by Jan Redford
* * *
—
By the time Grant came into the bedroom, I was all cried out. He pushed the desk out of the way, sat on the edge of the bed.
“I took the kids over to Karen.” His voice was calm, almost gentle.
He lay down beside me, put his hands behind his head. We studied the chart that spanned the whole of my wall, page after page taped together; the semester separated into weeks, the days into columns; my four courses separated into rows. I’d included all my readings, assignments, quizzes, exams and presentations using the kids’ markers, a different colour for the level of importance, and I’d calculated the percentage of time I should allot to each. It had taken hours.
“This isn’t working,” Grant finally said.
“I know.”
One month into my first semester and I was wasted, defeated. I knew what he was going to say. He was going to tell me to come home and I didn’t have the strength left to fight. Some days I was so homesick for my house, my garden, my mountains, for him, that I wished I could push a rewind button on my life. Sarah had said it wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t know it would be this hard.
“I think we should separate. I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” he said.
My breath caught in my throat.
“We’re going to kill each other. And we’re hurting the kids.”
The tears started up again; hot streams coursed down the sides of my face and pooled in my ears. Sobbing, I curled away from him. Wrapped my arms around my knees. “I know, I know.” This is what I thought I’d always wanted, to be free, but he wasn’t supposed to feel the same way. He was supposed to fight for me.
“I can’t think of any other way. Even if you came back to Golden you’d never be happy.”
“I know, I know.” I squeezed my knees into my chest, doubled in half. I couldn’t breathe.
We didn’t speak. We didn’t touch.
* * *
—
The morning light slanting through the curtains woke me. I pushed through heavy fog, struggling back to consciousness. My head throbbed with dehydration. I was alone in our big bed. Grant’s words from the night before settled on me like boulders.
Wrapped in a blanket, I shuffled down the stairs to an empty house. My bare feet hit the linoleum with a cold shock. A sleeping bag was folded neatly on our foamy on the living room carpet. I walked on top of it to turn up the thermostat.
The house was quiet without the kids, without the TV blaring. How had he managed to keep Jenna and Sam out of the bedroom? I must have slept twelve hours. I curled up on the couch, tucking my feet under the blanket. I should get out my books and study; I should finish my essay; I should do some cleaning; I should eat. So many shoulds. I stared out the window at the wall of bushes.
After a while, it could have been ten minutes or two hours, Grant pushed open the door and the chilly Alberta air followed him into the living room. October was way too early for winter.
“I took the kids to daycare. Looked like you needed to sleep.”
“Were they okay?” I pictured Sam, wrapped around my leg, me shaking him off. Jenna screaming. I groaned and curled into a tighter ball. What am I doing to my children?
“They’ll be fine. Kids are resilient.” He sounded like he was quoting from one of my parenting books. “Have you eaten?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You should eat.”
I started to say, Why should you care? but when my eyes met his I saw genuine concern. “I’ll eat later.”
He sat on the armrest. “I’m going to head back to Golden.”
It was only Friday. He was supposed to stay for two more days. I had four mid-terms to study for.
“This is the best decision for everyone. You know that. We should never have been together in the first place. We’ve only lasted this long because of the kids.”
“I know.” I’d always known. But I hadn’t thought he knew. It wasn’t something to be said out loud. It wasn’t something you could take back.
He started rolling up the foamy, cramming the sleeping bag into a stuff sack.
“I’ve been thinking. I probably shouldn’t come back here for a while. We should get used to not being together. Maybe you could meet me in Banff with the kids when I get out of camp. I can take them back to Golden with me for a few days.”
My kids and my husband in Golden without me? I dissolved again into big, heaving, hiccuping sobs. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to stop.
Grant sank to the floor, patted my arm as though scared to touch me in case emoting was contagious. “It’s okay. I’ll stay with you if you want, until you finish this year. We don’t have to do this now.” He was throwing me a scrap.
“Just go!” The words were barely out before my voice was consumed by sobs. I needed him to go now.
He stood for a moment looking down on me, hesitated, then picked up his bag and pushed open the door.
35
ONE LITTLE “NON”
I pulled the car up in front of the gate to the playground. We’d decided to meet here so the kids could play, but I’d forgotten how close it was to Dan’s old place. The grey walls of his townhouse peeked through the trees.
While I pushed the kids on the swings, Grant pulled the battered Dodge truck up beside the Tercel. We hadn’t seen him in three weeks because he’d gotten his dream job in Port Hardy. He was now in big wood, making big money. A faller’s dream. Three weeks on, one week off.
As he walked toward us, my throat squeezed shut. He was wearing a new, expensive-looking black leather jacket. He looked cool, self-assured, like an older version of James Dean. Or like he was sleeping with someone.
The kids raced toward him yelling, “Daddydaddydaddy!” I hung back, following slowly, but what I really wanted to do was sidle up to him, put my head on his chest under his chin, feel his heart beat through the black leather. Disappear into him. Quitting him was like quitting chewing tobacco or cigarettes. Needing one more drag, or one more chew, despite the threat of a gruesome assortment of cancers.
“Hey! I missed you two!” He scooped them both up, kissed them.
I edged closer to my little family.
Jenna had drawn a picture at school of her mommy and daddy getting married, with a little blond boy and girl in front of the mom’s white wedding dress. She was clinging to her fantasy family, just like I was. She didn’t know I’d been married in a twenty-year-old fuchsia-pink silk dress handed down from her grandmother.
“Hi.” I was so homesick I could smell the cedar walls of my home.
“Hello. How are you?” His voice was too loud, too formal, like he was talking to the lady behind the counter at the 7-Eleven.
I could tell he didn’t really want the truth. He didn’t want to know that for three weeks I’d been on the edge of a nervous breakdown during my waking hours, then in my sleep, I’d abandoned the kids in the truck at Emerald Lake in the dark and couldn’t get back to them, and lost Sam through a hole in the ice on a river and felt his little fingers slowly slip from mine.
“Fine,” I said. Fake it till you make it. I forced myself to match the detachment in his voice. “I’d like to have them back by four on Tuesday.” A statement, not a question. I was in a women’s assertiveness skills training group at the university counselling centre.
“Yeah, I’ll be here.” It was a full-on competition for who could be the most remote. He switched the car seat and booster seat to the truck, strapped in the kids.
“Say ‘bye-bye’ to Mommy!” He put on his cute puppy-dog voice, my cue to get lost.
Jenna and I kissed, rubbed noses.
“Butterfly kiss, butterfly kiss!” she said. With my face right up to her cheek, I tickled her with my wet eyelashes.
Sam was quiet, sucking on a bottle with his head resting against the car seat like he’d had enough. Leaning over Jenna, I kissed his cheek. His chin wobbled, and globs of yellow snot peeked from his nostrils, like worms eme
rging from their holes. He was getting sick, and daycare didn’t take sick babies, but I’d have to cross that barracuda-filled moat when I got to it. I wiped his nose with my sleeve. I couldn’t imagine being away from him overnight, let alone for four nights.
“Bye-bye, baby.” Words from the lullaby I sang to them.
“See you Tuesday.” Grant slipped the truck into gear.
* * *
—
Alone for four days. I’d fantasized about this for years: uninterrupted sleeps, long runs on the trails, relaxing glasses of wine. Pure silence. Now here I was, reading the same paragraph in my psychology text over and over with voices from the television filling the long empty room to ward off that silence. Driving back from Banff in an empty car, I’d felt like steering straight into a semi.
The phone rang. Nine o’clock. I had just talked to the kids an hour ago. Maybe Grant couldn’t get them settled. Maybe they needed me as much as I needed them. I ran into the kitchen, grabbed the phone.
“Hello, Grant?”
“Hi, Jan. It’s your old man.”
“Dad. Is everything okay?”
He was on his own in Victoria this week while Mom was visiting Susan in her new house with her new husband in Vancouver.
“I need to talk to you,” he said.
Something in his voice sent prickles of fear up the back of my neck, into my scalp.
“Dad, what’s wrong? Is Mom okay?” The terror of losing my mother was always there. I could not survive what I was doing without her. She calmed me down every second day over the phone, and she was booking a flight to come help me with the kids.
“I’m sure she’s fine. I wanted to talk to you on my own. How are you?” It sounded like he was stalling.
“I don’t know. Not great. How are you?”
He cleared his throat, then it sounded like he was taking a sip of a drink, but it could have been my imagination. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say for a long time.” He was slurring, but only slightly. He went quiet.
“Dad. Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here. I wanted to tell you something. That I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? For what?”
“This stuff with Grant. I feel responsible for your troubles with men.”
Was he really saying this? I pulled the phone on its cord around the corner, sank into the couch.
“Dad, are you okay?” He did not sound like himself at all.
“Yes, yes, Jan, I’m fine.” His chuckles relaxed me. “But I think I might have something to do with why you can’t find a good relationship.”
Might? When I didn’t answer, he cleared his throat. Once. Then twice, like something was lodged in there. “I wish I’d been a better father to you.” His voice cracked.
I didn’t know what to say. What could I say?
I wish you’d been a better father too.
Or: You did the best you could.
Or: No, Dad, you’re a great father. It was so hard not to try to rescue him.
“Thank you, Dad,” I whispered into the phone. “That means a lot to me.”
* * *
—
The girl sitting two desks ahead of me was reading out loud from the play Les Belles-Soeurs. I sat rigid at my desk, hyperventilating. The top of my head tingled. I was so nervous I could barely follow along. The prof had started the readings at the other side of the room, up and down the aisle, which left me last. I wasn’t too bad if I got it over with quickly—it was the anticipation that did me in. There was a ringing in my ears like the echo of cymbals clashing. I knew my mind was going to go blank when it was my turn to read, when all those eyes turned toward me.
“Merci beaucoup, Caroline. Julie?”
Julie started reading in the heavy joual—Québécois slang—of a bunch of disgruntled, middle-aged housewives who hung out in a kitchen in Quebec licking a million grocery stamps that Germaine had won and would redeem for a lawnmower in the prize catalogue. All the while they complained about la misère. Julie’s French was perfect; she must have been a francophone.
None of the courses I’d taken by distance, in the safety of my own home, had prepared me for this. I had occasionally talked to a tutor over the phone, but never face to face. Now, thirty students would be eyeing me, judging me, and I knew what they’d see. An imposter. A “mature” student with a grey streak in her hair who wasn’t really all that mature, and whose French sucked.
It was almost my turn. I closed my eyes, used my mom’s trick on myself: What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe my voice would shake a bit, but in all likelihood, I wasn’t going to throw up or black out just reading a passage from a book.
Julie stopped reading and silence enveloped the room. Someone at the back muffled a sneeze, a couple of people shifted in their seats.
The prof looked in my direction. She was no more than ten years older than I was, already the head of her department. Confident, funny, passionate, and she cursed like a French-Canadian climber. Maybe I could have been on that side of the desk if I’d stayed in school the first time. But then I wouldn’t have had Jenna and Sam.
Her brown eyes were friendly. This was not a challenge, I knew that, but I didn’t want her to see through me, to that weak, jiggling jelly at my core.
“Janeese?”
The words were doing a little jig on the page, so I pinned them down with my shaky index finger. I started reading softly, slowly. My monotone voice did a disservice to the Quebec housewife, Rose, and her impassioned monologue, loaded with vulgarities.
“We can’t hear at the back,” someone said.
I stopped.
“Un peu plus fort. Just get into the women’s lives,” the professor said in French. “C’est le fun.”
I cleared my throat. This was ridiculous. If I couldn’t even read a few paragraphs from a book in front of a small class, I’d never make it as a teacher.
I continued. The prof laughed at a sentence I didn’t fully understand and my voice got stronger. After a few more lines, my accent didn’t sound so bad after all. When I focused on the women, let their lives unravel, it was hard to focus on my panic attack. The housewives’ bitterness was tangible, their isolation in the kitchen complete. Their only hope of escape from la maudite vie plate—their miserable, rotten lives—was to score big in a contest. Rose materialized in front of me as she ranted about her husband; how a woman had to tolerate a pig like that for the rest of her life because she had had the misfortune to say oui that one time. “J’aurais dû crier ‘non’ à plein poumons.” I should have screamed no at the top of my lungs! Regret seeped through her monologue, for the past, for her hopeless future. But she vowed her daughter would never end up like her.
“Maudit cul!” The passage ended on a very bad swear word.
A few laughs peppered this room full of twenty-something girls. They probably thought because the play had been written in 1965, these kitchens didn’t exist anymore.
“Thank you, we’ll stop there.”
I put my book down, untangled myself from Rose’s life of misery, looked up at the professor.
“You put a lot of heart into that reading.”
It always surprised me how much French I understood, like I was slipping into someone else’s body. I was only a B student in this class because it was so labour-intensive having to look up every second word in my French-English dictionary, but in my other classes, on every essay, and on every mid-term exam, I’d gotten an A.
* * *
—
“How was the drive?” I asked.
It was Tuesday, back in the playground at Banff, and Grant didn’t look quite as in control as he had four days earlier. Instead of his black leather jacket, he was wearing his down coat, the one with duct tape over the holes. Four days with his kids in his rented room in a cabin in the woods and he was haggard.
“Long.”
I resisted the urge to apologize. He didn’t bother to ask about my drive.
&n
bsp; We sat on opposite ends of the bench and watched the kids chase each other through the soft wood shavings. This playground was like a big hamster cage. It even smelled the same. Grant lit up a cigarette. It was hard to see the climber in him. He seemed all logger.
The twins’ mother, Karen, had said to me soon after we met, “I can’t believe you’re a logger’s wife. You don’t seem the type.” And I’d said, “You don’t seem like a vending machine filler’s wife.” We’d agreed we had long, messy stories to compare over a few bottles of wine.
“I read an editorial in the Calgary Herald yesterday about how our society is falling apart due to a lack of moral conviction.” Grant sounded like he’d rehearsed these lines.
“Yeah, I read it too. The guy that wrote it is from some radical pro-life, pro-family coalition.”
“What’s wrong with pro-family? Everyone’s splitting up these days. There’s no commitment, no work ethic.”
Sam toddled after Jenna to the slide, his diaper under snow pants making him bowlegged. Jenna squealed as she sailed down, face first. At the bottom she looked over to make sure we were watching, then she put her hands out to catch her brother.
“I think we made a mistake. I think we should get back together,” Grant said.
I hadn’t seen that coming, even with the pro-family talk. I wrapped my arms around my core and a fog of confusion shrouded my head. We’d split up a month ago. I’d just found out I qualified for student loans as a single mother, and for a daycare subsidy. I was starting to think I could do this.
“I don’t think that’s such a good—”
“I really miss my family, you know.” Grant slumped over with his elbows on his knees, his eyes on the kids. I had a sudden urge to bake him banana bread.
“I know,” I said. His sadness stabbed into me, twisted. I had no idea where mine ended and his began. Four days without Jenna and Sam had been like solitary confinement for me. He must have been so lonely without us.
