The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  At the age of seventeen, because the boy with whom she was in love for life had left the small town to make his fortune in the city, and had not said he would return and take her with him while he made his fortune, she gave up boys, and gave up all pleasure and buried herself in books, and homework, and knelt in the crimson-draped confessional and whispered to the priest that she was entering a nunnery.

  “I want to enter a nunnery,” she said, hardly audible, so great was her devotion.

  The priest whispered, “You want to be a nun?”

  “I want to enter a nunnery.”

  She smelled incense, she heard liturgical music in her heart. She felt the boy’s hands on her breasts, her body shaking as she shook the night when she’d left her children alone.

  “I want to enter a nunnery.”

  The priest, knowing young girls, told her to think about it for a week and come back. When she did go back, to the same priest, in the same small box, with the same crimson velvet curtain, she said to him, in the same whispering voice, “Father, I think I am pregnant. But he has promised to get married before the baby shows.”

  “Are you still thinking of becoming a nun?”

  The house was dark. She could hear her own footsteps on the linoleum, and her heels sticking to it because she had not mopped up the orange juice and milk spilled on the previous morning at breakfast with her daughters. She dropped her briefcase, rested the brown paper bag on the table, and walked towards her bedroom. Normally, she stopped in the kitchen, put her manicured hands into the thick oily water full of plates and saucers and coffee mugs and knives and spoons and her one crystal martini glass. She washed the three sets of dirty dishes, unable to understand why the three of them used so many, and she would stand looking at them, plates half-submerged in the murky water. When done, almost every evening, it would be close to ten o’clock. No one would have an appetite: neither she nor the two children.

  Free of that chore, she headed for her bedroom, and felt the emptiness there. Sometimes the younger child, tormented by the older, would seek refuge on her mother’s bed. It was a welcome show of affection, even when she had to sort out the quarrels and secret beatings. Tonight, there was no child on the bed. And in a flash of hope and forgetfulness, she wondered why.

  She went down the wooden steps, almost too narrow even for her small body, into the basement, and along the cement floor, past the furnace-room door to the largest bedroom, the room her elder daughter had commandeered when they had moved into this house. The bed was made. In the middle of the single mattress was a book. The girl was always reading. At seven o’clock on that night, she had just put the book down when the car horn sounded. The book was open and turned down. She had always scolded her daughter about damaging the spines of books that way. She went to the small closet and opened the door, saw the empty shelves, and the wire hangers, some of them bent into shapes to suit her small-size blouses, brassieres, and denim jeans. On the bookcase, there was only a white envelope. Nothing was written on it. A ballpoint pen sat beside the envelope.

  All around the room, cool in the summer and warm in the winter, large and bright for a basement room, her eyes wandered, picking up her daughter’s presence, her movement and posture, the sound of her small feet when she walked in her bare feet after her bath, when the floor was spotted by water. She sat on the bed, and before she rose, she turned her face away from the bed, left her right hand on it as if she were patting it goodbye, as if the closeness of the body that slept in it was still on the blue sheet patterned with daisies.

  She hurried back upstairs. At the top of the stairs, she paused, as if catching her breath, but she was young and in good health. She paused and put her hand to her head, to think of the heavy presence in the empty house, and of loss.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Sure!”

  “You realize of course that it could be seen, perceived that you are giving your children up, and—”

  “I’m not giving my children up.”

  “I know that. But—”

  “Suppose, just suppose the arrangement is for a few months, till I catch myself, till I am more in control of myself. And we can have an agreement saying that it is for a few months and at the end of this time, they’ll come back to me, and—”

  “I understand what you mean, and I understand what you want, but I have to advise you that the perception—”

  “The perception is one thing. I know about perception. But the reality is that he’s taking them for a trial period. It is the decision of my daughter to go and live with her father.”

  “What’re you going to do with the little one? Send her too?”

  “How can I separate the two of them? What is he making me do? What is he up to? Does he want me to send the older one to him, and me keep the younger? I won’t have it. I won’t do it. I don’t trust his motives. What does he want me to do?”

  “Suppose . . . suppose before the time ends, they want to come back to you? Suppose only one wants to come back before the trial period ends? Or, now that you’re moving to a more economical place, suppose, before the five-month arrangement ends, one of them wants to live with you?”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Or when the time ends, they don’t want to stop living with their father?”

  “You mean, they’re not?”

  She took a Kleenex from her purse and spread it on her knee, and then put it to her face. She had been biting her lip. She could feel her muscles tighten.

  “How’s your concentration at work?”

  “Fine.”

  “And your nights?”

  “Just fine.”

  “You know, a little snort . . . a spot of brandy. Are you sleeping well?”

  “My doctor gave me something.”

  “Sleeping pills?”

  “Something to relax.”

  “To relax you? I’d be careful.”

  “I’m fine.”

  There was a slip of yellow paper, a paper a little bigger than a postage stamp, in her shoe. She recognized the handwriting of her sixteen-year-old. She closed her eyes, refused to read it, feared its message, and tore it from the insole of the shoe, balled it up, put it into the pocket of her skirt. She had arranged all her shoes at the bottom of the cupboard according to the fondness she had for them; and she ran her hand along the metal bar that held the wire hangers with her dresses. She wrenched the hangers to the left, not liking how they looked, and then wrenched them in the opposite direction. She looked at her bed, saw how large it was for the room, and promised to call her sister and take back the smaller bed and mattress she had left there. She looked around the bedroom, hating that she was forced to move out of her home, more comfortable than this even when the family was four, plus a dog that had fleas, and two cats.

  Her eyes were sore; she must take out her lenses. She blinked, held on to the top of the dresser, placed the third finger of her right hand to her eyeball, flicked her lid, and extracted the miniature piece of plastic; and she placed her left hand, not seeing clearly, on the white bottle that contained lens solution, and her fingers touched a small slip of paper, the same yellow colour as the first, and before she used the liquid, straining her eye to see, she saw the handwriting again, and this time, she had no excuse for not reading it.

  Mummy, I still like you. Your daughter.

  She used no Kleenex this time. She allowed the suppressed feelings of hurt and disappointment that had welled up for three days to spill out: and she sat on the edge of her unmade bed, allowed the tears to fall, and did not seek to control them.

  Why didn’t she write “love”? Did her daughter not love her? Why didn’t she say she loved me? She felt the parting note was too formal, too distant, after only three days. On the door of the fridge was another note. It repeated the same longing and liking. And when she took the plastic holder with the ice cubes for making her martini from the
fridge, there was another note. It was frozen into the ice.

  The martini she made was pure gin. Luckily, she’d found Bombay Sapphire. And she had an old bottle of olives in the cupboard. If she was in any doubt about the potency of the pills her doctor had prescribed, she would wash them down with the first martini.

  “In a way,” she said to herself, “in a way it’s good the kids are gone. I don’t have to worry about supper.” She corrected herself. “If they were here, I would not be able to have this martini.” She liked the revision.

  On the night she’d left the girls unattended, going to see the man, she’d known she was going to have sex, not make love, because, as she said to herself, “I can’t make love to a man I don’t know.” It had been such a long time since she had had sex with a man. It had happened only with her husband, it had happened whenever he came to see how the kids were taking it; and each time she broke down. He promised to change his ways and told her that it was “just for a time,” and that he intended to give her some space and distance. In that confused understanding, he took her upstairs into her new bedroom, where her clothes were still in boxes and some of them strewn over the uncovered mattress, and he took her and did not pay attention to the spots and smudges on the grey-striped single mattress, so thin that he thought he could feel the boards of the bedstead in his steady, hard, unloving pushing against her eager body. Yes, it was to have sex, to remind herself that she had not entered the nunnery and that her body, as the body of a woman, needed that nourishment. He knew it. And she knew it.

  She believed that with the other man, whom she has not spoken to or seen since that hectic night, the sinfulness of the act was mollified by the urgency of her body’s need. She was not going into a nunnery. And after all, she said, breaking the speed limit to get back to her unattended children, “I’m a free woman.”

  When she got back to the house, the sixteen-year-old was sitting on the couch in the living room. The television was a steady scene of falling snow. When she saw the screen, it reminded her of the plunging water at Niagara Falls. In the lap of the sixteen-year-old was the nine-year-old. Both were wrapped in sleep. Each had a smile on her face, oblivious to the risk her mother had taken. Both were in the rapture of sleep, as she had lain in rapture for five minutes in the man’s arms, after he had screwed her, and had sunk into a doze.

  She went back over these things. The clothes she had worn to work for the past five days were dropped over chairs, and some of her underclothes were draped over the back of the toilet. The shoes she’d worn were scattered, kicked off as soon as she had come through the door. “Feet killing me!”

  She had seen the state of the kitchen: the uneaten meals, the fragments of toast, the dishes left unwashed in the stagnant water. Ashtrays were filled with cigarettes stubbed out, twisted, and some were hardly smoked at all. In some cigarette packages, she had left matches and cigarettes and telephone messages which she never returned.

  The liquor she’d bought, the brandy, the Bombay Sapphire, and the sparkling wine, stood arranged in a triangle of bottles in the cleared kitchen counter space. The water glass was filled with cubes. The crystal glass, the only one she had washed from the cluttered sink, sat sparkling among them.

  The first taste of the martini struck her stomach, exploding all the hurt and pain and self-crucifixion at the sight of the notes from the sixteen-year-old, notes pinned against her heart. She walked through the house, ignoring the evening news on the television, and the announcer screaming about the success of the Blue Jays, who were playing in Oakland. She sipped her martini. She could not feel the touch of her feet on the carpet. I have to vacuum. Dust had risen; she could see it in the beam of light from the floor lamp. She swore to herself that she would shift a framed photograph, remove a dried bunch of flowers. Everywhere she looked she saw a note left by her child. She had three more martinis and cried herself to sleep.

  She fell asleep on the couch. Very early the next morning, the dishes were still unwashed. She found more notes from the sixteenyear-old. One was in her panties in the drawer. She discovered one stuck to the blank cheque in her book that was to be sent to the landlord. She sat down now and drank two more martinis, and as they did not stimulate her, she poured herself a brandy, looking at the morning news, and a game show and a talk show. She was about to take a sleeping pill, but realized it was nine in the morning. For the second time that week, she called in sick, saying she had to take the kids to the doctor. But they had been with their father for three days now. She took The Lives of the Saints from under the jumbo box of Kleenex and opened it, but before she had read the first paragraph, her vision became blurred by her tears. She was thinking of sin and of the time she’d sat in the small confessional and whispered to the priest, “I want to enter a nunnery.” She cried and she wondered if she was losing her mind. And how was she to stop it?

  She filled the house with noise from the radio, the television, and the stereo. But her best balm was the martinis. She loved martinis, and drank them in generous quantities. They were a part of her sophistication. Other women, her sister and friends in the office, drank white wine. She held that for a woman to drink martinis showed a sign of class.

  Now, she was sitting in the living room on the large couch. The gin was gone. She passed her hand over the couch’s silk material and noticed stains left by her children. She made a mental note to wash them with detergent and a cloth; better still, send the whole damn thing to the cleaners. No, not the cleaners; to the upholsterers. And she decided that the other couch, which was too large for the living room, should be sent to the upholsterers too. Then, she made up her mind to throw them out and replace them with furniture that she, as a new woman, demanded. A new, fresh, virginal beginning. She looked at the coffee table, and then at the end table, and the large dining table, and the television, her reliable friend, sworn to keep her company. All were discarded. She was sipping Courvoisier now. She became tense, with a pain that entered her stomach and went up into her chest. She thought of stress. She thought of ulcers. She thought of her heart. She inhaled deeply six times, taking deep, deep breaths, trying to hold them. She knew people held their breath in these circumstances. She couldn’t. She put the snifter down on the coffee table and said to herself, “These things could be my death.” She stood up and felt better. She poured herself a more generous Courvoisier, in which floated four snippets of lemon peel. She had eaten a bottle of green olives.

  It was late now. Still, only half of her body was tired. Fatigue did not touch her mind. She thought of things to do the next day at work; she thought of plans for the transformation of her bungalow; she thought of plans, not really plans but plottings, to get her children back with her; and she thought of the new richer life she would lead, as a result of this rebirth.

  The movie on television was in black and white. There were women in long dresses that reached to the floor. And men were wearing formal clothes, with stiff collars cutting into their necks, just below their chins. Their necks were red, though she could not see that colour; she had seen such men during her holidays in Florida, when they spoke to her. And there were servants coming and going. She had spoken to women like them at the bus stop. She could picture herself in that grand living room. The amount of drink being served made her comfortable. It was her place. She was born to be like this.

  When she was five months pregnant with her first daughter, he’d been kind and attentive. He’d sat with her on the hospital-room floor where she and six other mothers-to-be were on mats, and one day a week they’d pretended that they were giving birth. He would breathe with her, rub her belly, and have an erection, impatient to take her back home to jump on her belly, sometimes forgetting that his seed was buried already inside it.

  And he was in the room when the pains really started. And he held her hand when they increased. And when his first daughter was born, he saw it all, and did not leave the room until he had to. That night he called her mother and her father, her sister and bro
thers, and distributed expensive cigars. And then he went home.

  He was home for fifteen minutes before the woman arrived. She parked her car in their garage. She went through the front door, straight to the bedroom. The pink baby booties, bonnets, sweaters, nightgowns, and suits lay undisturbed at the foot of the bed, which his wife had made up minutes before he had driven her to the hospital. And the infant’s garments remained undisturbed, by some miracle, while he “fucked the living daylights outta her,” which is how he put it to his friend at the desk next to his the following morning, holding open the almost empty box of Tueros cigars, celebrating his firstborn child.

  She heard about this years later from her husband’s friend when they were no longer friends, when the friend wanted to assure her that that friendship had ended, after he made a pass at her, as he told her what a bastard her husband was, had been, and would always be. It was the same man she had gone to on that night when she had left the nine-year-old in the babysitting hands of her older sister.

  She gets up, tired and sure, and she takes up the telephone.

  “How are you?” It is her mother she is calling. “I haven’t spoken to you in a long time,” she says. And she has to repeat her words, because her mother cannot hear them distinctly.

  “You been drinking, darling? I know what you’re going through. And a glass does help. I won’t like to know you’re overdoing it, though. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

  “You know, darling, when you were a little girl, and you came home from school and I would ask you how school was, you always said, ‘Fine,’ just like you’re saying now. Everything I asked you about, you always said, ‘I’m fine.’ I knew things weren’t fine. Because things’re never fine, all the time.”