mounds of melting slush. Although she is over two, she still can’t walk fast enough in her red rubber boots to keep up when we go shopping. Also this way I can hang the grocery bags from the stroller handle, or tuck them in around her. I know a great many such minor tricks now, involving objects and gadgets and the rearrangement of space, that I didn’t need to know before.
We’re living in a larger place now, the three of us: the upper two stories of a red brick semidetached house with a sagging wooden square-pillared porch, on a side street west along Bloor. There are a lot of Italians around here. The older women, the married ones and the widows, wear black clothes and no makeup, as I used to do. When I was in the later months of pregnancy, they would smile at me, as if I was almost one of them. Now they smile at Sarah first.
I myself wear miniskirts in primary colors, with tights underneath and boots, and an ankle-length coat over top. I am not entirely satisfied with this clothing. It’s hard to sit down in. Also I’ve put on some weight, since having Sarah. These skimpy skirts and tiny bodices were designed for women a lot skinnier than I am, of which there now seem to be dozens, hundreds: weasel-faced girls with long hair hanging to the place where their bums ought to be, their chests flat as plywood, making me feel bulbous by comparison.
A new vocabulary has come with them. Far out, they say. Cosmic. Blew my mind. Uptight. Let it all bang out. I consider myself too old for such words: they are for young people, and I am no longer young. I have found a gray hair behind my left ear. In a couple of years I will be thirty. Over the hill. I wheel Sarah up the walk, unbuckle her, set her at the foot of the porch steps, unhook and lift out the grocery bags, fold up the stroller. I walk Sarah up the steps to the front door: these steps can be slippery. I go back for the bags and the stroller, lug them up the steps, fumble in my purse for the key, open the door, lift Sarah inside, then the bags and stroller, close and lock the door. I walk Sarah up the inside stairs, open the inside door, put her inside, close the baby gate, go back down for the bags, carry them up, open the gate, go in, close the gate, go into the kitchen, set the bags on the table, and begin to unpack: eggs, toilet paper, cheese, apples, bananas, carrots, hot dogs, and buns. I worry about serving too many hot dogs: when I was young they were carnival food, and supposed to be bad for you. You might get polio from them.
Sarah is hungry, so I stop unpacking the groceries to get her a glass of milk. I love her ferociously, and am frequently irritated by her.
For the first year I was tired all the time, and fogged by hormones. But I’m coming out of it now. I’m looking around me.
Jon comes in, scoops Sarah up, gives her a kiss, tickles her face with his beard, carries her squealing off into the living room. “Let’s hide on Mummy,” he says. He has a way of putting the two of them into the same camp, in pretended league against me, that annoys me more than it should. Also I don’t like it when he calls me Mummy. I am not his mummy, but hers. But he too loves her. This was a surprise, and I’m not finished being grateful for it. I don’t yet see Sarah as a gift I have given him, but one he has allowed me. It’s because of her that we got married, at City Hall, for the oldest of reasons. One that was nearly obsolete. But we didn’t know that.
Jon, who is a lapsed Lutheran from Niagara Falls, thought we should go there for our honeymoon. He broke up over the word honeymoon. He thought it would be a sort of joke: self-conscious corniness, like a painting of a giant Coke bottle. “Amazing visuals,” he said. He wanted to take me to the waxworks, the flower clock, the Maid of the Mist. He wanted us to get satin shirts with our names embroidered on the pockets and NIAGARA FALLS across the back. But I was silently offended by this approach to our marriage. Whatever else we were getting into as the weeks passed one another and my body swelled like a slow flesh balloon, it was not a joke. So we ended by not going. Right after we were married, I lapsed into a voluptuous sloth. My body was like a feather bed, warm, boneless, deeply comforting, in which I lay cocooned. It may have been the pregnancy, sponging up my adrenaline. Or it may have been relief. Jon glowed for me then like a plum in sunlight, richly colored, perfect in form. I would lie in bed beside him or sit at the kitchen table, running my eyes over him like hands. My adoration was physical, and wordless. I would think Ah, nothing more. Like a breath breathed out. Or I would think, like a child, Mine. Knowing it wasn’t true. Stay that way, I would think. But he could not.
Jon and I have begun to have fights. Our fights are secret fights, conducted at night, when Sarah is asleep: a squabbling in undertones. We keep them from her, because if they are frightening to us—as they are—how much more frightening will they be to her?
We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we are the grown-ups: this is the crux of it. Neither of us wants to take it on, not the whole thing. We compete, for instance, over which of us is in worse shape. If I get a headache, he gets a migraine. If his back hurts, my neck is killing me. Neither one of us wants to be in charge of the Band-Aids. We fight over our right to remain children. At first I do not win these fights, because of love. Or so I say to myself. If I were to win them, the order of the world would be changed, and I am not ready for that. So instead I lose the fights, and master different arts. I shrug, tighten my mouth in silent rebuke, turn my back in bed, leave questions unanswered. I say, “Do it however you like,” provoking sullen fury from Jon. He does not want just capitulation, but admiration, enthusiasm, for himself and his ideas, and when he doesn’t get it he feels cheated.