Well, once in a while a family has to surrender itself to an outsider’s account. A family can get buried in its own fairy dust, and this leads straight, in my opinion, to the unpacking of lies and fictions from its piddly shared scraps of inbred history. With the Fletts, for instance, the work ethic has always been writ large.
Barker and his hybrid grains. Alice and her Russians. Warren and his music. Joanie and her—whatever the hell it is she does down there in New Mexico—and so it’s only natural that they should attribute Daze’s breakdown to the loss of her newspaper column. I thought as much myself for the first month or so, but gradually I’ve come to believe that the forfeiting of her "job" was only a trigger that released a terrible yearning she’s been suppressing all her life.
Sex is what I’m referring to, what else?
Not that Daze and I ever discuss sex. Well, not for a long time anyway, not since we were young girls trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the copulative act: how long did it last? How much did it hurt? Were you supposed to talk at the same time you were doing it, whisper little endearments and so on? What did a "climax" feel like and how could you be sure you had it or not, and why did it matter anyway, and was it cheating to pretend you did even if you didn’t? That kind of thing.
Then suddenly it became lèse-majesté to discuss our sexual lives.
I think we both wanted to; each of us, when we got together, made a few clumsy gestures in that direction, but we never managed to find any common footing. There’s too much space between us, too much disproportion, you might say. Our awful imbalance.
Daze with her plodding Barker, that epicene presence—and perhaps, or perhaps not, a brief flutter with an editor at her paper, Jay Dudley his name was, who ended up a regular shit, handing her job over to someone else like a king anointing a new lord—well, that sums up Daze’s erotic experience, about one and a half bean sprouts by my count. And on the other side of the fence, here I sit with my fifty-three lovers, possibly fifty-four. I’ve been on the side of noise, nerve, movement, and thanking my lucky stars too, and raising a toast to my army of fifty-four—that’s how I see them, a small, smartly marching army with the sun shining on their beautiful heads and shoulders.
I’ve kept track. This is possibly a perverse admission, that I possess a little pocket diary in which I’ve made note of dates, initials, geographical reference points and coded particulars, going back to 1927, such as duration, position, repetition, degree of response, and the like.
My "phantom" fifty-fourth lover was encountered just weeks ago on a train to Ottawa, no names exchanged, only a pair of ragged weepy histories. We had both drunk too much bourbon in the club car, the hour was late, and we may or may not have made love before we passed out, the two of us drearily naked on the coarse blanket of my lower berth. I have an impression of a rosy, pleated male belly pushing against me. I have a recollection, like a black-and-white movie, that we were noisy, that we made a spectacle of ourselves. He was gone—thank God—when I opened my eyes in the morning. And my body, my sixty-year-old body (Christ!), was unwilling to report what had happened, other than a soreness "down there" that could have been anything, a dryness that puzzled. A question mark went into the diary instead of the usual data. In that question mark I read the possible end of my erotic life. Something to do with shame, though I won’t yet admit it.
What do women want, Freud asked. The old fool, the charlatan.
He knew what women wanted. They wanted nothing. Nothing was good enough. Everyone knew that. Everyone but me.
The reason I was on my way to Ottawa was to offer consolation to an old friend in distress. She had written to me telling me not to come, that she had her niece Beverly to look after her, that she was not fit company at the moment, but of course I went anyway. I thought, wrongly, that I could carry her back to sunnier times, dredging up old stories, foolish or sentimental or touching on some spring of affection between us. And I believed we might, after a few days, open up this forbidden topic of sex, letting our thoughts out loose and fresh.
There comes a time, I’ve seen it happen, when women offer to decode themselves. All of Alice’s shrewd sympathy would be nothing compared to a moment’s shared revelation between old pals.
The self is curved like space, I tried to say to my girlhood friend, and human beings can come around again and again to the sharpness of early excitations. The sexual spasm, despite its hideous embarrassments and inconvenience, is the way we enter the realm of the ecstatic. The only way. It’s a far darker and more powerful force than we dreamed back when we were girls chattering on about "climaxes" and saline douches. I wanted to tell her about Professor Popkov who was my first seducer, about Georgio with his endless sportive variations (The Royal Gonad, I called him), about poor Mel who lasted only four years before drifting off in his wispy way. I intended to hold nothing back, not even my pitiable little encounter on the train. I persuaded myself that an open confrontation would dislodge whatever it is that has shut off Daze’s happiness and made her into a crazy woman.
But the week was a disaster. She would not be coaxed out of her dark bedroom; she lay flat on her back, her neck and shoulder muscles in painful contraction and her queenly pounds dropping away one after the other. "Don’t make me pretend to be lively," she said to me once when I brought her a lunch tray. "It takes too much effort."
I went home to Bloomington and wrote her a note of monstrous good cheer. About the future. The sun breaking through. The joy of future generations. On and on.
A week later an envelope came addressed in her writing. No note, only my little pocket diary with its cryptic entries. I must have dropped it on the carpet when I was closing my suitcase.
Cousin Beverly’s Theory
Ten years ago back in Saskatchewan I got myself into hot water. It wasn’t enough that I was a divorced woman, and, boy oh boy, that was a real crime back then, let me tell you, but worse was to come.
Two short years after I kicked my husband Jerry out (a drinker from Day One), I got boinked by Leonard Mazurkiewich who worked in the pickling plant (married, natch) whose idea of lovemaking was—well, I get the willies just thinking about it—but anyway it wasn’t worth it, three minutes of grunt and bad breath, and, bingo, there I was in the family way.
I would have gone to Calgary but I was too scared. Imagine, me scared, me who served with the WRENS during the war, way over there in Britain. Bombs and everything. I lived through that. I was full of courage when I was young. And then I came home to Saskatchewan at the end of the war and the puff just went out of me.
There was Jerry, hounding me to get married. And my parents.
And my sisters. Everyone. Somehow they tore me apart, it happened fast. The funny thing about being married to Jerry was not being able to get pregnant no matter what kind of stunts we got up to. Ha!—and after one midnight roll with Leonard Mazurkiewich, just one, I was up a stump. Some girls will turn to suicide when they get themselves in a fix like that, but I never thought of it for one minute, the reason being I could still shut my eyes when I wanted and remember what I was like over there in Britain, how brave and full of pep I could be—this picture would light up for me like something on a calendar or in a movie, the way I was, and I thought maybe I could get it back, only I couldn’t, not if I committed suicide, that’s for sure.
Aunt Daisy in Ottawa took me in. I was one of the family. She let me paint the storeroom in the attic pink and white and put up curtains—my own private bedroom, no one to muck things up, and later, after Victoria was born, she said, "Why don’t you fix up the downstairs sunroom for the baby?" and I did.
Victoria Louise weighed eight and a half pounds at birth which is amazing when you think I only weigh ninety-eight myself, being skinny like the Flett side of the family and also short like my mom’s side. She was a real good baby after she got through the colicky period. She was born with this gorgeous soft yellow hair. Now she’s nine years old and what a doll! Thank God, I didn’t put her out for adoption the way I planned. I look after her, make her clothes myself, go to the school meetings and talk to her teacher, all that stuff, and make her pipe down at home so she won’t get on Aunt Daisy’s nerves. I also take care of the housework here, do most of the family cooking, and earn a little extra on the side typing insurance policies. And lately I’ve been nursing Aunt Daisy who’s suffering from nervous prostration.
Myself, I don’t think it’s her change of life that’s done it, or her allergies either. I think it’s the kids who’ve got her down. Being a widow she feels extra responsible, I can understand that, and then again some people are just natural worriers. She used to worry about her daughter Alice who has this way of coming on strong—whew, does she ever! Then she worried for a time about Warren, who was a nice kid but sort of a drip. He had this real bad acne growing up and that made him kind of shy and drippy, but the thing is, after a certain age, no one’s really a drip any more, they’re just kind of sweet or else "individualistic." That’s something I’ve noticed. Nowadays Warren’s a regular young man—his skin’s a whole lot improved too—and he’s down there in Rochester, New York, getting his master’s degree in music theory, first in his class, the Gold Medal. Aunt Daisy was planning to go down for the graduation, she even bought herself a darling little pillbox hat, kelly green, but now that’s out. She can hardly lug herself out of bed, she just lays there in the dark and cries a whole lot and scrunches up the sheet in her hands, just wrings those sheets like she’s wringing someone’s neck. I think it’s Joan she’s worried about now, little Joanie, the family princess, spoiled rotten, but smart as a whip, only now she’s smoking dope and doing I don’t know what, whatever hippies get up to. She says she’s selling jewelry down there in New Mexico, but I bet my bottom dollar she’s selling more than that. Well, it’s breaking her mother’s heart. It kills me to see it.
Aunt Daisy saved my life, that’s no exaggeration, giving Victoria and me a home, and now I want to save hers, only she’s the only one who can do that. A person can make herself sick and that same person has to will herself to get well again, that’s my personal theory.
Warren’s Theory
My mother’s an educated woman but you’d never know it. She has a degree in Liberal Arts from Long College for Women, class of 1926, but ask her where her diploma is and she’ll just give a shrug.
Once I came across a cardboard box up in the storeroom—this was when we were cleaning up so Cousin Beverly could move in—and in the box was a thick pile of essays my mother wrote back when she was a student. One of the essays was titled: "Camillo Cavour:
Statesman and Visionary." I couldn’t believe that my mother had ever heard of Camillo Cavour (I certainly hadn’t) or that she could write earnestly, even passionately, about an obscure period of nineteenth-century Italian history. The ink after all these years was still clear and bright—those were her loops and dashes, her paragraphs and soaring conclusion. Italians everywhere owe a huge debt to this monolithic hero who battled for the rights of his countrymen and . . .
Where did it go, my mother’s intellectual ease and energy? She has never once, that any of us can remember, mentioned the subject of Italian independence to her family. Or the nineteenth century. Or her theory about Mediterranean city-states that’s so clearly set out on the pages of her 1926 essay. It never occurred to me that she would care about the plight of the Italian peasant. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her reading a book except maybe a love novel from the library or some pamphlet about how to breed better dahlias. When I think about my mother’s essay on Camillo Cavour, I can’t help feeling cheated, as if there’s some wily subversion going on, a glittering joke locked in a box and buried underground. And then I think: if I feel cheated, how much more cheated she must feel. She must be in mourning for the squandering of herself. Something, someone, cut off her head, yanked out her tongue. My mother is a middle-aged woman, a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck, so that you would expect her to land somewhere near the middle of the world. Instead she’s over there at the edge. The least vibration could knock her off.
Joan’s Theory
My mother’s been sick this year, a nervous breakdown everyone’s calling it, and my sister Alice sent me money so I could go home and visit. She wrote me a long, long letter saying she had thought it over and come to the conclusion I was the best person to cheer our mother up, that my presence would be like a "glassful of medicine." Which is just like Alice; she’s someone who always goes around appointing people.
I expected to find my mother in a state of torpor and instead found her in a rage. It seems a man called Pinky Fulham has snatched away her newspaper column. All those hours she once put into writing about flower borders and seedlings, she now funnels into her hatred for Pinky Fulham. She can’t talk or think of anything else. She’s narrowed herself down to just this one little squint of injustice, and she beats her fists together and rehearses and rehearses her final scene with him, the unforgivable things he did and said, especially his concluding remark which was, apparently: "I hope this won’t affect our friendship." He said it blithely, unfeelingly, the way people say such things, never even noticing how pierced to the heart my mother was, how crushed she was by such casual presumption and disregard.
Now she can’t let it go. She lies in her bed and goes over and over that final exchange, how she’d gone to his office at the Recorder and pleaded with him, and how he turned to her and pronounced that impossible thing: "I hope this won’t affect our friendship." My mother recounts the scene for me, again and again, speaking harshly, weeping, shaking her head back and forth in a frenzy, and begging me to join in her drama of suffering.
I’d only been home a few days when I realized she was relishing all this, the pure and beautiful force of her hatred for Pinky Fulham, the ecstasy of being wronged. There’s a certain majesty in it.