At night I sit beside Sarah’s crib, watching the flutter of her eyelids as she dreams, listening to her breathe. She will be left alone. Or not alone, because she will have Jon. Motherless. This is unthinkable. I turn on the lights in the living room. I know I must start packing, but I don’t know what to take. Clothes, toys for Sarah, her furry rabbit. It seems too difficult, so I go to bed. Jon is already in there, turned toward the wall. We have gone through a pretence of truce and reformation, straight into deadlock. I don’t wake him up.
In the morning, after he leaves, I bundle Sarah into the stroller and take some of my grant money out of the bank. I don’t know where to go. All I can think of is away. I buy us tickets to Vancouver, which has the advantage of being warm, or so I suppose. I stuff our things into duffel bags, which I’ve bought at Army Surplus.
I want Jon to come back and stop me, because now that I’m in motion I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. But he doesn’t come.
I leave a note, I make a sandwich: peanut butter. I cut it in two and give half to Sarah, and a glass of milk. I call a taxi. We sit at the kitchen table with our coats on, eating our sandwiches and drinking our milk, and waiting.
This is when Jon comes back. I keep eating.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he says.
“Vancouver,” I say.
He sits down at the table, stares at me. He looks as if he hasn’t slept for weeks, although he’s been sleeping a lot, oversleeping. “I can’t stop you,” he says. It’s a statement of fact, not a maneuver: he will let us go without a fight. He too is exhausted.
“I think that’s the taxi,” I say. “I’ll write.”
I’m good at leaving. The trick is to close yourself off. Don’t hear, don’t see. Don’t look back. We don’t have a sleeper, because I need to save the money. I sit up all night, Sarah sprawled and snuffling in my lap. She’s done some crying, but she’s too young to realize what I’ve done, what we’re doing. The other passengers extend themselves into the aisles; baggage expands, smoke drifts in the stale air, food wrappings clog the washrooms. There’s a card game going on up at the front of the car, with beer.
The train runs northwest, through hundreds of miles of scraggy forests and granite outcrops, hundreds of small blue anonymous lakes edged with swamp and bulrushes and dead spruce, old snow in the shadows. I peer out through the glass of the train window, which is streaked with ram and dust, and there is the landscape of my early childhood, smudged and scentless and untouchable and moving backward. At long intervals the train crosses a road, gravel or thin and paved, with a white line down the middle. This looks like emptiness and silence, but to me it is not empty, not silent. Instead it’s filled with echoes. Home, I think. But it’s nowhere I can go back to.
It’s worse than I thought it would be, and also better.
Some days I think I’m crazy to have done this; other times that it’s the sanest move I’ve made in years. It’s cheaper in Vancouver. After a short spell in a Holiday Inn, I find a house I can rent, on the rise behind Kitsilano Beach, one of those toytown houses that are bigger inside than they look. It has a view of the bay, and the mountains across it, and, in the summer, endless light. I find a coop preschool for Sarah. For a time I live on grant money. I freelance a little, then get a part-time job refinishing furniture for an antique dealer. I like this, because it’s mindless and the furniture can’t talk. I am thirsty for silence. I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over. I think maybe I should go to see a shrink, because that is the accepted thing, now, for people who are not in balance, and I am not. Finally I do go. The shrink is a man, a nice man. He wants me to talk about everything that happened to me before I was six, nothing after. Once you are six, he implies, you are cast in bronze. What comes after is not important.
I have a good memory. I tell him about the war.
I tell him about the Exacto knife and the wrist, but not about the voice. I don’t want him to think I’m a loony. I want him to think well of me.
I tell him about nothing.
He asks if I have orgasms. I say that isn’t the problem.
He thinks I am hiding things.
After a while I stop going.
Gradually I grow back, into my hands. I take to getting up early in the morning, before Sarah is awake, to paint. I find I have a minor, ambiguous reputation, from the show in Toronto, and I am invited to parties. At first there is a resentful edge, because I am from what is known as back east, which is supposed to confer unfair advantages; but after a time I’ve been here long enough so I can pass, and after that I can do the resentful act myself, to easterners, and get away with it. I’m also invited to take part in several group showings, mostly by women: they’ve heard about the ink throwing, read the snotty reviews, all of which render me legitimate, although from the east. Women artists of many kinds, women of many kinds are in ferment here, they are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply.
Confession is popular, not of your flaws but of your sufferings, at the hands of men. Pain is important, but only certain kinds of it: the pain of women, but not the pain of men. Telling about your pain is called sharing. I don’t want to share in this way; also I am insufficient in scars. I have lived a privileged life, I’ve never been beaten up, raped, gone hungry. There is the issue of money, of course, but Jon was as poor as me.
There is Jon. But I don’t feel overmatched by him. Whatever he did to me, I did back, and maybe worse. He’s twisting now, because he misses Sarah. He calls long distance, his voice on the phone fading in and out like a wartime broadcast, plaintive with defeat, with an archaic sadness that seems, more and more, to be that of men in general.
No mercy for him, the women would say. I am not merciful, but I am sorry. A number of these women are lesbians, newly declared or changing over. This is at the same time courageous and demanded. According to some, it’s the only equal relationship possible, for women. You are not genuine otherwise.
I am ashamed of my own reluctance, my lack of desire; but the truth is that I would be terrified to get into bed with a woman. Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as they are frequently accused of being.
At parties they start to ask leading questions that have the ring of inquisition; they are interested in my positions, my dogmas. I am guilty about having so few of these: I know I am unorthodox, hopelessly heterosexual, a mother, quisling and secret wimp. My heart is a dubious object at best, blotchy and treacherous. I still shave my legs.
I avoid gatherings of these women, walking as I do in fear of being sanctified, or else burned at the stake. I think they are talking about me, behind my back. They make me more nervous than ever, because they have a certain way they want me to be, and I am not that way. They want to improve me. At times I feel defiant: what right have they to tell me what to think? I am not Woman, and I’m damned if I’ll be shoved into it. Bitch, I think silently. Don’t boss me around.