Dancing in the Dark

by Joan Barfoot

  I sent a gift, a little outfit for the baby, with my congratulations. Later when she had a little girl, I did the same. Stella kept working and her children were in day care before they went to school. She became her lawyer’s personal assistant. We continued to write letters. Hers were never the same again as that one outburst, that single attempt; mine were never different from what they’d always been.

  Now, in a perverse sort of way, I feel a little free myself.

  So I might ask her how it felt to bear a child and how it was to raise one. How it was to start again, to have two men instead of one, to earn a living. How it was to have had the right hair and the right smile and the right words for so long that she could take for granted a leap to the coast of the country, assume she would survive. How she could have all that and the babies, too.

  I might ask her why it was she got to start again, and how she knew the way to reach for a second chance and not a knife.

  22

  People stared.

  I remember them, our neighbours, gathered out in the darkness on their lawns, wrapped up in housecoats, wearing slippers, watching, listening. I can hardly blame them. Harry and I would have been out doing the same thing if it had been one of them. If I had not been fully occupied watching the tedious movement of the clock, and then the wallpaper again, and then having all those strange people in my house, I would have been out there watching too.

  I would also have been attracted to blood: sign of passion and also of fortune. Because if this happened to someone near, less chance of it happening to oneself. Statistics and odds. It must have cheered our neighbours to have it happen next door, across the street, not in their own living rooms or kitchens.

  A lovely day, today. Fresh snow, unmarked. The sun sparkles off it and it looks like jewels, maybe rhinestones, planted across the grounds. Tree branches are stark and still.

  For all the missed corners inside, for the moment it is clean and clear and brisk outdoors.

  Other places were brisk, but not so clean.

  In the first place I went afterward, there were dustballs in the corners, black grime on the windowsills, and untidy heaps of paper on the single big wooden desk. The metal filing trays on it were overflowing. There were two men and a woman in that small cramped room, and me. They kept talking and asking questions and their hands pressed their eyes and foreheads wearily. The sun came up on all their talk and questions.

  At home they had told me to change my clothes. So I did; but chose not something special, nothing for an occasion, but another housedress, the kind I did my work in, a small floral print. A dress for my ordinary moments.

  All my dresses are here now, and my underwear and robes. Someone must have gone to get them. Someone must have gone into that house.

  Oh, but I’m being stupid. A lot of people will have been in and out of that house by now.

  Later I was in a small room, still in the same building as the grimy office. The woman there and I had trudged down two flights of stairs from that office to the small room. It had fluorescent lights behind a mesh arrangement in the ceiling, and dull green walls. There were no windows. There was a toilet in a corner, a cot against one wall. I lay down when the woman told me to, and she pulled a scratching grey woollen blanket over me. Was it cold then? It should have been warm, it was July.

  It wasn’t bad to be there. I was tired, and while the cot sagged and slanted and wasn’t like my bed at all, it was a place to lie down. I felt like the colour of the blanket, but not scratchy or rough.

  I think I could maybe have just lain there forever, but of course they don’t leave you alone. It seems in these circumstances, there is a great deal to be done. The woman came back and made me stand and we walked along a light green corridor, up a different flight of stairs with heavy wooden banisters, along another hallway, this one light-brown-panelled, and into a big room. Like a ballroom or a conference hall, except that it had rows of benches. Like a church, maybe. And like a church a man sitting high up at one end, one had to look up at him. A lot of words were being said.

  It wasn’t that I could not see or hear. Just that my mind was elsewhere. It seemed to have suspended itself back there a bit, and couldn’t get itself here.

  I was prepared to wait. The vacuuming wasn’t finished, and other things that had to be done hadn’t even been started; although the downstairs was as finished as it would ever be. It was a little irritating to be kept away, but I was used to waiting.

  It was dark again, which I supposed meant a day gone so I was even further behind, when I was taken to a van outside. The air out there was different from the mustiness inside, but I was only out for a few moments. There was a short ride and then more halls, a different room but with a similar sort of cot, a toilet, and this time, a sink and a chair. They brought trays of food and took them away again. People came and went. Voices went on and on.

  The lights did not go out, but I fell asleep. When I woke, I was surprised to find my face damp, tears on my cheeks and soaked into the pillow. I couldn’t tell what might have caused that.

  Now there were so many rooms, large and small ones, and so many different people and voices and questions, so many places they wanted me to sit and things they wanted me to do. Many men, and a few women. I could feel them: sometimes they were impatient, sometimes angry; but mainly tired, bored perhaps. There was a sense of people sighing all around me.

  I could have told them, I suppose. It wouldn’t have taken so much effort or concentration. But it was not their business. Harry and I were just the two of us, we always had been. We had no room for strangers. Besides, they were dangerous. They may have been weary and bored, but they also wanted me not to be safe any more. They wanted to put me outside, when I’d been so careful and worked so hard to get inside and stay there where I’d be safe.

  I closed my mind against them, folded it over on itself.

  More words, more people, more talk, more questions. I came here, to this room. I have only left here once, and that was to go back to one of those big rooms with a man sitting high up at one end. There were a few people watching, scattered along the benches, but I don’t think I recognized any of them.

  Maybe my parents were there. Or Harry’s. Or some of our friends, or her. But I surely would have recognized them. If I had seen her, I surely would have known.

  This was all going on too long. The vacuum cleaner was still lying upstairs in the bedroom, switched off but still plugged in. I hadn’t even started on the bathroom. The mirrors would be smudged. I wanted to have it finished.

  “Is there anything you’d care to say at this stage, Mrs. Cormick?” the looming man at the end of the room, high up, was asking. He must have been surprised when I spoke up firmly, so they’d all hear and nobody would be able to ignore my wishes.

  “I want to go home now, please,” I said. “I didn’t get the cleaning done.”

  I know, I understand now, how strange that must have sounded. But it was what was on my mind. It was what I wanted, and when they did take me back out into the sun and we got back into the car, I thought, “Well finally. I should have spoken up before.”

  But of course the car came right back here.

  Oh, I was angry. I was just seething. That night they gave me pills to make me sleep. And where was Harry when I needed him? When he should have helped me, he wasn’t there. That I was the cause of his absence, his failure to defend me, was not the point. It was because of him that I was here.

  Which was true enough.

  If he could fail me, anybody could. The world was once again populated by snapping beasts with their eyes on me.

  Never trust. Never relax. Never consider yourself safe. Never speak if it can be helped. Here, especially, words are weapons.

  Sometimes, of course, they can’t be avoided. When I saw a nurse writing in a notebook just like this one, I had to ask, “Can I have one please?”

  She was startled, her head snapped up from her notes.

  “What? Di
d you want something, Mrs. Cormick?”

  “Your book. And your pen.”

  “Oh, well, you can’t have this one, I’ve been using it, but I can see if I can get you one of your own. Would you like that?”

  I didn’t think she would bring one. Apart from broken promises, they would be leery of pens. But maybe would consider the promise greater than the danger? They would have to weigh that.

  It was the doctor, not she, who brought me the first pure, perfect notebook. I don’t know what I thought of when I first saw the one in the nurse’s hands. A poem maybe. Or some other way to put events in place. Flatten them out with words, or straighten them, or look at them. Or just get rid of them. Put them some place where covers could be shut on them.

  They thought a notebook might be an opening? It has built a new wall instead. And this time it is just my wall, I don’t have to share it. So no groping fingers are going to poke through this time. In either direction.

  This notebook, I can touch it, hold it, it doesn’t waver and it has no will of its own, outside of mine. It alters only when I make an alteration in it, in my perfect handwriting.

  Often it does not contain what I want it to: which is every small thing here, all written down, identified and pinned. Too often I wander off into the other time. But that is not the notebook’s fault, but a failure of my will. Whatever is here, I have made.

  Some nights I go to sleep holding it. Not that I mistake it for something else, because it’s chilly and smooth. It couldn’t possibly be confused with something warm and embracing in return.

  But chilly smoothness does not lie; whereas embraces may.

  23

  Embraces may lie. But I admit, some days I miss the illusion.

  I may not be able to recall precisely how Harry looked, but I can recall the feel of him. His arm across my body in the night, his shoulder beneath my head. His legs stretched alongside mine. The warmth alone, just that, I miss. I still waken sometimes in the night and turn to the warmth and find it is not there.

  I don’t remember him as well inside me. That part seems deadened now. There is no stirring or heat in remembering him. There used to be. There used to be something almost sacramental about it. For a few months when I was a young girl, I became religious. Taking communion had a shuddering effect: the bread and the wine that was really grape juice, I would stare at them and try to see in them the actual blood and the body of Christ and shiver at the thought. Harry inside was something like that: sacred in a way, symbolic of the whole, and a link with some unity greater than either of us apart.

  I would have liked to consume him in this communion; to draw him whole inside my body, to make us a proper unity. It seemed that must be what he was striving for as well, with all his efforts and strainings.

  I suppose he wasn’t though. I suppose it must have been something else as far as he was concerned. When the telephone rang, when I found out this was not a sacred act at all, that must be when that part of me lost feeling. Unplugged, another loose end in my body is dangling disconnected.

  If Christ came back and said something like, “Oh no, did you think I really meant all those things I said?”, people’s souls would surely shrivel. Think of all the things that would collapse. And wouldn’t the people hate? Wouldn’t they kill Christ?

  It was not necessarily sacredness I felt at the time, when we were actually together. It was what I felt about the idea of the thing. It was what brought my own passion to our bed.

  There were those moments of impending closeness, when I wanted to pull him entirely into my body, all safe and warm the two of us.

  But I admit there were other kinds of moments. It isn’t always easy to concentrate on what is going on. The mind wanders. One thinks things that are frivolous and unrelated. One thinks, maybe, about being almost out of peanut butter or laundry soap, or what to wear to dinner Saturday. One hears the sounds of making love as sounds, and heard that way they may not be terribly attractive. They may be just slaps of perspiring flesh or short rasping breaths.

  And sometimes even odder things occur. I remember that sometimes my mind simply moved away, off into a corner of the room, and my eyes were watching as if I were not a part of it at all; the way I could feel our child watching in those days when we were trying so hard to create him.

  From that perspective I saw two strange people on the bed, his familiar buttocks shuddering, legs tensing; and up and down, up and down the body moving. Beneath his heaving outstretched body, I could barely see myself, the second person.

  Who would be a voyeur, I wondered, seeing things like this?

  Just sometimes this happened—not often, really—and only for a few seconds. Then my eyes would rejoin myself beneath him. I did wonder, though, if this were a flaw or some sort of betrayal.

  The best was afterward. Then he had time to be tender and slow, he would lie close alongside me and stroke my arms, my back. That is what I miss: the tenderness, gentleness, slowness of him all around me.

  Then, too, I could draw my fingers along his jaw, examine his cheekbones in the dark, and find his shoulder blades. There was a dent in the small of his back I liked to reach. Beneath the skin was the hardness of his real body. Like a shell around my own soft one. And my own soft body was a dark cubbyhole for him.

  It seemed to fit.

  I had almost a horror of him holding me in the night and feeling my flesh sag. This can happen easily, with just a little too much weight: lying on your side, your stomach slides towards the mattress and an arm around you feels that, something soft and pliant, like one of those sea animals that don’t have any spines. Not a nice thing to feel in the night.

  So I did my exercises to stay firm and did not eat too much, and I slept with my back to him or with my head in his shoulder but tilted down, so he wouldn’t smell night breath.

  I did everything. What didn’t I do?

  I got used to the idea that there would be no result from all this but blood. No babies. I thought, “Whatever may be missing inside, at least there are no marks. I have stayed firm.”

  I would not have liked the marks, although I might have liked the babies. I suppose I was like Harry in some ways: wanting everything. “You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” my mother used to say with some air of weary knowledge. This seemed true.

  I also thought, “If we’d had a child, I wouldn’t be able to do all this.” I meant all the proper care. Instead, there would be playpens, cribs, toys, bottles, boxes of Pablum, and jars of green and yellow baby foods, that acid smell of diapers overlaid with sweet baby powder, all the infant aromas of some of the homes we went to. Then tricycles and bicycles and watching and being scared of something terrible happening, a whole new world of fear, having a child.

  Just what I did now was complex enough. I might not be equal to two sets of devotion.

  Harry said once after a lingering dinner with wine, our private celebration of a promotion I believe, “I’m glad I don’t have to share you.” I suppose he meant babies.

  “Me too.”

  But surely he could see I wouldn’t want to share him either?

  We seem to have had different sets of rules. I wish I’d thought to ask what his were.

  It’s so stupid, such a blindness, not to be able to see him. Twenty years and I see a boy running up behind me on a street, and after that only the sense of a long hard narrow body, a sort of vibration of personality, and a shattering into pieces. Somewhere along the line did I not look?

  But we took everything for granted, everything. We never thought.

  That house where we lived, that suburb, neat and bleak when we moved in, but after twenty years well treed and flowered—but still neat—it grew up around us. We settled into it like getting comfortable in an easy chair.

  We took for granted the big cars traded every other year; the colour television sets as soon as they were on the market; the record player; and later what Harry called the sound system; the very texture of our days.


  It’s the texture I can feel, not the events. Parties and dinners and conversations and a cup of coffee with a neighbour in a back yard—all these things happened. We had our little disagreements, which hurt, and I did my work. All of it happened in innocence. And all of it is out of focus now, distorted, like a photograph taken from a strange angle with an odd lens, a different perspective entirely. The innocence isn’t there in the memory; because the ending casts it in a different light. A mushroom cloud, a blaze of eerie brilliance, twenty years illuminated in a different way that could not have been imagined during the living of them.

  At the time, the texture was smooth and soft, like a velvety robe you step into after a bath on a chilly day.

  I think I can say with confidence that we took it all for granted, that we did not think. It must be true for him as well; because if he had thought, if he had not assumed, he could never have dared, could never have risked it, or me, or himself. To take such a leap as he did—well, it can only be done from a trusted, taken-for-granted base.

  Unless, of course, he didn’t care at all. But he wasn’t such a liar as that. He lied, but not like that.

  He must have changed, though, in other ways than new glasses and stooping shoulders. I aged and changed, whatever my efforts, and of course he must have too. Grey hairs, lines, a dragging of the skin, these things must have happened to him as well.

  If I failed to see all that, what about invisible changes?

  Is that what he thought, that I failed to see him? Did he just want somebody to look?

  It could as easily be the reverse, for all I know. He might have thought I saw too well, or too much, and wanted a little time to be invisible.

  It wasn’t so much time. A small portion of our years.

  When I lie in bed looking up, what I see are white ceiling tiles. I’ve counted the holes in them, which is not an easy thing to do. You get a certain way along and the holes blur and two of them seem to jump together and you have to start again. But by going slowly and patiently along the lines, I have counted twenty-three along each side. Each corner hole, of course, is counted twice, once for each of the two sides it connects.