Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (29 page)

The hallway of this house was all wood, polished, fragrant, smooth, cozy as the inside of a nutshell. A yellow lamp was on in the dining room. I did my homework—something I never bothered with, at home, because there was no place or time for it—on the dining room table, after Aunt Madge had spread a newspaper to protect the cloth. Aunt Madge was my great-aunt, my grandmother's sister, they were widows.

Aunt Madge was ironing (they ironed everything, down to underwear and potholders) and my grandmother was making a carrot pudding for supper. Lovely smells. Compare this to the scene at home. The only warm room there was the kitchen; we had a wood stove. My brother brought in wood, and left tracks of dirty snow on the linoleum; I swore at him. Dirt and chaos threatened all the time. My mother often had to lie down on the couch, and tell her grievances. I argued with her whenever possible, and she said my heart would be broken when I had children of my own. We were selling eggs at this time, and everywhere there were baskets of eggs with bits of straw and feathers and hen-dirt stuck to them, waiting to be cleaned. I believed that a smell of hencoops came into the house on boots and clothes and you could not get rid of it.

In the dining room I could look up at two dark oil paintings. They had been done by another sister of my grandmother's, who had died in early middle age. One showed a cottage by a stream and one a dog with a bird in its mouth. My mother had pointed out that the bird was too big, in comparison with the dog.

“Well it was not Tina's mistake, then,” my grandmother said. “It was copied from a calendar.”

“She was talented but she gave it up when she got married,” said Aunt Madge approvingly.

There was also in the room a photograph of my grandmother
and Aunt Madge, with their parents, and this sister who had died, and another sister who had married a Catholic, so that it seemed almost as bad as if she died, though peace was made later on. I did not bother to look at this photograph, except in a passing way, but after my grandmother's death and Aunt Madge's removal to a nursing-home (where she lives yet, lives on and on, unrecognizable, unrecognizing, completely divested of herself, dried up like a little monkey, past all memory and maybe past bewilderment, free), I salvaged it, and have taken it with me wherever I go.

The parents are seated. The mother firm and unsmiling, in a black silk dress, hair scanty and center-parted, eyes bulging and faded. The father handsome still, bearded, hand-on-knee, patriarchal. A bit of Irish acting here, a relishing of the part, which he might as well relish since he cannot now escape it? When young he was popular in taverns; even after his children were born he had the name of a drinker, a great celebrator. But he gave up those ways, he turned his back on his friends and brought his family here, to take up land in the newly opened Huron Tract. This photograph was the sign and record of his achievement: respectability, moderate prosperity, mollified wife in a black silk dress, the well-turned-out tall daughters.

Though as a matter of fact their dresses look frightful; flouncy and countrified. All except Aunt Madge's; a tight, simple, high-necked affair, black with some sparkle about it, perhaps of jet. She wears it with a sense of style, tilts her head a little to the side, smiles without embarrassment at the camera. She was a notable seamstress, and would have made her own dress, understanding what suited her. But it is likely she made her sisters' dresses also, and what are we to make of that? My grandmother is done up in something with floppy sleeves and a wide velvet collar, and a sort of vest with crisscrossed velvet trim; something seems askew at the waist. She wears this outfit with no authority and indeed
with a shamefaced, flushed, half-grinning and half-desperate apology. She looks a great tomboy, her mop of hair rolled up but sliding forward, in danger of falling down. But she wears a wedding ring; my father had been born. She was at that time the only one married; the eldest, also the tallest of the sisters.

At supper my grandmother said, “How is your mother?” and at once my spirits dropped.

“All right.”

She was not all right, she never would be. She had a slowly progressive, incurable disease.

“The poor thing,” Aunt Madge said.

“I have a terrible time understanding her on the phone,” my grandmother said. “It just seems the worse her voice gets, the more she wants to talk.”

My mother's vocal cords were partly paralyzed. Sometimes I would have to act as her interpreter, a job that made me wild with shame.

“I wouldn't wonder she gets lonely out there,” Aunt Madge said. “The poor soul.”

“It would not make any difference where she was,” my grandmother said, “if people cannot understand her.”

My grandmother wanted then a report on our household routine. Had we got the washing done, had we got the washing dried, had we got the ironing done? The baking? My father's socks mended? She wished to be of help. She would make biscuits and muffins, a pie (did we have a pie?); bring the mending and she would do it. The ironing too. She would go out to our place for a day, to help, as soon as the roads were clear. I was embarrassed to think we needed help, and I especially tried to ward off the visits. Before my grandmother came I would be obliged to try to clean the house, reorganize the cupboards as much as possible, shove certain disgraces—a roasting-pan I had never got around to scrubbing, a basket of torn clothes I had told her were already mended—under the sink or the beds. But I never cleaned
thoroughly enough, my reorganization proved to be haphazard, the disgraces came unfailingly to light, and it was clear how we failed, how disastrously we fell short of that ideal of order and cleanliness, household decency, which I as much as anybody else believed in. Believing in it was not enough. And it was not just for myself but for my mother that I had to feel shame.

“Your mother isn't well, she cannot get around to things,” said my grandmother, in a voice that indicated doubt as to how much would have been gotten around to, in any case.

I tried to present good reports. In the old days, when such things were sometimes true, I would say that my mother had made some pickled beets, or that she was busy ripping worn-out sheets down the middle and sewing the outer edges together, to make them last longer. My grandmother perceived the effort, and registered the transparent falsity of this picture (false even if its details were true); she said, well, is she really?

“She's painting the kitchen cupboards,” I said. It was not a lie. My mother was painting our cupboards yellow and on each of the drawers and doors she was painting some decoration: flowers or fish or a sailboat or even a flag. Although her hands and arms trembled she could control the brush sufficiently for a short time. So these designs were not so badly done. Just the same there was something crude and glaring about them, something that seemed to reflect the stiffness and intensity of the stage of the disease my mother had now got into. I did not mention them at all to my grandmother, knowing that she was going to find them extremely bizarre and upsetting. My grandmother and Aunt Madge believed, as most people do, that houses should be made to look as much as possible like other people's houses. Some of the ideas my mother had conceived and carried out could not help but make me see the sense in this conformity.

Also, the paint, the brushes, the turpentine, were left
for me to clean up, since my mother always worked till she was exhausted, then stretched out groaning on the couch.

“There,” said my grandmother with annoyance and satisfaction, “she will get herself involved in something like that, which she ought to know will wear her out, and she will not be able to do any of the things that have to be done. She will be painting the cupboards when she would be better off getting your father's dinner.”

Truer words were never spoken.

After supper I went out, in spite of the weather. A blizzard in town hardly seemed like a blizzard to me; so much was blocked out by the houses and the buildings. I met my friend Betty Gosley, another country girl who was staying in town with her married sister. We were pleased and rather excited to be in town, to be able to
go out
like this into some kind of evening life, not just the dark and cold and rushing storms that wrapped our houses in the country. Here were the streets leading into one another, the lights evenly spaced, a human design that had taken root and was working. People were curling at the curling rink, skating at the Arena, watching the show at the Lyceum Theater, shooting pool in the poolroom, sitting around in two cafés. From most of these activities we were barred by age or sex or lack of money, but we could walk around, we could drink lemon Cokes—the cheapest thing—in the Blue Owl Café, watching who came in, talking with a girl we knew who worked there. Betty and I were not exactly at the center of power, and we spent a lot of time, like nonentities at court, discussing the affairs of those more powerful and fortunate, speculating on the ups and downs of their careers, judging harshly of their morals. We told each other that we would not for a million dollars go out with certain boys, the truth being that we would have dissolved in happiness if these
boys had even called us by name. We talked about which girls might be pregnant. (The winter following this, Betty Gosley herself became pregnant, by a neighboring farmer with a speech impediment and a purebred dairy herd, whom she had never so much as mentioned to me; she then withdrew, abashed and proud, into the privileged life of married women, and could talk of nothing but kitchen showers, linens, baby clothes, morning sickness, which made me both envious and appalled.)

We walked past the house where Mr. Harmer lived. His were the upstairs windows. The lights were on. What did he do in the evenings? He did not take advantage of the entertainment offered in town, was not to be found at the movies or the hockey games. He was not really very popular. And this was why I had chosen him. I liked to think I had a special taste. His pale fine hair, his soft mustache, his narrow shoulders in his worn, tweed, leather-patched jacket, the waspish words which were his classroom substitute for physical force. Once I had talked to him—it was the only time I had talked to him—in the town library. He had recommended to me a novel about Welsh coal miners, which I did not like. There was no sex in it, only strikes and unions, and men.

Walking past his house, loitering under his windows, with Betty Gosley, I did not show my interest in him in any straightforward way but instead made scornful jokes about him, called him a sissy and a hermit, accused him of shameful private practices which kept him home evenings. Betty joined in this speculation but did not really understand why it had to be so wild or go on so long. Then to keep her interest up I began to tease her, I pretended to believe she was in love with him. I said I had seen him looking up her skirt going up the stairs. I said I was going to throw a snowball at the wall between his windows, call him down for her. She was entertained at first by this fantasy, but before long she grew cold and bewildered and cranky, and headed
back towards the main street by herself, forcing me to follow.

And all this wildness, crudity, hilarity, was as far as possible from my private dreams, which were of most tender meetings, chaste embraces melting into holy passion, harmony shadowed by the inevitable parting, high romantic love.

Aunt Madge had been happily married. The happiness of her marriage was remembered and commented on, even in that community where it is usually thought much better to leave such things unsaid. (Even today, if you ask how somebody is, the answer will often be that they are doing well, have bought two cars, have bought a dishwasher, and this way of answering is only partly based on simple, natural, poverty-bred materialism; it comes also from a superstitious kind of delicacy, which skirts even words like
happy, frightened, sad
.)

Aunt Madge's husband had been a leisurely sort of farmer, with political interests; he was opinionated, stubborn, entertaining. There were never any children, to dilute her feelings for him. She took joy in his company. She would never refuse an invitation to go to town with him, to go for a drive with him, even though she took her life in her hands every time she got into his car. He was a terrible driver, and in his later years half-blind. She would never shame him, by learning how to drive, herself. Her support of him was perfect. She could have been held up as an example, an ideal wife, except that she gave no impression of sacrifice, of resignation, of doing one's duty, such as is looked for in ideals. She was light-hearted, impudent sometimes, so she was not particularly respected for her love, but held to be lucky, or half-doty, whichever you liked. After his death she was not really interested in her life; she looked on it as a waiting period—she believed firmly and literally in Heaven—but she had been too well brought up to give way to moping.