Object of Your Love (16 page)

Reed stands up and presses the back of his hand to his mouth.

“Those tools are only half yours,” Anne reminds Eric, “and you've got no use for them in an apartment anyway. Now, I want you to clear out of here, or I'll call the cops.”

Eric stands there for a moment, clenching his fists, evidently considering his options. At last he says, “Okay, fine. I'll go peacefully. But that doesn't mean I won't be back.”

“Oh, you scare me to death,” says Anne, mocking him.

“Come on, Mom,” says Eric bitterly, getting behind the wheel.

Mrs. King moves slowly to the car and opens her door. She climbs in awkwardly as though she's forgotten what a car is, her legs stiff, her feet clumsy in her thick-heeled shoes, both hands braced on the door frame, her square purse banging against her hip. The car drives off up the hill to the highway, spitting gravel out from under its tires.

Anne leads Reed into the kitchen, where she examines his split mouth.

“Your husband is an asshole,” Reed tells her, wincing as she applies ice to his mouth.

“Well, in three weeks he won't be my husband any more, but he'll still be your brother,” says Anne, and Reed snorts with bitter amusement.

“Why'd you take the wrench?” she asks.

“I got something I can use it on. D'you mind?”

“No,” she says quickly.

“I didn't think you would,” he says with a knowing smirk. He takes her hand away from his face, seizes her by the wrist and pulls her roughly toward him. He bends to kiss her and she is lifted back to the summer of the white ship. Now she feels Reed's strong fingers pulling the tails of her blouse out of her shorts, his rough oilman's hands riding up her stomach, pushing back her bra. He kneads her breasts rhythmically, with bruising strength, watching her face. She winces, aroused but torn. Soon they will lie down together, Reed will slide into her, greedy, fugitive, brutal, drive himself deep within her, stirring up old wounds, old desires. Anne wants him. She wants him, and yet. And yet, some part of her is saddened, humiliated by her need to be entered, replenished, completed by this blood brother of her ex-husband, this second son of a woman she hates. For doesn't this make her, when all is said and done, no better than they? All these years when she thought she was so much above Eric's family, so separate from their violence, their disloyal ways, she is still turning to them for sustenance, for approbation.

“Tell you what,” Reed says. “Why don't you go and fix yourself up while I smoke a joint? Jesus, I've been waiting for a high all afternoon.”

Anne goes into the bathroom to freshen up, then crosses the hall to her bedroom, where she pulls out a drawer, looking for something enticing to wear. She pauses for a moment, stepping to the window to look out. It is nearly eight o'clock and dusk is falling, the grey light flattening the shapes of everything. The river has turned silver in the soft night. Anne watches its steady, drugged current, feels herself pulled down by it. For a moment, she sees herself—a young, rebellious woman many years ago—standing on the shore of the river, flinging her wallet, identification and all, out across the gleaming surface. What I really wanted to do that day, she now realizes, was to throw myself into the river, to free myself of Eric and his family forever, to sink gently beneath the watery surface, sending out a delicate pattern of ripples.

The smell of Reed's joint drifts down the hall to her.

I must go and tell Reed I want him to leave, thinks Anne. But she does not move. She stands at the window biting her nails. I must go and tell him that.

THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

TARA SAID
, “That Irmgard!”

“That Irmgard!” she said one Saturday afternoon at the kitchen table where she was doing her homework.

Franklin was opposite her, sorting his hockey cards.

“That Irmgard! I just love her!” Tara was in the co-op program at school where they go out half-days into the community and work in some job situation to get an idea of different walks of life. Harlan had got her a placement at his school, with the kindergarten teacher.

I said, “Irmgard, Irmgard.” I was washing up the lunch dishes. “When will we stop hearing about Irmgard?”

Tara said, “Irmgard's wonderful. Isn't she, Dad?”

Harlan, reading nearby on the family-room sofa, looked up. “She's a very fine teacher,” he said neutrally.

“She knows every one of those kindergarten children inside out,” Tara told us. “She listens. She understands. She loves them like a mother. She sees their faults and yet she doesn't criticize. She brings out their strengths instead. They adore her.”

I said, “You've turned her into a saint because of her wooden leg. Would you canonize me if I had one?” I heard Harlan sigh from the couch.

“Irmgard is strong and deep and good,” Tara said, her voice quivering with admiration.

I said, “And, of course, I'm not.”

“Why are you so insecure? Why do you take everything personally?” Tara asked bitterly, her eyes blazing at me. The hatred of teenagers is so pure. Pure as the wind. It takes your breath away. Sometimes Tara looked at me with such loathing that I had to wonder who it was she was seeing.

“Did you hear what she said, Harlan?” I demanded, looking to him for support, always a mistake.

“You do seem to be threatened by other people's strengths,” he said with gentle honesty.

“Do you think that, Franklin?” I asked, looking at our son, who gave a little, torn smile. He was an expert at skating around conflict.

“I don't suppose we could go down to the store and buy me some more hockey cards?” he said, his voice like a sparrow's song. He was at that golden age of childhood, which seems to fall between the ages of ten and twelve. Children at that age are blessed in a way that they never will be again in their lives. They are full of optimism and naivety and such deep trust in life that it breaks your heart in a way. He played goalie on a bantam team. It was enough to make him happy. Life could be that simple.

Tara said, “I want to model myself after Irmgard. I've decided I'm going to be a teacher.”

I said, “A teacher! You're going to throw yourself away on a pack of brats like your father did?”

“What do
you
think I should be?” asked Tara. “A waitress?”—which of course was a dig at me. Then for an instant she looked so like my mother. It was not just the thick black hair falling against the fine bones of her face, but something more—in her expression I saw my mother the blind missionary, the willing victim, the fortress, the wise, profound and unshakable woman I could never reach or understand—and I felt that already Tara had passed me in life somehow.

Of course, then, Tara decided to pack up her books and march off in a huff to work in her room. Franklin slid away from the table too. He had an instinct for seeking out places of calm, like a river flowing gently to the sea.

After they were gone, Harlan sighed that weary little sigh he'd perfected and looked at me tragically, a thick text balanced on his knee. He always had his nose in some book, being what they call cerebral. When I met him I was working down on Elgin Street in a diner and he used to come across from the old stone teachers' college after classes and sit in one of the window booths in the sun, reading some tome and drinking coffee or enjoying a student's supper of minestrone soup. Beyond the window, the world slid past, unnoticed by him. His long flowing hair and full blond beard lent him a biblical look.

“Here comes the prophet Abraham,” I'd say to the girls when we saw him come in, and though I joked, I sensed the strength in him. Sitting there in the sun, he seemed to be the source of the light, its power spread out from him miraculously, and along with it a serenity that must have come from the great weight of knowledge he'd amassed in his young head, leaving him at peace, grounded, like a ship at anchor. This aura flowing out from him filled me with irrational hope. One day I went over and handed him an extra paper serviette.

I said, “You have let soup fall in your beard.”

“Thank you,” he said, taking the serviette and dabbing at his beard. “I am often absent-minded.” He looked up at me, searching my face carefully. “Would you like to go to a movie on your day off?” he asked, though it was obvious he'd never seen me before, notwithstanding that I'd been carrying his coffee to him for months, taking special care not to slop it over the rim and sometimes sliding a digestive cookie onto the saucer too. He'd never noticed I hadn't charged him for the cookies, and for all I knew he didn't even remember eating them. His face told me he was fond of people, even of strangers. His expression was warm and spontaneous and so ready to let me in that for just an instant I feared for him. “You are very observant,” he said, and he told me he thought I'd be good for him, I'd keep him connected to “real life.”

Soon, Harlan was saying he'd never met a girl like me before. He said he loved my skewed sense of humour and my rebelliousness and my strength and he loved my family, because of course I'd taken him home by this time. He said he especially loved my brother Art and I said, “You've got to be kidding.” Then Harlan came out with all this psychological bunk about Art being a free spirit and an original personality and misunderstood by society and
blah-blah-blah,
and I told him, “Harlan, you've got a lot to learn.”

When we got married, Harlan taught grade one and for a long time I looked up to him and felt proud and amazed to be his wife. After a while, though, I kept expecting him to grow up and get tired of playing with Plasticine and wooden blocks, but he said there was a lot more to his job than that. He got a reputation all over the school board as a progressive teacher, an advocate of what they now call child-centred learning. He moved the desks out of his classroom and put a sofa and an Indian rug in their place to make the children think that learning was not a task but a natural and easy part of life. He got rid of tests and marks and report cards. He was all in favour of self-esteem and emotional growth. Once there was a big article on him in the paper that I cut out and thought about having framed. People began to say to him: Why don't you move on? Why don't you go for principal? Why don't you develop curricula, spread your message from the top down? But he said no, he liked it at the grass roots, he didn't want to lose touch with “The Children.” I told him, “You could make more money in administration, you could
be
somebody,” but he just gave me that pitying smile I was becoming accustomed to. I told him he wasn't a real man—because you don't see grown men, do you, teaching little kids, it's unnatural?

So on Saturday afternoon, after Tara cleared off to her room, Harlan came to me in the kitchen, walking softly in his bare feet like a Buddhist monk, and laid a heavy book down beside me on the counter.

“What's this?” I said.

“It's all about adolescents and how to deal with them,” he said in his best professional voice. “I think you should read it.” Beneath the harsh kitchen lights, his head gleamed, for by this time he had grown quite bald. You do often seem to see this in highly intellectual men, these scalps as smooth as an egg, as though the power of their thinking has forced all the hair out.

I said, “I don't need any books on psychology. I know when I'm being talked back to by a teenager.” I took the book and dropped it in the dishwater even though it was an old weathered hardcover and probably from the library. Harlan snatched it out before it sank completely and quietly stood it up in the dish drainer, patiently fanning out the pages to dry. He closed his eyes like a priest about to administer a prayer and pinched the bridge of his nose contemplatively with his finger and thumb.

“I'm going out for a walk,” he said with great control.

I said, “Where do you go on these walks? You disappear for hours.”

“They help me to think.”

“Maybe you think too
much.
”

The house was very quiet after he left. I went to Franklin, who'd turned on a hockey game on television. He had Harlan's fair colouring, the same translucent skin, the blond eyelashes, the ivory hair, the pale, graceful, feminine hands. He was pure and essential, like sand or a field of wheat.

I said, “Come for a drive with me. We could go and see Grandma and Grandpa.”

“Will Art be there?”

“Hopefully not.”

“I wouldn't want to go if Art wasn't there.”

“What is so wonderful about Art, I'd like to know?”

“I better stay here, Mom,” he said from that cool, peaceful centre of his. Sometimes he had a soft way of talking that made him sound like a miniature Harlan. “I need to watch this game.”

*   *   *

When I reached my parents' apartment I apprehended them in the front hall, on their way out. My mother had put on her ultrasuede coat, which she wears only for special occasions. Each time I saw her now, I had to look twice, because retirement had entirely transformed her. She'd become elegant, happy, young—all the things I'd wanted her to be when I was growing up. Throughout her life she'd worked on the counter of a small dry cleaner, taking in the customers' garments, or matching up their tickets to the dry cleaning that whizzed by on one of those electronic revolving racks, and in between that, working on a sewing machine in a corner doing small repairs, mending seams and replacing zippers. I remember her being tired all the time and wearing faded cotton housedresses and running shoes to work and not taking care of her looks.

But now that she was retired I hardly recognized her. She was unexpectedly attractive, modern and smoothly groomed, with her hair cut straight across at her eyebrows and in a thick wedge to her shoulders, like an Egyptian empress. She'd become what people like to call “a handsome woman.” She had height on her side and she carried herself well, with such dignity and poise that people often remarked on it. “It's Art,” she'd tell them then. “It's Art who's given me this grace,” and I'd say, “It's Art who's turned you grey!”