Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (33 page)

“Years ago, and in Gestalt too. I
really
did it in Gestalt. I worked it all out and finished with it.”

I have not worked through anything
, Eileen thought. And further:
I do not believe things are there to be worked through
.

People die; they suffer, they die. Their mother had died of ordinary pneumonia, after all that craziness. Illness and accidents. They ought to be respected, not explained. Words are all shameful. They ought to crumble in shame.

The words from
The Prophet
, read at the Memorial Service that afternoon, had offended Eileen. Such fraud, she thought, such insolence. Unintentional—offered in fact with the modern equivalent of piety—but that was no excuse. Now in drunk reflection she saw that no words would have been any better.
Now in sure and certain hope.…
No fraud in the words but what fraud now in saying them. Silence the only possible thing.

At one time she and June had been worth more consideration than they were now. At one time they had been less offensive. Was that not so? Ewart too, the neighbors too, the Unitarians too. At one time we could all be trusted to know what we meant, but not now, although we all mean well. June has been in Growth Groups, she has learned Yoga, she has looked into Transcendental Meditation; she has been naked, with others, in a warm pool on an expensive island. As for Eileen, she has read a great deal, and knows how to be offended by all kinds of cheapness. You would think they
would be better off than their mother was. But something is wrong just the same. The only thing that we can hope for is that we lapse now and then into reality, thinks Eileen, and falls asleep for a few seconds, to wake up scared, fingers tightening on the glass.

Almost spilled it. The rug, the spread. She drank all that was left and set the glass on the bedside table and almost at once fell asleep.

She woke still drunk, not knowing the time. The house was quiet. She got up, thought she must change into nightclothes. First she went to the bathroom, wearing her dark blue caftan, and then into the kitchen to look at the electric clock. The kitchen light was on. It was only a quarter past eleven.

She drank a full glass of cold water, which she knew from experience would reduce, or if she was lucky entirely eliminate, her morning headache. She went out the side door to the garage, thinking that she would stand there out of the rain and breathe fresh air. The door was up. Wavering, she felt her way along the wall past coiled garden hose and tools hung on nails. She heard someone coming but was not worried. She was too drunk. She did not care who it was or what they thought of her, finding her here.

It was Ewart. He had the watering can.

“June?” he said. “June? Eileen. I didn't see how it could be June. She took two sleeping pills.”

“What are you doing,” said Eileen. Her voice was drunk, challenging but not really quarrelsome.

“Watering.”

“It's raining. Ewart you are a fool.”

“It's not raining any more.”

“It was earlier. I noticed when we were in the living room.”

“I had to water the new shrubs. They take an incredible amount of water at first. You can't depend on the rain being enough. Even for the first day.”

He was putting the can away. He came round the cars to her.

“Eileen. You better go in. You had a lot to drink. June looked in on you earlier. She said you were dead to the world.”

He was drunk too. She knew, not by his voice or by the way he moved, but by a certain weight, a density and stubbornness he had, standing in front of her.

“Eileen. You were crying. That's very kind of you.”

Not for Douglas, she had not been crying for Douglas.

“Eileen you know it's been a great help to June, having you here.”

“I haven't done anything. I wish I could do something.”

“Just having you here. June values you so much.”

“Does she?” said Eileen, not disbelievingly. How Ewart compelled politeness, even when they were both drunk.

“She is not able to express herself sometimes. She seems—you know, sometimes she seems a little—bossy. She is aware of it. But it is hard to change.”

“Eileen.” Ewart moved the two steps that brought him against her.

Eileen was a hospitable woman, particularly when drunk. This embrace did not exactly take her by surprise. It had been predicted, though she would be hard put to say how. Perhaps with Eileen—alone, wayward, astonishingly limp at times though brisk enough at others—such an embrace could always be predicted. And she permitted, she almost welcomed it, how could she extricate herself without gross unkindness? Even if this had not been in her plans, she could shift her expectations around enough to make room for it, thinking, as she usually thought at such moments, why not?

Women like this, women who think like this, are generally believed to be lackadaisical, purely wanting in
spirit, dazed receptacles, pitiable. Other women express this opinion and men too, the very men in fact who have burrowed in them with every sign of gratitude and appreciation. Eileen knew this. She found it far from the fact. She supposed she was easily aroused. At the moment, not very much so; she did not anticipate great pleasure from her brother-in-law Ewart—who was now maneuvering her, with more determination and adroitness than she would have expected, toward the back seat of the larger car—but she did more than suffer him. Nearly always she did more than that She liked their faces at these times. She liked their seriousness—lovely devout and naked seriousness, attention to realities, their own realities.

Repetition of her name was all the speech she got from him. She had heard that before. What did Ewart mean by that name, what was Eileen to him? Women have to wonder. Pinned down not too comfortably on a car seat—one leg crooked and held against the back of the seat in danger of getting a cramp—they will still look for clues, and store things up in a hurry to be considered later. They have to believe that more is going on than seems to be going on; that is part of the trouble.

What Eileen meant to Ewart, she would tell herself later, was confusion. The opposite of June, wasn't that what she was? The natural thing for a man in pain to look for, who loves and fears his wife. The brief restorative dip. Eileen is aimless and irresponsible, she comes out of the same part of the world accidents come from. He lies in her to acknowledge, to yield—but temporarily, safely—to whatever has got his son, whatever cannot be spoken of in his house. So Eileen, with her fruitful background of reading, her nimble habit of analysis (material and direction different from June's, but the habit not so different, after all), can later explain and arrange it for herself. Not knowing, never knowing, if that is not all literary, fanciful. A woman's body. Before and during the act they seem to invest this body with certain individual
powers, they will say its name in a way that indicates something particular, something unique, that is sought for. Afterwards it appears that they have changed their minds, they wish it understood that such bodies are interchangeable. Women's bodies.

Eileen was packing. She folded the wrinkled, stained caftan and put it at the bottom of her suitcase, in a hurry lest June, who had two or three times passed her door, should decide to come in. She and June were alone in the house. The children were all back at school today, and Ewart had driven over to town to get some piping for the water system. June was to drive Eileen to the airport.

June did come in. “It's too bad you have to go so soon,” she said. “I feel we haven't done anything for you. We haven't taken you anywhere. If you could stay a few days longer.”

“I didn't expect,” said Eileen. She was not appalled as she would have been the first day, not surprised. She knew that if she stayed a few days more June really would make an effort to show her the city, even though she had seen it before. She would be taken up the chairlift, driven through the parks, taken to look at totem poles.

“You must come for a real visit,” said June.

“I haven't helped you the way I meant to,” Eileen said. No sooner was that sentence out than it flung itself inside out and grinned at her. This was a day when there was nothing she could say that would work.

“I always pack more than I need.”

June sat on the bed. “He was not killed in the accident, you know.”

“Not killed?”

“Not in the actual crash. It couldn't have been too bad, really. Those other kids were just scratched up. He was
dazed, probably. I think he was probably dazed. He climbed out of the car, they all did. The car was at a very strange angle on the roadbank. You see it had sort of climbed the bank and it was on its side, it must have been on its side, like this”—June set one hand, the fingers spread and slightly trembling, on top of the other—“but on a corner, too, sort of—tilted. I don't really understand how it could have been. I try to picture it but I really can't. I mean I can't understand the angle it must have been at and how it could have been high enough. It fell on him. The car just—it fell on him, and he was killed. I don't know how he was standing. Or maybe he was not standing. You know, he may have—crawled out and been trying to get up. But I can't really understand how. Can you picture it?”

“No,” said Eileen.

“I can't either.”

“Who told you that?”

“One of the boys who—one of the other boys told his mother and she told me.”

“Maybe that was cruel.”

“Oh, no,” said June in a thoughtful voice. “No. I don't think so. You do want to know.”

In the mirror over the dresser Eileen could see her sister's face, the downward profile, which was waiting, perhaps embarrassed, now that this offering had been made. Also her own face, surprising her with its wonderfully appropriate look of tactfulness and concern. She felt cold and tired, she wanted mostly to get away. It was an effort to put her hand out. Acts done without faith may restore faith. She believed, with whatever energy she could summon at the moment, she had to believe and hope that was true.

The Ottawa Valley
 

I think of my mother sometimes in department stores. I don't know why, I was never in one with her; their plenitude, their sober bustle, it seems to me, would have satisfied her. I think of her of course when I see somebody on the street who has Parkinson's disease, and more and more often lately when I look in the mirror. Also in Union Station, Toronto, because the first time I was there I was with her, and my little sister. It was one summer during the War, we waited between trains; we were going home with her, with my mother, to her old home in the Ottawa Valley.

A cousin she was planning to meet, for a between-trains visit, did not show up. “She probably couldn't get away,” said my mother, sitting in a leather chair in the darkly paneled Ladies' Lounge, which is now boarded up. “There was probably something to do that she couldn't leave to anybody else.” This cousin was a legal secretary, and she worked for a senior partner in what my mother always called, in her categorical way, “the city's leading law firm.” Once she had come to visit us, wearing a large black hat and a black suit, her lips and nails like rubies. She did not bring her husband. He was an alcoholic. My mother always mentioned that her husband was an alcoholic, immediately after she had stated that she held an important job with the city's leading law firm. The two things were seen to balance each other, to be tied together in some inevitable and foreboding way. In the same way my mother would say of a family we knew that they had everything money could buy but their
only son was an epileptic, or that the parents of the only person from our town who had become moderately famous, a pianist named Mary Renwick, had said that they would give all their daughter's fame for a pair of baby hands.
A pair of baby hands?
Luck was not without its shadow, in her universe.

My sister and I went out into the station which was like a street with its lighted shops and like a church with its high curved roof and great windows at each end. It was full of the thunder of trains hidden, it seemed, just behind the walls, and an amplified voice, luxuriant, powerful, reciting place names that could not quite be understood. I bought a movie magazine and my sister bought chocolate bars with the money we had been given. I was going to say to her, “Give me a bite or I won't show you the way back,” but she was so undone by the grandeur of the place, or subdued by her dependence on me, that she broke off a piece without being asked.