Baltimore (11 page)
Authors: Jelena Lengold
As I was getting out of bed that morning, as I waited for the water in the tea kettle to come to a boil, as I watched the shadows dance through the curtains in an attempt to touch the spice jars which irretrievably shy away from them each morning, I thought to myself: I could grow old soon and at some point, when it’s too late to do anything about it, discover that I did everything wrong.
This would imply a few things. First of all, that there is a right and a wrong way. Then, that we are the ones who decide which one of these ways is going to take the shape of what we call our life. And furthermore, this implies the existence of exclusivism in the relation between the right and the wrong way. On the other hand, maybe these two ways are a mixture of both right and wrong?
I tried to find comfort in this as I drank my tea, but the fear was still there. I couldn’t dispose of it like I did with the bag of Earl Grey. It just stood there, soaking and turning black. It wasn’t something you could sweeten. Dilute with milk. Or decide not to drink. Fear seized my morning in an all too familiar way: it appears unexpectedly, somewhere in the pit of my stomach, making my insides tremble, then it slowly rises up my diaphragm to my chest, causing my heart to stop for a second, only to demonstrate the extent of its power, and just when I begin to think it has finished me off, it races to my throat and starts choking me.
“All right,” I said to my fear. “What do you want from me? Where are the two of us going this morning?”
My fear stood silent, staring at me. It loved to establish a hierarchy for the day, first thing in the morning. It had to let me know what is most important. And who is in charge. After we settle this, it allows me to make decisions concerning the less important things. It is only interested in the strategic set up. For example: will I live through another day?
What if I realize, on the last day of my life, that I stayed in the wrong place when I should have moved on? What if something was waiting for me in a place I didn’t feel like going? What if everything could have been different and infinitely better had I remembered the right sentence at the right moment, the only possible answer to the posed question? What if I didn’t turn around when I should have, and missed something that had been intended only for me?
There are times when you know your life is really yours and you feel like you completely belong there. However, there are those times when you clearly know it’s just one of the numerous lives you could have had. And all these other lives suddenly begin to sting like newly acquired blisters.
“Are you trying to tell me,” I asked my fear, “that I have a certain obligation to these other lives I basically know nothing about?”
My fear was smiling at me slyly, tilting its head to one side, shrugging its shoulders, pretending to be someone who let’s me draw my own conclusions, make my own decisions, handle things the way I see fit… what a snake! An outsider might even get the notion that I actually had a choice!
She told me to imagine a cliff - a sharp, isolated cliff looking over the sea. I wanted to tell her I actually stood on a cliff like that once, in Northern Ireland, and that it wasn’t a bit romantic. All I could think of, there on that cliff, was how easy it would be to throw myself down on the sharp rocks and into the icy cold, surly water.
All right then, a cliff. Any cliff. And a view of the line where the sea meets the sky in the far distance. And my hands, slowly transforming into wings. Totally absurd, but I went along. I never had wings in my dreams about flying. I always flew using only my arms. So, I’m flying, flying, flying and I see an island. And what else could possibly appear in the middle of a sea? If you ask me, the island is covered with sharp rocks, rocks no one would ever wish to land on. But, she told me to land. First, I feel gravel under my feet, then stones, grass, and finally soil. This surprised me. I didn’t expect grass. At least that’s not what it looked like from above. And then a forest. A thick forest overflowing with shadows. Our lives are made up of mundane places, so much so that it makes me sick. Cliffs, wide-open spaces of the sea, forests full of shadows… nevertheless, I continue to walk in my mind through this forest of cheap symbolism, and I feel very uneasy. I don’t have much of an adventurous spirit. At least not when it comes to venturing alone through a forest full of shadows. On a deserted island, no less. Although, no one said the island was deserted, but I guess it’s implied. Life observed from above, from a cliff and then across the sea, can’t help but resemble a deserted island. My thoughts are wandering, and that’s not good. I should focus on the trail in front of me, which of course winds through tall trees. What are these trees supposed to be? My life goals? My failures? My fears? Diseases I’m going to be stricken with? Orgasms? It’s not important. Anyway, I’m walking through this forest and – you guessed it – I come across a house. She doesn’t tell me what the house is like, but I see a pleasant, wooden house. It’s got a porch with two or three steps leading up to it. It looks like a house out of a Western movie. I approach the house and tune into my feelings. Curiosity, but not too much. Absence of fear. Almost like performing a duty. The house is there. You have to go into the house. That’s it. Nothing spectacular, nothing that would indicate a major revelation.
I’m opening the door. At first, I don’t see anything. My eyes are getting used to the darkness. What do I see in the room? Indeed, what? Slowly, I start to make out shapes. A wooden table in the middle, chairs set up around it. A piano on the left. Closed, dusty. No one is playing it. A rifle is leaning against the wall in the corner. Am I going to tell her about the rifle? Who knows how she’s going to interpret that.
Her voice is guiding me on, it says look to the other side, there’s a figure standing there and you’re amazed to discover it looks just like you! What’s it made of? What’s it like? Look carefully, stand in front of it, see if it has anything to say to you, face it….
I wouldn’t mind seeing Barbie standing there. We were born the same year; she wouldn’t have anything against playing my double on a deserted island. But, it wasn’t Barbie. The figure was made of dark wood. It was uneven and warm. It had something like a veil over its head and face, it was holding a baby in its arms, which was also wooden and uneven and, all in all, it looked like a character from a mural. Like Virgin Mary. Instead of feet, the figure had a pedestal. I could clearly see it had no feet. I stood in front of it, and the figure looked at me and said, “Why are you so cold?” And that was it.
Later, I returned down the same boring trail through the forest, across the beach and the sea, to the same cliff I started from.
“When you feel that your arms are no longer wings and when everything returns to normal, you can slowly open your eyes,” she said.
My arms never did become wings, and things are never going to be normal, so I opened my eyes right away.
I told her about my double from the island.
She led me to the middle of the room, shoved a pillow in my arms and said I was now the wooden figure without feet. The pillow was, of course, my wooden baby.
“How do I feel in that house, on that deserted island?”
“Peaceful. Good. I’m performing my duty.”
“What is my duty?”
“To raise this child and then let it go across the sea, then to the cliff, and from there, into the world.”
“Am I lonely there?”
“A little, but at the same time I know I’m fulfilling my sacred duty as a woman.”
“What do you think about your visitor from the cliff?”
“She looks a lot like me, but at the same time, she’s very different. She wouldn’t be able to spend her life here.”
The tears were very close, on the very edge of my eyelids, but amazingly, this time I held them back. There’s no use crying over a wooden woman without feet, which only could have been me. I made a conscious decision not to be her, I kept repeating to myself.
Later, back in my chair, I told her, trying to convince myself first, and then her as well, how I always felt disdain for this archetype, according to which women become saints the moment they fulfill their assigned womanly duties.
“It’s important for you to understand that both these characters are a part of you. The one over there, and the one here. Maybe you don’t like the one over there, maybe it frightens you that her feet were changed into a pedestal, maybe that means she has a strong foundation, or that she can’t budge from where she’s standing, but whatever the reason, she represents some part of you. This is something you have to accept.”
“She’s so ordinary,” I said. “She thinks she’s a saint. She has that serene look in her eyes full of silent reproach for any woman who ever wanted to be anything other than a woman.”
“But she’s still a part of you.”
“And what did she mean when she said I was cold? I don’t see myself as a cold person at all!”
“What could that coldness be?”
“She is under the illusion of being eternal. She thinks, only because she has procreated, that she has made herself eternal. Unlike her, I live every day with the knowledge that I’m disappearing. Maybe she sensed I was aware of my fleeting existence and interpreted this as coldness. Women like her think very highly of duration, of passing their boring, monotonous existence from one generation to another, with as little change as possible. There’s something narcissistic about this, if you ask me. Parenthood in general is a type of socially acceptable narcissism. Every parent dreams of bringing into this world his own clone, and then adding the finishing touches he himself is lacking.”
At the end, as if reading me a bedtime story, she told me some story from her area of expertise about how damaging it is not to accept every last part of your inner self. About how, if you bury yourself in only one of these characters, sooner or later, you fall into the state I am in now.
So now it looks like I have to make room for the Lady Saint. The fact that she never existed isn’t important, what’s important is that I acknowledge the fact that she could have existed. Something like that.
Her wooden child opened its eyes and looked at me. I already told you I’m not good with children, even when they’re made of wood, even when they’re mine, from one of my other conceivable lives.
Its wooden eyes rested on me and it slowly stretched out its little wooden hand towards my cheek. Lady Saint stood still, satisfied, peaceful, as if she wanted to say: “There, you see!” For a second, I thought she was going to thrust her wooden child into my arms, for me to hold it a little. But, I didn’t move my arms and the wooden child didn’t manage to touch me, because I didn’t budge an inch. I just stood there, looking at the two of them and thinking how this was only one of those cliffs one could take a leap from. Who knows who I would find waiting for me on some other island?
All I did was accidentally bump into that stupid CD shelf, which was standing in the wrong place anyway, making it difficult to go out on the terrace without making at least some contact. My husband didn’t say anything special. He just yelled, “Be careful!” But his tone was offensive. You know what I mean? As if I were someone who always bumps into things, and intentionally turns over and breaks his CD’s.
There are days when I don’t even notice such things.
Then again, there are those other days when something like this is enough to make me start an argument, which then lasts for hours.
You guessed it. This was one of those other days.
That’s how it started, slowly but surely, leading to the moment when we’re both in bed, because it’s already late, and we’ve already argued in the living room and the kitchen; gone through our round of insults from the bathroom to the bedroom, as he turned down the bed and I removed my make-up; already managed to release the introductory poisonous arrows, which guarantee a night of quality sleeplessness, and now, here we were in a bed, wide enough for each of us to wrap ourselves up tightly in our own blankets and avoid touching the other with even the smallest part of our tense, angry skin.
I thought about what normal people usually do in situations like this. They probably turn their backs to each other and try to sleep. The next morning, everything looks different. The next morning, everyone has work to do and they don’t feel like arguing anymore, at least not with the same passion. The next morning, the argument is magically buried in that mysterious place where we always put all our arguments. I’m not saying that they disappear, I’m not that naïve, but I know the lid can be closed relatively easily. Sometimes, you need to sit on it, like you do with luggage, but nevertheless, if you’ve supplied yourself with a half-decent suitcase for packing arguments, you’ll be able to close it.
My husband is silent on his side of the bed, hoping, I guess, that I’ll stop there. Actually, it could be so simple: all he needs to do is turn towards me and give me a hug. Still, this is something he never does in situations like this. His only contribution is stubborn silence. Meanwhile, his silence has always been such an inspiration to me ever since the first time I wanted him to kiss me, instead of just sitting there, not saying a word.
“I know how this will end,” I say. “Sooner or later we’ll make up and act as if we never said any of those things.”
He’s lying silently in the darkness, but I know he’s listening to me.
“That’s one of the biggest deceptions in a marriage,” I continue. “At some point, people get tired of arguing and say to themselves: ‘All right, it’s over now, we can make up, with or without sex, it doesn’t matter, I just want it to be over because I don’t have the will or the energy to continue with this.’ At some point, we realize all those stories in marriage manuals and the marriage advice in women’s magazines are pure nonsense, and that all these things are very different in real life. None of the arguments have ever turned into a constructive conversation. Nor will this one. At one point, the two of us will begin to act like we’ve made up.”
It was strange. I was still there, in the argument, the pillow was still wet from my tears, I could still feel the left side of my body being pierced by a wire fence of hatred, which erupts out of nowhere and then very quickly vanishes who knows where; but at the same time, it was as if I was looking in from the outside. I’ve learned in all these years the way it usually begins, the paths it takes, and how it ends. We resembled two well-rehearsed actors modestly celebrating the 300th showing of a small chamber play. The set sometimes changes, the décor is falling apart, so new set pieces are dragged in, they broke a few tea sets during the years, and as time passed, they took the liberty of changing the original text. They even got it into their heads that they knew more about what the characters should say than the writer himself! They were able to start from the middle, the end, go backwards, if needed. They could have done the play in a large, luxurious theatre or on the stage of a small, provincial movie theatre. It was all the same to them. They’ve surpassed the required amount of applause a long time ago. Everything after that is a plus. Such were our arguments.
I wanted to ask him where he thinks the hate goes after we fall asleep, or decide to end an argument, but I knew I wouldn’t get an answer. At least not one that would allow me to expand my theory. My husband doesn’t believe hate is an integral part of love.
Nevertheless, I wanted to bring this out into the open, and so I said:
“Since you’re so stubborn, both you and I know that at some point I’m going to turn around and hug you. In fact, that’s what you’re waiting for. So we can then finally go to sleep.”
Instead of an answer, I got some sort of subdued, obscure groan, something like disapproval, like a sigh of a man pretending to be worn out.
I could lay my hand on his chest now. I wouldn’t find it hard. Or unpleasant. I could pretend I’m upset because we fought. But I’m not. I’m completely indifferent, because, at this point, a fight doesn’t mean anything, nor does a kiss. That’s what I’m talking about. At a certain point, it all becomes equally unimportant and almost the same. The only thing that changes is the position of the hands on the clock.
Maybe he was able to follow my train of thought, or not, besides, it wasn’t really that important. As I already said, none of it was important. That’s why he was given only bits and pieces, with the opportunity of putting them together as he sees fit.
“It’s all love, I guess,” I said to him from my wet pillow.
This is when he got the courage to slowly turn his head towards me, for the first time.
“Do you know what love is?” I asked the pillow next to me.
He didn’t say anything, of course. He had no intention of falling into the trap.
“More than anything, love is the fear of loneliness. That’s love. People added all the other things simply to shield themselves from banality.”
He had already turned towards me, and was looking at me in the dark. I could hear his breathing and feel the barbed wire fence become softer and silkier. Soon, I’ll be able to walk through it without any injuries.
“I’m afraid of loneliness. You’re afraid of loneliness. We’re all afraid.”
His breath was nearing mine, and hate sensed it was time to go back into its dwelling place. Without dinner, but still rewarded with a long walk.
My hand moved towards his face and he was there. And that was plenty, much more than the possibility of him not being there at all.