by David Bergen
One evening, Roy asked if she needed a holiday, or if she needed to talk to someone. She said that she was fine. Winter had been very long that year and she’d been shut in. They were sitting at the dining room table. Supper was finished. The kids were upstairs and downstairs. Conner had run outside to work on a fort in the backyard.
“Jim Martin’s wife, Liz, was put in the Winkler Mental Health Centre last week.”
Roy had a way of saying things, as if he didn’t quite understand the subtlety of language. She wondered how he managed to run a business with thirty employees.
“Put in?” she asked. “It sounds like she’s some sort of rabid animal that’s been locked up.”
“She went voluntarily. Jim said that one morning she woke him up and asked him to drive her to Winkler.”
“Oh, so now you have me going crazy. I’m not going crazy. I’m fine.” She wondered if Liz had seen the breakdown coming. Was it like a train on a track, far in the distance, and it just kept coming, slowly and implacably, until at some moment it arrived? How did she know to ask? She found herself envying Liz in some small way. Liz would be by herself, in a room, with no one making any demands. Hope looked down at her thighs and smoothed her hands across her skirt. She had dressed for dinner at 4 p.m. Up until that hour she had wandered about the house in her nightie, moving clothes about, lifting a dishcloth and putting it down, sitting and staring out the window. She felt better now that she was dressed and the children and Roy had been fed. She said again, “I know that if I can swim through the mornings then I’m good to go. I’m very contented right now.” She sighed and stood and went to fetch Roy more coffee.
He touched her hand just as she was moving back to the kitchen and he said, “You shouldn’t have to swim through any part of the day. Maybe you need to join a club, or set up a breakfast group with some friends.”
“We can’t both be going out to breakfast every morning with our acquaintances. Who’d get the children off to school? Who’d make lunches?”
“Heidi does that now, doesn’t she?”
She was quiet. She knew Roy saw her as a complete failure. She was incapable of raising the children and taking care of them. She said, off the cuff, as if she ‘d just thought of it, “Do you love Melanie?”
“Why sure. What a question.”
“She’s different, don’t you think? She just sits there.”
“She’s happy. You want unhappy, like Judith?”
“You don’t love Judith?”
“Of course I do.”
“Judith is sensitive. She broods and thinks. She’s reflective.”
“As a baby she just cried. I’m quite happy that Melanie doesn’t cry.”
Her mother took to coming over mid-morning. She walked in and picked up Melanie and kissed both cheeks and then she helped Hope get dressed and sent her off. Hope would go directly back to her childhood home, undress, and climb into bed. She slept the days away and returned to her own place in the late afternoon to discover that the house had not burned down, that the children had returned from school, and that her mother had prepared dinner. She would sit with her mother then, at the kitchen table. This was the best time of day for her, a time when there were just a few hours of daylight left and then the children would be off to bed.
One afternoon, her mother said that Penny had come home early from school. She had a stomach ache.
“Well, she’s like me that way. The worries of the world end up in her stomach.”
“She might be unhappy in her classroom,” her mother said. “It happens sometimes with young girls. They get caught in a triangle or they have difficulty finding their way with friends. I saw a lot of that when I was teaching grade three. Sometimes the child just needs a break. I don’t mind helping out.”
“Do you think so? She already spends after school cleaning the house. That’s what she does. And writing in her notebook. If she stayed home, the house would vanish from cleanliness.”
“She’s such a sweetheart. Don’t worry about her. I could teach her at my house. A bit of math, social studies, and I could read to her. Even though she’s a fine reader, children like to be read to. In this way she could stop worrying.”
Hope felt a kinship with her middle daughter. Poor thing, lost in a jumble of siblings. She told her mother that she would consider it. She would even talk to Penny, try to find out what she wanted. Perhaps Penny would know what she was suffering from.
In spring, when the fields were still full of water and the lilac bush in the back was pushing out new buds, Hope travelled to St. Anne, a neighbouring French town, where she had arranged for a room at the community centre. She had put up posters announcing that a Friendship Club would be meeting at 2 p.m. every Thursday, Hope Koop presiding. She carried some board games and an article from Reader’s Digest that she imagined might start a conversation. She also carried her Bible as something to fall back on should there be a difficult discussion or a need to go to a source.
The first day, one woman showed up. Her name was Annie and she smelled of alcohol. She was slightly younger than Hope, maybe thirty, but appeared to have lived harder. They talked about their personal lives, swapped stories about children, shared a recipe or two, and said goodbye. Hope, driving home, thought that the first meeting had been a tremendous success.
At the second meeting, three people appeared. Annie, her cousin Linda, and an older man named Frank who showed an obsessive fascination for Hope’s breastfeeding. In the end, she left the room to feed Melanie, and returned with the child draped over her shoulder, patting her back, seeking the elusive burp. Frank wanted to talk about Armageddon and the end times. He took Hope’s Bible and read from Revelation and went on a long rant about Richard Nixon being the anti-Christ. Linda waited impatiently for Frank to finish and then she said that the hardest thing in life was to accept one’s lot. “All this nonsense about the world coming to our doorstep and destroying life as we know it is just fearful people blowing smoke up your ass. Take control of your own life. Make smart decisions. Realize that this is it, this is all you have, this life, in this little place, on this planet, in this corner of the world.” She paused and looked at Hope and for a brilliant moment Hope saw that what she was saying was absolutely true, and then the window that looked out onto that clear space slammed shut.
As she drove home later, Melanie slept on the floor, wrapped in blankets. Hope didn’t intend it—in fact she would think later that there hadn’t been a plan and it was almost as if someone else were driving her car, but she pulled off onto a side road and turned the ignition off, and she sat and listened to the wind blow, rocking the car slightly. The field to her right was bare, with patches of water, and she saw a path made of flowers and sunlight winding its way between the puddles. She got out of the car and left Melanie and she walked down through the ditch and out into the field. Her shoes were immediately wet but she did not notice. The temperature was near freezing, but the sun was warm and fell on her head and shoulders. She walked the golden path between the bright puddles and found, deep in the field, a bed of straw that had been laid out for her, and onto this pallet she first kneeled and then lay down. She heard high above her the cry of a bird that sounded very much like the call of a child. She sought out the bird but the light was brilliant and blinding and so she closed her eyes and thought that she might take a little nap before returning home.
2
Age of Despair
Her room had two windows, both of which looked out onto several apple trees that were, at some point during her stay in Winkler, replete with bright pink blossoms. The view and the blossoms were such a deliberate mockery of her state that she had the nurses draw the blinds closed when she was alone. Visitors, when they arrived in the first week, often opened the blinds and exclaimed, and so she felt she had to exclaim as well in order to appear to be well on her way to health and happiness. This facade, and her utter capitulation, disheartened her and she grew to dread visitors, especially the women w
ho arrived from Eden bearing gifts of food and cards with Bible verses. Many of these visitors were distant acquaintances, women from the church or the community who knew Hope only in passing, and she knew that they had come to inspect her, to fill their own little lives with possible gossip of what a crazy woman looked like. It was important to be the first to know. After a week of this, she asked Doctor Janzen if he could bring to a halt all visitors save her own family and Emily Shroeder, who was her best friend. She also said that she hated the craft times in the afternoons. “I’m not a child and I’m not simple,” she said. Her doctor said that the point of doing crafts was to take her outside of herself. But if she insisted, he would talk to the staff. “I insist,” she said. And so she settled into her stay at Winkler, and she found that with time and medication and, ultimately, electric shock therapy, she was beginning to arrange her thoughts more logically, or to simply let go.
Her doctor told her that electric shock therapy would be necessary and she did not argue. Neither did Roy, though he was concerned about the side effects. Her mother visited on Sunday afternoon, the day before her first treatment. Even though her mother had come two days earlier, on this day Hope was so pleased to see her that she cried for a bit as they held hands. She thought she might be relieved that she did not have to behave herself, that she did not have to project strength and courtesy. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Oh, no,” her mother said. She brushed a stray hair from Hope’s brow.
“I think I should feel ashamed. But I don’t. I’m just tired.” She twirled a finger near her temple. “Hope Koop goes nuts.”
“Your body knows when enough is enough. I’m sorry that I didn’t help you more with the children. And you must stop worrying about what people think. About Roy. The children. Me. You’ll drive yourself crazy.” She raised her eyebrows, acknowledging her false step, and said, “Everyone is fine. The children are very happy. What an awful colour these walls are.” Her mother frowned at the bright green paint. “How do they expect people to get better?”
“The doctor thinks that I will get better only if he electrocutes me.” She tried to make her voice light and inconsequential.
“Well, that’s one way to put it, I suppose. You were always a little extreme, Hope. Even as a child, a little burn on your finger produced intense theatrics.”
“It doesn’t frighten me. Not a bit. As long as the darkness goes away.”
On Monday morning, the nurse who prepared her before wheeling her down the hallway to the treatment room was a stout Mennonite with a slight lisp and a Low German accent. Later, on the gurney, as the rubber clamp was being fitted into her mouth and just before she fell asleep, she reached up and tried to straighten the stout nurse’s cap, which was crooked, sweet thing. When she woke, she did not recognize her room or her own hands lying on the bed. She wanted to cry out but thought that might be inappropriate. Her arms ached, and her mouth tasted of tin. Two mornings later she went for another treatment, and so it continued for two weeks.
At first there was little change in her spirits. And then, imperceptibly, her mood changed, and she found herself looking forward to seeing her children. When she had first entered the hospital, she did not know who was taking care of them, and she did not care. When she finally asked Roy, he said that there was nothing to worry about, that Heidi was living at the house and the children were thriving. “They love Heidi. They see her as a sister.”
“What about Melanie. Is she eating?”
“She’s taking the bottle just fine.”
“Who found us?”
“A man named Hugo Bertrand, from St. Anne. He found Melanie, and then followed your tracks out into the field.”
“That was very good of him.” She heard the words come out of her mouth, but she did not recognize them as her own. Her tongue felt thick, and she realized that the conversation with Roy was very formal, but she could not stop herself.
Roy smiled.
“Was Melanie still sleeping?”
Roy shook his head.
“She was crying?”
“A little. She’s no worse for wear.”
“Poor thing. I’m worried, Roy.”
“What are you worried about?”
“That I don’t love her.”
“You do, Hope. It’s just the sadness talking.”
“Do you think so? Tell me about Melanie.”
“She’s getting fat.”
“Is she? I want to see her.”
“Are you sure? And the other children?”
“Do you think I could? Do they want to see me?”
“They’re always talking about you, asking. The other day Conner pretended to be you. It was rich.”
“What did he say? What did he do?”
“He was flipping pancakes and wearing your apron. He told Penny to put her notebook away, that she wouldn’t get any food until it went under her chair.”
“He’s such a card. So wild and original. What will happen to him?”
“What do you mean?”
“And Penny? She’s still obsessing over her diary?”
“She’s making a comic book now. About a crazy woman.”
“Bring the children here, okay? I want to see them.”
And so the weekly Saturday visits began. The girls sat on either side of her and watched vigilantly as she held Melanie, who, as Roy had promised, seemed no worse for wear, and in fact seemed to be doing better without a mother. Hope did not speak much, other than to ask the girls questions about school and friends. The responses were monosyllabic on Penny’s part and produced, from Judith’s mouth, long soliloquies on life in Eden, in grade six, where her teacher Mrs. Highbottom had declared that dinosaurs had lived millions of years ago and that the world had not been created in six days and suddenly Mrs. Highbottom had disappeared for a week—the substitute said she was ill—and then she returned and changed her story slightly, to say that it was quite possible that the six-day creation might have occurred, though she still stuck to the dinosaurs, just go and see the bones in Drumheller, and also Angela had visited her father last weekend and she ‘d got her period.
Penny was listening intently and writing all this down in some sort of pictograph shorthand. Judith shrugged.
“Good for her,” Hope said. “She is young, isn’t she?”
“She might skip a grade.”
“Does she still have that boyfriend?”
“Oh, no. There’s a new boy, Pascal.”
“That’s interesting. It won’t last.” She didn’t know why she said that, or how she thought that might help the conversation, but it just slipped out, perhaps because tales of Angela were always so large and she required so much attention, dating now a boy with a French name and getting her period to boot. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to be small.” And all that time, she kept glancing down at Melanie, trying to ascertain what her own feelings were, or if she had any feelings at all, and though she was pleased to find that she did not resent the child, she felt no love for her. Melanie chewed on a fist and stared back into her mother’s eyes darkly, and she wondered if her child was accusing her of abandonment. She tried to lock in, to will love, but her heart was empty. She gave Melanie to Judith and said, “Here, you take her for a bit. She’s heavy.”
Judith held Melanie on her lap and leaned forward to tickle her under her chin. Melanie gurgled and squirmed. Punched her fat fists in the air. “Who are you? Whatcha doing?” Judith said.
Hope turned away, ashamed by her own insufficiency and amazed at the ease with which her eldest daughter accepted this child.
Conner had slipped out of the room much earlier. Roy found him playing checkers with an elderly man in the games room. When they returned Conner stood at the foot of the bed and said, “This place is pretty nice.”
“Really?” She smiled bleakly.
“Okay, kids, let’s go,” Roy said, and he bent to kiss the top of her head. “I’ll come tomorrow.”
�
��You don’t have to. I’m fine. You have so much to do.”
“I’ll come.”
But he didn’t come. Emily, wearing a bright pink raincoat, arrived instead, perhaps sent by Roy, perhaps arriving of her own volition. Hope didn’t have the courage to ask. She was very pleased to see Emily, who came with books—a spy novel by John le Carré and The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck—and with these gifts she had included a small framed print of a Degas painting (she made a point of saying the painter’s name), in which a young woman wearing a white chemise was bent over in a dark room, and behind the woman on a small table was an open suitcase beside which rested a string of pearls. Emily placed the framed print beside Hope’s water glass. It would remain there for the duration of Hope’s stay, though she rarely looked at it, and when she did, it was merely to glance at it and then turn away. The open suitcase held some message, she was sure, but the thought of interpreting that message frightened her.
Emily told her to get dressed—they were going to walk outside for a bit. She had received permission from the staff. And so they strolled, arm in arm, around the block, and as it was Sunday and everyone was at rest, there was very little traffic, though children played in a nearby park, their voices lifting and then falling and then dissipating, and to Hope the sounds of children were like the cries of birds. She listened to Emily talk about her life, an existence that now included an older man who owned a restaurant that catered to a high-end clientele and served dishes such as trout and mussels and beef tenderloin on skewers. She had met him at a parent–teacher meeting at Angela’s school and they had immediately formed a bond. He was witty and intelligent and well-travelled. “He has two sons. His wife died last year.” Emily said his name, Sam, and then said that Sam thought the apartment she lived in was deplorable. He was looking for something more fitting. “Not that I can afford it. But he wants to help me out.” She squeezed Hope’s arm. “He’s quite the catch.”
