He knew what women wanted. They wanted nothing. Nothing was good enough. Everyone knew that. Everyone but me.
The reason I was on my way to Ottawa was to offer consolation to an old friend in distress. She had written to me telling me not to come, that she had her niece Beverly to look after her, that she was not fit company at the moment, but of course I went anyway. I thought, wrongly, that I could carry her back to sunnier times, dredging up old stories, foolish or sentimental or touching on some spring of affection between us. And I believed we might, after a few days, open up this forbidden topic of sex, letting our thoughts out loose and fresh.
There comes a time, I’ve seen it happen, when women offer to decode themselves. All of Alice’s shrewd sympathy would be nothing compared to a moment’s shared revelation between old pals.
The self is curved like space, I tried to say to my girlhood friend, and human beings can come around again and again to the sharpness of early excitations. The sexual spasm, despite its hideous embarrassments and inconvenience, is the way we enter the realm of the ecstatic. The only way. It’s a far darker and more powerful force than we dreamed back when we were girls chattering on about “climaxes” and saline douches. I wanted to tell her about Professor Popkov who was my first seducer, about Georgio with his endless sportive variations (The Royal Gonad, I called him), about poor Mel who lasted only four years before drifting off in his wispy way. I intended to hold nothing back, not even my pitiable little encounter on the train. I persuaded myself that an open confrontation would dislodge whatever it is that has shut off Daze’s happiness and made her into a crazy woman.
But the week was a disaster. She would not be coaxed out of her dark bedroom; she lay flat on her back, her neck and shoulder muscles in painful contraction and her queenly pounds dropping away one after the other. “Don’t make me pretend to be lively,” she said to me once when I brought her a lunch tray. “It takes too much effort.”
I went home to Bloomington and wrote her a note of monstrous good cheer. About the future. The sun breaking through. The joy of future generations. On and on.
A week later an envelope came addressed in her writing. No note, only my little pocket diary with its cryptic entries. I must have dropped it on the carpet when I was closing my suitcase.
Cousin Beverly’s Theory
Ten years ago back in Saskatchewan I got myself into hot water. It wasn’t enough that I was a divorced woman, and, boy oh boy, that was a real crime back then, let me tell you, but worse was to come.
Two short years after I kicked my husband Jerry out (a drinker from Day One), I got boinked by Leonard Mazurkiewich who worked in the pickling plant (married, natch) whose idea of lovemaking was — well, I get the willies just thinking about it — but anyway it wasn’t worth it, three minutes of grunt and bad breath, and, bingo, there I was in the family way.
I would have gone to Calgary but I was too scared. Imagine, me scared, me who served with the WRENS during the war, way over there in Britain. Bombs and everything. I lived through that. I was full of courage when I was young. And then I came home to Saskatchewan at the end of the war and the puff just went out of me.
There was Jerry, hounding me to get married. And my parents.
And my sisters. Everyone. Somehow they tore me apart, it happened fast. The funny thing about being married to Jerry was not being able to get pregnant no matter what kind of stunts we got up to. Ha! — and after one midnight roll with Leonard Mazurkiewich, just one, I was up a stump. Some girls will turn to suicide when they get themselves in a fix like that, but I never thought of it for one minute, the reason being I could still shut my eyes when I wanted and remember what I was like over there in Britain, how brave and full of pep I could be — this picture would light up for me like something on a calendar or in a movie, the way I was, and I thought maybe I could get it back, only I couldn’t, not if I committed suicide, that’s for sure.
Aunt Daisy in Ottawa took me in. I was one of the family. She let me paint the storeroom in the attic pink and white and put up curtains — my own private bedroom, no one to muck things up, and later, after Victoria was born, she said, “Why don’t you fix up the downstairs sunroom for the baby?” and I did.
Victoria Louise weighed eight and a half pounds at birth which is amazing when you think I only weigh ninety-eight myself, being skinny like the Flett side of the family and also short like my mom’s side. She was a real good baby after she got through the colicky period. She was born with this gorgeous soft yellow hair. Now she’s nine years old and what a doll! Thank God, I didn’t put her out for adoption the way I planned. I look after her, make her clothes myself, go to the school meetings and talk to her teacher, all that stuff, and make her pipe down at home so she won’t get on Aunt Daisy’s nerves. I also take care of the housework here, do most of the family cooking, and earn a little extra on the side typing insurance policies. And lately I’ve been nursing Aunt Daisy who’s suffering from nervous prostration.
Myself, I don’t think it’s her change of life that’s done it, or her allergies either. I think it’s the kids who’ve got her down. Being a widow she feels extra responsible, I can understand that, and then again some people are just natural worriers. She used to worry about her daughter Alice who has this way of coming on strong — whew, does she ever! Then she worried for a time about Warren, who was a nice kid but sort of a drip. He had this real bad acne growing up and that made him kind of shy and drippy, but the thing is, after a certain age, no one’s really a drip any more, they’re just kind of sweet or else “individualistic.” That’s something I’ve noticed. Nowadays Warren’s a regular young man — his skin’s a whole lot improved too — and he’s down there in Rochester, New York, getting his master’s degree in music theory, first in his class, the Gold Medal. Aunt Daisy was planning to go down for the graduation, she even bought herself a darling little pillbox hat, kelly green, but now that’s out. She can hardly lug herself out of bed, she just lays there in the dark and cries a whole lot and scrunches up the sheet in her hands, just wrings those sheets like she’s wringing someone’s neck. I think it’s Joan she’s worried about now, little Joanie, the family princess, spoiled rotten, but smart as a whip, only now she’s smoking dope and doing I don’t know what, whatever hippies get up to. She says she’s selling jewelry down there in New Mexico, but I bet my bottom dollar she’s selling more than that. Well, it’s breaking her mother’s heart. It kills me to see it.
Aunt Daisy saved my life, that’s no exaggeration, giving Victoria and me a home, and now I want to save hers, only she’s the only one who can do that. A person can make herself sick and that same person has to will herself to get well again, that’s my personal theory.
Warren’s Theory
My mother’s an educated woman but you’d never know it. She has a degree in Liberal Arts from Long College for Women, class of 1926, but ask her where her diploma is and she’ll just give a shrug.
Once I came across a cardboard box up in the storeroom — this was when we were cleaning up so Cousin Beverly could move in — and in the box was a thick pile of essays my mother wrote back when she was a student. One of the essays was titled: “Camillo Cavour:
Statesman and Visionary.” I couldn’t believe that my mother had ever heard of Camillo Cavour (I certainly hadn’t) or that she could write earnestly, even passionately, about an obscure period of nineteenth-century Italian history. The ink after all these years was still clear and bright — those were her loops and dashes, her paragraphs and soaring conclusion. Italians everywhere owe a huge debt to this monolithic hero who battled for the rights of his countrymen and …