Dancing in the Dark (13 page)

Maybe in that house suppressed rage was seeping out of them like leaking gas and was inhaled by the wood, the wallpaper, and the linoleum. Maybe I breathed it in, along with fear. Maybe we were all poisoned by the air.

If ever, in my parents’ house, someone had truly spoken and the anger had emerged from the woodwork and the linoleum, surely the walls would have crumbled, the roof collapsed, the glass windows shattered.

To have ever said the truth to Harry.

What was the truth, to be so terrifying?

That sometimes I looked at him across the living room at night, or watched him sleeping in our bed, and wondered, “Who is this man?”

Did he glance at me sometimes too and mistake me for a stranger? Did he find my burden boring?

But where did the final fury come from?

I wish to record the colour of carrots on the plate, the softness of potatoes, the quality of meat. For the second course, the doughiness of pie crusts, the dryness of cakes, the seeds in the fruits. I would catch in words the doctor’s voice, the coolness of water warming in the throat, the tightness of a comb tugging through hair, pulling at the roots.

I lived with a man for twenty-odd years. Here, the only man I see is the doctor, twice a week.

He is quite different from Harry, it seems, although sometimes I feel an inclination to rest against him, to trust him in a similar way. But I no longer have faith in my own assessments.

I have no firm reason to believe he wouldn’t lie to me.

He is still young—a decade younger than Harry. He has fine blond hair, cut moderately long so that it often catches on his shirt collar and I would like to brush it free. He has a habit, when he’s talking, asking all those questions, of flicking his head so that the hair tosses back from his forehead.

The backs of his hands have fine hair on the knuckles, just as Harry’s did. Are there similar hairs, equally soft-looking, on his chest, his legs, perhaps even his back? He dresses so carefully. He wears suits and shirts and ties, and although the ties are sometimes loosened at the throat, the shirts are always buttoned to the top, allowing no glimpse of flesh. And his socks are pulled high so that even when he sits in that listening pose, leaning forward, right ankle resting on left knee, with the tautness of trousers following the angles of his legs, no calf or ankle shows. Except for his face and hands, he keeps his skin to himself.

The hair on his head and knuckles seems so fine and soft it isn’t possible to imagine a proper beard. His face would only grow more silky hair.

There is nothing harsh about him; even his voice is gentle.

What about anger then? Does he shout at home? I can’t imagine; but then, who can tell?

He has slender hands and long fingers, but although they remind me of Harry’s, I could not mistake them. There are blue veins prominent beneath the skin, and his fingernails are clean and neatly clipped. He is so clean he has no scent of even aftershave or soap.

His eyes are immensely blue and deep. They invite me to dive in. They look as if they’re waiting. It feels almost safe, looking into them, because I don’t see anything back.

I’m pleased when he stops in to my room, or when a nurse says, “Come on now, Mrs. Cormick, time to see the doctor.” I stand quickly, eagerly, then dawdle to hide my anticipation.

Sometimes he has new clothes and I like that: he has pride in his appearance. His shirts are always crisply ironed, so either his wife takes care of him well or he takes them to a laundry. Many people do, these days. So many things are easier, or ignored, these days.

His arms are long and his body is thin. Like Harry’s, his wrists show bones. Also like Harry, he stands straight. (Although in the last few years, Harry was starting to stoop a little, as if his shoulders were becoming heavy. Perhaps this doctor will come to that.)

Sometimes I see him in the hall, going past my door, and if he sees me notice, he smiles. But he does not stop unless he has planned a visit. He does not walk quickly, but seems always to be on his way somewhere. I would like to know where all he goes.

What I would like sometimes would be to put my arms around him and set my head against the solid bones of his chest. I would like to touch the softness of his hair.

Instead I sit in a chair across his desk from him, and write these wishes down.

It’s snowing. For the first time this year. The flakes melt and disappear as soon as they land against the window and the earth. What happens? Do they turn into something else, or simply vanish? I should be able to see it happen, the transformation of one thing into something else. It looks solid, the snow, coming down, and suddenly it’s gone and just the greyness of the day is left. If it fell on me, surely I could touch it so gently there’d be no need for it to vanish. I might at least get close enough to see.

S
tella, now, images of my sister dance by now and then as I sit here. Which is funny, since I rarely thought of her once I got away. Once I didn’t have to watch her easiness, like someone eating a bowl of strawberries and refusing to share, I mostly forgot.

Of course I only knew her as a child. Those are my memories.

I thought events would not touch my sister, who would always dance over disaster. Or stare it in the teeth the way she did my mother, and defy it. Even as a little girl, I remember her stamping her foot, her tiny fists planted on her hips, a miniature of my mother’s stance, and saying, “No. I don’t want to. I won’t.”

She got spanked. I slid along being quiet and obedient and observing.

We seemed to have nothing in common.

In high school she was one of those swift-footed golden people who knew the steps.

But then—then it seemed to me that after I left home, because I worked at school and I was bright enough, or needy
enough, to be sent away, the tables turned. The advantage on my wedding day was mine.

And she, my bright-haired laughing sister, married a young plumber and they bought a little house just three blocks from my parents’, and when Harry and I visited at Christmas I was the one with what they may have thought was a life with some glamour.

I was not a different person from the one they knew; but it was a great deal, enough, to seem to be a different person.

It may have astonished them to see me with this driving man who talked with passion about things they didn’t even think about. A businessman talking to a plumber and a retired hardware clerk.

Of course it isn’t that we were better, nothing so mean or pretentious. Just that against every expectation I married a man with a career and a future and moved on to the city and an unfamiliar life, while there was Stella, at home with her plumber. If things had been as they appeared, surely it would have been the reverse? Stella, the sparkling hostess, with the dazzling husband; me, the small-space person, with the plumber in the town. If with anyone at all.

“Lovely to see you,” we said at Christmas and brushed cheeks lightly with our lips.

“Honest to God,” Harry said as we drove home afterward, “it’s like being with a bunch of strangers trapped in a storm. Nobody says anything. Don’t you have anything to say to each other?”

No, we didn’t. Scratch the surface and a maelstrom underneath? None of us had the will for that, certainly not I.

We talked, Stella and my mother and I, about clothes, new stores in town, and recipes. Small problems with our homes, redecorating. I doubt these domestic details were particularly
satisfying, to my mother especially, but there we were, three adult women thrown together for a day or two, what would we talk about? The question for my mother would have been, “What made you so stiff and unhappy and stern?” For my sister it might have been, “What is that secret you knew? Why did it always go so smoothly?” And maybe they would have had questions for me as well.

No chance we would say things like that.

“That old saying about shoemakers’ children going barefoot is just about true at our place,” Stella complained. “We’ve had a dripping kitchen tap for weeks, and Frank never gets around to doing a thing about it. I’m going to have to call a plumber, if you can believe it.”

My mother never tried to set rules for Harry or Stella’s Frank, she must have had some respect for them, so when they sat down with my father in the living room and pulled out cigarettes, my father found courage to light up his pipe. His annual treat, this holiday defiance. He never looked entirely comfortable about it, his pleasure was uneasy, but he did it.

After they went to bed, my mother sprayed the room and washed the blue-glass candy dishes they used as ashtrays.

“Why do we do this every year?” Harry asked.

I don’t know. We spent Thanksgiving with his parents, and sometimes Easter. But Christmas with mine. Nothing to do with fairness or equal time, I think. But Christmas would have been strange to me anywhere else. Unhappy sometimes, and always odd, but it smelled right, the only time in the year that house smelled friendly instead of damp. The onions and spices and turkey, cranberry bubbles and gravy and mincemeat pies—nowhere else would have had the right smells.

Christmas sent me back to childhood, made me childish. I remember for years there were dolls, one for me and
one for Stella, unwrapped, under the tree from Santa Claus. Christmas Eve the four of us would sit in the darkened living room, only the coloured tree lights on, and stare at them. Mute, of course. Stuck in our own thoughts. But there we were, the four of us. Maybe we were all waiting for somebody to say something. Maybe every Christmas for years afterward we went back there to sit and wait for somebody to say something. In any case, whoever else was added, Harry, Frank, we’d started off, the four of us, together, and there was a sort of inescapable life sentence about it.

But where are they now? Have I gone too far and been abandoned?

It could be they just don’t know what to say.

We wrote letters to each other occasionally, in a sort of three-way futility. My mother about neighbours, the weather, a new lampshade, her small attempts to do something with the house. “Your father’s well,” she always ended. “He sends his best.” She signed herself, “Mother.” I wrote about Harry and his work and the changes in our house, the company we had for dinner or the party we might be going to.

Stella covered much the same ground as my mother, as well as bits of news about people we both knew from our school days. “Mother and Dad are well,” she said. “Bored with each other and miserable as usual.”

We might have talked about them, maybe, Stella and I. Certainly they were what we had in common. We were never alone together though. First our parents, then our husbands. I have never sat across a kitchen table just talking with my sister over a cup of coffee. I have never sat out on a porch and smoked a cigarette just with her. We have only written letters and stared into space.

But she tried. Once, she tried, and for a little while afterward. It’s that effort that makes me think that if she walked into this room right now, I might put down the pen and the notebook and let her put her arms around me, if she would.

Now, I would certainly have things to say. And now no reason not to.

I guess when she wrote me that letter, it would have been a little like that for her. And I failed her. Would she fail me? For revenge, if nothing else? I see now what she may have meant, but I didn’t then, I couldn’t imagine. And I am sorry, Stella. That’s the first thing I would say to her now: I’m sorry, I didn’t know.

Then I would say, but I do now, and we might compare notes and tell each other how it felt. Of course it worked out better for her, quite differently. Because she knew how to stamp her feet and put her fists on her hips and say no? Because she had long practice at defiance and survival? Well, if she came to see me here, we could maybe discuss that sort of thing.

A fat, scrawled letter it was, the handwriting not quite recognizable as hers. I finished my morning’s work and sat down with my coffee and cigarette to read it. There was never any urgency about the mail.

She always wrote on notepaper just like her: little pink and mauve and white flower bunches on the top left-hand corner of each sheet, a matching mauve envelope. One would expect a lilac scent to float from it. Usually there were two neatly filled sheets; this time a bundle, different.

“Dear Edna,” up by the flowers. Green ink. She always used green ink.

“Dear Edna, This will come as a surprise, but to come right to the point, I’m leaving Frank. I’ve been putting off writing you about it because it’s hard to put down like that, it’s like
saying somebody’s dead, but I’ve known long enough now, I’m used to the idea in a funny sort of way, so now I can write it down. This is the first time, I’m practising on you, because one of the hard things about it is actually telling people. They don’t sell cards so you can just announce it. Not that I’m telling people everything, just that I’m leaving and what my plans are, but you’d be surprised (maybe you wouldn’t) how nosey and rude people can be. It’s all over town, of course you know people here don’t have anything much better to do than talk. Mother is totally humiliated, so she’s furious with me. Not with Frank, even though it’s his fault, but with me because I’ve made a thing about it so everybody knows. She wouldn’t even tell you.

“Anyway, to get to what happened, do you remember my best friend in high school, Carol? She and her husband Tony and Frank and I have chummed around for years. A couple of weeks ago Tony called me and said did I know Carol and Frank were having an affair. Of course I didn’t, so you can imagine how shocked I was. But he had all the proof, dates and times and even a note from Frank to Carol setting something up, he’s so stupid, although I guess I should be glad he is because otherwise I mightn’t have ever found out. Tony kicked the crap out of Carol and I just packed Frank’s things and told him to get lost. It’s bad enough he was screwing around, but with my best friend! When I think about it, I’m more upset with her than I am with him, I mean friends shouldn’t do that, should they? I don’t see how a friend could. And I mean, what is Frank anyway, just some dumb plumber, why should she want him so much, he’s not so hot. Well, she’s got him now, for good if she wants him.