by Jan Redford
“He seems to drink more when you’re here,” she said.
“Why would he need to do that?”
“I don’t know, Jan. He seems to need to thump his chest around you.”
Just like me showing off for him when I was a kid, doing chin-ups on the shower curtain bar. “Well, I don’t know how you live with him.”
“It’s much better than it looks. He’s mellowed with age.”
“Mommy, I’m scared.” Jenna, in her pink nightie, sucking on her blanket, stood at the top of the stairs between the kitchen and TV room, looking down on us. “I need you to sleep with me.”
She seemed traumatized from only two days in her nana’s spotless beige condo. She and Sam and Chaba had been confined like goats behind a baby gate in the TV room so they wouldn’t empty bowls of smelly potpourri onto white carpets, or get fingerprints on mirrors, or tip over the antique family coffee table, which was “priceless” but unstable. Having her mother threaten to abandon her on the side of the highway probably hadn’t helped.
I pushed myself up out of the chair. “Night, Ma. Sorry for being so cranky.”
In the bedroom, Jenna and I snuggled under the covers and started reading her favourite Robert Munsch book, The Paper Bag Princess, where the princess gets dirty trying to save Prince Ronald from the dragon and he tells her to clean herself up before he’ll marry her, so she turns up her nose and dances off into the sunset, all by herself, to live her own life.
Sometimes I wondered if it was Jenna’s favourite book because she knew it was my favourite.
* * *
—
“So, what brings you back?”
Sarah swivelled toward me in her chair with her clipboard full of papers, notes she’d taken during my previous counselling sessions. It looked thick.
I shifted on the leather sofa, trying to assume the appropriate facial expression under her scrutiny. Instead of meeting her gaze, I let my eyes wander around her office. We were in a heritage home near downtown Victoria. The room was huge, with dark hardwood floors and windows on three walls with wide ledges full of plants. There was a slight smell of incense, possibly jasmine.
Last spring I’d paced this office, vibrating with anger, recounting how Grant was trying to sabotage my attempt to go back to work after sabotaging my multiple attempts to go to school. Instead of sympathizing, Sarah had said, “You must be getting something out of it or you wouldn’t stay. What do you think is your payoff?”
I’d looked at her as if she were in the throes of psychosis. How could she have thought any of this was my fault? Couldn’t she see it was Grant? Couldn’t she see how stuck I was?
“We all make choices,” she’d said. “And if you don’t believe that, you’ll never have any control over your life.”
I’d been trying to figure it out all winter. What was my payoff? Money? Stimulating conversation? Safety? Nope. Nope. Nope. Familiarity? Was that enough?
Sarah rephrased her question. “What do you want out of these next few sessions? We have to be specific since we don’t have much time.”
I almost said, Make me satisfied with what I’ve got. Cure me of this obsession with school. It’s ruining my marriage.
She looked harmless—small and plump in her billowing flowered hippie skirt, her long grey hair tied back in a ponytail. But her softness hid boundaries like chain mail armour. She knew where she ended and I began. She didn’t sit there wondering if I liked her or approved of her. Some day, I wanted to be on her side of the room.
I sat up like I’d been given a couple of pumps of air. Now I knew why I’d come back.
“When I’m around Grant I give up, turn to mush. I need to stay awake. I need to stay angry long enough to get to school. The good anger. Not the kind that keeps me in limbo.”
She watched me for a moment, nodded, wrote something down.
“Grant’s always telling me how negative I am, always asking why I can’t focus on the good parts of the marriage instead of the bad.”
I wanted to stop telling Sarah what Grant said and did and felt and thought, but it was like he was implanted in my head, jabbering away at me. I couldn’t get rid of him. I knew the name for what I had. I’d read many books on it. Co-dependence. In one survey, out of 237 characteristics of co-dependence I’d checked off 220.
Sarah looked up from her clipboard.
“What is good about the marriage?” She looked genuinely curious.
“Good? Um…” I pulled my legs up on the couch to sit cross-legged while I gave that some thought. “Well, he’s a hard worker. Like my dad. And a good provider.”
“And?”
“He’s really strong, really physically fit. He’s an excellent climber.”
She waited for more.
“He loves the kids. Loves having a family. Well, he at least loves the concept of family. And he doesn’t show it, but I’m sure he loves me.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, he married me. Didn’t screw off on me when I got pregnant. That couldn’t have been easy for him, at the height of his climbing career. And he’s stayed with us. Sort of. Not emotionally, but physically. Well, I guess he’s only there a few days a month, but he wouldn’t be working as a logger if he didn’t love us….”
“Most people work for a living, you know. It isn’t an act above and beyond the call of duty.”
“It kind of is with climbers.”
She didn’t laugh. My former counsellor Rhea once told me I used humour to deflect.
“Do you think your mother loves your father?”
“Of course she does.” My mother loving my father seemed as indisputable as my mother loving me. Or my father loving me. It was just the natural course of things.
“How do you know that?”
“I guess because she stayed with him?”
My sister and I had often discussed what kind of person Mom could have been if she’d left. What kind of people we could have been.
“So you’re with Grant because you love him?”
“I must be. Why else would I put up with so much shit?” My love for Grant, for any man, it seemed, stood between me and some dark abyss I’d only come close to on a few occasions. Like when I lost Dan. But having this knowledge didn’t make it any easier to leave.
She gave me homework. I was to describe an “intimate relationship.” I asked her if I could look it up at the library or if that would be cheating.
“That would be cheating.” A tiny smile.
* * *
—
“Mom, do you love him?” I looked up from the pile of clean laundry on the bed.
“Who, your father?” My mother kept folding Sam’s tiny T-shirts.
“Yeah. Dad.”
“What kind of question is that?”
“Well, do you?”
She stopped folding. Looked at me. “Of course not. How could you think I loved your father?”
I glanced at the door, suddenly afraid Dad was just in the other bedroom, or coming up the stairs. He had the hearing of a bat. Shame, like the ash of Pompeii, settled over me just for being part of this conversation. Me, of all people. “You’re the only one who loves me,” he’d told me when I was a kid. A familiar mixture of anger and protectiveness churned around inside me.
“Why would you stay with him then?”
“People didn’t just leave their husbands. What would I do? I had you three. And now what’s the point? We’re comfortable.” I could hear the words she wasn’t saying: “What would the neighbours think?” It had always been more important to her for us to look like a normal family than to be one. To eat supper at six o’clock, with a tablecloth and place mats, the cutlery properly placed, and a father at the head of the table.
I turned my back on my mother to put a stack of folded sleepers in the drawer.
“Well, I love him,” I said, partly in case he was listening.
* * *
—
While Sam slept, Jenna watched
the first cartoon from the foot-tall stack of videos that my parents’ neighbours, Mike and Liz, had brought over. I was prepared to insert them into the machine, one after another until we left, just to keep the kids out of their grandfather’s hair, but he was already moaning about losing his television privileges. He was in self-exile in his office off the TV room, with the accordion-style doors closed.
I popped my head through his doorway, scanned the desk. No Scotch. Mom had talked to him about his drinking, made it clear it was unacceptable. She had sounded proud of herself, as though it wasn’t thirty years too late.
“I’m going to grab a beer. Do you want one?” Beer was okay. Beer wasn’t Scotch.
“It’s about that time, isn’t it?” There was a hint of conspiracy in his voice.
No one else in my family drank anymore except my dad and me, but thankfully I was well past my high-school drink-till-you-puke phase. My mother would sip wine on occasion, my brother had been sober for years, and my sister couldn’t drink anything except the occasional straight vodka. She’d discovered she was allergic to almost anything she put in her body, including most food. Apparently it had something to do with our upbringing.
“Yeah, thanks. I’ll have a beer. Just keep those goddamned rug rats quiet, will you?” Dad chuckled. I chuckled with him. I loved it when we got along.
* * *
—
“So, do you think you have an intimate relationship?”
Sarah had just read my list of characteristics: supporting one another’s dreams, communication, conversation, respect, eye contact…Eye contact! I couldn’t believe I’d had to put something as basic as eye contact on my list.
“No.”
Not a single one of the twenty characteristics on my list existed in my marriage.
“Do you want one?”
“Of course I do. Doesn’t everyone?”
“No, not everyone. Do you think Grant does?”
“Yes, he just doesn’t know how.”
Maybe Sarah should come to Kelowna with me sometime for a reunion with Grant’s family. Then she’d understand.
“Do you think he can learn?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you stay without intimacy?”
“I hope not.”
“So, you can leave?”
“No.”
“So, where does that leave you?”
“In limbo. Making no decision as usual. Just letting life do to me as it will.” I put my head in my hands. I was so tired. I wondered if it would be rude to curl into a ball and take a little nap.
“You are making a decision. That’s the whole point. You are making a decision to flop around and not make a decision. That’s a decision.”
I looked up. That last statement had sounded a bit rude. Sarah looked exasperated. Were counsellors allowed to look exasperated? I didn’t blame her. I was getting tired of me too.
“I didn’t say it was a good decision,” she said. “It is the one you are able to make right now. But it is your decision. Not Grant’s. It’s your decision.”
I stared at my clenched fists on my lap. My breathing was shallow, moving in and out too fast. My head was a ball of fluff, floating somewhere above my shoulders, detached. I wanted to reach up and pull it back down, cram it onto my neck where it belonged. I should have eaten something before I came.
“So, you told me he blamed you for his broken leg.”
“Yeah,” I said warily.
“So, you find it unreasonable that he’s not taking responsibility for the things happening to him?”
“Of course. It was his choice to log in the first place. It was his choice to go back to work while I was working….”
Jesus, what is she getting at?
“So, what do you blame Grant for?”
“Everything! For sleeping with me after Dan died. For making me move to Golden, for stopping me every year from going back to school…” My anger was back.
“Does that make any more sense than him blaming you for his broken leg?”
She paused for a moment, letting me make the connection. A tiny light tried hard to flicker on in some far-off corner of my consciousness.
“If you float,” she said, “you have no power. If you take responsibility for your decisions, you have power. Because that means you can make other decisions. If you believe Grant keeps you stuck, or your father keeps you stuck, you’ll stay stuck. You only have control over your own actions.”
My father had once said to me, “You can’t keep blaming me forever.” But apparently I could. I split the blame evenly between him and Grant.
* * *
—
Jenna and Sam sprawled across my bed, asleep. I closed my journal on my pen. I kept seeing the look on Jenna’s face in the rear-view mirror after I’d told her I’d abandon her on the side of the road in a snowstorm.
I threw the journal on the floor and curled around my kids. Jenna’s mouth was lax around her two fingers.
Sarah had said, “You’re doing the best you can in the circumstances.” Grant had said the same thing to me: “I’m doing the best I can.” But I wanted our best to be better.
I untangled myself from my kids’ sleeping bodies, pulled on my housecoat, slipped down the carpeted stairs. Maybe if I heated up some milk I could sleep. When I’d been plagued with insomnia as a child, sure I was dying of cancer and would roast in hell for eternity, or worse, that my family would roast in hell, Mom had drugged me up with warm milk and Gravol.
The TV was still on. Dad looked up from the couch. He was empty-handed. No Scotch. “Trouble sleeping?” he asked.
“Yup. You too?”
“Yup.”
“What are you watching?”
“Late news.”
I sat beside him on the couch. We watched quietly together. His news-watching had been sacrosanct when we were kids, just like the morning newspaper. No talking.
My dad smelled faintly of aftershave. Old Spice. My suit-and-tie-and-briefcase morning dad.
My throat tightened. I’d been crying every day these past couple of weeks, usually several times. Almost as much as after Alaska.
“So, your mother tells me things are still rough with Grant.”
I nodded. Tried to hold back the tears. I didn’t want him to head upstairs, or out to the garage. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”
He patted my leg briefly. Made the growly sound in the back of his throat that I’d liked so much when I was little. It used to make me feel special, even though he made the same noise to the dog and cat and gerbils. Sometimes he’d wink at the same time, like we shared a secret.
“I think school’s a good idea,” he said.
I sniffled quietly as we watched the rest of the news.
* * *
—
I drove toward downtown, turned onto Sarah’s narrow, tree-lined street and parked the car around the back of her office. This was my last session. I’d barely slept, worried that Sarah still hadn’t cured me. Worried that maybe this was as good as it got. Was I really as unhappy as I thought I was?
Sarah seemed more relaxed, and I wondered if she’d set up the past sessions like boot camp, or basic training. Break me down to build me back up again. Maybe she’d be easier on me today.
“Why do you want to go to school so badly?”
School. For years school had been dangling in front of me like a massive carrot. Education led to meaningful work, which led to money, which led to independence, which led to confidence—and it all led to freedom. Education was something I could take with me everywhere because it’d be inside me. It would transform me. Education would save me.
“I feel like if I can take this step, I can do anything. I can turn into someone who can’t live with someone like Grant. I can turn into the person I know I can be.”
“Don’t worry about leaving him at this point. If it’s going to happen, it’ll happen when you’re ready. Just get yourself to school.”
; “I’ll never convince Grant.”
Sarah leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “So when he didn’t want you to go back to work, what did you do?”
“I went back to work.”
“And when he didn’t want to move back to Canmore, what did you do?”
“I bought a townhouse. I’m actually pretty proud of that.” I smiled.
“So, it’s selective. You let him tell you what to do sometimes, and not others.”
“It’s not that easy. I can’t get a student loan. Grant makes too much money now. I have kids. A house. A cat. A dog. Chaba can’t come to Calgary with us.”
Just the thought of leaving Chaba made me want to stay in the Blaeberry and make Grant’s lunch for the rest of my life. Chaba was part of the family.
“No one said it would be easy.”
I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees. Sarah had approximately ten minutes left to save me. I could not dick around. “Sarah, I can sit here in this room and think, Yes, I’ll go to university, but what about when I get home? How do I hold on to this conviction? How do I hold on to me? When I start to explain to Grant why I need to go to school, he gets pissed off and I start to shrink. Then poof! I’m gone.”
“What are you the most afraid of?”
I thought of the chilly silence in our house. When he wasn’t in camp it was like walking through a minefield.
“His anger. His disapproval.”
“So you have his approval now?”
“Nope. I don’t. I don’t have it at all.”
“But you had it before?”
I tilted my head. “No. Not really. Maybe sometimes. When I buy into the ‘me Tarzan, you Jane’ lifestyle. But no. Not even then.” The only time he seemed somewhat happy was when he was climbing, with no interference from me or the kids or the logging industry.
“You could stay at home with his anger or go to school with his anger. You can blame him until you’re eighty if you want, and even if you’re right, you still won’t have gone to school. And you still won’t have his approval.”
There was a little click in my brain, like the switch in a railway yard that makes a train head down a different set of tracks.
