More in Anger (23 page)

During the day she studied, read and wrote papers. She didn't have time for friends even if she'd made any. Up at the university she talked to her profs in class, but that was all. She needed to do well; she was on academic probation; she had to prove herself, or they wouldn't let her continue. At night she worked in a lounge as big as a tavern. Her face was hard, and she didn't smile, but her mind was quick and she knew how to give good service, so she made pretty good tips. She didn't like being outside, got home quickly with her smokes and books and bottles of wine. She didn't need anyone. Anyone. She kept her door locked. She copied out quotes and pinned them to her walls.

The Soul selects its own society, then Shuts the Door—

After work at two, three, four in the morning, her shirt sweaty and wrinkled, and booze and ashes on her black skirt and runs in her pantyhose, she knocked back a couple of black Russians or Caesars before she cabbed it home to crash and get up for nine o'clock Latin.

“Good insights,” a professor wrote on her paper. “Interesting discussion,” said another. “Good use of secondary sources.” Slowly she began to accept their praise as genuine. Somewhere along the way in those four years she began to realize that her mother's judgment had always been the only one that mattered, and that she had always failed in her eyes. No more. Her mother's voice had always been the equivalent of the voice of God, her view the only one that counted, that ruled on her worth, her value. No more: now there were others. And how could her mother know anything about her, anyway? When had she ever known anything about her? And yet one letter from her could still negate everything in an instant, demolish her. She felt as though she were holding hell itself when she read her mother's letters, as though she held anger, not paper.

On her nights off work at the bar, she sat on her foamy with her books, a deck of smokes, her lighter, a big ashtray and a bottle of wine. She read—maybe Milton, or Vaughan—or watched her little black-and-white TV. And waited for that familiar feeling. That not caring, that going, going and gone.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate.

The day before convocation, a letter from her mother had come, one of the bad ones. Lashing out at her for stuff she didn't even remember. The same old same old. She was about to get her degree, but it hadn't changed her mother. Not for a second. Fool that she was, she had thought it might be a letter of congratulations. It might even be a card. But no. It was a letter about universities. Her mother thought she might find it interesting to read the enclosed article. The article ranked the universities, and did she notice that the University of Calgary was nowhere near the top of the list? No one had ever pretended that the University of Calgary was Queen's, or McGill, or McMaster. But wasn't it interesting that it wasn't even UBC—or Edmonton!

She took the fifty dollars her father had sent as a graduation gift and went to the liquor store. The next morning, hungover, she had looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. It was stupid to go to convocation. It was stupid to get dressed up like some la la happy university graduate about to embark on life. What a fraud she was, what a failure no matter what she did. Nothing would ever be good enough. She saw beyond her greasy skin, her florid, puffy face, her bloodshot eyes and smudged mascara, her dirty, messy hair, her tight, hard line of a mouth. She saw herself as a chunk of granite: she was common, and hard. Black and white. Flung at someone, she'd gash a temple. She said aloud, evenly, staring into her eyes: “I hate you.” And blinked. “You are a snivelling, pathetic thing,” she said. And then she had found the resolve. Found her mother's inner fortitude and grim determination. “Get the razor,” she said to her miserable image. “
Do you hear me?
Get it.”

She glanced at the door her mother would come out. And then up at the stars, which were all swinging now, and she picked out the brightest. Then she looked down, to her body. She pulled up her shirt sleeves and took a long look at the tender slices and stitches on each of her wrists. Then she hid them again.

More than two decades had passed since she was a little girl so deeply in love with her mother no matter how she treated her; since her mother was the queen of her child's heart, so glamorous with her bright red lipstick, her velvet jackets, her sparkling brooches. Going off to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the symphony, the hospital ball. She and Amy standing in adoration as she got ready to go. Pressing their faces into the thick chocolate pile of her faux fur coat, asking for lipstick kisses that kept her close while she was gone. Oh, how she had loved her. In her gardening clothes, in those Black Watch plaid wool pants and that newly ironed yellow blouse, kneeling down to plant bulbs, daffodil and hyacinth; bending over to stake delphiniums, tie back the snowball bush. Talking to her African violets. Viv had loved her, and had loved watching her.

When her mother had carried her down the hall to her bath, had she loved her? When Viv crawled into her mother's bed to be safe from the witches that haunted her dreams, did she love her then? When her mother crouched down in front of her and straightened her white collar before she went to Sunday school, did she love her? Doing up the buttons on her green coat and folding down her white socks, did she love her? And as she screamed at her to
get out of her sight
, as she called her
useless
and
thoughtless
and
cruel
, as she shoved her, yelling
Go away!
, as she thrashed her, did she love her?

Every silence of her childhood deceptive and dangerous. Every day and every night. For as long as she could remember. Dreams of her mother with an axe. Dreams of her mother as a witch trying to grab her. What the hell was she doing here now?

Viv opened her eyes, gazed across the patio to the darkening shadows around the day lilies, then up, at the stars brightly swinging back and forth across the sky. That old and familiar little girl's longing inside. The wisps of longing for a mother who loved her, who was proud of her. But there was no other mother to have. This was the one. Between whose legs she had come into the world. And in that moment she wanted to dive into a deep pool of still water, she wanted to have grown in someone else's womb, to have been born a
beloved
daughter. This woman who had given her life made her wish she were dead every time she saw her.

“You don't have to stay. You could drive away,” Viv said softly to herself, wiping away tears. “Just get in your car and drive away.”

But then the back door opened and Pearl shuffled out. Hair-spray, an acrid halo, floated over her head. She was carrying her gold purse and she was wearing her gold shoes. “I'm ready for the celebration,” she said.

Partway to Chas's place, Viv stopped on the sidewalk to light a smoke, crossed to the boulevard in the centre of the street, sat
down, and propped herself up against the trunk of one of the old trees and closed her eyes. She liked the feel of the trunk and the bark against her back, the feel of the ground beneath her. And when she opened her eyes again, she liked how the street lamps barely penetrated the branches of the heavily leafed old trees above her, which obscured the sky.

She loved Chas. She had met him down the street at the neighbourhood pub, and had gone home with him that night. He made her so happy; he was so nice; he was the nicest man she had ever met. When she woke up the next day, he was gone to his construction job and had left a note on the bedside table.
See you at lunch, honey-pie
. He brought her a burger, and a rose, and she got up to eat and drink coffee with him, and then she went back to his bed and slept again, her pounding head buried in the smell of one of his cast-off shirts.

If they stayed in the city on the weekend, they took a drive that became a ritual circuit. They started by driving past her grandparents' houses, then past Elbow Park elementary school where her mother and Aunt May had gone as children. Viv got out of the truck, walked over to the school's front door, imagined her mother going in those very doors all those decades ago. Six years old. Seven, eight, nine. Ten. Travelling through this very space, back and forth, back and forth.

On these drives she felt as though she was on some kind of a search, but had no idea about what or why. She wasn't curious about anything specific, but it was some kind of longing, and she was drawn to this repetition, this incantation, some attempt to stir something up she wanted, without knowing, to know. Other times they drove up north of Sixteenth Avenue to the
graveyard where her grandparents were buried, and she and Chas might both get out of the truck and stand in front of the markers. What was one supposed to do? Sweep the dirt off, pull stray grass away. They did that. Then what? How were you supposed to honour your ancestors, grey ash beneath the grass, anyway? Who knew. Cheers, anyway, and she raised her Caesar.

“Is it Destiny that kept me here in Calgary, Chas, do you think? Am I
meant
to be here?” she asked him as they got back in the truck. “I mean, why didn't I move away? Why did I decide to stay in school?”

“Could be,” Chas said, turning over the Dolly Parton cassette and then turning to her.

“Tighter,” she said when he held her. “Tighter.”

“No problem, Babe,” he said.

He was the sweetest, most patient guy. Too nice, too patient sometimes. He didn't get anxious as they neared the bottom of a bottle, or the end of a deck of smokes. He could wait until tomorrow, and he was the same with everything—with sex, with food, with work. There was nothing he
had
to have, nothing he couldn't wait for. While she wanted everything right now. She wished he were just a bit stronger, wished he were a bit harder to please. He put up with her bullshit way too much and she found herself pushing to see just how far she could go. Too far. He needed to draw better lines. But no. After a few drinks he got all sweet and soft and mushy before he fell asleep, and when he woke up it was with an open, loving smile.

On other weekends they went for long drives out in the country in his old GMC truck, plugging cassettes of Randy Travis, the Forester Sisters, Dwight Yoakam into the tape deck and singing
along. As they drove, they drank the Caesars they'd made up in batches on her kitchen counter and stashed in juice bottles they put in a car-sized cooler. They drove west to Bragg Creek, into the Kananaskis, to Banff, or south to Black Diamond, or Millarville. They drove, they got out and walked by the river, they came back to the truck for fresh drinks or a couple of tokes, and drove around some more. Going somewhere, going nowhere.

She was in grad school now, supposedly thinking complex literary thoughts, challenging her intellect, reading deeply, preparing presentations. Not killing more and more time with Chas. As they drove, she'd glance at her texts beside her on the seat, maybe tell him what she'd been reading about her specialty, the metaphysical poets, and she quoted some of them to set them in her mind, and told him why they were called that, and what the differences were among them. She taught him their names, and praised him like a pet when he could repeat them. Donne. Herbert. Marvell. Vaughan. Crashaw. And maybe, said some, Traherne. “Good boy!” she laughed. “Well done!”

“Woolf,” said Chas. “Woof woof.”

She told him what she was learning about love, and about the tug-of-war between bodily pleasure and the welfare of the soul in Henry Vaughan. She told him about Sir Philip Sidney, and the love between Astrophel and Stella. About Pound, and Stevens, and why they were so hard to access and why that was good, or bad, depending on what you thought about poetry. Was accessibility a crime or a virtue?

“You're getting good stuff into that pretty head of yours, aren't you?” Chas said proudly, with a loving smile. “But Vivvy—can you change a tire?”

On their first New Year's Eve, he showed up with red wine instead of white and she lost it. How many times had she said white? Didn't he know by now she hated red? She was so pissed off she called him a stupid fucking idiot and he left. And as he left, with the door wide open and other tenants in the foyer, he yelled at her for the first time.

“I don't fucking need this, Viv. I don't.”

She slammed the door behind him. Her heart pounded with excitement. But he didn't come back. He didn't answer his phone, wouldn't come to his door or his window. His roommate, Teddy, half snapped and wearing a Santa hat, answered the front door with a smoke between his lips and a hot rum in his hand. “Sorry there, Vivvy. Not home. Well, home but not home. You know?”

At the corner store, she bought a deck of smokes with pennies and nickels she scrounged from all her pockets and then she sat on her couch, which, like all her furniture, had come from Chas, and looked around at the emptiness. No liquor. Nothing.