SOMEHOW, EVEN THOUGH SHE FAILED HER CIVIL-SERVICE exam, Maureen got a job as the assistant to the film-strip librarian at the Department of Education Film Library. Gerry was the film-strip librarian, and he was old, but as old as he was, he didn’t really need an assistant for the simple reason that no one ever wanted to borrow film strips anymore.
A cute but dorky guy named George, who was doing a master’s degree in English at the university, worked in the film library, humping around those big heavy cans of film, checking them out and restacking them on the shelves when they came back. There was a steady stream of films being borrowed and brought back, but George always found time to hang out in the tiny film-strip library room to talk to Maureen—talk at Maureen, really. He talked at her about Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, about Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and Mike Hammer. Maureen could not be less interested. She dismissed all those books as penny dreadfuls, mindless pulp, but George was doing his master’s thesis on mid-century American hard-boiled detective fiction. He’d say, “Don’t be a bunny,” when he meant, “Don’t be stupid.” He called money “cabbage,” and when he referred to Diana Ross, he always called her “the canary.” It could have sounded cool, Maureen guessed, but it just didn’t. Gerry didn’t say anything, but whenever George was perched on the edge of Maureen’s desk, talking a mile a minute, Gerry would give Maureen that goofy “oh, he likes you” nod and wink, which managed to make Maureen feel even more low-minded than she already did.
Of course he would like you, said Maureen’s mind, because he’s a dweeb and you are like a gravitational force field for dweebs. They cannot resist you.
At least someone likes me, Maureen said to her mind.
Yea—’cause they think they’ve got a chance with you. Who else are they gonna like?
Oh, shut up.
Maureen tried to lose herself in restacking the shelves of film strips, which were unmoved and untouched since she restacked them two days ago.
Sometimes, Maureen didn’t show up for work. It was a hard job to believe in. There was really nothing for her to do. Sometimes, her bruises were too visible, and sometimes, she couldn’t get up out of bed. Bo was working with his father, a wholesaler who supplied Groc and Confs across the island with bars and chips and soft drinks, and Bo would occasionally have to travel out to Grand Falls or Corner Brook or as far as Port aux Basques to make deliveries for his father. Maureen thought that driving a truck full of three-for-a-cent candy—coloured jujubes, green leaves, bananas, jawbreakers, Bazooka gum—not to mention all those different delicious Vachon cakes—May Wests, Lune Moons, Flaky buns, Jos Louis—would be a job that would lighten the heart and lift the spirits, but Bo often came back crankier and even more unhappy than when he left. Sometimes, on the days he was travelling, Maureen didn’t bother to get up at all. She just stayed nailed to the bed for twenty-four hours, rarely eating, just drinking juice, reading, not thinking, staying as still as she possibly could. During those marathon bed-ins, probably from a combination of semi-starvation and not moving for three days (that’s what Maureen put it to, anyway), she would find herself in a kind of trance, seeming to have risen above herself and looking down from a great height at her own inert form lying dead still on the bed below, not thinking, not feeling, not planning. Then the two of them, the real Maureen and the Maureen who was watching the real Maureen, would share a moment of, if not peace, at least emptiness.
Then Bo would come home and Maureen would be forced to get up and step back into the thick of that mad and painful storm that had become her life. She was sure that other than choosing to lie there dead to the world, that this life, the life with Bo, was her only choice. She was damaged goods. There was no other life open to her. She had nowhere to go.
SOMETIMES ON FRIDAY EVENINGS, BO WOULD PICK HER UP after work and they would go out to the Pioneer Drive-In and Restaurant, out past Topsail. On those Fridays, she felt like she was normal and that this was what regular people did. He’d pick her up in his little red Renault—Red for anger, black for death, her thoughts would chant—and they’d be just like a real boyfriend and girlfriend celebrating the weekend by driving out to the country and having supper, but she was drowning in misery, choking with unhappiness. She was only eighteen—what was wrong with her? Why didn’t she leave Bo? She was no good—that had been proven to her finally and irrevocably. She just was no use; she was totally use-less, “a total useless waste of skin,” as the Sarge used to call her when she was little. She didn’t like to think about that sort of stuff, because she didn’t want to emotionally cash in on that whole “my mother was so mean to me blah blah blah” thing. She had no time for those dreary sob sisters. She was getting on with her life, not whining and complaining all the time about what her mom did to her. She was moving forward—well, when she wasn’t staying in bed twenty-four hours a day, or picking herself up off the bottom of some staircase, or too beat up to do much of anything. When she was drinking, though, just before the racket rose, before she and Bo would take that fatal turn, she’d start snotting and bawling about the Sarge and about her lost baby.
Maureen was afraid that her life without the baby had no meaning. Sometimes she thought that being hit, punched and hated and still holding on gave some awful meaning to her otherwise empty existence. Sometimes, she thought that her pain, her flesh and her blood, sacrificed on the Altar of Love, would somehow redeem everything. But mostly, she didn’t think like that. Mostly, she didn’t think; mostly, she was just afraid. Afraid of everything—afraid of Bo, afraid of Bo leaving, afraid Bo would never leave, afraid of keeping her meaningless job, afraid of having no job, afraid of the Sarge, afraid of her father, afraid of people in the streets and in the shops, afraid of the baby whom she secretly called Nora, afraid that everyone could see her worthlessness, that it was written all over her.
She was shoplifting like crazy, smashing in the odd window, sometimes pulling a scattered fire alarm, and one morning, letting the air out of all the tires on Riverview Avenue, an upscale area in town. At one point, during a Turtles concert at the Student Union Centre, she even put a big wad of chewing gum into the perfect long blond hair of the girl in front of her. She was so beautiful, thin, ephemeral and spacey, one of “the Vague Sisters”—that’s what they called the three Fardy girls. She was the youngest, Leanne, and was dating Wayne Furlong, a member of DAFT. She was everything Maureen longed to be. She loved Leanne’s ability to appear uninterested in everything, her mysterious vapidity. Maureen wanted to be just like her.
“Oh my God!” Maureen said when Leanne started to cry. “Oh my God, what a mess. Here, let me see if I can get it out for you.”
Leanne declined Maureen’s help and sobbed that she would have to cut it out. Her pupils were like tiny pinpricks. She’s on acid, Maureen thought. A real bad trip, what a sin!
After the concert, as she was lying on the couch, reading every last word of Esquire, desperately trying to avoid having sex with Bo, Maureen thought it was no wonder that she often felt so bad about herself. I am just bad. Who would do something as mean as that? No one, that’s who. Even in books, it’s only the really, really bad people who commit the mean acts of petty cruelty like that. I am a real bad person.
“No, I’m still reading,” she said to Bo’s inquiry as to whether or not she was ever going to come to fucking bed out of it. Sex had gotten even worse since about a month before. Maureen had been walking home from another mind-numbingly boring day at the film-strip library. She hadn’t gotten to work until 11:20 that morning, and just as she was settling in, Gerry sat down across from her and said, “Maureen, nine-fifteen, nine-thirty okay, even ten . . . ten-thirty is pushing it, but it’s still all right. But after eleven? Coming into work after eleven in the morning is not acceptable—even if there is nothing to do.” Then he just smiled a somewhat painful smile at her and went back to his desk.
So Maureen stayed late that day, and she was just slogging up Military Road through the ice and slush at five-thirty. Her new leather boots were so soaked that her feet actually squished. Usually, Bo picked her up, but he was playing bridge at a tournament down at the hotel. She had nothing pressing to go home to, and the big picture window under the sign “The Women’s Centre” caught her off guard. She could see a bunch of women inside, sitting around in a circle in big, comfortable chairs, talking, and it seemed particularly warm and inviting. March had come in like a lion and was continuing to roar all month long; the cold of March was more penetrating and bitter than even January. Maureen knew you could just drop in the big, open office for no other reason than that you were a woman and this was your centre. When she got inside, though she was relieved to be out of the biting cold, she immediately felt uncomfortable and was overwhelmed with a feeling of being out of place. They were having a consciousness raising. One really smart-looking woman with glasses and Angela Davis hair—even though she was white—stood up and gave Maureen her armchair. But Maureen knew right away she didn’t have any of the right kinds of things wrong with her for this crowd. And when they started discussing whether their orgasm was clitoral or vaginal, Maureen sat mute, because, of course, she’d never had an orgasm, not ever. She’d never said it out loud, because you weren’t allowed to. It was all bad and shameful enough without having to admit to that. It was all part of the big bullshit life story, and you could never let on that you saw through the tissue of lies, all the big fat fibs that everyone told about “The Family,” about the inherent virtue of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, about true love and romance—and orgasms.
Listening to the women defending their vaginal orgasms, talking about pleasure, talking about being in charge of their own orgasms, Maureen couldn’t help but think this was just another crippling fiction, another tall tale told to keep you in your place and thinking it was all your fault if your family life was a nightmare, if the Church was up to stuff too evil to even think about, and love and romance were a big crock of fairy tale nonsense, and now it was your own fault if you couldn’t find pleasure in the old in-out. Maureen dismissed them as just another crowd of bullshitters. She was in a rage at the whole phoniness of the consciousness raising, but at the same time, later that night, after she’d had sex with Bo and she’d done the half-hearted, heavy-breathing, nails-scraped-down-his-back job of finishing the hideous encounter, something made her say in her smallest, phoniest voice, “I feel it’s only right to tell you this because, well, I feel it’s just so important for us to be, you know, honest with each other . . .” As her lips were engaged in this pseudo-earnest heart to heart, her mind went mad on that last remark about honesty. Oh yes, it’s so, so, very important to speak honestly to each other. It’s crucial that the torturer and his victim be open and truthful, one to the other, for Dr. Mengele and his patients to speak honestly to each other. “I’m afraid I haven’t been totally honest with you . . .” You big hairy-arsed, slope-headed, ham-fisted, childish, moronic, violent motherfucker! her mind screamed with more vehemence than Maureen thought she might be able to contain. “I have to say it: I’ve never had . . . actually had, you know . . . I’ve never actually had what you might call an orgasm.”
“What?” Bo said, looking a bit like this news was really, really going to piss him off.
“No, no, no, no, I’m not saying it’s your fault. No, no, no, it’s not your fault at all. It’s me! It’s me! I’ve never, ever, ever, I’ve not ever in my whole life, I’ve never had an orgasm, not ever.”
“Well, what was that just then?”
“Well, that was me . . . I was making out that I’d had one. Pretending.”
“Why?”
“I—I—I don’t know.”
“Oh,” he said, and turned his big, hairy back to her and went to sleep.
Maureen would live to regret this brief burst of honesty, as sex with Bo became even worse and more relentless. There was a singular ruthlessness to it now. He was going to make her come “supposing he had to fuck her right out through the other side.” He actually said that, or something very close to that anyway, and Maureen got the picture. After about a month of what seemed like ceaseless and really quite painful sex, she started back on the heavy-breathing, back-clawing, squealing, squalling act again.
Bo said, “But how do I know that that one is real?”
“Because . . . because the sex was just so good,” Maureen said, almost robotically.
It turned out that heartfelt performances didn’t really matter anyway. Bo heard what he wanted to hear. He smiled smugly, rolled over, turning his hairy and now Oh Jesu joy of man’s delivering pimply back to Maureen and went into a deep sleep.
Things got worse from there. Ever since that party at Booman Tate’s, it felt like Maureen and Bo were engaged in a kind of nightmare war scenario. It was like Beaumont-Hamel, Maureen thought, with her continuing to go bravely over the top, always hoping the German machine guns were misfiring. But just like the Newfoundland Regiment, Maureen just kept getting slaughtered. It was a nightmare, a war zone, where she and Bo daily exchanged fire, made treaties, promised each other they would not drink or would only drink moderately, promised they’d use a safe word, “pickles,” when things seemed to be headed down the bad road, but not once did it ever work. If they promised they’d only drink a flask of whisky, before that flask was even finished, they’d be driving to the liquor store to get another, and then one of them would say, “Hey, might as well get a twenty-six-ouncer while we’re here.”
But as the year got older and the days lengthened, Maureen felt less and less like she was engaged in war, and more like she was being held prisoner in one of those dreadful Japanese prisoner-of-war camps you saw in the movies, with the daily beatings and the brainwashing and the humiliations and degradations. It became clear to Maureen that as the ice was cracking up, so was she. The constant fear with which she was living, always waiting for the next blow, was a pain worse than even the physical beatings.