Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  Why is it so important to me to insist that we both are feminine women? I find the frank ambiguity of Pierre’s sex intriguing, the subtle femininity in Allen actually mildly attractive. If it ever occurred to him to take me to bed, I’d go. Yet any trace of masculinity in either Roxanne or me is something to cover up, deny. Is that why, aside from being terrified of exposure, I don’t want to go to a women’s bar? I don’t want to see women in motorcycle drag and think we have anything in common.

  Roxanne hasn’t been to the clubs since she’s known me. She says the only reason she’d go now would be to enjoy making love in public, a desire I couldn’t understand at all until the first night we had dinner with Allen and Pierre, and Roxanne stretched out on the couch and put her head in my lap. I have been embarrassed by obvious sexual gestures between men and women, yes, calling them cheap and vulgar, but to see Pierre kiss Allen is an affirmation of my desire for Roxanne. Pierre occasionally kisses Roxanne.

  “Do you find him attractive?” I asked her.

  She shrugged and said, “He’s sometimes very lonely.”

  “In leap year,” Pierre said, “we should all four marry each other.”

  At that moment it seemed to Roxanne and me an hilarious and wonderful idea, one of the thousand never-never lands we dreamed of living in together. Allen stays aloof from such games, indulgently parental.

  I think Allen is the loneliest person I’ve ever known, far lonelier than Carlotta, for instance. There is a great deal in Allen Pierre doesn’t touch. It’s not just the difference in their ages. Allen stays aloof from everyone. It’s as if he’s protecting not himself but other people from something in himself.

  Carlotta is even harder to face than this notebook, which at least doesn’t talk back with experiences of its own. I have tried to drop in on her several times in the last couple of months, but she’s never at home. Then this morning, driving back from taking the boys to school, I saw her on the beach, sitting on a log. I pulled over into the parking lot and just sat in the car for awhile, watching her sketch, the only one on the beach on this cold April morning. Finally I got out of the car and walked over to her.

  She didn’t look up from her work, so I stood looking down at what she was doing: a very accurate sketch of the debris at her feet. Carlotta is the only person I know who can make a pencil drawing sulk.

  “I’m tired of not knowing why I don’t see you,” I said finally.

  She kept on working.

  “According to everyone in town, I’m the one who should be mad at you.”

  She still didn’t look up.

  “Carlotta, you’re my oldest friend, really my only friend. I don’t want to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about, honestly but I need to know you’re around.”

  “I’m not around,” she said, “not for anybody.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve had enough, more than enough, and I’ve got work to do.”

  “Look, the only reason I haven’t asked about you and Mike is that I didn’t know at the time whether to be outraged or grateful. I couldn’t quite believe, after all these years of putting up with him as my husband, you actually wanted him, though you were certainly always nicer to him than most people, and that’s one of the reasons we could stay friends. Anyway, it seems to me crazy now that he’s gone, not to see you.”

  “I don’t much like you in generous moods.”

  “How do you want me to feel?”

  “Melodramatic and silly the way I do.”

  I sat down next to her on the log. I wanted to put an arm around her, but I was physically shy of her, as I have been with everyone lately.

  “I’ve never felt so silly in all my life,” I told her.

  “But you’re happy about it. You’re glad to be rid of him.”

  “Terribly.”

  “Of course, he didn’t leave you. He left me.”

  She was crying. I forget how easily Carlotta cries. It’s not something anyone in my family does, at least not in front of anyone else. How do you go about comforting your best friend about being left by your husband? I suddenly felt impatient with her.

  “Why on earth did you get involved with him? You know what a bastard he is.”

  “Why did you?”

  “The more I think about it, the less I know, but I was twenty-one, not thirty-one.”

  “And now that you think you’ve got what you want, will you know any better what to do with it than Mike?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’re as cruel as children, both of you.”

  I was very cold and very tired. I had been with Roxanne until three o’clock this morning, crazy with need of her, and even now I felt more like an amputated part of her than a person to deal with Carlotta. I had probably stopped here on the beach more for the reason of avoiding questions my mother was waiting to ask me than to make any real connection with Carlotta.

  “Where is he?” she asked suddenly.

  “In Arizona with his mother and brother.”

  “Is he going to stay down there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I thought she might try to hit me. There was really no point in fighting over a man I don’t want who is a thousand miles away, and I feel so little charity for him I really do find it hard to believe anyone else would want him in the painful way Carlotta apparently does. I left her there on the beach and came home to Mother.

  Why do I feel guilty about Carlotta? It took time for me to believe what everyone in town was telling me, that Mike and Carlotta were having an affair. I knew exactly what Mike was doing, getting vengeance and teaching me a lesson. He couldn’t have known that, if I felt any jealousy, it was of him, not of Carlotta. I lied to her this morning. To be torn between gratitude and outrage was the sarcastic surface of what was really happening. Her being with Mike gave me an excuse to ignore her, to punish her a little. All along the person I was deserting was not Mike but Carlotta, and the card on the bottle of perfume was intended to hurt her, not Mike. It didn’t occur to me until this morning that she might really have taken Mike not to spite me over Roxanne or teach me a lesson but because she actually wanted him.

  Mike has always accused me of romanticizing Carlotta. I did see her as a free spirit, made of sterner stuff than the rest of us. While she was attached to no one else, I admired her detachment from me. I even identified myself with it, thinking my secret self, my real self, was detached, too, and, if I hadn’t been trapped in the prison of a family, I might be a disciplined and determined writer, paring Joycean fingernails over my characters. In that fantasy Carlotta was always with me, and we stalked about town, being famous and aloof.

  I feel guilt about Carlotta because, from the moment I met Roxanne, I felt cheated by Carlotta of all that friendship might have been. Of course, it couldn’t ever have been anything other than what it was. It was only in the first few moments of touching and holding Roxanne’s thinness that I might really have been making love with Carlotta. Then I wanted to break what I hadn’t been able to touch.

  “You’re as cruel as children, both of you.”

  But she didn’t want me. She wanted Mike.

  Am I cruel? I confess, where Roxanne is concerned, I don’t care. I’ve got to be with her.

  When Mother asked why I was out so late last night—wasn’t I just going to a movie with a friend—I said, “We were invited to a feast, and we went.”

  I was tempted to tell her how many hours it lasted, what each course consisted of, how little appetite I have now for anything else. For the first time in my life I’m losing weight without dieting, and Mother sees it as a sign of my unhappiness.

  Victor hardly ever mentions Mike these days, but sometimes he comes apart at the seams under the burden of Dad and Mother’s unspoken expectations, and I have to yell at him, sometimes even swat or cuff him, as his father would, to give him a line to get back into. Mother and Dad don’t approve of that. Neither do I, but a seven-year-old can’
t cope with a vacuum as he’s been asked to, as if it had always been there.

  Tony, whom I would have expected to miss Mike as I do, with daily relief, begins to draw pictures of him which are all very large and full of black hair. And he asks questions about his father. “Does Dad know I’m learning to play the violin?” “Does Dad know I have to wear glasses?”

  I’d suggest he put such information into the postcards he writes every week, but every fact Tony raises is something he doesn’t want his father to know, vulnerabilities he’s building up against which he may have to defend himself.

  “Is Dad ever coming back?”

  I say, yes, of course, after a while, to visit. His own sending of postcards to the boys and the religiously prompt monthly checks make me know what I would know anyway: Mike has no intention of forgetting he is a father.

  Is Mike biding his time, just as I am, until the divorce is a fact, his parental rights spelled out by law? Does he know what he’s going to do any more than I do? Sometimes the idea that he might try to take the boys is a nightmare, sometimes a daydream, but I could no more be made to give them up than decide to volunteer them.

  I wish this were a clearly bad place for all of us to be. Living with Mike, I sometimes felt guilty about how much I simply liked my family, as if it were deeply disloyal to him. But the real point is the money isn’t it? And it always has been. But I wouldn’t have married Mike in the first place if there hadn’t been money. I couldn’t have walked into that trap without one guaranteed open door, which I’ve now walked through. If I have to be dependent, it’s certainly safer and more comfortable to be dependent on my parents than on an ex-husband of Mike’s temper.

  If I hadn’t dropped out of school when I married Mike, if I’d finished my degree, I could go out and teach. But I didn’t do that. It would take at least a year back at UBC to finish off, and I couldn’t face that.

  Is there anything I can face? Certainly not one more question.

  I have invited Roxanne to dinner. I have kept her so much to myself that my parents didn’t know her name until last week, when I said I’d like her to come. Mother immediately suggested I invite Carlotta as well or any other friend, but I said, no, just Roxanne. I told them she was a friend of Allen’s. “Such an unfortunate man!” is now Mother’s habitual punctuation whenever his name is mentioned. I told them she worked in a record store with a hi-fi store in the basement. Father knows the fellow who owns the shop, a Jewish fellow, quite a nice sort. I told them she was interested in electronic music. Mother, who thinks Stravinsky should have been deported to another planet and the twenty-first century, frowned. Dad asked what instrument she played. Woman and tape recorder. I offered only the second and explained the little I could.

  Roxanne’s compositions are called things like “Swimmer,” “Bird,” “Boat,” “Fish,” “Bridge,” and they are made up of the sounds she collects and then manipulates with her various machines. She says they should be played together in different combinations. I have heard no more than two at a time because of the limited equipment in her room, which is also not large enough for the sound. Fortunately she lives over a grocery store so that she—and we—can make as much noise as she likes at night, but she wishes I could hear them as they should be heard.

  “A bit like that fellow John Cage?” Dad asked.

  A man with Dad’s memory can read Time and never be at a social loss. It’s a kindness in him which he uses to make other people feel at home, and tonight he’ll remember every conversational clue I’ve given him.

  Tony suggested himself that he could play for Roxanne. Victor, not to be outdone, offered to stand on his head, but he’s not allowed to do any of his tumbling tricks inside this house since they can be more tumble and less trick than makes Mother comfortable. One of the reasons I’ve asked Roxanne is that the boys haven’t really seen her in months, and they like her. She plays with them as seriously as she plays with Pierre. Mother is kindly disposed to anyone who indulges her grandsons.

  I can’t hope that either Mother or Dad will accept Roxanne. They won’t even know they are supposed to. She’ll become for Mother “one of your creative friends,” a category of decreased expectations. I think Mother is frightened of Carlotta. When I used to spend so much time with her, Mother checked me over for symptoms of temperament until she was satisfied that I was immune. Carlotta is a mass of middle-class conventions compared to Roxanne. It doesn’t even occur to Roxanne that she has nothing to wear for dinner with my parents.

  I should be nervous. I should be wondering why on earth I asked her, but I do know why. Living here is like being under deep anesthetic, Roxanne a wild, repeating hallucination of another world. I don’t want to drag her into this drugged sleep. I want her to wake me here, make me look at her here, and begin to have some sense of what I can do. I am playing Snow White without a wicked stepmother, Rapunzel with no one to lock me in, except, if you wait for a princess instead of a prince, any parents in the story may turn into poisonous toads. But I am not even afraid of her transparent shirt at the dinner table. I wonder why.

  Extraordinary! We could have been back in grade school, Mother asking me to take Roxanne to my room to leave her coat and even play awhile before dinner, which we did until the boys banged on my door like obnoxious little brothers, and Roxanne tumbled into the living room like one of them. I think Dad was on the brink of offering her a Shirley Temple when I told him she likes scotch on the rocks.

  She had a tank top on under her see-through shirt and was wearing the single pearl and gold chain I gave her for Christmas, a pin made of real butterfly wings in her hair, which she took off and clipped on Victor’s glass of milk.

  She was like a magical toy, fascinating to everyone. When she left soon after the boys went to bed, she said, “Maybe next time they’ll let me spend the night.”

  Would we get involved in a pillow fight?

  “Such amazing hair,” Mother said. “I suppose it must be natural.”

  “How old is she?”

  “My age.”

  “It must be her size. She isn’t really like a child,” Dad said.

  “She’s awfully good with the boys,” Mother said. “I was afraid Vic would get overexcited, but he really did awfully well, even when Tony was playing. They grow up every day at this age, don’t they?”

  It was, in fact, Mother who suggested Roxanne spend the night. It was last Saturday, and she suggested it not even as a convenience but as a treat, offering two shifts of Sunday breakfast so that we could sleep over like teenagers and get up to pancakes and bacon after the boys had gone off to the beach with Dad. Instead of wailing into this notebook with guilty fingers that this should have happened to me at fifteen, I lay touching and being touched in this bed in the first innocent pleasure of my life. We took a shower together before we dressed.

  Mother said, as we ate second helpings, “Ah, it’s nice to have girls in the house again. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that kind of laughter.”

  Did I ever play in the shower with Margaret or Joan? So long ago I hardly remember and certainly never the games Roxanne and I had been playing!

  Later Mother said, “Roxanne’s a funny little thing. She’s good for you. You should have her over more often.”

  I guess, without thinking about it, I expected Mike to come home for the divorce, as if it were an occasion for both of us, or, if it were mine, he should attend as he would my funeral. I dreaded seeing him and at the same time longed to, not simply as a way of ending my relationship with him but as the signal that I, and everyone around me, could stop saying, “After the divorce …”

  Even this morning, on the way to court, I expected him. And now I feel no more divorced than I would have felt married if he hadn’t turned up at the church. My lawyer assures me that I am. “A free woman,” he called me. I feel the way I did when I was a kid and stole something. Getting it out of the store was no relief, and as long as I had it, I felt in danger. I remember throwing
a pencil box into the sea. It was weeks before I’d go to the beach again because I was sure I’d find it washed up with the tide. I buried a typewriter ribbon—I took it long before I had a typewriter—and waited for a dog to dig it up. By the time I was nine I had learned to steal only what I could eat.

  A free woman? I’ll never get away with this. I can’t eat my wedding ring. If I knew how, I would cry.

  God, this is awful! I had a near fight with Dad tonight at dinner. He wants me to take the boys off on a trip somewhere as soon as school is out.

  “A change will do you good.”

  I don’t want a change. It terrifies me. Everything terrifies me. I haven’t seen Roxanne in a week. I haven’t even phoned her. Why hasn’t she phoned me? Suddenly everything’s up to me. Suddenly everyone expects me to know what to do. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t even want to take the boys to school in the morning. Mother’s done it three times this week. When I try to tell her how awful I feel, all she can say is, “It’s only natural, dear.” As if divorce had as many recognizable physical symptoms as pregnancy. I want to scream at her kind, stupid face, “What do you know about it? What do you know about anything?” She manages to love her children by not knowing the first thing about them. Motherhood is blindness and platitudes.

  Fatherhood is a mortgage on your children you can never pay off. Witness this damned check from Mike today in the mail. He must know by now—he’s been informed—that he’s not required by law to send anything now that the divorce is final. Final.