by Cecelia Frey
“It’s funny you should say that.” She spoke quickly so that there would be no blank spaces, uncomfortable gaps. “About mythologies. That’s what George said to me, the first day I arrived, you and I are the sort of people who create mythologies. I suppose what he meant was, we make too much of things. We over-interpret ordinary events.”
“Yes, well, I try not to do that any more. I try to live in the real world.” He was turned toward her now, the palms of his hands supported by the counter behind him. “It’s liberating … no longer letting yourself be controlled and manipulated by illusions.”
He feels better, she thought. Speaking had always helped him order his mind and assume a voice of authority. “Besides,” he went on, “I thought it pretentious of me to raise my life to the level of myth.” He gestured toward her with his hands. They were steady now. “If we’re to have clean cups,” he said, “I’ll have to wash dishes.”
“Let me help.” Glad of something to do, Helena stood up and took off her coat, a navy blue raincoat, which she draped over the back of a chair.
“Can you collect those cups on the table?” He had turned to the sink. Hot water was gushing from the tap. “They’re my total supply.”
“Which you don’t wash until you run out.”
“Don’t complain. My housekeeping has improved a hundred per cent from what it used to be.” By adding water to the dregs of a plastic bottle of detergent, he had enough for one more job.
“I can’t imagine what it used to be.”
“Living alone, a person gets into sloppy habits.”
He’s alone, she thought.
Helena brought the cups to the sink. “You like being alone.” Her voice was coming stronger now. And Ben, busy with his housekeeping, seemed more comfortable. Maybe things would be all right after all.
He cleared off the drain tray, a rubber mat and rack. “You always said I’d make a good monk.”
She began washing the cups. “But who ever heard of a Jewish monk?” She turned. “Where’s your tea towel?”
“Tea towel?”
“Don’t you have a tea towel?”
“There may be one…” He looked around in some confusion.
“How about paper towels?”
“Uhhh…”
“No? Kleenex? Don’t answer. We’ll have to let them air dry.”
“Just put some coffee in these cups. And hand me those plates. I may as well do a complete swamp-up while we have these great suds. Ahhh. There’s something so comforting and reassuring about hot soapy water.”
Helena put coffee and boiling water into two cups. She kept stirring after the granules were dissolved. She couldn’t think beyond the brown liquid swirling around the spoon.
“I don’t have milk or cream.” He was scraping a pot, looking toward her. “You like cream.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can drink it black.”
She carried both cups to the table. Benjamin followed, giving his hands a quick wipe on the sides of his trousers. He pulled forward another chair and sat down. He foraged amongst the stack of student papers. His hand emerged with a pack of cigarettes. He shook one up and held it out to Helena, then tossed another up from the packet into his own mouth. He found a wooden match in his shirt pocket, lit it on his thumbnail, held it out to her. While his head was bent to light his cigarette, she finally dared to look closely at his face. He looked older. Well, of course he was older; they were both older. He no longer had a beard, the lines on his face were evident. His skin looked pasty. It always did this time of year, until he got a summer tan. He still had a great deal of brown curly hair. It used to be drawn back by an elastic band, but it was too short for that now. “You’ve cut your hair,” she said.
He looked up suddenly and caught her with his eyes. She could not bear those eyes. At one time they had been so certain, so clear with a straightforward purpose. Now they were bewildered, questioning, containing a pain that she suspected was never totally absent. She looked down at her coffee.
“On my fortieth birthday,” he said. “I thought it was time.”
“I liked your ponytail.” She flicked her eyes up briefly.
“I’ll grow it back.”
They both looked down. How easily, how unthinkingly, they had fallen into their old camaraderie. That they were comfortable together had been one of their strengths as a couple.
She took a sip of scalding liquid and winced. She looked around the room.
Ben had never been the materialistic type, but this was ridiculous. Hanging from the brown-spotted ceiling was a jagged piece of plaster that looked like it could at the merest jarring come down on someone’s head.
Her survey stopped when it came around to his face. He had removed his glasses. He was looking at her. She recalled the intense look his eyes took on when he was wild with a new idea. When she first saw him, around a table in the Cave, he was spouting a theory, punctuating it with his hands. She had noticed his hands, even then imagining what they would be like touching her. Mid-sentence, he looked her way. The world stopped, simply stopped. The others around the table faded into a hazy background. She watched his mouth open and close; she had no idea what he was saying.
The silence was becoming uncomfortable. She must break it. “In the hospital, for two days you sat and watched me drift in and out of consciousness. Then you left without giving me a chance to thank you.”
“You were in pretty bad shape.”
“Yes.”
“How are you now?”
“Some days I’m okay.”
She had lowered her eyes to her coffee cup but she could feel his eyes still upon her.
“I’ve never seen you with such short hair.”
“No.”
“You’re thin.”
“Esther’s been trying to fatten me up for the last two months. But I’m afraid I’m a lost cause.”
“I heard you were travelling. I didn’t hear where.”
“Oh, all over.” She picked up her cup.
A wave of exhaustion surged up within Helena’s body, deep in the core. For the past hour she had been battling her nerves. She had tried to hold herself strong. Now, it struck her — where she was and who she was with. She started to tremble, her legs jumped, her skin crawled. She drank from her mug. She set it down. “Ugh, Ben, this is terrible coffee. I don’t suppose you have any whiskey around here?”
“I may have.” He went to the cupboards and opened and closed several doors. “I can run out and get some.” He banged another door shut. “There’s an ALCB store on the corner.”
“No, no, don’t do that,” she said. Yes, you’ll have to, she thought.
“Ah.” He was at the far cupboard, next to the wall. “Success.” He took down a brown bottle and found a couple of clean tumblers in the drying rack. He went to the fridge and looked in the freezer compartment. “I’m afraid I don’t have any ice,” he said.
“That’s all right. I don’t want ice.”
He returned and poured them each an inch of whiskey and set the uncapped bottle on the table between them. He produced two more cigarettes from the packet and went to the stove in search of another match.
Helena picked up her glass, took a large sip, held it in her mouth a moment and swallowed. She could feel the liquid burning through her, warming her, bracing her. She could feel her strength returning. She stared at a spot on the table as though her life depended on her memorizing some detail of it. “You may as well know,” she said, “I’ve lived a rather dissolute life the last few years.”
“You don’t have to tell me.” Unable to find a match, Benjamin was bent to the gas flame of the stove top.
Why should he be interested in anything about me or my life? she thought. We’re separated in the true sense of the word. “Maybe I want to tell someone,” she said. “I haven’t been a very ni
ce person.”
He came back to the table. He held his cigarette toward her so that she could light hers from his. “We never were nice people, you and me. We always wanted our own way. We thought we knew it all.”
“Thanks,” she said, drily.
“Two intellectual supercilious snots, that was us.”
But you’ve changed, she thought. How did you manage to change?
“How about Esther?” he said. “Do you talk to her? I remember her as being a very sympathetic person.”
“Esther’s so naive. She thinks everyone is a dear soul. One of her favourite expressions. It’s amazing. She can’t assign selfish or malicious motives to anyone. She’s lived such a sheltered life with George. She’s the one who’s a dear soul. But she does want to help me straighten myself out.”
“Are you going to let her?”
No, she thought. “I don’t think she can,” she said. “Esther lives on the surface. While I seem banished to the depths. She’s in the charmed circle of humanity. I’ve been cast out. When you do something opposed to life, you are cast out.”
“Now you are making up mythologies.”
“Maybe. I don’t think so. There are lots of precedents. People who become lost souls and must wander the earth and never be at home. Your street people must be like that.”
“Mostly, they’re schizophrenic. Certifiably ill.”
“How do you know I’m not?
“I don’t think so.” He looked steadily at her.
She could not meet his eyes. “Anyway, Esther can’t conceive of anyone being bad. She finds the good in everyone.”
“Maybe you should let her find it in you.”
“She’d have a long job ahead of her.”
“Still, maybe you should let her try and help you. She loves you. You’d be doing her a favour.”
He doesn’t want to help me, she thought. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. He’s unloading me on Esther.
“Maybe that’s why you came back, so she could help you,” Ben went on.
Helena shifted impatiently. She didn’t want to be told how to live. She wanted to be told how to die. “Maybe I came back to see you,” she said. Shit, she had not meant it to come out of her mouth quite like that. She looked at him. He seemed to have stopped breathing, his typical reaction to an emotion thrown in his face. “You went to see Amanda,” she went on, brusquely, relieving him of the wrong idea. “The summer before the accident. She told me, that night in the car. The picture I keep seeing of Amanda is one of her face just before we hit the barrier. Shock and terror is what I see. I need to have another picture of her in my mind. Can you give me another picture?”
Benjamin let out a long sigh. He poured Helena another inch of whiskey and upended his glass. He threw back his head and closed his eyes. “The summer my father died, I had to get away. I rented a car and started driving. I found myself on her island. I stopped in to see her. She gave me a cup of tea, herbal tea. She had an herb garden. She showed me all the tender small plants. Reuben was away some place. I didn’t see him. Or the kids. I only stayed an hour.”
“What was she like? I mean, what picture of her do you have in your mind?”
“‘Serenity’ is the word. She seemed at peace. She had lived, was still living, the ideals of the revolution, although I don’t think she thought of it that way. The “make love not war” slogan was simply part of her personality. We sat in the sunshine, in a little grassy spot. She brought out a tea pot and cups, on a tray, and set it on a tree stump. We sat on logs around the stump. She was wearing one of those long shapeless dresses she always wore. Her hair was shorter, but you know how it was always so wispy around her face. She looked very young. I had the impression that I’d walked into a Beatrix Potter scenario.”
“She was able to stay a flower child to the end.”
“Yes, and a true flower child, not one of the pseudo types. She was a person who would look to find a reason to believe. A beautiful person.”
“Which I erased from this world. Can you see the enormity of what I did? A good person gone, a bad person left.”
“I don’t like the expression ‘bad’. We’re all simply at different stages of our journey. And what makes you think you’re bad?”
“I was so horrid to Amanda. I was so busy finding fault. Poor Amanda was hopelessly incompetent. She never seemed to know how much she could manage. Instead of getting down to some serious organization and then following through on it, she was always taking up projects. She always had bits and pieces of things lying about, embroidery, crocheting, knitting, silk flowers. She tried everything in every craft book. But nothing was ever properly finished. The same with her people projects. She was always taking in the halt and the maimed and the drugged-out. She was always head of this or that committee for the old or the young or the under-privileged or the misbegotten or the sick or insane. She kept herself so busy, everything was always in a confused mess. It all bothered me so, I’m afraid I lectured her on it. That’s one of my last memories of her, my harping on her case.”
“You always were hard on people who can’t cope.”
“I know. I could never understand that some people simply can’t do it. I always thought they weren’t trying. If they would only get up a little backbone, they too could conquer their trials and tribulations. And now I’ve got it back in my face.”
Benjamin sat silent, his hands folded quietly in his lap.
“Oh, I miss her so,” Helena burst out. She was sitting with elbows on the table, hands up and clasped. She put her head against her hands. “I so depended on Amanda. Even though I didn’t see her often, I knew she was there. I felt positive vibrations coming to me from her. I knew that I was in her head, in her thoughts, in a good way. I felt safe in that place. Then that place was gone.”
“I’ve had that thought, too. That we were all part of a narrative in her mind. When she died we were no longer part of a coherent narrative.”
“We were thrown out of paradise. I no longer feel at home in this world.”
“When we lose our place, we have to try and find it or find another. Sometimes we have to find a new meaning for home. A new idea for home.”
“I suppose that’s what you try and do with your street people. Provide a new meaning for home. But I don’t think I can find a new meaning.”
“Have you tried?”
Oh, yes.” She searched her mind. She doubted that men and booze qualified. “I went to a bereavement group.” It’s not a lie, she thought, although, again, she had doubts, this time as to whether one meeting would qualify as an attempt. “They said it would pass, the grief. I lost interest when it didn’t.”
“It doesn’t pass without effort. You have to make a decision to get rid of it.”
“I can’t make rational decisions about emotions the way you can. Anyway, it comes to me when I’m asleep. I keep having a dream, where the accident happens over and over again. I don’t want to live if I keep having that dream. But I’m afraid to die because what if it’s true, what they told us in Sunday School, that there is life after death and if you’re bad you’ll be tortured in the fires of hell for eternity. For me that would be an endless eternity of having that dream. I wish I would stop having that dream.”
“Maybe you never will stop having it. Maybe you’ll have to learn to live with it.”
“That’s impossible. I can’t do it.”
“That’s because you haven’t found the way yet. It takes time.”
I don’t have time, she thought. “Time is the enemy,” she said. “I don’t want time.”
“Time is your friend.” Benjamin spoke slowly, emphatically, in low even tones. He’s used to this, she thought, used to talking people into handing over the gun or the pills. “As long as you’re alive, you have time to try and set things right.”
But is
it worth it? she wanted to say. Why not give up? Why not choose death? But she didn’t want to reveal too much. He might try and stop her.
“Death takes away all possibilities for setting things right,” he said.
Helena sighed. “I get so tired of it.” What? she asked herself. Suffering, she answered herself.
He seemed to know. “There’s good suffering and bad suffering. You have to replace bad with good.”
She found herself looking at Benjamin’s hand where it was now resting on the table. It was a good strong hand. She almost reached out and covered it with hers, but she did not want to start something. She saw that she had finished her whiskey. She must go. It was either more whiskey and oblivion, in which case she would have to stay too long, or leave now, while she could still drive. She stood up and gathered her coat from the chair back.
At the door, she turned. Around Benjamin’s shoulder, she could see into his bedroom. Across the bed, on a night table piled with books and magazines and an overflowing ashtray, was their wedding picture. Ben had such a pleased expression on his face, as though he had just swept up the princess and carried her off on a white charger. Her own face was unbelievably soft, unrecognizably malleable. Her eyes were full of dreams. Quickly, quickly, she looked away.
“What happened to us Ben?” She kept her eyes on a brown stain on the wallpaper. “And not only us. What happened to the revolution? All our protesting, did it do any good at all?
“We were going to change the world. We were all so hopeful. Did we even think of the future?”
“We thought we’d all get wonderful jobs, have infinitely good health, conduct our experiments, discover the cure for cancer, discover a highway to the moon, to Mars, write our novels, our history, do good.”
“We started out with such hope, such strength, such power. Was life simply too much for us?”
“We can’t blame life.”
“We are to blame then.”
