Страница 27 из 74
A curtain was kept closed all the time across the foot of the bed, to divide the alcove from the kitchen. It was actually an old bedspread, a slippery fringed cloth that showed yellowy beige on one side, with a pattern of winy roses and green leaves, and on the other, bedward-side stripes of wine red and green with flowers and foliage appearing like ghosts in the beige color. This curtain is the thing I remember more vividly than anything else in the apartment. And no wonder. In the full spate of sex, and during its achieved aftermath, that fabric was in front of my eyes and became a reminder of what I liked about being married-the reward for which I suffered the unforeseen insult of being a little bride and the peculiar threat of a china cabinet.
Chess and I both came from homes where unmarried sex was held to be disgusting and unforgivable, and married sex was apparently never mentioned and soon forgotten about. We were right at the end of the time of looking at things that way, though we didn’t know it. When Chess’s mother had found condoms in his suitcase, she went weeping to his father. (Chess said that they had been given out at the camp where he had taken his university military training-which was true-and that he had forgotten all about them, which was a lie.) So having a place of our own and a bed of our own where we could carry on as we liked seemed marvellous to us. We had made this bargain, but it never occurred to us that older people-our parents, our aunts and uncles-could have made the same bargain, for lust. It seemed as if their main itch had been for houses, property, power mowers, and home freezers and retaining walls. And, of course, as far as women were concerned, for babies. All those things were what we thought we might choose, or might not choose, in the future. We never thought any of that would come on us inexorably, like age or weather.
And now that I come to think of it honestly, it didn’t. Nothing came without our choice. Not pregnancy, either. We risked it, just to see if we were really grown up, if it could really happen.
The other thing I did behind the curtain was read. I read books that I got from the Kitsilano Library a few blocks away. And when I looked up in that churned-up state of astonishment that a book could bring me to, a giddiness of gulped riches, the stripes were what I’d see. And not just the characters, the story, but the climate of the book became attached to the u
But one complication had been added since childhood-it seemed that I had to be a writer as well as a reader. I bought a school notebook and tried to write-did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then went dry, so that I had to tear them out and twist them up in hard punishment and put them in the garbage can. I did this over and over again until I had only the notebook cover left. Then I bought another notebook and started the whole process once more. The same cycle-excitement and despair, excitement and despair. It was like having a secret pregnancy and miscarriage every week.
Not entirely secret, either. Chess knew that I read a lot and that I was trying to write. He didn’t discourage it at all. He thought that it was something reasonable that I might quite possibly learn to do. It would take hard practice but could be mastered, like bridge or te
Chess worked for a wholesale grocery firm. He had thought of being a history teacher, but his father had persuaded him that teaching was no way to support a wife and get on in the world. His father had helped him get this job but told him that once he got in he was not to expect any favors. He didn’t. He left the house before it was light, during this first winter of our marriage, and came home after dark. He worked hard, not asking that the work he did fit in with any interests he might have had or have any purpose to it that he might once have honored. No purpose except to carry us both toward that life of lawnmowers and freezers which we believed we had no mind for. I might marvel at his submission, if I thought about it. His cheerful, you might say gallant, submission.
But then, I thought, it’s what men do.
I went out to look for work myself. If it wasn’t raining too hard I went down to the drugstore and bought a paper and read the ads while I drank a cup of coffee. Then I set out, even in a drizzle, to walk to the places that had advertised for a waitress or a salesgirl or a factory worker-any job that didn’t specifically require typing or experience. If the rain had come on heavily I would travel by bus. Chess said that I should always go by bus and not walk to save money. While I was saving money, he said, some other girl could have got the job.
That was in fact what I seemed to be hoping for. I was never altogether sorry to hear it. Sometimes I would get to my destination and stand on the sidewalk, looking at the Ladies’ Dress Shop, with its mirrors and pale carpeting, or watch the girls tripping downstairs on their lunch break from the office that needed a filing clerk. I would not even go inside, knowing how my hair and fingernails and flat scuffed shoes would tell against me. And 1 was just as daunted by the factories-I could hear the noise of the machines going in the buildings where soft drinks were bottled or Christmas decorations put together, and I could see the bare lightbulbs hanging down from the barnlike ceilings. My fingernails and fiat heels might not matter there, but my clumsiness and mechanical stupidity would get me sworn at, shouted at (I could also hear the shouted orders above the noise of the machines). I would be disgraced and fired. I didn’t think myself capable even of learning to operate a cash register. I told the manager of a restaurant that, when he actually seemed to be thinking of hiring me. “Do you think you could pick it up?” he said, and I said no. He looked as if he had never heard anybody admit to such a thing before. But I spoke the truth. I didn’t think I could pick things up, not in a hurry and out in public. I would freeze. The only things that I could pick up easily were things like the convolutions of the Thirty Years’ War.
The truth is, of course, that I didn’t have to. Chess was supporting me, at our very basic level. I didn’t have to push myself out into the world because he had done it. Men had to.
I thought that maybe I could manage the work in the library, so I asked there, though they hadn’t advertised. A woman put my name on a list. She was polite but not encouraging. Then I went into bookstores, choosing the ones that looked as if they wouldn’t have a cash register. The emptier and untidier the better. The owners would be smoking or dozing at the desk, and in the secondhand stores there was often a smell of cat.
“We’re not busy enough in the winter,” they said. One woman said I might come back in the spring. “Though we’re not usually very busy then, either.”
Winter in Vancouver was not like any winter I had ever known. No snow, not even anything much in the way of a cold wind. In the middle of the day, downtown, I could smell something like burned sugar-I think it had to do with the trolley wires. I walked along Hastings Street, where there wouldn’t be another woman walking-just drunks, tramps, poor old men, shuffling Chinese. Nobody spoke an ill word to me. I walked past warehouses, weedy lots where there wouldn’t be even a man in sight. Or through Kitsilano, with its high wooden houses crammed with people living tight, as we were, to the tidy Dunbar district, with its stucco bungalows and pollarded trees. And through Kerrisdale, where the classier trees appeared, birches on the lawns. Tudor beams, Georgian symmetry, Snow White fantasies with imitation thatched roofs. Or maybe real thatched roofs, how could I tell?