The Marriage Bed (4 page)

The kids stood by the carry-cot looking down critically at the newcomer. “He’ll look better, maybe, next week,” said Martha.

Jennifer laughed. “Don’t take any bets,” she said. But she touched the carrier lightly, just once, with her long hand.

“You must find he complicates things for you here, don’t you, Jen?”

“Sure he does. But what the hell. I got lonesome.”

And indeed a profound and permanent loneliness enfolded Jenny as palpably as her long, rich-coloured gowns, and gave her a dignity never seen in simply happy people. Yet you could not possibly feel sorry for her. She seemed to have no particular attachment to anyone, despite the existence of a large, gregarious family. In fact, she ran her life, like her business, with a cool detachment I admired and envied. And the boy in the cot would not alter her basic quality; you could see that by the way she looked at him. Her kind of motherhood would be aloof without being cold, proprietary without being possessive. When I thought of future likely developments in my own she-wolf relationship with my kids, I wondered whether I couldn’t use lessons from Jen in more than weaving. For a minute I stood there watching her thread the shuttle back and forth, back and forth, and her silence rested me. Then the shrill bleat of a noontime factory whistle recalled me to the business of life.

“Oh God, is that noon? Come on, kids. Health Shop next.”

“It’s Monday,” Jen said. “They’re closed today.”

“They would be. It’s shaping into that kind of day. Come on, then, Hugh. Hup-hup, Mar. See you, Jen.”

D
oggedly we set out once more. The little Greek everything shop that was the nearest thing to a supermarket our district had to offer lay two blocks south along the groove of a sawtooth wind off the lake. Violet shuffled along cheerfully enough, the vet now being safely downwind, but Martha paused to slap every bare and creaking tree we passed, and Hugh began to grizzle again, his nose cherry-red in the cold, as the stroller jolted him over ice shards on the pavement.

We were all glad to dive into the shop’s cosy fug smelling of coffee and vegetables and sugary packaged biscuits. The aisles were crammed with every conceivable kind of tinned, packaged, dehydrated, and frozen food. Senior citizens inched up and down the gangways as if mesmerized by such a choice of evils, and over our heads Muzak speakers oozed the kind of vapid tunes some baleful expert had found stimulated consumers to consume more.

I hovered a long time at the bakery shelf, trying without success to find brown bread that wasn’t full of sinister chemicals. One of the many things motherhood had done to me was produce a deep suspicion of all preservatives and artificial flavours added to food. I’d even gone so far as to shape a theory that these additives fostered not only allergies but drug dependence, personality disorders, depression, violence, and racial tension. As theories go, mine seemed to explain the seventies as well as anything else; not that there was much satisfaction in that. Gloomily I chose a small ready-sliced brown loaf loaded with preservatives, as Martha duck-footed toward me lugging a huge box of sugared cereal.

“No, love, we don’t want that kind.” Too late, I remembered that the word “No” invariably triggered a head-on collision with Martha’s will-power, a force Ivan the Terrible himself might have respected. She clamped herself now so tightly to the box that when I tried to get it out of her arms by pulling up, her feet dangled six inches above the ground. With a final jerk I separated
her from the carton and set it out of reach on a shelf. Shrieking with rage, she aimed a kick (which luckily missed) at a display of pet food and rolled herself like a dervish down the narrow aisle. Various elderly shoppers nervously stepped aside to avoid her flailing arms and legs. It was hard to believe, I thought, going in pursuit, that here was a child whose diet was almost entirely free of preservatives.

By the time I reached her, Martha had already attracted a small group of spectators watching the performance with pleasurable horror.

“Well, that one’s got the devil’s own temper, for sure,” said one old man with munching relish.

“Honestly, I don’t know what’s the matter with kids today,” a middle-aged woman with a tic murmured.

“I’d give her a good slap if she were mine,” contributed a grim old person of unidentifiable sex.

“You better be careful, young lady, or a policeman will come and take you off to jail,” a fat woman said, bending menacingly over Martha with her bifocals flashing.

In other circumstances, I would have hauled young Martha to her feet, adding a brisk smack if necessary, and that would have been that. As it was, I gathered her up tenderly and gave her a number of kisses, at the same time spraying the audience with a dismissive glare. The woman in bifocals had a cruel, beak-nosed profile that reminded me of Pamela, a waitress from my childhood, who had the same kind of furrowed face, like some barbarian chieftain slow in the head but nifty with the battle-axe. Just to think of Pamela brought me a retrospective qualm of fear. I must have been about seven when Billie hired her to look after me the three or four evenings a week when she liked to go to the pub.

“Of course, you could easily put yourself to bed,” she said, “and if the hotel bursts into flames, you’ve got two perfectly good legs,
which is more than can be said for most of the poor old bods here. But Pamela will keep you company, and help with your bath, and that will be nicer for you.” What she meant was that this way she could both have her evening out and feel like a wise and generous mother. I grudged her neither of these pleasures, but I did protest.

“Bill, I don’t like Pamela.”

“Why on earth not? She can’t help being fat, you know.”

I thought she could, since I’d seen the number of Mars bars she could put away at a sitting; but this wasn’t the point. Pamela had heavy eyebrows that met and mingled on the bridge of her large, hooked nose. A peculiar metallic smell hung about her, and on one of her broad hands she had a rudimentary sixth finger, a little stump that made me flinch every time it caught my eye. One of her pastimes was to tickle me with fingers that grew increasingly hard and probing, adding sharp little jabs with this deformed stump until my laughter turned to sobbing under the red mask grinning down at me.

“I don’t like it when she tickles me,” I said helplessly.

“Oh, don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud, Anne. Can’t you enjoy a game like anyone else?”

All children learn in ways like this that they can expect no justice in this world. I was no exception; but to this day, I think having Pamela as a babysitter was unusually bad luck in every way. Not only were her looks – and her smell – repulsive, they were deeply disturbing, because I knew these things were the outward signs of her true inner self.

On some evenings she brought along reading matter like
Woman’s Own
and the time went by more or less peacefully; but more often she preferred to talk, thus preventing me from diving into a book of my own, where I was already finding refuge from the world and some of the people in it.

“What’s this, then?” she would say, riffling the pages of
The Magician’s Nephew
or
The Phoenix and the Carpet.
“Rubbish, I call it. Un’ealthy stuff for a kid. Give you nightmares, that will. Now you take my cousin Ede’s boy, ’e’s just about your age, and that kid ’asn’t never ’ad ’is nerves right since the teacher read ’is class some rubbish about a dragon. Walks in ’is sleep, ’e does, like some kind of a zombie, arms ’eld out and ’is eyes wide open, while Ede and ’er friends are trying to get on with a card game or that. It’s ’orrible to see ’im. You want to give ’im a clip round the ear ’ole to wake ’im up, I tell ’er, but Ede won’t do it. I shouldn’t wonder it’ll end in ’im going mental. But there, Ede’s got one boy already stealing knicks off of clotheslines, so maybe it’s in the blood.”

The thought of this corrupted blood creeping along with stolen underwear on its sinister tide was disquieting enough, but as the evening wore on, Pamela often had worse revelations to make.

“No, I wouldn’t want no kids; none of that for me, thank you,” she would go on. “Too much can go wrong, and that’s a fact. There’s my sister, waited ten years and then ’ad ’er first, all them fancy vi’amins and a great big modern ’ospital – and then what ’appened? I’ll tell you what. That baby when it was born ’adn’t got but the one eye, right bang in the middle of its fore’ead. Know what they done? They drowned it, that’s what, right there in the delivery room, in a pail of water.”

Nothing about this narrative struck me as even remotely funny at the time. She would watch me closely all through these accounts, and when I began to swallow and hide my cold and sweating hands, her face would darken with a heavy flush. She saved up for bedtime tales of the psychic experiences of her niece Doreen, who once heard a voice in the wind on Margate sands calling “Beware,” and on another occasion, just before getting into bed, felt a skinny hand grasp her by the ankle and hold her fast.

Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, the things Pamela liked to talk about were just as inescapably true and real as she was herself, and there seemed no way I could discuss either of them with Billie. So I simply accepted fear of the dark, fear of blood, fear of the wind, and fear of Pamela as part of living. When Billie suddenly announced one spring that she thought a few months in Boulogne might be amusing, for once I had no tears to shed at the thought of lost friends and a school actually conducted in French. It wasn’t till years later I realized that I would never be free of her; never. Which may explain a good deal, if not everything, about the way I am now.

I bent over Martha tenderly.

“Now come on, lovey, and we’ll all have a nice ice-cream, how’s that?”

A smile of blissful triumph spread over her fat face. The audience scattered, amid disapproving murmurs. As we all emerged once more into the wind, licking our cones, I muttered “Beware,” and the memory of Pamela shrank just a little.

H
alfway down the block we met my neighbour Junie and her two kids, Darryl dragging dough-faced Charleen along on a toboggan in a series of malicious jerks to make her cry. Snow was now driving in stinging gusts through the grey and bitter air, forming as it fell a layer of hard little pellets underfoot as dry as salt.

“Hi, June. Ugh, isn’t this awful?”

“Mo-om-my. Make Darryl stop that.”

“I need a drink badly,” said Martha.

“Don’t we all. Stop that, Violet.”

“Want to come over for coffee, Anne? Bring the gang, then.”

“Mo-om-my …”

“Shut up, Charleen.”

On we went to this reiterated theme through the blast, pushing or pulling kids and parcels and dogs and ourselves. Under our plodding feet the snow crunched like the salt of Siberian mines. Our street soon mercifully appeared, with its terraced rows of exslummy houses, their doors and woodwork painted bold fuchsia, lime green, or yellow by their trendy occupants. I admired these Depression-built houses for remaining, in spite of everything, stubbornly dated, incorrigibly lower class, with their mean little bay windows and prissy gingerbread trim. What’s more, though they were cheek to cheek, as it were, and blandly similar, each one had none the less an air of separateness that seemed to me very Canadian and satisfactory.

“You sit down, Anne. I’ll get the baby’s stuff off. Darryl, you help Martha with her boots. Coffee or a beer, Anne? No kidding, you look awful. God, when are you due? You must be five feet round, I never saw anything like it.” And she actually pushed a hassock under my feet.

This solicitude was vaguely alarming, because Junie so rarely expressed concern about or even interest in anyone but herself, with the possible exception of the shadow-people in afternoon soaps like
As the World Turns.
In fact, the flickering action on the small screen seemed to her the one reality: life itself from day to day was an illusion she moved through like a somnambulist. Now, though it was only midday, she automatically turned on the set like someone plugging into a vital source; but to my relief she forgot to turn the sound up. The kids immediately squatted around the
TV
, Charleen sucking her thumb, to watch the host of a talk show bare all his glittering teeth at his guest, a frightened middle-aged lady novelist.

“I saw Ross when he called in last week,” June called from the kitchen, where I could see her stirring tap water into the powdered instant.

I’ll bet you did, I thought unkindly. When I say June Williamson isn’t interested in real people, I mean with the exception of one and all circulating in and out of our house next door.

“Well, anything new with him?”

“Nothing much. He did the ironing. As usual. Fixed the bathroom tap. Read a story to the kids. And then took off.”

“That was Tuesday. Haven’t heard from him since? Sheesh. Aren’t men the pits.” Junie’s idiom was terrifically with it and up to date; but I sometimes wondered whether it meant she was advanced or retarded for her age, which was thirty-four.

Now should I tell her Mother is coming for tea, or let her have the thrill of catching it without preparation? Decisions, decisions. Christ, it was delicious to be sitting down. While June rummaged biscuits out of a packet, I sighed and closed my eyes to the rhythmic scratching of Violet; opened them a minute or two later to find the talk-show man now looking rather nervously at the novelist, who was laughing.

“Not asleep, are you?” demanded June’s thin voice. My eyes blinked to focus her long, narrow face, green eyeshadow over close-set eyes, the whole in a lavish Botticelli frame of dry, frizzy hair.

No such luck, I thought ungratefully, and sipped my lukewarm drink.

“I mean like what are you going to
do
about that guy, Anne? Call him up and tell him to get lost permanently, I would.”

“I can’t call him up.”

“Good grief, why not?”

“Too proud or something. Or just bloody-minded. I don’t know. It’s being in the wrong, it makes me stubborn as hell.”

“In the wrong! What next. He’s the one shacked up with someone else. I mean this is why divorce was
invented,
right?”