by Jan Redford
I shut off my tape recorder. I had to get Tanya cleaned up before her mother got back. Patty was at a counselling session at the Women’s Centre. Last week she’d started packing to leave her husband. This week she’d found out she was pregnant. It could turn out to be an extra-long session.
* * *
—
After Patty and Tanya had headed home, I put Jenna down for a nap, poured myself a cider and surveyed the damage. Sand from the back door, through the kitchen, across the red shag carpet in the living room, and up the stairs. Toys from one end of the living room to the other: plastic monkeys from the barrel, wooden puzzles, teething toys, stuffed animals, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. Dishes from breakfast and lunch still on the kitchen table. Two bloated wet diapers beside the garbage pail.
I had about an hour before Grant got home. I poked some potatoes, shoved them in the oven, then grabbed my cider and Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization Workbook, sat cross-legged on the blood-red living room shag carpet, and opened the book to my goals.
For most of the winter, I’d worked hard on my “relationship goal.” I’d written out an affirmation, in present tense, to trick my brain into thinking I’d already achieved it: Grant and I are now feeling very close and getting along well. We have begun to express our love for each other verbally. Then Grant had announced that he and Peter were planning a trip to Alaska to climb the Infinite Spur in Dan and Ian’s honour, and that put the kibosh on my relationship goals. I started visualizing going to school. Real school. Not a mail-order school. I sent my application in to the University of Calgary again and just last week my acceptance letter had arrived.
* * *
—
Jenna’s singsong voice, dragging out the vowels in her favourite word—Mommy!—brought me back to Yodel Village. I opened my eyes, groaned. Drained my cider, stood up. How could I love my child so much, yet feel so free when she was asleep? I’d forgiven my mother countless times in the last two years when I thought of her in Inuvik with a newborn, a two-year-old, a four-year-old and my father.
* * *
—
Jenna and I looked up from our tea party when we heard the diesel engine of the Crummy as it pulled into the driveway. “Crummy” was what they called an extended cab pickup stuffed full of smelly loggers; it was not a description of how they felt. But Friday seemed to be the only time they didn’t feel crummy. Grant had told me some of the guys drank beer all the way home on the logging roads, pissing in the cans and throwing them out the window so they wouldn’t have to stop.
When the basement door slammed, I tensed up. Was that an angry slam, or just a regular slam? In Canmore, Grant had blamed his moods on the long drive, but our move to Golden hadn’t made him any less cranky. He’d shaved four hours off the commute, but still had to drive a couple of hours to camp, spend all week in an Atco trailer an hour or so from their block, then drive two hours home to listen to “the wife” bitch and complain all weekend.
“Dat Daddy?” Jenna jumped off the couch and ran to the door leading to the basement with me following close behind. Even though she couldn’t yet turn the knob, I was paranoid about the steep stairs down to concrete. I picked her up and plunked her on a chair at the table with a bag of pink homemade play-dough. Grant would put away his chainsaw and take a shower before coming upstairs. I had a bit more time to work.
I poured Shake ’n Bake into a plastic bag, added pork chops, shook, popped them in the oven. The smell of baked potatoes filled the kitchen and I realized they’d be done long before the meat. I spun the lettuce, threw it in a bowl, put bread in the toaster for instant croutons. Voilà.
Grant emerged from the basement, his blond hair wet and slicked back.
“Daddy!”
“Jenna!” Grant used a voice he reserved for his daughter—animated, exaggerated, loving. She was in his arms, squealing, flying above his head. Grant pressed his face into her tummy, his deep voice rumbling like a train. She giggled and squirmed, her head thrown back.
“How was your week?” I put my arm around him in a half hug, but I couldn’t squeeze in.
“Fine.”
Since the arrival of my acceptance letter he talked to me mostly in monosyllables. Our one discussion of school had ended with him saying, “Just tell me where to send the money.” At least it was better than what Patty’s husband had said when she’d wanted child support: “Good luck finding me in Mexico.”
But our deal had been to spend one year in Golden, then, if it didn’t work out, we’d kick the tenants out of our townhouse in Canmore and move back in. And I’d go to school in Calgary. That year was almost up.
“Dinner’ll be ready soon.”
“Good, I’m starving.” He pulled a beer from the fridge.
“I made Shake ’n Bake and Caesar salad.”
“Great.” He made eye contact with me briefly, then turned and squatted low to get into the living room with Jenna on his shoulders. He kicked a toy out of the way.
“What the fuck happened in here? It looks like a bomb went off.”
“I watched Tanya all afternoon for Patty. She went to the women’s centre to talk to Rhea. She’s pregnant.”
“Oh, Christ.” He turned on the TV. Grant was not a fan of Rhea, who was now my counsellor too. He knew we talked about him.
I stepped back into the kitchen. Scheduling the news at suppertime must have been part of the patriarchal plot to keep women uninformed.
The anchorman’s voice on CBC, the only channel we could get with rabbit ears, filled the house. At least I could listen to it.
Jenna started to whine.
“Go see what Mommy’s doing!”
Jenna wandered into the kitchen, stretched her arms out. “Up!”
I put her on my hip, opened another cider, headed back into the living room. “Could you take her for a few minutes? I’ve got to get dinner finished.”
“She wants you.”
“She’d be fine if you played with her.”
“I’m trying to watch the news.”
“I’m trying to get dinner on the table.” He took her out of my arms, eyes still on the TV.
She wandered back into the kitchen as I was pulling the pork chops and shrivelled potatoes out of the oven. There was something black in the corner of her mouth. I took a closer look.
“Shit. Grant! You’re supposed to watch her! She’s eating flies again.”
I swirled my finger around in her mouth and scooped out a black fly, still wiggling, then threw the wet blob into the sink and turned on the hot water, full blast.
“Yukky, Jenna! Yukky!”
“Ukky, Mommy! Ukky!” She opened her mouth wide, showing her widely spaced baby teeth. I picked a leg off her tongue, muttering, “I hate this goddamned house.”
I stomped into the living room. “What is wrong with you? All I ask for is a few minutes to get supper on the table. You’ve got to watch her. You can’t let her out of your sight.”
“What’s wrong with me? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I come home to a fucking pigsty after working my ass off all week…” He brushed by me, grabbed his pouch of tobacco off the counter and headed outside, slamming the screen door behind him.
* * *
—
When Grant came back into the kitchen, supper was on the table and Jenna was in her high chair playing with Cheerios. He closed the door quietly. With my back to him, I tossed the salad. I tossed and tossed all my anger and hatred up with his favourite food, Caesar salad. The last time I’d made it he’d choked out a compliment, said I was a pretty good cook.
He came up from behind, circled his arms around me. I stopped tossing.
“I’m sorry for being such an asshole.”
I couldn’t remember him ever apologizing. I leaned back against him. I just wanted us to be a happy little family.
* * *
—
The next morning, I opened my eyes to a hint of daylight softening the dark room and a pair
of big hands groping at my pajamas.
“Why do you wear all this shit to bed?” My “armour,” he called it.
I groaned and looked at the alarm clock.
“It’s six o’clock. Go away.” I pulled the pillow over my head, but he was curling into my back, pushing against me. It felt good to have his heavy arm draped over me, anchoring me to the bed. It felt safe. I moved toward him. He peeled off my pajamas till they were bunched at our feet under the covers. I wondered for a moment if Jenna would wake up. Should I close the door?
I melted into him. We didn’t speak. Didn’t look at each other.
* * *
—
Lying with my head on his damp shoulder, I couldn’t remember why I’d been so pissed off. I traced my fingers over his lean stomach while my head rose and fell with his breathing. This was what I needed. Connection. Harmony. But we could never hold on to it for long.
“I think we should buy the Morrises’ house.”
I rolled off him. Sat up. “But I just got my acceptance letter.”
The Morrises were climbers who’d moved to Revelstoke. They were having trouble selling their house on ten acres. Most of Golden’s climbers lived on rural properties either north or south of town: generally, the more redneckish hippie climbers settled to the north, and the hippie-ish hippie climbers to the south. It made it hard to know where to move when you had one of each in a family. The Morrises’ house was to the north, in the Blaeberry Valley.
“Let’s get a real estate agent to take us out there next weekend. At least take a look.”
“What about university? I don’t want to be fifty when I get my degree.”
“You aren’t even thirty yet. We can go to Calgary later, when the kids are older.”
“What do you mean, ‘kids’? You said kids, with an s.”
“I’ve been thinking. Jenna needs a sibling.”
A baby? Intense feelings flooded through me, horror or joy, I couldn’t tell. It was that same sensation you got when you put your foot in water so hot you could almost mistake it for freezing.
“What?” he said. “I think it’s a great idea.”
My mouth must have been hanging open. I’d hinted at another kid a few times, always pretending to be joking, but I’d never expected he’d actually go for it.
“I couldn’t have survived without my brother Nate,” he added.
I could never have survived my family without siblings either, and it was looking more and more like Jenna would need a sibling to survive us.
“We should focus on the family right now,” he said in his world-according-to-Grant voice.
I stiffened, crossed my arms. “The family. You say it like it’s a disease. Or the mafia. The family, not our family. It’s like the guys you work with who say, the wife. ‘I was talking to the wife the other day—’”
“Where do you come up with this crap? I love my family.”
I needed to hear him say he loved me, not an idea, a collective. But him saying he wanted another baby was almost like him saying he loved me.
“Just phone Barney at Re/Max this week and make an appointment. If we don’t like the place we won’t buy it.”
I’d already quit university once to have a baby, then last year I’d cancelled my registration to move to Golden. In ten years, some admissions officer was going to open my tenth application and say, “Oh, Christ, it’s that woman again,” and put me in the reject pile.
“What about Alaska?” I said.
“We couldn’t afford a climbing trip if we bought the house. The family comes first.”
All along I must have known that the acceptance letter was just a bunch of words typed on paper. That it was the easy part. There were still a lot of loose ends to take care of: affordable housing, daycare, reliable transportation, money, Jenna and Grant. Guilt. All the moms here stayed at home with their kids. When I told one of our friends I was planning to go back to school, he said, “We decided Nancy would stay at home because we didn’t want someone else raising our kids.” In Canmore the moms were motivational speakers, adventure consultants, physiotherapists, doctors, teachers, mountain guides, all with their kids in daycare. No one questioned them. Moving from Canmore to Golden was like reversing twenty years in a time machine.
* * *
—
“You’re planning to look at a house? Just last week you were ready to get a divorce. Again! And what about university?” My sister sounded exasperated through the phone from Vancouver.
Susan wasn’t married. She wasn’t a mother. She didn’t get how hard it was to just pick up a kid and go to university.
“We’re just looking. But I’m wondering if maybe I’ve been so miserable here just because of this house. If we had our own place…”
When Susan had come for a visit in the spring, the squiggly wormy bugs were right in the bed she was supposed to sleep in, like they’d dropped from the ceiling. She’d slept with me for a week while Grant was in camp.
“Jan, it’s not just the house.”
“But he was back to the nice Grant again last weekend. By Sunday, anyway. And he thinks he’s been so miserable all winter because I’ve been so negative and miserable. And if he’s unhappy because I’m unhappy, that means if I change my behaviour, maybe he can change his behaviour.”
Silence on the other end.
“You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m still here. It’s just that, I don’t know, you seemed your perky self on my last visit, until Grant came home. Then you could have cut the tension with a knife.”
“Don’t worry so much. Anyway, you wouldn’t believe how funny Jenna is these days. She’s constantly bringing me the book you gave her. I’ll point to a picture of a dog and she’ll go, ‘Woof, woof!’ Then I’ll point to a cat and she’ll say, ‘Meow!’”
“Really? That’s nice.” My sister sounded distracted. “So, did you read my essay? I was a bit worried about what you’d think about the section on you.”
Susan had written an essay about our family dynamics titled “And a Rock Feels No Pain” for one of her social-work classes at UBC. It was about our father’s little drinking problem. Dad was the villain of the story, and the only one who hadn’t read the essay. She wrote that I’d learned early to ignore anything I didn’t want to hear or see. How Eric and Dad would scream at each other, and I’d tune them out by getting down on the floor to do sit-ups and push-ups. How surprised I was during my annual visits home that I didn’t have a nice family.
“I’d forgotten I told you all that stuff—about blocking everything out.”
“It seemed like you just didn’t want to live in a family like ours so you made one up.”
In Whitehorse, in the park across from our house, I used to etch lines in the dirt for my fantasy home—bedrooms, kitchen, living room—then wander through the rooms talking to my fantasy family, the famous singing Partridge Family. Keith was my big brother, Shirley my perfect mother, and there were all those cool siblings. The father was conspicuously absent. Conveniently dead.
“Well, we were no Partridge Family, that’s for damned sure,” I said.
“Just don’t forget how badly you want school.”
“Um. There’s one more thing. Ah…Grant’s thinking it’d be good to have another baby….”
“Oh, Jan. You’d better phone Mom.”
My poor mother. She and Dad would probably have to remortgage their house to pay the phone bill. We had a special system. When I needed to talk, I’d call her collect, she’d refuse the charge, then call me back. She tolerated Dad’s bitching about the bill to keep Grant off my back about ours. In Munster she’d listened to Dad’s sister, crazy Aunt Helen, for hours and hours with my dad muttering in the background to get off the bloody phone. Now she had to listen to her crazy daughter.
* * *
—
The highway wound and twisted, hugging the Columbia River as we headed north of town. I had to look straight ahead so I wouldn’t lo
se my Raisin Bran. We were on our way to look at the Morrises’ house. My brain hopped from one affirmation to another, from I am now a university student to We now own a beautiful house in the Blaeberry and I am pregnant with my second child, till I felt like I was playing pinball with the universe. Two opposing affirmations probably cancelled each other out.
A fully loaded logging truck came around the corner toward us. My fingers clamped down on the armrest like a claw.
Grant watched the truck recede in his rear-view mirror. “Shit, that’s big cedar. Wonder where that’s coming from?”
“I hate those trucks. I’m always scared a log’ll roll off on us.”
“That’s why there’s all those squished cars on the side of the road.” He looked over at me and laughed.
I punched him in the arm. My happy Grant was back and it was only Saturday. Maybe it wasn’t a degree I needed. Maybe I needed to be more committed to this marriage. Rhea had told me that Adult Children of Alcoholics are always defining themselves through externals, meaning, for me, climbing, mountain biking, skiing and Grant. She’d think this house was an external. But what if a degree was as external as a house? And Jenna? How could she be an external? She was my life.
“What about Al?” I said. “He’d shit if we told him we’re looking for a house. We promised we’d stay a year.”
“Fuck ’im. We’ve been in that hole for eight months. That’s close enough.”
That’s what I wanted to be able to do. Tell the world where to go. Not give a shit what anyone thought. Sometimes I felt like Grant and I would be fine if we could live in our own little bubble, with no outside influences.
“We’re just looking, remember?” I said.
