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Authors: Elizabeth Hay

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BOOK: Small Change
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“Ah, it’s you,” said Carol, smiling her deep real welcome. We walked to the end of the block, past the stretch of sidewalk torn up in a different place each week and for no clear
purpose. I had planned to go into the drugstore to get cough syrup for my daughter. I walked with Carol instead, as though breaking away to go into the store would be breaking away from the friendship.

At the corner Carol said they needed to borrow the car, they had to pick up a box of their belongings shipped from Italy.

I said yes, I knew. Mario had called.

There is so much balefulness under the surface of friendship. I wonder about it and give in to it, just as I often give in to the shy and savage impulse to cross the street and avoid someone I know. But I did not avoid Carol. We walked down the block together, genuinely glad to see each other, genuinely entering into the appearance of being glad. She invited us to come for dinner. “Saturday, Sunday, you pick,” she said.

We kissed each other goodbye and I went home, lulled by her friendliness. I felt well-liked and this relaxed me.

2

Sunshine followed two days of rain. It was late September, the streets and air were clean, light filled any apartment higher than the second floor. Carol lived on the eleventh floor. She sat on her new sofa beside a row of windows and said she felt old.

“I am,” she said, “I’m finally aging.”

She had been aging for a long time: her hair had gone silver when she was thirty, she had had a child when she was
forty, another when she was forty-two; fatigue had settled into her dark eyes and into her skin, but she was still very beautiful. She knew it and was attached to the idea: she wanted to be beautiful and to be reminded that she was. She also knew that hers was not a common beauty. Women appreciated her face far more than men.

The sofa was L-shaped and expensive, made of green fabric and light wood. I was sitting beside her and I said, “You look well.”

“No. I don’t.”

“You do.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She wasn’t wearing makeup. She had stopped a few months ago, having worn it unfailingly for years. While not wanting to look old, she wanted to underscore her age. Mario was working in their bedroom down the hall. He was a student, fifteen years younger than she was, and the marriage was on the skids.

Before my arrival she had changed her T-shirt for a silk blouse and a necklace of silver and jade. She said to me, “I thought to myself, Beth is coming; let me put on one of my necklaces.”

I watched her with a certain tenderness not because she wasn’t as beautiful any more, and she wasn’t, but because she could have been had she been less troubled by her age. I enjoyed her face the way Mario should have. Carol knew this, it was almost an unstated joke between us. We sat together on the sofa, saying what a relief it was to look at things that were pleasing to the eye, and we knew we were talking not just
about the sofa, but about each other. She told me not to cut my hair and never to get bangs. “I’ve never liked bangs,” she said. “Women with strong faces shouldn’t wear bangs.” (I’m wearing bangs now, several years later, and she’s right. It was a mistake.)

Then she showed me photographs of Mario. Look at him, she said, just look at him: he could be a movie star. They were pictures of the birth of the second child: Mario held the baby in front of the hospital window, then Carol held the baby in front of the same window, he as unaffected by the birth as she had been changed – her face wide, white, and exhausted. She didn’t want to be a young man’s old wife, but she had let herself fall in love and now she was letting herself look old. These lapses in her resistance – falling in love, getting old – were at the same time displays of resistance: to being old, to being unloved.

I sat with my back twisted slightly to the side so that I faced her. Even though the position was uncomfortable and my back began to hurt I didn’t move, because any shift might have led Carol to believe that I wasn’t as interested as I appeared to be. I struck a pose for fixed friendship. I was a statue with rocks in my head. A woman with no notion, not so much as the N of a notion, of how to move easily and as myself inside a friendship. So of course the friendship had to fail, and probably as explosively as it did.

The new sofa was an investment in their marriage. Carol and Mario stood in the store and he said, “Buy it.”

“But the price!”

“Buy it.”

Mario studied out of sight and hearing down the hall, his shoulders bent over his books. He was far behind Carol in
most ways: she dominated with her experience, her education, her command of the language, her money. But an older woman’s pride is nothing compared to a young man’s physical vanity and lack of self-reproach. Before the birth, on the day Carol was expecting to go into labour, she sat at my kitchen table and tried to get Mario to pay attention to her. He only had eyes for my two-year-old son with whom he played.

“I get very childish at times like this,” she said. “I start to say, I don’t want to be here.” By
here
she meant the hospital. “I don’t want to be here.” And she talked about getting an epidural as soon as she went in.

I told her to be sure to take food along. I had given birth at three in the morning, not eaten until eight, and suffered from hypoglycemia all the next day. She said to Mario, “Listen. You should be listening to this.” But he was all smiles, all don’t worrys, all pleasantness, absence, evasion, putdown. Playing with my little boy.

“I’ll be surrounded by women,” he told me after learning the second child would be a girl.

“Are you disappointed?”

“Oh no. I adore women.”

I told Carol that she looked great. “Doesn’t she look beautiful,” I said to Mario.

He looked away, off into space, and after a moment he said, “Sometimes.”

I had attention to offer. I focused on Carol, was expected to focus on her, because her husband did not. Had the marriage been different, the friendship would have been different, not
in its mechanics but in the intensity of its tone and the quality of its relief. Carol welcomed me like a new and peaceful landscape.

In October she insisted she was all right, even while tears welled up in her eyes and her face constricted and changed colour. We sat for an hour and a half in a restaurant, Carol playing with the utensils she didn’t use and saying little, me playing with the dead skin on my elbows and saying less. She didn’t want to talk about the marriage. Had never wanted to talk about it in detail. She would say, “It’s awful, just awful.” I would ask why and she would answer, “It’s so awful I can’t talk about it.”

She liked to state things in extremes. Something was
terrible
. Something else was
awful
. That must be
awful
for you, she would say, and you would think no, it’s not so awful, but feel pleased she thought so, as though she had handed you a compliment. She dominated the conversation not with talk, but with her pauses which I didn’t know how to fill, with her tears which she wiped away, and her reassurances that she was fine. She liked the drama of announcing something without explaining it. And so her mood dominated, her problems dominated, her thoughts dominated, but they did not satisfy.

Our small square table had two paper napkins and two sets of utensils provided by the hopeful waiter, one glass of red wine, and one beer and a glass. Carol drank her beer quickly, I drank my wine slowly. It was the wrong wine. I had asked for white.

“Will it be wasted if you take it back?” I asked the waiter. Yes, it would be thrown out. “Then I’ll drink it.”

Carol didn’t understand this. “You ordered white,” she said, “you wanted white.”

The restaurant was large, well-used, and on a corner, an easy place to meet. I used to come here, I told her, with two other friends who were taking the same film course. I was thinking that it was easier to come with two people than with one. The thought didn’t articulate itself except as an overeager smile.

It smelled of Paris to Carol. She said so out loud. “It smells of Paris,” sniffing the coffee in the air. This should have been a pleasant association but it wasn’t; her sister had just died in Paris, she had gone to the funeral and found the city too polished, too full of tourists. A place you pass through, a restaurant you pass through – a friendship – with the same attitude as a traveller’s: curious, uncommitted, detached.

“It’s so tough on Emma,” she finally said.

“It’s tough on you too,” I said.

She smiled through her tears and repeated that it was tough on her daughter.

I wanted to know what would happen, where Mario would go if they split up, how she would manage with a small child and a baby, whether she regretted having the baby, whether she blamed herself. But none of the questions seemed appropriate either because they were too personal, or because they were unanswerable.

I reached across the table and took her small hand. First I touched the little finger the way you might a child’s curled-up fist, to make it open. Her fingers loosened, gave way, and pressed mine in turn. She smiled again and wiped her eyes. Then she started to talk about her past. She had always fallen
for men much younger or much less educated than herself, creating a new imbalance in order to right the age-old imbalance between men and women. A recipe for failure and something that didn’t bear examination, the failing of a marriage no one thought would work.

And the failing now of friendship. She was quick to finish her beer, quick to realize the visit wasn’t satisfying and wouldn’t be, quick to feel bored and want to get away. But I was slow with my wine, intent upon finding some way to show my affection and desire to help, even as I had no help to offer and nothing to say.

3

In an old notebook I find the beginning of my first fight with Carol and the beginning is so peaceful. We were on a ferry at midnight, the sea breezes soft and cool, the kids asleep in the back seat of the old Chevette. We leaned against the railing, Ted and I, our bodies still hot from the city and stiff from the car, and felt a brief, quick sense of voyage. We came to an island full of deep green hollows in one of which we found Carol’s cottage lit up like something Japanese made of paper and wood.

I come upon this scene by chance and feel the sudden dread, the sense of inevitability, about what is coming next. We had known Carol and Mario, at this point, for six months. That night we slept in their cottage, the next day we swam in a pond. Carol said, “It’s amazing to be surrounded by salt water and swimming in a freshwater pond.” The day after that we were having our first salty-corrosive spat in the
middle of a soft afternoon. I had just criticized her for her overwrought
ohs
of lament whenever her daughter Emma got upset.

“You mean her traumas aren’t really traumas?” acidly. “They’re not as real as adult traumas?”

I was irked because the day before Carol had spoken sharply to my daughter. Her remarks had occurred on the beach and were hardly severe. “Annie, it’s not that important,” when Emma attacked and spilled her pie plate of sand, Annie crying out as Emma hit it. Then Annie said something was hers which wasn’t. Carol said, “No. It’s
not
yours.”

But when Emma spilled her own pie plate of sand it was, “Poor Emma! Oh,
poor
Emma!”

Mothers who think their children can do no wrong
went the bitter little chant in my head. I expect this is fairly common. Women often meet each other as mothers, in playgrounds, outside stores, on the beach, drawn together by mutual need, only to discover in a few days, or weeks, or months, that as mothers we can’t stand each other. Later that same day I yelled fiercely at Annie twice. Then I brooded about my behaviour, suspecting that my harshness with Annie gave others the licence to be harsh, and knowing that my harshness was a reflection of my tension about her as a child and about myself as a mother. No mystery here, just the usual unbearable nature of family life. But it laid the groundwork for my impulsive criticism of Carol the following day.

She cooked bacon as we fought, burning it on too hot a stove, then she dumped the frypan into the sink and scoured furiously while I poked at my eyes with an orange towel.

Dissecting the fight now, I remember the incredibly beautiful light-green praying mantis we found on a leaf exactly the same shade. Carol had been looking for the source of a certain fragrance and had found it in a high lush hedge yards away from the sea. On one of the leaves she found the praying mantis. She said, “I think I’ll come back here tonight to sleep.”

That beautiful bug, invisible in its beauty, having become the leaf. While I stood out. Made myself stand out. Pushed myself into the open and got creamed.

Carol: you aren’t honest; your comments are underhanded; if you were upset with me, why didn’t you just say so?

Me: conversations aren’t always perfectly staged, we say things impulsively; I’m out of sorts; maybe, I said pathetically, I’m pregnant.

And what I thought and didn’t say: I am afraid of you. No matter what I said you would have taken it as criticism, and attacked, and won.

I was so full of tears (people who cry easily should never fight) that I had to leave the house. I walked out through the sliding glass door, leaving Ted and Mario with their softly dismayed faces hovering over the children, and across the lawn and down the road to the sea. I was a child again. I was too small for the big mess I had made. I was walking down a dusty road in the full heat of midday, quivering in shock from the head-on collision I had just staged. I couldn’t believe that I had created something so punishing for myself and so full of reverberations for everyone else. For half an hour I walked. Then I went back.

I came across the lawn and beautiful Carol dressed in pink spread out her arms and welcomed me back. I almost went down on my knees in gratitude.

One year went by, and I was careful. Carol and Mario went to Italy the next year. They came back and seven more careful months went by. Then we had our big fight.

I began to write about the fight this morning, safe in my little room in Ottawa, when the phone rang. Carol was calling from New York. We had not spoken in two years, and she was calling. Such is the magnetism of stories and guilt. I listened to her voice, feeling horror, affection, and the old desire to make myself likeable. She needed something from Ted and I would give him the message; it was wonderful to hear each other’s voices; we would do our utmost to get together, and so on. I hung up and wrote down the words: Nothing escapes her. I wrote down: I am taken over by what I’m drawn to: her vivid, effusive, perceptive, exaggerating presence. I wrote: I am afraid she will read this, yet I write it anyway; always afraid of someone’s reaction, yet writing anyway. I feel her glittering eyes cutting into me, seeing all there is to see.

BOOK: Small Change
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