Why did we have to study these hapless, annoying, dumb-bunny girls? I wondered. Who chose the books and poems that would be on the curriculum? What use would they be in our future lives? What exactly were we supposed to be learning from them? Maybe Bill was right. Maybe the whole thing was a waste of time.
Upstairs, my parents were sleeping peacefully; they knew nothing of doomed love, of words spoken in anger, of fated separation. They were ignorant of the darker side of life – of girls betrayed in forests, of girls falling into streams and singing till they drowned, of girls done away with for being too pleasant. All over the city, everyone was asleep, drifting on the vast blue sea of unconsciousness. Everyone except me.
Me, and Miss Bessie. Miss Bessie, too, must have been up late. I couldn’t imagine her doing anything as lax and unguarded as sleeping. Her eyes – not sarcastic eyes, I now realized, but merry eyes, the eyes of an elderly child, crinkled at the corners as if she were suppressing a joke or a quaint piece of wisdom – surely those eyes of hers never closed. Perhaps she was the one responsible for choosing our required reading material – she, and a group of others like her, all of a certain age, all with excellent suits, all with real stones in their lapel brooches, all with qualifications. They got together, they had secret meetings, they conferred, they cooked up our book list among them. They knew something we needed to know, but it was a complicated thing – not so much a thing as a pattern, like the clues in a detective story once you started connecting them together. These women – these teachers – had no direct method of conveying this thing to us, not in a way that would make us listen, because it was too tangled, it was too oblique. It was hidden within the stories.
I looked at my watch: three in the morning. I was so tired I was seeing double, but at the same time I was wide awake. I ought to have been brooding over Bill – didn’t he require more tears? Instead, in the bright place at the back of my head, there was an image of Miss Bessie. She was standing in a patch of sunlight, which twinkled off her brooch, the amber-and-gold one in the shape of a bee. She had on her best suit, and a blouse with a crisp white bow, and her impeccable gleaming shoes. She seemed distant but very clear, like a photograph. Now she was smiling at me with gentle irony, and holding aside a curtain; behind the curtain was the entrance to a dark tunnel. I would have to go into the tunnel whether I wanted to or not – the tunnel was the road of going on, and then there was more of the road on the other side of it – but the entrance was where Miss Bessie had to stop. Inside the tunnel was what I was meant to learn.
Very soon I would be a last-year’s student. I would be gone from Miss Bessie’s world, and she would be gone from mine. Both of us would be in the past, both of us over and done with – me from her point of view, her from mine. Sitting in my present-day desk there would be another, younger student, who would be poked and prodded and herded relentlessly through the prescribed texts, as I had been. The first line of a poem is very important, class, Miss Bessie would say. It sets the tone. Let us proceed.
Meanwhile, I myself would be inside the dark tunnel. I’d be going on. I’d be finding things out. I’d be all on my own.
The Other Place
For a long time I wandered aimlessly. It felt like a long time. It didn’t feel aimless, however, or not in any carefree way: I was being driven by necessity, by fate, like the characters in the more melodramatic novels I’d read in high school who would rush out into thunderstorms and lurk around on moors. Like them I had to keep moving. I couldn’t help it.
I had an image of myself trudging along a dusty or lumpy or ice-covered road, carrying a little bundle on a stick, like the hobos in comic books. But that was much too droll. More like a mysterious traveller, striding inexorably forward, entering each new town like a portent, then vanishing without a trace, mission accomplished.
In reality I had no mission, and I did not trudge or stride. I went on the train, or – a treat at that time – on an airplane.
I would welcome each new dislocation, unpack my few belongings with alacrity and even joy, then set out to explore the neighbourhood or district or city and learn its ways; but soon enough I’d begin to imagine what I’d become if I stayed in that place forever. Here, a stringy-haired intellectual, pasty-faced, humourless, and morbid; there, a self-satisfied matron, shut up in a cage of a house that would not be recognized as a cage until it was too late.
Too late for what? To get out, to move on. Yet at the same time I longed for security. It was a similar story with men. Each one was a possibility that quickly became an impossibility. As soon as there were two toothbrushes – no, as soon as I could even picture two toothbrushes, side by side on the bathroom counter in trapped, stagnant, limp-bristled companionship – I would have to leave. My books would go into cardboard boxes and be shipped by bus, some getting lost on the way; my clothes and my towel – I did have a towel – would go into my small tin trunk. I hummed while I packed. Yet every time I began packing, it would feel like leaving home: my humming would alternate with fits of tearful nostalgia about the place I was doing the packing in, but that I hadn’t even vacated yet.
As for my real home, the one I’d grown up in, I seldom thought about it, or not in any detail. I was dimly aware that I was a worry to my parents, but I resented their worry. I was doing fine. I was supporting myself. Every once in a while, an inner window would pop open and I would glimpse my parents, far away and very small, rushing through their daily activities as in a sped-up film: doing the dishes in a blur of soapy hands and cutlery, throwing themselves into bouts of maniacal gardening, making trips to their summer place with the car whizzing along as if jet-propelled; then doing the dishes there, then the gardening frenzy there, then back again, then into bed, then up with the dawn, round and round. They were immersed in mundane affairs, they were not contemplating any higher truths. I’d feel superior to them. Then I’d feel homesick. Then I’d feel like an orphan, a barefoot waif in the chilly night, peering in at scenes of cozy family life while filching a potato or two from the back plot. I would torture myself with these pathetic scenarios, then hastily shut the window again.
I was not an orphan, I told myself; I was not nearly enough of an orphan. I needed to be more of one, so I could eat food that was bad for me, stay up all night, wear unflattering clothes, and hang out with unsuitable companions, without the anxious running commentary this behaviour would call forth inside my head. Why are you living in this dump? What are you doing with your time? Why are you with that creep? Why can’t you accomplish anything? Get enough sleep! You’ll ruin your health! Wear less black!
None of these were things my parents would have said out loud – they knew better – but I believed in thought rays. These rays were shooting out from my parents’ craniums, directly into mine. It was like radio waves. The farther away from home I got, the weaker the rays they were silently beaming at me would become. So I had to put a lot of distance between us.
Set against my desire for fecklessness was an opposite and more shameful desire. I’d never got over the Grade Two reader, the one featuring a father who went to a job every day and drove a car, a mother who wore an apron and did baking, two children – boy and girl – and a cat and a dog, all living in a white house with frilly window curtains. Though no house I’d ever lived in possessed such curtains, they seemed foreordained. They weren’t a goal, they weren’t something I’d have to strive for: these curtains would simply materialize in my life because they were destined. My future would not be complete – no, it would not be normal – unless it contained window curtains like these, and everything that went with them. This image was tucked away in a corner of my suitcase, like an emergency wardrobe item: nothing I wanted to wear at the moment, but worse come to worst, I could take it out, shake out the wrinkles, and step into it.
I couldn’t keep up my transient existence forever. I would have to end up with someone, sometime, someplace. Wouldn’t I?
But what if I missed a turn somewhere – missed my ow
n future? That would be frighteningly easy to do. I’d make one hesitation or one departure too many and then I’d have run out of choices; I’d be standing all alone, like the cheese in the children’s song about the farmer taking a wife. Hi-ho, the derry-o, the cheese stands alone, they used to sing about this cheese, and everyone would clap hands over its head and make fun of it.
Even I had made fun of the solitary cheese during that game. Now I was ashamed of myself. Why should being alone – in and of itself – be such a matter for derision? But it was. The alone – the loners – were not to be trusted. They were strange and twisted. Most likely they were psychopaths. They might have a few murdered corpses stowed away in their freezers. They didn’t love anyone, and nobody loved them either.
In my more rebellious moments I asked myself why I should care about being shut out of the Noah’s ark of coupledom – in effect a glorified zoo, with locks on the bars and fodder dished out at set intervals. I wouldn’t allow myself to be tempted; I’d keep my distance; I’d stay lean and wolflike, and skirt the edges. I would be a creature of the night, in a trench coat with the collar turned up, pacing between streetlights, my heels making an impressively hollow and echoing sound, casting a long shadow before me, having serious thoughts about topics of importance.
Still, I was haunted by a poem I’d read at the age of twenty, written by a well-known poet much older than myself. This poem claimed that all intellectual women had pimples on their bums. It was an absurd generalization, I realized; nevertheless I worried about it. The frilly curtains I was destined to obtain and the pimply bum I was doomed to develop did not go together. Yet neither one had happened, so far.
Meanwhile I had to earn a living. In those times you could pick up jobs, do them for a while, put them down, then pick up something else, somewhere else. There was a shortage of labour, or a shortage of my kind of it, a kind that did not exactly have a name. I thought of myself as an itinerant brain – the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute. I also – I felt – had the disreputability that came with such a position. At parties – faculty parties, during the times when the jobs I had were at universities, or company parties, when I peddled my skills in other sectors – I caught the faculty wives or the company wives eyeing me as if I had lice. Perhaps they thought I had designs on their husbands, though they needn’t have worried about me.
The husbands were another matter. Any woman without a wedding ring on, no matter how dourly dressed, was free for a tryout in their books. Why did I never see them coming? But I didn’t, I didn’t edge away fast enough, and then there would be scuffles, in the kitchen perhaps where I’d be helpfully tidying up, or in the bedroom where the coats were piled, and then there would be outrage and hurt feelings, on everyone’s part, it seemed. The husbands got angry because I’d drawn attention to their furtive trial gropings, the wives because I’d led the husbands on. As for me, I was less outraged than astonished. How could these pudgy or rancid elderly men possibly think they had any sort of allure? (This kind of astonishment is a function of youth. I got over it later.)
These attitudes and encounters were the norm in the early years of my ramblings. But then things changed. At the time I’d set out, all women were expected to get married, and many of my friends had already done so. But by the end of this period – it was only eight years, not so long after all – a wave had swept through, changing the landscape completely. Miniskirts and bell-bottoms had made a brief appearance, to be replaced immediately by sandals and tie-dyed T-shirts. Beards had sprouted, communes had sprung up, thin girls with long straight hair and no brassieres were everywhere. Sexual jealousy was like using the wrong fork, marriage was a joke, and those already married found their once-solid unions crumbling like defective stucco. You were supposed to hang loose, to collect experiences, to be a rolling stone.
Isn’t that what I’d been doing, years before the widespread advent of facial hair and roach clips? But I felt myself too old, or possibly too solemn, for the love beads and pothead crowd. They lacked gravity. They wanted to live in the moment, but like frogs, not like wolves. They wanted to sit in the sun and blink. But I was raised in the age of strenuousness. Relaxation bored me. I thought I should be making my way in the world, wherever that was. I thought I should be getting somewhere – in my case, as things so often were, somewhere else.
During this period I lived in rooming houses, or in shared apartments, or in sublets. I had no furniture of my own: it would have slowed me down. I bought makeshift items at thrift stores in each new location and sold them when I left. I had no tableware. Now and then I’d indulge myself in a frill – a vulgar, colourful vase, a flea-market curio. I acquired a carved wooden hand holding a sort of chalice with the words Souvenir of Pitcairn Island on it. I splurged on a Thirties perfume bottle minus the stopper.
The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn’t fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst. I knew they were worthless clutter, but they made it into the tin trunk whenever I packed up again.
One year I got a job teaching grammar to freshmen at a university, which meant I could afford a real apartment, all to myself. The job was in Vancouver; the apartment was a top floor the family had built onto their bungalow for the purpose of renting it out. It had its own staircase, very steep and plain, with rubber runners and no banister or windows – more like a vertical tunnel than a staircase. It even had a few pieces of furniture – things the family below no longer had any use for. There was – for instance – a bed, covered with a bright green slippery satin bedspread of a kind that must have been thought glamorous twenty years or so before. There was a dressing table in a style that might have been Thirties. There was a gigantic gold-framed mirror. All of the furniture that came with the apartment was in the bedroom, which was like an old movie set or the cover of a paperback murder mystery of some years before. Satin bedspreads had been a feature of those. The corpse of the woman would be displayed surrounded by artfully rumpled satin, like a big flesh confection in a luxury box. In the gold-framed mirror would be the reflection of a man – just part of a man, his back turned, making his exit after the crime.
The apartment had a living room with a dining nook, and another room into which I put a Salvation Army desk and a chair and a typewriter. In the living room I set up a borrowed card table that acted as a dining table whenever I had any guests. For these affairs I used plates and cutlery, also borrowed.
I had a painting, bought from a friend of a friend because that person needed twenty-five dollars. The painting was an abstract, and showed some reddish blobs and scratches. When I’d had a few drinks I could see something in it, but without that sort of enhancement it looked like a damp patch on the wallpaper where something had leaked through. I hung it over the fireplace, which was not functional.
In this apartment, free at last from the eyes of roommates and far from the thought rays beamed out by my parents, I cycled through my most extreme versions of in and out, yes and no, stay and go, high and low, alone and together, elation and despair. One day I’d be flying through the clouds, drunk on cloudy possibilities; the next, up to my neck in mud, dragged down by the sodden prospects of the here and now. I walked around through the various rooms without any clothes on; I wore myself out reading until late in the night, then slept till noon, waking up entangled in the glossy green satin spread, unsure of where I was. I talked to myself; I sang out loud, silly, defiant songs I’d learned in school playgrounds a long time ago. Hi-ho, the derry-o, I’d sing. The cheese stands alone! Tried the other place, tried the other place, tried the other place last night … There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea, there’s a hole in the bottom of the sea … I care for nobody, no not I, and nobody cares for me! Or, deprived of all speech and song and even of motion, I’d find myself lying face down on the wall-to-wall carpeting of the hallway, through which I couldn’t help hearin
g the derisive television laughter from the dwelling below. What if I died from starvation, right there on the carpet, through a simple inability to crawl to the refrigerator and get myself something to eat? Then all those fun-filled, roistering people on the television would be sorry.
In the evenings, when I wasn’t twittering with glee or prostrate on the floor, I’d go for long, pensive walks. I’d start out purposefully, marching forward as if I had a destination. I was conscious of being watched through the windows of the floor below by the husband and wife who owned the apartment – he with a crewcut and a lawnmower, she with an apron and hair rollers. Although I dressed with relentless drabness, in dark browns and greys and shapeless blacks, they’d worried about renting to me until I’d proved I had a salary. It excited them to believe I was depraved in some way, or so I felt. I did have a lover or two during that time – temporary lovers, just borrowed – and they must have heard, on occasion, more than one pair of footsteps going up the stairs.
But for my evening walks I was alone. I made a point of it. As soon as I was out of the sight of the downstairs couple, I would slow down and choose the turnings at random, trying to avoid stepping on the huge black and grey slugs that crawled over the sidewalks as soon as it was dusk. These slugs ate everything, nothing ate them. There were advantages to looking unattractive.
Moral Disorder Page 8
