he next day began not with the sun rising behind the window shade in her bedroom but behind eyes closed in half-sleep, the memory of the events of the previous day blessedly unreal, still locked away until her eyelashes began fluttering and dream phantoms shrank in the light of consciousness.
This was the day following the one when a child’s jacket had been ironed dry and he was reluctantly coaxed from play to be taken by the hand and walked the three blocks to register for kindergarten at a school named after an Arctic explorer. They had walked holding hands and she’d sung a song about raindrops. But when she remembers that walk home now – as it was golden, bright with warm June sun and the newly minted leaves swaying in the lilac-scented air – she thinks of another song. She hears music that is swollen with longing, desire, and she feels like the two Marys in Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater.” She mourns, as much as she knows how to, her own loss, the pouty mouth, the nimble, tanned fingers, her child, her childhood.
When I woke up Saturday morning I was aware that during the night something cataclysmic had occurred. Deep beneath the strata, in the geology of Hank’s and my relationship, something had shifted. If Hank and I were two stone plates floating side by side along a fault line, then during the night one had reared up against the other, gouging and scouring its way to the surface. I felt the tension of the impending rupture as I cooked breakfast that morning, cleaned up, and waited for Hank to get into the shower before I picked up the telephone, dialled the number Selena had given me, and made an appointment for Monday to see her boss about a job.
I’d been reading different books lately. Novels. I liked the Matt Cohen novel I’d read for the book club. Especially the part about Kitty Malone having restless eyes: “eyes that couldn’t stay still were her whole restless story, refusing anything except whatever she could see in the centre of herself.” Yes, that’s me, I’d thought when I read those lines, and felt a twinge of panic. Well, if that was me, then what was I doing here, a mother for life? I’d read many other novels Rhoda had recommended. Stories of men who more or less made love to their wives, waited until they fell asleep, and then got into their cars and drove away forever. The way Timothy had done. I had read about women sneaking out of their marriages suitcase by suitcase until one morning a month or year later the husband would suddenly realize that his wife no longer sat across the table from him. More or less. I had decided that the long way of leaving might not be as painful. I would leapfrog out on the back of a job, security, a goal.
But it didn’t turn out that way. Circumstances decided for me, and by the end of that summer I would be gone.
Later in the morning Hank came into the kitchen carrying the alarm clock, which was in pieces, back and front removed. Richard had taken it apart earlier, amusing himself when what he was supposed to be doing was playing quietly with books or puzzles as the doctor at the Children’s Centre had instructed. “Make certain he takes it easy for a day or two.” Hank slid in behind the table, his back to the window, and light shone through his tightly curled and now-grey hair: an Afro. Hank was finally in style.
“I registered Richard for kindergarten yesterday,” I said.
Hank asked how it had gone but seemed distracted. Although his stubby fingers could cope with the insides of major household appliances, the minute inner workings of an alarm clock frazzled him and demanded his concentration.
I told him it had gone pretty well, that the tests had shown Richard had above-average intelligence.
“Well, if Richard is so darn smart, then how come he can’t put this thing back together again, eh?” I heard pride in his voice.
I saw Richard through the front screen door from where I stood at the kitchen counter. He had climbed halfway up the chainlink fence and hung there by his fingers and toes like a monkey. He had a good full-sized head. Egg-shaped. Thick, dark hair, which he hated for me to wash or comb. Because of the constant battles we had over washing his hair, I often let it go longer than I should, and consequently most of the time he exuded the odour of a squirmy pup, hot and dusty-smelling. I wouldn’t attempt to wash his hair for a while now because of the shaved spot at the back of his head and the two sutures that laced up the cut. He had examined those sutures with a curious kind of satisfaction, almost pride. They would make him king of the neighbourhood. An accident. He fell, I told the doctor. He fell off his tricycle.
I had thought of that puppy smell on the way to the Children’s Centre the day before as he curled in my lap in the back seat of the cab, clutching up to his face what remained of his comfort blanket, a frayed square of flannel cloth, while I pressed a sanitary napkin against the cut. His sides heaved with energy and life and I remembered the first time I had held him. I had been amazed by the weight of him in the crook of my arms, at how solid that little floating being had become. He had settled into my arms instantly, a slanted-eyed stranger, and claimed the right to my embrace. Sometimes I would coax Richard with the promise of a treat or an adventure, to have a rest with me. We would cuddle, the two of us, beneath a blanket in the middle of an afternoon. Richard, shrimp-like, curled up in front of me, and me lying there, feeling despair, feeling that a burglar had crept into the house to steal my energy, had sat on my heart so that my blood became sluggish. Sometimes I would lie with him for an entire afternoon, listening for the telephone to ring, for the sound of mail thumping into the box. The warmth of him leaning into me as we rode in the cab spread up to my throat. Richard, Richard, I thought, as I held him against me tightly, watching the grey city glide past the cab window. “I fell, didn’t I?” he said. “On my bicycle. I fell.”
I stood in the centre of the kitchen, hands on my hips to make myself appear larger, as Hank would often do. “Hank,” I said, “I want to talk to you.”
“Yah?” he said, still concentrating intently on the inner workings of the alarm clock. “Shoot.”
The telephone rang, startling both of us. Hank looked up at me and then his eyes shifted away to the hall and front door where Richard peered in at the both of us, his invisible antennae quivering. I reached the telephone before Hank. My friend, Rhoda, had a way of sounding breathless whenever she called, as though the house was burning down around her and she was pouring water on it and making last-minute calls before the firemen arrived. “Hey,” I think she may have said, “I’m just checking with you. I can’t talk. Would you believe it? Tom’s chosen this very moment to come traipsing in the door with six of his friends. Six, Amy. Six fucking boys. I’ve got to go and barricade the fridge. Just checking about the book club. You still coming?”
“Of course I’m coming to the book club on Monday,” I said, loud enough to remind Hank. Because he worked Saturday afternoons he took off a half-day on Mondays and he’d promised to keep Richard for an hour and let me use the car.
“Well, you never know,” Rhoda said, and implied with her tone the possibility of mysterious and exotic happenings in my life. Intrigue, gossip, the things Rhoda fed on. When she talked, words spilled like water into the kitchen sink, a bubbling torrent of sentences, seemingly without direction, but then funnelling into prying questions and sucking me in.
Hank cleared his throat to indicate impatience. Whenever the telephone rang and it was for me, Hank suddenly had to use it. To make contacts, appointments to pick up appliances in need of repair. I told Rhoda that I had finished reading the book we were supposed to discuss on Monday but that I didn’t understand it. I had found it rather strange.
“Of course it’s strange, dummy,” Rhoda said. “It isn’t a Harlequin, after all.” Rhoda insulted all the women in the book club equally. Once she said to me, “You are an anomaly.” And another time, “You are an obsequious person.” I went out and bought my own dictionary, and more and more since I’d met Rhoda I’d felt compelled to reach for it. I needed a clear definition for the word “victim.” We were reading Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing. I enjoyed reading it, I told Rhoda, but I didn’t understand the ending, the point that was being made. I didn’t tell Rhoda about my dream, though. Of me standing in the bow of a ship and Margaret Atwood standing beside me. Her hair twitched in the wind. She pointed across the watery horizon, off at something in the distance. “I’m trying,” I said. “But I can’t see what you see.” “Open your eyes. Look, it’s over there, plain as day,” she said, her voice sounding like Rhoda’s. Then she disappeared.
“What’s to understand?” Rhoda asked. “The woman in the novel begins to take responsibility. She begins to reject the idea of being a victim. Simple. There, it’s yours. I give it to you. Use it in the discussion and I’ll let everyone think it was your idea. Thomas!” she shouted. “Jesus! Boys! They’re so insufferably smug at this age. They make me want to puke. Oh, why couldn’t I have had just one girl?”
The alarm buzzed harshly, Hank proving that he’d fixed the clock. I told Rhoda I had to go.
“Oh, I get it. Old whatziz is home.”
“Rhoda,” I said as I hung up.
“The spinny one,” Hank said, and reached around me for the telephone. I held my breath as I waited for him to finish his call. I could hear the telephone ringing at the other end, four, five times. He hung up.
“Hank.” I stood there, hands on my hips. “Hank. I registered Richard for kindergarten yesterday.”
“Yah, I know, you already told me.”
I could not hold it in any longer. “Well, it seems that our financial state of affairs is worse than I thought. So I think it might be a smart move for me to get a job.”
“You have a job,” Hank said. “But if you’re bored” – he shifted, as though embarrassed, his mouth curling in a half-smile, his eyes evading mine – “well, then maybe it’s time we got started on another one.”
It’s still early afternoon on Friday when Amy and Richard return from registering him for kindergarten and so Amy takes him to the playground. She sits on a warm bench, basking in the glow of the June sun and the kindergarten teacher’s comments about Richard’s evaluation tests. Above-average vocabulary; intelligent.
Middle-aged, fat, the woman had bottle-blonde hair and wore a kind of fairy-queen costume. For the children, she explained, and waved her magic wand. It made them feel more at ease when they were brought in. As Amy watched her float around the room in bouffant netting, she thought, Who do you think you’re kidding? She came to learn later that the woman was a trained musician. An opera diva who had sung all over Europe but suffered a mental collapse and became a teacher late in life. “Richard is an intelligent and well-adjusted child,” she’d said, and Amy thought, Thank God for small mercies. In spite of me, Richard is well-adjusted. She’s impatient to tell Hank that Richard has an above-average vocabulary, which includes a few words she wishes he didn’t have, the ones he’s picked up at the playground where they have spent entire summers, Amy reading, Richard learning how to defend himself. Children’s play, Amy discovered, could be awfully bloody and Richard managed to do his fair share of bashing. Does it hurt? Where does it hurt? she’d ask. Show me. But she didn’t offer to kiss it better the way other mothers did. She didn’t want to use tricks.
Amy already knew her son was intelligent. She’d known it early on from the books she brought home from the library on child development. She realized he was ahead of his age in the way he stacked blocks or arranged them in patterns. She watched him in the kindergarten room as he explored, going back and forth between the Activity Centre and the Learning Centre, fingers lifting, examining, deftly fitting pieces of puzzles together; fingers never, never still.
She watches now, his thin legs scissoring through the sun as he dashes between the water fountain and the sandbox carrying a soup can. On the bench beside her, unopened, is the latest book she has borrowed from the library: Your Gifted Child. Richard waits patiently for the narrow stream of water to fill the tin can and then he races back to the sandbox and empties the water in one corner, his spot. His tongue follows the direction of the road he’s constructing.
“Can I? Can I?” Richard stands in front of her now, his sand-encrusted fingers drumming against her knee.
“Sure.” She watches him dart off to the refuse barrel to rummage through it for a larger container.
Later, Amy feels the tug of his hand in hers as he drags his feet, tired from the excitement of the visit to the school and an afternoon in the bright sun. She feels the flush of it in her own cheeks too. Amy sings a song about raindrops, and he joins in now and then with his ragged voice, a bit off-key. He wants to go to school again, tomorrow, he says, and Amy will take him to the calendar when they get home and try to explain how many days, weeks, months before this will happen. “When the leaves on the trees are gold and start to fall off,” she explains and he seems satisfied by this and turns his face up to the trees as they walk away from the park, heading down towards Pete’s Grocery to pick up the can of peaches she didn’t manage to get that morning. “Not gold yet,” Amy says. He nods solemnly. Her heart twists.
“Hi, hi, hi,” Richard says as he scrambles up the stairs in front of her. “Stanley Knowles,” he says, and points to the poster.
“What? You here again?” Pete says as she enters the store and then he kicks an empty box down a narrow aisle and disappears behind a shelf. She hears a knife slicing open a carton.
“Milk,” she says. “I told you I was bound to forget something. Any specials?” she asks, more to hear the sound of his voice, so that she can determine where he is at all times.
“There’s a special on canned ham,” Pete says. “I got a good buy.”
Richard kneels in front of the bins of potatoes and begins sorting through them, dumping red potatoes in with the white and white in with the red. Amy moves down the aisle. MOTHER AND CHILD ARRESTED FOR SHOPLIFTING. I beg your pardon, ma’am, would you spread your legs, put your hands above your head. Don’t move. Careful, she’s got a can of peaches in her jacket pocket. Look, I only take what I need. This is just a temporary solution.
“Been a busy day today?” she asks.
“Not any more than usual,” Pete says.
Her hand jumps. He’s moved. His voice comes from – she looks in the mirror. Where in hell is he? Suddenly, he’s standing beside her, leaning against the shelf. He crosses his pointed-toed shoes. “You want to buy tickets for a social?”
She picks up a can of devilled ham and pretends to read its label. “I haven’t been to a dance for ages. I don’t think I’d know how,” she says.
“Go ‘way. You and Hank go to socials, don’t you?”
“Oh, we used to. But he can’t stand the smoke,” Amy says. “It’s terrible in those halls. It makes his eyes swell.”
Pete laughs. “He’s pulling your leg. I’ve seen that man of yours in the Lincoln Motor Inn often enough. The smoke’s so thick in that place you could cut it with a knife. I’ll bet he doesn’t take you because he’s afraid he’d never get a chance to dance with you.”
No weather talk, this, Amy thinks. She feels the heat of blood rising in her face, feels flustered, confused. “I’ll have half a pound of bacon,” she says so that they will fall back into their familiar roles. She doesn’t need bacon but is relieved as Pete becomes businesslike again. He hurries away behind the meat counter. She’s irritated and set off balance by this information. When Hank is away she always assumes it’s work, an estimate or a pick-up or delivery. She’s never doubted that his absence was due to work.
Mrs. Pozinski is waiting for them at the fence as they enter the yard. “Yoo hoo, missus,” she calls. “I don’t like it to bother you, but I find glass on my sidewalk. Your boy, he throw drink bottle into my yard yesterday.”
“Uh uh, no I didn’t,” Richard says and backs away from the woman’s accusing finger.
“I’ll come over and clean it up,” Amy says wearily. No peaches for dessert, a half a pound of bacon she doesn’t really need, and an irate neighbour. What next?
“Good, good,” Mrs. Pozinski says. “Boy oh boy, broken glass, big trouble.”
“I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose,” Amy says. “I’ll speak to him.” She sends Richard into the house with the bacon and then follows the woman down the walk to the broken pop bottle. As she bends and gingerly picks at the thin slivers of glass, she winces with pain. A bubble of blood rises on her finger.
They keep the Band-Aids on the top shelf in the bedroom closet and out of reach or else they’d find them plastered on Richard’s toys or on cracks in the walls, his attempts to “fix” things. She jumps and makes a grab for the box on the shelf and a clear plastic bag falls to the floor at her feet. Inside it are dozens of plastic monkeys, amber, green, red, the kind used to decorate fancy cocktails. But something else captures her attention. A bank passbook. She opens it and the figures jump from the page. Two thousand and eight hundred dollars. She sits down on the bed. Each entry, the precise accounting of deposits, interest payments, each figure a hammer blow. Bitterness fills her mouth. Here I am, she thinks, a juggler, trying to keep all the balls in the air and he’s hoarding money in a savings account. The unfairness of this settles heavily in her chest. Her hands shake as she slips the passbook back into its plastic sleeve.
Richard lies on his stomach under the kitchen table shielding something with his arm. “I’m making a surprise,” he says. “You’re going to like it.”
“I sure hope it’s not the kind of surprise you gave Mrs. Pozinski,” Amy says drily. Damn him, Amy thinks, the cheap bastard.
“I didn’t do it.”
“I’m going outside for a while. I’ll be out in the backyard if you need me, okay?”
“I’ll call you when my surprise is finished.” He bends over his work, scribbling furiously.
Amy lies back in the chaise lounge facing the garden. She looks up at the latticework of wires crisscrossing the sky above her yard, at the chokecherry bush growing wild beside the battered garbage cans, thinking: Almost three thousand dollars. Thinking of his meagre gifts in the past, a roasting pot for Christmas, a second-hand synthetic Persian lamb jacket, the cheap Woolworth’s nightgowns. Thinking: Here I am, twenty-six years old, with a mouthful of plastic teeth. It isn’t fair. But it’s his secretiveness that unnerves her. What else, she wonders, has he concealed? She sees Selena across the street, closing her gate and teetering off on very high heels to the corner and the bus. To work, Amy thinks, and realizes that she envies Selena. Amy isn’t at all certain what courses she would take even if she did go to university. Three thousand dollars is a lot of courses. But she doesn’t want Hank’s money. She wants to be like Selena, to have the freedom a job allows, to weigh possibilities and make decisions. Maybe she should take a course in psychology. She would like to try and learn how to understand herself better. Or perhaps she could become a teacher; or a medical lab technician who tracks down the insufficiencies of human fluids or the presence of abnormal cells, records the hot and cold of the body’s climate zones. She would like to be in a position of saving people. Whatever, she would not study what Mel had and become a snob who gets her kicks being recognized by waiters. I want to do something, she thinks, and feels the pressing urge just to do. Then she hears a scream inside the house. It yanks her to her feet. Richard meets her at the door, his face gone pale, his mouth open, and his words jumble together. “Mommy, Mommy, oh, oh, oh.”
“What is it?”
“Fire.” He points towards the kitchen.
As Amy bounds up the stairs two at a time she can see in the kitchen doorway the reflection of orange light dancing on the refrigerator door and as she enters, then the fire itself, shooting up the wall from the garbage can. She grabs a pot of leftover coffee from the counter and sloshes it onto the flames. The coffee sizzles and the fire draws back under cover of a sheet of smoke. Then she flings water from the dishpan, quenching the flames. The smoke rises and billows throughout the room, dark and thick, making her eyes and throat smart. Pieces of burnt paper swirl up near the ceiling and then softly float down onto the table, the countertop, her head and shoulders. Amy opens the window as wide as it will go and both the front and back doors. Her canvas running shoes are tinged black with soot and the wallpaper and ceiling around the garbage can glisten silky black.
“Richard! What the hell happened?” He enters the kitchen rubbing his eyes against the sting of smoke. “You almost burned the house down! What were you doing?” She’s an inch from hysteria.
“I was baking a cake,” he says. “I was baking you a cake.” He points and she sees the broiler element in the oven glowing red.
She forces herself to lower her voice so that he will not retreat into stubborn silence. “What do you mean, baking a cake?”
His eyes shift to a pie plate lying on the floor and a tea-towel beside it, slightly singed. Amy squats in front of him and looks into his fear-filled eyes. “It’s okay, Richard, everything’s okay. Just tell me the whole story, all right?”
“I put the cake in the oven,” he says, blinking the way Hank does and twisting a corner of his tee shirt around one finger.
“And then what?”
“It started on fire and so I put it in the garbage.”
“Put what, Richard? I don’t see anything here.”
“It burned. It was a paper cake.”
The evidence of this lies under the kitchen table, the crayons, scissors, and brown paper. Her surprise.
She draws him into herself, holding him against her tightly. She feels the sticky warmth of his hands sliding about her neck in a hug and the tickle of his moist lashes against her face. “It’s okay, honey,” she hears herself say. Positive reinforcement, she has read somewhere, for telling the truth. “I’m glad you told me. Would you like to make a real cake some time?”
He nods and leans heavily into her breasts, clinging, wanting to stay.
She pats his back, draws his hands from her neck, and moves away. “Well, that’s what we’ll do then. Not now, but another day. Soon, okay?”
An hour later the kitchen is back to normal except for the lingering burnt odour and a scorch mark on the wallpaper beside the garbage can. She looks at the clock and realizes that Hank is late. Her joyful anticipation of telling him that their son will do well has faded and in its place is the sour taste of his secret: the bank passbook. His withholding. She thinks she will use it as ammunition to put him on the offensive, off balance, and then she’ll tell him flat out that she’s going to get a job. “It stinks in here,” Richard says. She agrees and so they go out into the backyard where they’ll wait for Hank.
Richard plays in a corner of the yard where Hank has set down a piece of indoor-outdoor carpeting. He moves vehicles through streets in the town he has constructed out of pieces of wood, bits of broken cement, anything he can find. The rush-hour traffic has thinned to a trickle of cars passing through the intersection on the corner. The day has lost its brightness and the sharp edges of the neighbourhood begin to soften. She watches as Richard gets up and tiptoes to the back of the garden and over to the chokecherry bush. He carries a stone, she knows, and watches as he bends and places it among the others he has laid there. A tiny pile of stones, which they were not to touch or ever disturb because they are “very, very magic,” Richard had said rather vehemently. He cups his mouth and leans forward and whispers into the tree’s branches. Then he turns his ear as though he’s listening to something. He walks towards Amy, carrying a twig that he’s pulled from the bush. “Daddy’s coming soon,” he says and offers no explanation. Hank, you bastard, where are you? Amy thinks.
She watches as Richard climbs up onto the clothesline stoop and begins to strip the branch of its leaves. His tongue flicks from side to side as he concentrates. Then he twists the twig until it breaks into two pieces and he sets the pieces one against the other. He lifts the crossed sticks and swings them across the sky, making the ssshh ssshh sound of a powerful jet engine as he pushes his airplane up over the roofs of the houses, over the stingy, gritty neighbourhood, high above and on to other worlds. Yes, Amy thinks. Yes, she will confront Hank about the passbook and ask, Why do I have a mouth full of plastic teeth when we have all this money? She will demand the right to get a job, to make decisions, the freedom to choose.
Later, Amy runs water for Richard’s bath and then goes out into the kitchen and calls Hank’s shop. The setting sun glares through the bedroom windows at the other side of the house but the kitchen is already dim. She sits at the table in the kitchen nook and listens to the ring of the telephone. Richard stands in the doorway, eyes bright, fixed on her. She hangs up. He doesn’t wait for her to ask, What is it?
“It’s broken again,” he says. “Can you fix it? I want to watch ‘The Brady Bunch.’ “
The world outside the house rushes inside. A shrill ambulance siren, the waspy whine of a motorbike passing by colliding against the sound of water running into the bathtub – she must constantly be on guard that it won’t overflow. The stink of the scorched wall, Hank’s absence, his duplicity, eat at her. She crosses the hall into the living room and she sees the flickering roll of the television set. “By Jesus, you little bugger!” she hears herself scream, and sees herself grab Richard by the arm, swing him around, and let go. She sees him slide and slide across the living-room floor. She hears the horrible crack of his head meeting the edge of the coffee table.
The shift that had occurred overnight was cataclysmic, I realized, because I knew I couldn’t be deflected or driven away from my resolution to make changes. I held my ground in the kitchen with Hank. “Another baby? You must have rocks in your head. Number one,” I said, “with the miserly bit you’ve been giving me to run this house we can barely afford the one we have. No matter what you say I won’t continue trying to feed the three of us on twenty-five dollars a week. Period.” I told him that I had been forced to buy groceries on the cuff at Pete’s. “Fact number two,” I said, “it’s a job I want, not another kid. Selena, across the street, just started cocktail waitressing, and she says she makes as much in tips in one night as you give me for an entire week’s groceries.”
“Number one,” Hank countered, “there’s something pretty screwy about the system if it takes two incomes to run a family. And, number two, it stinks if a waitress can earn as much as a skilled worker. It just plain well stinks. And that’s what happens because of socialism,” he said, jabbing at the tabletop. “That’s what comes from voting for the likes of Stanley Knowles.”
I said I didn’t quite get the connection and he ground to a halt, throat knotting with words that refused to be born. He managed to say, “Richard needs his mother. A full-time mother, and not one with her nose in a book all day either, not watching properly. No wonder accidents happen,” he said, his voice accusing.
I could see Richard from where I stood in the centre of the kitchen, opening the front gate to let one of Selena’s children into the yard. The cut on his head would need a fresh bandage at bedtime.
Hank’s voice grew quieter as he turned the alarm clock around and around in his hands, and I listened once again as he recited the litany of his hard life – about being the illegitimate child of a single working mother, her early death, and his consequent vow that if he ever had children they would have their mother at home, full time. I said that I would try to get a night job, be at work while Richard slept, and he pointed out that he couldn’t be expected to babysit, not while he was sweating blood to increase his clientele and needed the freedom to be able to get up and go at a moment’s notice.
“What, to the Lincoln Motor Inn?” I asked. “Is that where you find your customers?”
He began to blink and his face became a mask I couldn’t read. “I work all day,” he said. “I need to go out once in a while.”
“And I don’t?”
“You do, almost every day,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised by my question. I wanted to hear glass shattering, feel the pain of it cutting my knuckles as I put my fist through the window beside his head. Put fear into his flat, smug expression. “And what about this?” I pulled his bank passbook from my jeans pocket. “What about all this money sitting in a bank while I’ve been short for food, worrying myself sick about how to make the money you give me stretch? What about the fact that we couldn’t afford to get my teeth fixed?”
“You’ve been snooping through my things,” he said and then he lunged, snatched the book from me, and jammed it into his shirt pocket. His face grew scarlet.
“So what about it?” I said, unwilling to back down.
“A person’s entitled to save ten per cent of what they earn,” he said. “It’s a smart practice. And, anyway, if you’d known about it, do you think it would still be there?”
“Fuck your money,” I said and saw him flinch. “I’ll get my own.” I told him then I had made an appointment for a job interview on Monday and that if I got the job I would find someone to look after Richard on the nights he had to be out, “working” at the Lincoln Motor Inn.
“Like who?” Hank asked, with a slight mocking smile, implying I didn’t have a single friend who might help me out.
“Like Rhoda,” I said, and that’s when he attacked me.
No way would that “bra-burning bitch” get near Richard, Hank said. What I needed was to come to my senses, to cool off, he said, as he grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. He brought his knee up and bumped me across the room to the sink. He turned on the water tap and pushed me under it. I gasped with the shock of cold water against my scalp as he forced my head down and down until my nose squashed flat against the bottom of the sink. “So what do you think of that?” Hank said, me rearing up, gasping and sputtering, unable to say what I thought of it because the moment I tried to open my mouth and talk, he’d push my head down again to the bottom of the sink and the rising water. “You think you’re so goddamned smart. You think you know everything about everything. You think I’m an asshole, don’t you? You think I don’t know that? You with your stupid smirk and big nose always in the air. Big nose stuck in a book all day. Well, let me tell you, life is not in books,” he said, the words spat out as he released me then plunged me under again. “Life is out there. Ten hours a day. One week off a year. How would you like being jerked around by guys at work? Locked in the washroom, ha, ha, big joke. Turds in my tool box. Hank the Tank. Big dumb Hank. Did you ever stop to think that maybe I can’t stand you? That maybe I hate the sight of your nose? I try to do something. I get my own place. Now I’m being jerked around by salesmen, the sales tax people, income tax, business tax, accountants. And what for? Because I want something better for myself and they don’t want me to have it. They see that I’m trying and they don’t want me to make it.”
Once again he released me and I lifted my head. Water streamed down my face, the front of my shirt. “No, Hank,” I said. “I don’t think that’s the case –” and then he shoved me under again.
“If you want to work so darn bad then why not come and work for me, eh? All that stupid paperwork. You think I wanted Richard to have to say at school, ‘My dad works as a repairman at Eaton’s’? That’s why I’m doing this! I’m a businessman! I’m trying to run a business so that I, I, I. …” He couldn’t find the words to continue. Red-faced, the cords in his neck still jumping, he turned away, freeing me, half-drowned, dripping and wheezing. I was stunned by his anger.
Hank sat down at the table and covered his face with his hands.
I stood at the sink twisting water from my hair and then sponged my sodden shirt with a tea towel. I saw my reflection in the tiny mirror above the sink. Eyes large, looking black with fully dilated pupils. When I touched my nose it hurt. I was shocked by what he’d said about it. I wondered how it was possible to live twenty-six years and never realize that your face is off kilter, your nose too large.
“What do you mean, big?” I asked. “I don’t have a big nose.”
I heard the front door open and close. Richard stood in the hallway staring at us. “I’m not going to play with the TV,” he said. “I promise I won’t play with the TV and I won’t ride my bike too far. I’m not going to be bad any more.”
“Okay, okay, true,” my friend Rhoda said to me Monday afternoon after the others had left the book club meeting. “When a person is a victim they don’t have to take the responsibility for the things that happen to them. But when you think of it, doing nothing is actually making a decision too, you know.” She curled into a quilted floral chair and her fine blonde hair became a puff ball as the sun slanted though the vertical blinds behind her. In the street beyond I saw the last of the book club women, Sara, get into her car and drive away.
“By the way,” Rhoda said, following my gaze, “Sara is fucking someone.”
I saw in my mind’s eye Sara. Tall, thin, with raw hands, a harried mother of four children, who still managed to donate several hours of her week to UNICEF. I said I didn’t believe it.
Rhoda laughed. “The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you don’t look past the surface. I’d say the guy she’s fucking is about fifty-five, grey, and a little on the heavy side.” She leaned back into the chair and swirled orange juice around in her glass. “She’s fucking her father, if you get what I mean. Have you?”
What Rhoda had “done for her father” was two years in engineering, she’d explained after one of the book club meetings, when what she really should have been doing was throwing pots and drawing. “What makes you think Sara is having an affair?”
“Affair?” Again the trill of laughter. “Quaint word. Well, for one thing, she’s so mysterious. She’s asked me to take her kids after school three times this week and she never tells me where she’s been. Listen,” she said, “when you get home, write this down somewhere so you don’t forget I said it. I predict that Sara will split within a year. It’s the pattern.”
The muscles in my neck still hurt from the force of Hank’s hand and my nose was sore to touch. I had added little to the discussion around the book Surfacing and allowed Rhoda ownership of the idea that the protagonist rejected the label “victim.” I looked at the clay pots hanging crooked in Rhoda’s front window. Like my head, I thought. “What I like about clay,” Rhoda had said to me, “is that no two pieces are ever the same.” Wrong, I thought, they’re all lopsided.
When she’d asked me to stay on after the others had left so we could talk, I needed to talk but was reluctant. Sometimes I suspected that Rhoda had taken me on as a project of some kind, as though she were building a coil vase to ward off her own depression. She wanted to see if she could make something from nothing.
“Well, so, have you?” She said the words slowly, articulating each one dramatically. “Have you had an affair?”
Most of the women we’d read about had had affairs. They lay on their backs at the bottom of coal mines, on blankets in parks, or in empty or borrowed apartments. They seemed driven to give away little pieces of their hearts here and there for short amounts of time. I wanted to try and get mine back. I wanted to know the process.
“Don’t tell me,” Rhoda said when I didn’t answer. Her eyes went wide behind her glasses. “You’re not going to tell me that you married your first love and that there’s never been anyone else! Wow, what a can of worms,” she said. She tapped me on the knee. “Look, I don’t know whatziz very well, but from what I’ve seen I do know that you’re totally unsuited for each other. How in hell do you manage, that’s what I’d like to know? Hey,” she said, when I didn’t answer, “I’ll help you any way I can. Just tell me how.”
“I’ve got a job. This morning,” I said. “It’s just part-time but I may need someone to take Richard at night off and on.” Now that it had finally happened I was terrified, uncertain whether I could carry through what I had set in motion.
“Well, good for you! It’s a start, anyway. And you can count on me. He can spend the night here any time. Listen, people who stay in unhappy marriages, and who don’t do anything to get out, wind up choosing either alcohol or religion to cope.” This a quote, no doubt, from one of the many “survival” books she read constantly.
“Yeah, art,” she said drily. She started at a noise and her hands flew up around her face. “You hear that?”
I’d heard it, too, a crash in the room above our heads. “Something fell.”
“Well, of course something fell. But what fell? And why?” She stared up at the ceiling. “You have to come up with me.”
I climbed the stairs ahead of Rhoda and entered her workroom at the far end of the hall. Beneath the window was a door set up on trestles as a work table and strewn across it were curled sheets of drawing paper covered with scraggly lines and smudges of charcoal. All along the window sills sat lumpy shapes of fired clay. Books overflowed from shelves and were piled in stacks about the room, and I ached with envy. Rhoda tiptoed through the clutter. “Look.” She pointed to a painting lying face down on the floor. I laughed and felt the release of tension as she bent and righted it, leaning it against the wall.
“What am I going to do?”
“Hang it back up,” I said.
“But you don’t understand. It’s an omen. A picture falling like that means something terrible is going to happen.”
I drove home through the residential streets, slowly, carefully, mindful of a group of children standing between a couple of parked cars. I slowed down as I approached them. There was a church on the corner and recorded church-bell music chimed a hymn I thought I recognized. I watched in the mirror as the children crossed the street safely behind me. When I pulled into our driveway I saw Richard rise up from his play corner in the garden. I saw the bald spot and the bandage on the back of his head. Something terrible has already happened, I thought. I saw my eyes reflected in the rear-view mirror. Sharp, blue, hard.