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They sat apart but shone out together. Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
I have no proof. I construct somebody from this one smudgy picture, I am content with such clichés. I have not the imagination or good will to proceed differently; and I have noticed anyway, everybody must have noticed as we go further into middle age, how shopworn and simple, really, are the disguises, the identities if you like, that people take up.
I believed that writers were calm, sad people, knowing too much. I believed that there was a difference about them, some hard and shining, rare intimidating quality they had from the beginning, and Hugo didn’t have it.
‘Have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die,’
But I thought it was still a lot easier, living the way we lived at home, to picture something like this, the painted flamingoes and the warmth and the soft mat, than it was for anybody knowing only things like this to picture how it was the other way. And why was that?
This was the first place I ever worked but I already had picked up things about the way people feel when you are working for them. They like to think you aren’t curious. Not just that you aren’t dishonest, that isn’t enough. They like to feel you don’t notice things, that you don’t think or wonder about anything but what they liked to eat and how they like things ironed, and so on.
I was really glad I think to get away from him, it was like he was piling presents on me I couldn’t get the pleasure of till I considered them alone.
Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go grey, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. So I stopped meeting the mail. If there were women all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be. Even though there might be things the second kind of women have to pass up and never know about, it still is better.
They struck Mr Lougheed as having got here without parents, without any experience of highchairs or tricycles or wagons; they seemed to have sprung up, armed as they were, from the earth. No doubt that was how they thought of themselves.
‘You were wrong.’ Both were smiling. Mr Lougheed’s smile was thin but hopeful, tactical. Eugene’s was frank and kind. And yet – what was that frankness? It was not natural, it was achieved.
‘That isn’t an expression that means anything to me, really. Make a fool of yourself. How can anybody do that? How can you make a fool? Show the fool, yes, expose the fool, but isn’t the fool just yourself, isn’t it there all the time? Show yourself. What else can you do?’
It occurred to him, and had occurred to him before, that there was after all something to be said for dealing with things the way most people of his age seemed to do. It was sensible perhaps to stop noticing, to believe that this was still the same world they were living in, with some dreadful but curable aberrations, never to understand how the whole arrangement had altered.
But didn’t their expectations run along the same lines? And what was it in them that prompted such expectations? It was despair, it was being at the end of the track. Nevertheless pride should forbid one.
I sat there hour after hour and read The Reader’s Digest. The jokes. Thinking this is how it is, this is it, really, she’s dying. Now, this moment, behind those doors, dying. Nothing stops or holds off for it the way you somehow and against all your sense believe it will.
And I thought, all these things don’t seem that much like life, when you’re doing them, they’re just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you’ll find yourself, then you’ll find yourself, in life. It’s not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, you’re comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you’re dying, Mother is dying, and it’s just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you’ve had is all there is, and
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‘It’s the tension,’ Haro said. ‘I know. You build yourself up ready for something bad to happen and then when it doesn’t, it’s a queer feeling, you can’t feel good right away, it’s almost like a disappointment.’
Disappointment. That was the word that stayed with me. I was so glad, really, grateful, but underneath I was thinking, so Cam didn’t kill her after all, with his carelessness and craziness and going out and neglecting her he didn’t kill her, and I was, yes, I was, sorry in some part of me to find out that was true.
because it is a comfort to discover that one’s own case holds no particular agony, only some shopworn recognizable pain.
had the feeling that if she could have moved all around me, been in front and behind and on both sides at once, that was what she would do. She would close me off, she would peer into me until she found whatever she wanted, and got it rearranged.
Viola was a great one for the smile to the face and the knife in the back. It was her social life as a banker’s wife that had trained her.
It was a strange thing to see the child already meeting the old woman in Jeanette’s face. One moment she looked younger than she had done ten years ago, her face pale without make-up, her mouth wide and secretive. She looked fresh, clean, dreamy and self-absorbed. Then with a change of light or mood or body chemistry this same face showed itself bruised, bluish, sharp, skin more than a little shrivelled under the eyes. A great deal had been simply skipped out.
Anything would do for her to look at; beautiful or ugly had ceased to matter, because there was in everything something to be discovered. This was a feeling that had come on her as she got older, and it was not at all a peaceful, letting-go sort of feeling, such as old people were supposed to get; it was the very opposite, pinning her where she was in irritable, baffled concentration.
She wore a college girl’s skirt and sweater, a barrette in her shoulder-length hair (she was the college girl of fifteen years ago, she hadn’t kept up with the times in quite the way Jeanette had) and she had a lowpitched well-bred voice that many people in town found subtly insulting. Also such confidence and homeliness as Dorothy had seldom seen met together in one face.
Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
and all that time of care and confusion that seemed as if it would never end seems as if it never was.
But it was Hugh’s act, his dropping the dime, such uncharacteristic frivolity, that seemed so amazing, an avowal of love, more than anything he did or said at any other time, any high point of need or satisfaction. That act was like something startling and temporary – a very small bird, say, with rare colours – sitting close by, in a corner of your vision, that you dare not look at openly. In that moment our kindness to each other was quite unclouded, not tactical, our struggles seemed unreal. A gate had opened, very likely. But we did not get past.
The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other – I with words, Hugh with silence – for being each other. We never needed any more than that.
(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.)
Proximity, impossibility, renunciation. That does make for an enduring kind of love. And I believe that would be my grandmother’s choice, that self-glorifying dangerous self-denying passion, never satisfied, never risked, to last a lifetime. Not admitted to, either, except perhaps that one time, one or two times, under circumstances of great stress. We must never speak of this again.
Luck was not without its shadow, in her universe.
Aunt Dodie laughed at me, to cheer me up. In her thin brown face her eyes were large and hot. She had a scarf around her head that day and looked like a gypsy woman, flashing malice and kindness at me, threatening to let out more secrets than I could stand.
For I did feel it was she who decided, she gave her consent. As long as she lived, and through all the changes that happened to her, and after I had received the medical explanations of what was happening, I still felt secretly that she had given her consent. For her own purposes, I felt she did it: display, of a sort; revenge of a sort as well. More, that nobody could ever understand.
The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of, her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it
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