Too Much Happiness

Then perhaps to make up for laughing, sensing the child’s humiliation, the teacher suggests they go down to Willingdon Park and see if the ice-cream stand has opened for the summer.

“Do they worry if you don’t come straight home?”

“They know I’m with you.”

The ice-cream stand is open though the selection is limited. They haven’t got the more exciting flavors in yet. The child picks strawberry, this time making sure to be ready, in the middle of her bliss and agitation. The teacher picks vanilla, as many adults do. Though she jokes with the attendant, telling him to hurry up and get rum raisin or she won’t like him anymore.

Maybe that is when there is another change. Hearing the teacher speak in that way, in a saucy voice almost the way big girls speak, the child relaxes. From then on she is less stricken with adoration, though entirely happy. They drive down to the dock to look at the moored boats, and the teacher says she has always wanted to live on a houseboat. Wouldn’t it be fun, she says, and the child of course agrees. They pick the one they’d choose. It is homemade and painted a light blue, with a row of little windows in which there are potted geraniums.

This leads to a conversation about the house the child lives in now, the house where the teacher used to live. And somehow after that, on their drives, they often come back to that subject. The child reports that she likes having her own bedroom but doesn’t like how dark it is outside. Sometimes she thinks she can hear wild animals outside her window.

What wild animals?

Bears, cougars. Her mother says those are in the bush and never to go there.

“Do you run and get into your mother’s bed when you hear them?”

“I’m not supposed to.”

“Goodness, why not?”

“Jon’s there.”

“What does Jon think about the bears and cougars?”

“He thinks it’s just deer.”

“Was he mad at your mother for what she’d told you?”

“No.”

“I guess he’s never mad.”

“He was sort of mad one time. When me and my mother poured all his wine down the sink.”

The teacher says it is a pity to be scared of the woods all the time. There are walks you can take there, she says, where wild animals won’t bother you, especially if you make a noise and usually you do. She knows the safe paths and she knows the names of all the wildflowers that will be coming out about now. Dogtooth violets. Trilliums. Wake-robins. Purple violets and columbines. Chocolate lilies.

“I think there is another proper name for them, but I like to call them chocolate lilies. It sounds so delicious. Of course, it isn’t anything about the way they taste but the way they look. They look just like chocolate with a bit of purple like crushed berries. They’re rare but I know where there are some.”

Joyce puts the book down again. Now, now, she really has caught the drift, she can feel the horror coming. The i

For some of it was true, certainly. She does remember things she had forgotten. Driving Christine home, and never thinking of her as Christine but always as Edie’s child. She remembers how she could not drive into the yard to turn around but always let the child off by the side of the road, then drove another half mile or so to get a place to turn. She does not remember anything about the ice cream. But there used to be a houseboat exactly like that moored down at the dock. Even the flowers, and the sly horrible questioning of the child-that could be true.

She has to continue. She would like to pour more brandy, but she has a rehearsal at nine o’clock in the morning.

Nothing of the sort. She has made another mistake. The woods and the chocolate lilies drop out of the story, the recital is almost passed over. School has just ended. And on the Sunday morning after the final week the child is wakened early. She hears the teacher’s voice in the yard and she goes to her window. There is the teacher in her car with the window down, talking to Jon. A small U-Haul is attached to the car. Jon is in his bare feet, bare chested, wearing only his jeans. He calls to the child’s mother and she comes to the kitchen door and walks a few steps into the yard but does not go up to the car. She is wearing a shirt of Jon’s which she uses as a dressing gown. She always wears long sleeves to hide her tattoos.

The conversation is about something in the apartment which Jon promises to pick up. The teacher tosses him the keys. Then he and the child’s mother, talking over each other, urge her to take some other things. But the teacher laughs unpleasantly and says, “All yours.” Soon Jon says, “Okay. See you,” and the teacher echoes “See you,” and the child’s mother doesn’t say anything you can hear. The teacher laughs in the same way she did before and Jon gives her directions about how to turn the car and the U-Haul around in the yard. By this time the child is ru

“You just missed her,” the child’s mother says. “She had to catch the ferry.”

There is a honk of the horn; Jon raises one hand. Then he comes across the yard and says to the child’s mother, “That’s that.”

The child asks if the teacher is going to come back and he says, “Not likely.”

What takes up another half page is the child’s increasing understanding of what has been going on. As she grows older she recalls certain questions, the seemingly haphazard probing there had been. Information-quite useless really-about Jon (whom she does not call Jon) and her mother. When did they get up in the morning? What did they like to eat and did they cook together? What did they listen to on the radio? (Nothing-they had bought a television.)

What was the teacher after? Did she hope to hear bad things? Or was she just hungry to hear anything, to be in contact with somebody who slept under the same roof, ate at the same table, was close to those two people daily?

That is what the child can never know. What she can know is how little she herself counted for, how her infatuation was manipulated, what a poor little fool she was. And this fills her with bitterness, certainly it does. Bitterness and pride. She thinks of herself as a person never to be fooled again.

But something happens. And here is the surprise ending. Her feelings about the teacher and that period in her childhood one day change. She doesn’t know how or when, but she realizes that she no longer thinks of that time as a cheat. She thinks of the music she painfully learned to play (she gave it up, of course, before she was even in her teens). The buoyancy of her hopes, the streaks of happiness, the curious and delightful names of the forest flowers that she never got to see.

Love. She was glad of it. It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness-however temporary, however flimsy-of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.

Why yes, Joyce thinks. Yes.

On Friday afternoon she goes to the bookstore. She brings her book to be signed, as well as a small box from Le Bon Chocolatier. She joins a lineup. She is slightly surprised to see how many people have come. Women of her own age, women older and younger. A few men who are all younger, some accompanying their girlfriends.

The woman who sold Joyce the book recognizes her.

“Good to see you back,” she says. “Did you read the review in the Globe? Wow.”

Joyce is bewildered, actually trembling a little. She finds it hard to speak.