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One day weeks afterwards, when I was wearing my fall coat, I was standing by the door of the shoe store while my mother tried on shoes, and I heard a woman call, “Mike.” She ran past the store, calling, “Mike.” I was suddenly convinced that this woman whom I did not know must be Mike’s mother-I knew, though not from him, that she was separated from his father, not dead-and that they had come back to town for some reason. I did not consider whether this return might be temporary or permanent, only-I was now ru
The woman had caught up with a boy about five years old, who had just helped himself to an apple out of a bushel of apples that was standing on the sidewalk in front of the grocery shop next door.
I stopped and stared at this child in disbelief, as if an outrageous, an unfair enchantment had taken place before my eyes.
A common name. A stupid flat-faced child with dirty blond hair.
My heart was beating in big thumps, like howls happening in my chest.
Su
She swept me into her life as she had always done, telling me that she had thought she was going to be late because Claire had got a bug in her ear that morning and had to be taken to the hospital to have it flushed out, then the dog threw up on the kitchen step, probably because it hated the trip and the house and the country, and when she-Su
“So suppose we go someplace nice and quiet and get drunk and never go back there?” she said. “We have to, though. Johnston invited a friend whose wife and kids are away in Ireland, and they want to go and play golf.”
Su
Our husbands were not in this frame of mind at all. When we tried to talk about such things with them they would say, “Oh, that’s just literature” or “You sound like Philosophy 101.”
Now we had both moved away from Vancouver. But Su
I lived now on the second floor of a house in Toronto. The people downstairs-the people who owned the house-had come from Trinidad a dozen years before. All up and down the street, the old brick houses with their verandahs and high, narrow windows, the former homes of Methodists and Presbyterians who had names like Henderson and Grisham and McAllister, were full up with olive- or brownish-ski
Expeditions to the Science Centre and the C.N. Tower, to the Museum and the Zoo, treats in the cooled restaurants of department stores, a boat trip to Toronto Island, could not make up to them the absence of their friends or reconcile them to the travesty of a home that I provided. They missed their cats. They wanted their own rooms, the freedom of the neighborhood, the dawdling stay-at-home days.
For a while they did not complain. I heard the older one say to the younger one. “Let Mom think we’re happy. Or she’ll feel bad.”
At last a blowup. Accusations, confessions of misery (even exaggerations of misery, as I thought, developed for my benefit). The younger wailing, “Why can’t you just live at home?” and the older telling her bitterly, “Because she hates Dad.”
I phoned my husband-who asked me nearly the same question and provided, on his own, nearly the same answer. I changed the tickets and helped my children pack and took them to the airport. All the way we played a silly game introduced by the older girl. You had to pick a number-27, 42-and then look out of the window and count the men you saw, and the 27th or 42nd man, or whatever, would be the one you had to marry. When I came back, alone, I gathered up all reminders of them-a cartoon the younger one had drawn, a Glamour magazine that the older one had bought, various bits of jewelry and clothing they could wear in Toronto but not at home-and stuffed them into a garbage bag. And I did more or less the same thing every time I thought of them-I snapped my mind shut. There were miseries that I could bear-those co
I went back to living as I had lived before they came. I stopped cooking breakfast and went out every morning to get coffee and fresh rolls at the Italian deli. The idea of being so far freed from domesticity enchanted me. But I noticed now, as I hadn’t done before, the look on some of the faces of the people who sat every morning on the stools behind the window or at the sidewalk tables-people for whom this was in no way a fine and amazing thing to be doing but the stale habit of a lonely life.
Back home, then, I would sit and write for hours at a wooden table under the windows of a former sunporch now become a makeshift kitchen. I was hoping to make my living as a writer. The sun soon heated up the little room, and the backs of my legs-I would be wearing shorts-stuck to the chair. I could smell the peculiar sweetish chemical odor of my plastic sandals absorbing the sweat of my feet. I liked that-it was the smell of my industry, and, I hoped, of my accomplishment. What I wrote wasn’t any better than what I’d managed to write back in the old life while the potatoes cooked or the laundry thumped around in its automatic cycle. There was just more of it, and it wasn’t any worse-that was all.
Later in the day I would have a bath and probably go to meet one or another of my women friends. We drank wine at the sidewalk tables in front of little restaurants on Queen Street or Baldwin Street or Brunswick Street and talked about our lives-chiefly about our lovers, but we felt queasy saying “lover,” so we called them “the men we were involved with.” And sometimes I met the man I was involved with. He had been banished when the children were with me, though I had broken this rule twice, leaving my daughters in a frigid movie-house.