“I don’t know what to vote.”
“Well, whatever you want. Did you read that poet?”
“Yes. What would you say about that book with a man present. I mean, strange stuff.”
“It’s poetry,” Mona says.
“I liked some pieces though,” Charlene says. She’s on the verge of a defence of sorts and wonders why. “I’ll see,” she says. “I’ll probably come.”
“You okay now?”
“Yes, better. Much.”
Once again Charlene begins to fit into the flow of life in Lesser. The women at work feed her gossip, things like Melissa Emery’s son, Roger, needing to go to court. Supposedly Melody Krahn and Chris Wallace were involved too. “They all stole a half-ton,” Judy Penner says. “Out near St. Pierre.”
And the pastor of the United Church is having an affair with Mrs. Cornies. She’s the grain elevator manager’s wife. Charlene doesn’t know her except to recognize her red hair. Mr. Cornies comes in to pay bills sometimes; he’s always dusty and coughing. Serving him makes Charlene sneeze. She’s not happy to hear about someone else’s affair; it saddens her, makes her cynical and scared.
Her mother calls from the city. Though they don’t see much of each other they talk once a week by phone. Sometimes her parents come out to the country for a visit but they don’t really like it. Her mother’s face, especially, becomes this oval of disappointment: with the town, the house, Johnny.
“What about Christmas?” her mother asks. “We’re trying to make plans.”
“Johnny and I were talking about Mexico,” Charlene says.
“Really? That doesn’t sound like him.”
Charlene ignores this. “We thought two weeks right over Christmas. There’s this cheap package I saw.”
“Well, you decide and let us know. Is Johnny still doing that youth thing?”
“You mean the centre?”
“I suppose.”
“Yes, Friday and Saturday nights.”
“What does he do all that time, just hang out?”
“He talks to the kids, gives them a place to be. He’s good with teen -agers.”
“I should hope so, he’s lousy with adults.”
Charlene draws a slow breath and makes little rabbit movements with her nose. She hates to argue with her mother. It’s tasteless, boring, and always slides in the same direction. Still, she says, “I don’t know why you pick on Johnny. You hardly see him, you don’t know where he’s going, where his mind’s at.”
“I look at you, dear. I’m still waiting for you to blossom. I’m sorry, but he grinds you down, I can see it.”
Charlene doesn’t respond. Finally, her mother says, “Are you okay?”
“Yes, sure, why not?”
“Well, last time we talked you and Johnny were going to see a counsellor.”
“It’s better,” Charlene says. “We’ve decided we don’t need to spend money on a counsellor. Johnny’s at home, we’re talking, he’s making meals. We’re happy.”
It is only later, after hanging up, that Charlene thinks about happiness. She lied; Johnny’s happy, she’s not. She knows she will never experience the pure joy Johnny drains out of life. There is not enough of that joy to go around.
She dreams. She is lost, standing beside a deserted road, and a young girl with blonde hair picks her up, stops beside the road and beckons her into the car which smells of orchids. When she gets into the car, the girl at the wheel is dead. She dreams about Loraine Wallace. Loraine is naked and at full term. She is having the baby and Charlene can see the head crowning. Then Johnny is there and he’s trying to push the baby back in.
At first Charlene doesn’t tell anyone about these dreams, even though they scare her. Then, in late November, on a Saturday, she decides to go to the book club. It’s the night of the vote, the decision regarding Avi’s friend. Deb says that before she votes she’d like to see a picture of the guy. Everyone laughs and Mona says she had a dream about him. He was splitting atoms, the way someone would split firewood. “Little explosions were coming off the axe,” she says.
Then Charlene jumps in and talks about her dreams, the one about being lost and the one about Loraine. When she’s finished, nobody speaks. It’s as if she’s stepped over that fine line of decorum—she’s embarrassed the group.
Avi, the new woman, says, “It’s normal. Completely. Dreams allow us to be violent, to murder, to pull heads off, to lust, fornicate. I would say your wish in that one dream, Charlene, is to disappear Loraine’s baby. And not only that, but to have Johnny do it for you.”
“It’s not that I hate Loraine,” Charlene says. She twists her fingers until the knuckles turn white. “I don’t even know her. I guess I’m jealous.”
“Well, of course, you’re jealous,” Avi roars.
“Oh, not only because Johnny slept with her, sleeps with her, see, I’m not even sure about that, though I do know he’s been faithful for at least one month. But, you know, it’s the fact that she’s going to have his baby. That was supposed to be my job.”
“You want to kill the baby,” Avi says.
Charlene nods. “I guess so,” she says, and these three words chill the group for a moment, especially Nancy and Mona, the ones with children, and then Helen titters. She’s sort of friends with Loraine, but still she titters.
“I had a dream too,” Helen says. “I was eating cream cheese cake. Eating and eating and I couldn’t stop so I just kept expanding. Oh, right, and I was eating in bed and I rolled over at one point and smothered Jimmy. He died.” Helen laughs and slips an olive onto a cracker.
Charlene loves Helen, who is a big woman and makes no apologies for it; when she laughs her body rolls and her eyes squeeze and shut and then open again.
Finally Mona says that they have to decide about Avi’s friend Michael. “Personally, I think it would destroy the intimacy of the group. It’s not like we just talk books. Look at us, we delve into personal matters, and with this man around we’d lose that closeness.”
“I agree,” Nancy says. “I’ve always seen this as a kind of coven, a place where magic is possible. A woman’s magic.”
“Hey,” Avi says, “I don’t want to push it. Michael’s new in town and I thought it would be a good entry point. But that’s okay.”
“Why doesn’t he try Phil Barkman’s group? Is he religious?” Helen asks.
The women laugh.
“In a way, I suppose,” Avi says.
“Really?” says Mona. “I thought he was a physicist.”
“Well,” says Helen, making little impatient shooing movements with her hands, “it seems we’ve got nays all around. I guess it makes sense. I personally couldn’t imagine talking about this poet with Jimmy in the group.” Helen plucks at an elbow and says, dangling the book by two fingers, “What is this?”
“You’re mocking me,” Avi says. She is hurt.
“No, no, love. Jimmy would mock you.”
And so they go around in a circle and talk about the poems. Mona likes the one called “The Pope’s Penis.” “I love it,” she chortles, “and I’m not even Catholic.”
“That’s exactly why you love it,” Avi says.
Deb says she doesn’t like any of them. They’re crude and not really poems anyway.
“Why not?” Charlene asks.
“Because they’re like stories, and not very good ones, and there’s no rhythm or rhyme. I’d like to do an Amy Tan novel.”
Nancy says she had a lot of favourites. “It’s all so explicit,” she says. “I mean, ‘A Woman in Heat Wiping Herself.’ Yuck! Still, I read it twice. My favourite though was ‘It.’ The description of the sex, of being folded over like paper, of being stunned. It was all so honest and strangely familiar.”
“Yes, I liked that too, that one.” This is Charlene talking. Her face is flushed and she’s opening her book to that poem. “Except I didn’t get the last part where she talks about the river and these boatloads of children. Why talk about dead
children in the middle of a poem about sex?”
“The river means death,” Avi says. “Kind of like the river Styx.”
“But these children never died, did they?”
“It seems not, but I think we always expect them to die or we don’t expect children at all.”
“Hey, well, that’s me,” Charlene says. She’s smiling but she’s got a pain in her side.
Helen says, “I remember a river we crossed when I was young. In Saskatchewan, on a ferry.”
There is a pause and then Charlene says, “My favourite was ‘Looking at my Father.’ May I read part of it?”
Heads nod. Deb looks sleepy.
“Go ahead,” Avi says.
Charlene folds open the book. “This is the last of it,” she says.
I know he is not perfect but my
body thinks his body is perfect, the
fine stretched coarse pink
skin, the big size of him, the
sour-ball mass, darkness, hair,
sex, legs even longer than mine,
lovely feet. What I know I know, what my
body knows it knows, it likes to
slip the leash of my mind and go and
look at him, like an animal
looking at water, then going to it and
drinking until it has had its fill and can
lie down and sleep.
When Charlene’s finished she says, “I think I know why I like it. I like it because it reminds me of Johnny.”
That night Charlene lies in bed waiting for Johnny to come home. Around midnight she hears the car door slam, then the sound of footsteps up the porch stairs and Johnny’s in the kitchen, pouring himself Cornflakes, and then the rhythmic click of the spoon on the glass bowl. Charlene watches the ceiling above her and predicts Johnny’s moves. Rinse the bowl, blow his nose, run a glass of water, up the stairs, brush his teeth, pee, drop his pants across the laundry hamper, socks in a ball, sigh.
Through all this Charlene is aware, at a deeper level, of having in some way betrayed Johnny. By baring herself earlier that evening, by holding Johnny up as a picture of parts, old and used, she feels she has dismissed him as a joke. The other women seemed to have missed the longing, the adoration, in the words that she read. What they saw was a sickness, and this is not what she intended. Because, above all, she loves Johnny.
His shape approaches, and now beside her he reaches out and touches her hip, waist, elbow. He warms his feet on her calves.
“Yaiee,” she says, pulling away.
“You’re not sleeping?”
“Not yet. How was it tonight?”
“Good,” he says. “Great turnout.”
Charlene rolls and throws a leg over Johnny’s hip.
“You’re naked,” he says.
“Hmmm.” Charlene puts her nose on Johnny’s neck and breathes in smoke and outside air and sweat and the perfume of the centre where Johnny likes to burn incense. His hands are cold on her head and face. They kiss and Charlene tastes Cornflakes and Crest. “Can we?” she says and pushes herself up so she’s sitting on top of Johnny. She lifts herself slightly and pulls down his shorts. He is not yet hard so she takes him in her hands and coaxes him. When he is ready she slides him inside her and puts her hands on his shoulders. Johnny is quick, and after, when they are lying beside each other, only hands touching, he asks, “Aren’t you going to go to the bathroom?”
Charlene squeezes his hand and says, “No.” Later, when Johnny is sleeping, Charlene tightens her bum and holds her breath, as if by some physical exertion she could wish the movement up inside her. She has an image in her head of frantic babies in white suits trying to break through a rubbery wall and finally one succeeds and then the wall closes again.
Four more times that week Charlene initiates sex. Each time Johnny is surprised, and perhaps it is this surprise that produces a tenderness in him. He is careful with Charlene, lets her have her way. He asks, “Is this okay?” “Does that hurt?” He licks her ears and kisses her eyes. He must know, but if he does, he does not let on. He slides up from beneath her like a child, face glowing, contented, fists full of candy.
On Thursday, they lie in the darkness of their room and Charlene, the wetness dribbling between her legs, asks about Loraine.
“Have you seen her?” she says.
“Not for a while.” It seems Johnny is both embarrassed and proud.
“How many months is she now?” Charlene asks.
“I dunno. Four?” Johnny is tired. He falls asleep quickly, his bare shoulders breaching the blanket. Outside the moon is full, the night cold. The room seems brightly washed, as if daylight were catching Johnny and Charlene still in bed.
Charlene senses tonight that her plan has failed. She has miscalculated. Her stomach is slightly bloated as if preparing for evacuation. She folds her hands and closes her eyes and when she finally sleeps she dreams. And in the dream Johnny and Loraine are practicing their breathing. Loraine is on her back and Johnny kneels beside her, chanting in her ear. Loraine is beautifully huge. Then Johnny stoops to Loraine’s crotch and when he reappears he holds the tiny head of a baby between his teeth.
Charlene wakes up and pushes herself into a sitting position. She is breathing hard. She moans, shoves at Johnny and says, “I had a nightmare.”
Johnny grunts and turns away.
“It was awful,” Charlene says. “Frightening.”
Johnny’s sleeping again and Charlene’s still afraid. She goes to the bathroom and sits for a long time. When she wipes herself she feels sticky. She checks the toilet paper and finds traces of blood mixed with semen. Failure tugs at her somewhere; she is not sure, perhaps at her stomach, between her shoulders, and down her spine. In the hard light of the bathroom she lays a liner across her panties, washes herself, and slides in a tampon. In the next room, Johnny sleeps and sleeps.
And then on Friday afternoon, around five, Loraine Wallace drops by. Charlene is making herself a small meal, Johnny is at the centre, and she hears a knock but thinks it is an icicle dropping off the eaves or the wind blowing. But the sound comes again and when Charlene opens the door there is Loraine, her face hooded by her parka, her feet moving on the squeaky snow of the step.
“Hi, Charlene,” she says.
Charlene doesn’t respond, just stands there and lets the wind whip at her hair and she thinks how cold her neck feels.
“May I come in?”
Charlene nods and Loraine enters and then the coat is off and Charlene’s offering supper, but Loraine says no, she’s eaten. So Charlene serves tea and stands with her bum against the kitchen counter and watches Loraine handle the sugar and milk.
They are not friends. They rarely talk. Charlene lights a cigarette and moves her hand to her throat. Her teeth ache.
Loraine says, “This is really abrupt and maybe uncalled for, but …”
“You’re going to have a baby,” Charlene says. It’s amazing, Loraine is showing. As she sat, Charlene saw the curve of her belly beneath her blouse. Loraine is small, compact, her stomach a slightly inflated balloon. Charlene finds that the roof of her mouth is gritty, she’s short of breath.
“Yes,” Loraine says. “I guess that’s why I came. Sort of.” Physically Loraine appears so healthy; face rounding out, cheeks pink. Her whole body screaming Yes.
“To taunt me,” Charlene says. She can’t help it. She is both angry and brimming with admiration. She wants to fall on her knees before this woman.
“No. No.” Loraine stands quickly, hands fumbling for her coat. “I’m sorry, I’ll go.”
“Don’t.” Charlene stands, pulls at Loraine’s arm. Her fingers clutch and pinch. She lets go; Loraine’s skin is cool and smooth. Johnny must love that, he has an eye for details.
Loraine sits down again and says, “I was hoping we could talk. Last night I was sitting by myself thinking about this baby and I wondered if you were sitting by yourself too.”
“Johnny and I are doing really
well these days.”
“Oh, well. I assumed so. I haven’t seen him,” Loraine says. “Where is he tonight?”
“At the centre.” Charlene knows that Loraine knows this, otherwise she wouldn’t have come. She watches Loraine’s lips approach the teacup. Charlene says, “I was thinking, when the baby’s born, we should cut it in half. Part for you, part for me. You’ve read that story, haven’t you?”
“Johnny never told me you had a sense of humour. You want to touch?”
Charlene surprises herself. She swallows and, “Yes,” she whispers. Loraine comes around the table and lifts up her blouse. Charlene puts both hands on Loraine’s stomach, one above the belly button, one below.
“You can’t feel anything right now. When I lie down and keep still, it moves. At first it was like a gas bubble, but now it’s like a small animal in a gunny sack.”
Charlene thinks she should pull her hands away. Suddenly she is self-conscious, touching the same body Johnny touches. If she slid her hands a little lower, she could scrape the edges of Loraine’s pubic hair. His hands here and here. Here. Little Johnny inside there.
Charlene looks up. Loraine is looking down at her. She takes one of Charlene’s hands and holds it. “Sometimes,” Loraine says, “I imagine taking revenge. As you must do? Do you?”
Charlene nods. She feels inadequate. Inferior. It’s not just the baby. It’s Loraine’s confidence; coming over here, showing off her stomach. Charlene thinks Loraine’s laughing at her. Even now, she’s talking, saying she doesn’t want to hurt anyone, especially not her son Chris, Charlene neither, and Charlene thinks how Johnny must gloat, shuttling back and forth between his lover and wife. This is all about greed, but it’s not Johnny’s greed, it’s the women’s. Charlene knows how when she lays her weight down on Johnny she could crush him, her need is so great.
A Year of Lesser Page 9
