More in Anger (19 page)

What was the matter, anyway? Life had become more, not less, difficult to manage. The money of her own to spend as she liked was most welcome, but at what cost to her? No one saw her struggle, or if they did, no one cared about her superhuman efforts on their behalf.

After all I've done for you.
It was true, damn it all. She had driven them to their lessons. Taken them to the library, the art gallery, the beach. She had fed them. Washed them. Washed and ironed their clothes. Mended their clothes. They had always had books, and dogs, and then the horses—but nothing was ever enough. Their greed was insatiable, and not a single word of thanks ever crossed their lips.

Some days it was almost too much to bear. Some days she just let the floodgates open and abandoned any semblance of control, usually when her husband wasn't around, but on occasion when he was. You never saw a man disappear so fast. She knelt down and unleashed her rage, let loose crying, and wailing, lashing out at whoever came near. She screamed down the hall at the closed bedroom doors,
I am working all day and all night too, and for what? For what? What is the matter with you all?
She walked down the hall and struck out at their bedroom doors and at their bodies with her hands, with wooden spoons, and the yardstick.
Damn you!
She chased them.
Damn you all!
she shrieked, and she sobbed at their heartlessness, at how she had been abandoned, so unfairly, how she had always,
always
been unloved. Not one of them cared, nobody loved her. And then she got mad, and dried her tears, and called her children to her study. Soon enough, she warned, they would see just how little she cared. The children stared at the floor. They already knew.

On this, her second trip to Ireland, to Yeats country this time, she sat in a park in Sligo and stared long and hard at the place where two streams converged and became stronger. What a time she was having, away from all responsibility except to herself. How good it was to be completely free of encumbrances. To look after herself, only herself. She could sit here quietly forever, she thought, left alone, left to her solitude and her thoughts. And as she sat there, it came to her. Her older two daughters were for all intents and purposes gone. Amy was fourteen, Viv thirteen.
What was stopping her now? Not guilt for abandoning her children when they still needed her—they were all now in their teens or beyond. She had the means to support herself; she had a car, and her wits. She and Tom were sleeping in separate rooms now and barely spoke—they would not miss each other. She could leave. She could go.

But leave after sinking all that money into the house and property in her futile efforts to make it a home? It wasn't fair. But what choice was there? It was the price of her freedom. Either she accepted the cost or she paid more dearly—with the remainder of her life. She watched the water course by in front of her and thought fleetingly of Crane's ambivalent universe. Nothing, no one really cared. She would have to leave her study, her gardens, her origami light fixtures. Leave the place she had toiled over for almost twenty years. Where she had met failure day after day. Her determination not to give up, her stubborn stick-to-it-iveness had in the end been laughable, not laudable. She was as bad as her mother. And now, if anything was going to change, really change, it would have to be she, she who was the only one who took any initiative about anything, she who would have to leave if she was going to save herself, because she was the only one who gave a damn about her welfare. If she did not, she would be swallowed again by that world where she was never enough.

She had a choice. She did. She had thought about leaving before, had even tried to leave before, but her sense of responsibility had always brought her back, much notice anyone took of that. Maybe this time she would find the strength to put herself first. Maybe this time she could get it right. She mustn't rush. It might take another year to save her money and lay her plans,
but now, now she saw a beacon of hope above the dark mess of things waiting for her at home. When she returned, she would not, she would
not
be swallowed up again by that family, that selfish, ungrateful family of hers.

Why was it so much easier to keep perspective, gain perspective, from a distance? She ought to know something about that from her art studies. In Ireland she could see what she needed to do, could see what was wrong, what was necessary to fix it. But back home, up to her neck in it again, she felt only in great danger, flailing, screaming, begging for sympathy that never came. No one loved her. No one cared. She had been a fool to think it might be otherwise. Hope after hope dashed on jagged rocks. No more. When she got back from her holiday, things were going to be different. She would play second fiddle no longer. She promised herself.

VIVIEN

 

Her bangs, usually cut short in a half moon, were shaggy and long, almost in her eyes. Barefoot, in cut-offs and a T-shirt, Viv, thirteen, was sitting on the mare, Dolly, out in the field, practising looking wistful, and practising whistling—both required holding her mouth in a particular way. Dolly had her head down, and was nibbling at the scanty remains of grass. She wasn't wearing a bridle; Viv had looped two hay ropes together and then noosed them loosely around the horse's muzzle. After a while she gave up on the whistling and began singing the songs she made up as she went along. Yearny cowboy songs. Songs based on the ones she heard on the radio at her friend Colleen's.
He don't love me, why don't he love me, please won't you love me.
Ballads of broken or breaking hearts.

She lay back on the horse's rump and looked up at the clouds. She had been so sure that turning thirteen would make a difference, but it hadn't. Who
was
she, anyhow? Someone named Vivien—Viv now, she had decided—who lived in that room and sat at that place at the table and whose name was on that drawer in the kitchen and above that coat hook in the playroom.
Someone who was going into grade nine in September. But what she
still
did not know, longed desperately to know, was what was the
matter
with her. What is
wrong
with you? her mother demanded again and again. What is the
matter
with you, Vivien?

She hadn't heard the questions for a while. Her mother was gone again. Not for good—she hadn't said that for a while—but on a holiday, one of the holidays the money from her teaching job allowed her to take now. This time she was far, far away in Ireland, and right then, in that moment, Vivien was feeling good. She loved being on Dolly. She liked the feel of the old mare under her, her warm fur and regular breathing. Viv's legs and cut-offs were filthy because Dolly hadn't been brushed or curry-combed in a long time, and her dusty fur came off in drifts and handfuls, and stuck to Viv's clothes and her legs. Viv didn't care about the dirt, but when she went back to the house she'd have to shuck her clothes at the back door and run naked to her room so that Amy wouldn't get allergic.

She had thought she'd be with Amy today, that Amy would take her allergy pill and catch the horses with her, that the two of them would ride bareback out of the field and down the driveway, through the gardens and past their low blue house. They would follow the path through the trees and down into the ravine to the creek near the woods. While the horses stood up to their knees in the cool running water and yanked tall, lush grass from the banks, green slobber drooling from their mouths, she and Amy would have lain back along the horses' spines and watched the sky and the clouds and talked about movie stars and singers and measured to see whether Amy's hair was long enough yet to touch her bra strap if she tilted her head way back. Or maybe
they would have stayed up in the orchard, and while they sat on the corral fence rails eating golden plums the horses would pull apples from the trees. But instead she was by herself, because Amy had gone shopping for slingbacks with Jeanette.

Dolly, fifteen hands high, stood perfectly still except for the occasional quiver to rid herself of a fly. Her head was held low, her eyes were half closed as she dozed. Viv sat up, felt tall. She liked the view of the world from here, she liked being on Dolly bareback; liked the pleasant discomfort of the horse's spine hard against her coccyx.

This morning in the corral, Dolly's colt had come up behind Viv, breathed his warm horse breath on her neck, waggled his big ears, nibbled her ear with his big fleshy lips. She had been mean to him. “No,” she had said, and shoved his head away. “Go away. I don't want you.” When he didn't move, she pushed on his chest, trying to force him to move back. Stubbornly, he set his hooves and wouldn't budge. “Get out of here, I said!” She had turned her back on him and moved several feet away. He followed her. Lightly pushed her in the back with his head. She smiled, turned, murmured love words, called him her dear one, and kissed the place where his shoulder met his neck, kissed the sides of his velvet muzzle, his soft reddish-brown and white nose, put her arms around his strong, smooth neck.

Sometimes she thought about her mother when she was alone like this. In some vague sort of way she still hoped that she might start to like her. That maybe when Pearl got back from Ireland she would be happier, and nicer, and stay that way this time. And that by some magic she, Viv herself, would have changed too, and that her mother would finally be able to love
her. Viv closed her eyes and felt them fill with tears. Before she had left for the airport, Pearl had screamed at her. It was nothing new, but Viv wasn't ready for the attack, hadn't had a chance to brace herself. As Pearl approached her, she had thought she was maybe going to kiss her goodbye, maybe say something nice because she was going away for so long. When her mother had come towards her, Viv had even offered a little smile. She hadn't really looked at her mother; if she had, she would have known. Pearl told her to shut her trap and listen even though she hadn't said a word. Then she'd said she couldn't stand the sight of Viv one second longer and would be glad to be rid of her. And then she had left. Just left, and Vivien had stood there for a long time and then she had gone down to the woods, to her own little nook in the trees, and curled up against the thick, deep roots.

Now, lost in memory, she lost her balance, slipped off the horse's back and fell to the ground with a thump. She didn't move; she lay on her back on the stony earth and looked up at Dolly beside her. At Dolly's brown and white legs, and furry belly. The old mare slowly swung her head around. She met Viv's gaze with her big brown eyes. She reached over and breathed her warm breath on the girl's face. Viv looked at Dolly's soft brown muzzle and the yellow and green slobber and smelled her grassy breath. The mare gently nuzzled her, and Viv looked into the horse's kind eyes, and beyond, up at the sky, and felt the world, the earth, hard under her.

Around Easter the following spring, Amy confided to Viv as they smoked out her bedroom window that she liked Rusty, the oldest cousin of the Gagliardi kids across the street. She liked his red hair, she said; she liked how he was always laughing and being a smartass and getting into trouble; she liked how he didn't care about anything, and she didn't care that he wasn't that smart. Her private-school friends wouldn't think much of him, but she didn't really care, she said. So what?

Rusty had dropped out of high school. He was sixteen now, working nights catching chickens and turkeys and loading them onto trucks. He had deep, ugly scratches on his arms from the birds as they tried to escape the blinding lights and cruel hands that grabbed them. When he got paid, Rusty hung around outside the beer parlour of the Beresford Arms or outside the liquor store by the Dairy Queen looking for someone to buy him a bottle, or a case of beer. If he wasn't there, he'd succeeded, and was off partying with Barry, his best friend, if he'd talked him into skipping school.

Sometimes Rusty brought Barry over to the Gagliardis' and Viv, sitting concealed in the hawthorn tree at the end of her driveway, looked over and watched him longingly, living her lovesick cowboy songs as Barry put his cigarette in his mouth while he combed his straight, strawberry blond hair forward and then flicked it back out of his small blue eyes with a toss of his head. That toss was so cool she thought she'd die each time he reached into the back pocket of his skin-tight jeans for the broken rat-tail comb.