Year of Lesser (11 page)

“Not so silly,” Johnny says. An attempt at kindness.

Tuesday is level, Wednesday fine. Thursday, Mona calls about the book club and wants to know if Charlene will be coming the following week. “We never really got to the book of poetry,” she says. “Conversation wandered, recipes and things. And Avi asked if she could bring this new professor friend, who’s just moved into town. Bought some land out by Cleary’s.”

“A guy?”

“Yeah, so we debated. Nancy didn’t want it, said it would break up the intimacy. Deb asked if this guy was single. He is. Although I wonder if he and Avi aren’t friends, you know? The guy’s a physicist or into religion, I forget which.”

“Maybe he’s lonely,” Charlene says. “So, what did you decide?”

“We didn’t. We’re going to vote next time. You should come.”

“I don’t know what to vote.”

“Well, whatever you want. Did you read that poet?”

“Yes. What would you say about that book with a man present. I mean, strange stuff.”

“It’s poetry,” Mona says.

“I liked some pieces though,” Charlene says. She’s on the verge of a defence of sorts and wonders why. “I’ll see,” she says. “I’ll probably come.”

“You okay now?”

“Yes, better. Much.”

Once again Charlene begins to fit into the flow of life in Lesser. The women at work feed her gossip, things like Melissa Emery’s son, Roger, needing to go to court. Supposedly Melody Krahn and Chris Wallace were involved too. “They all stole a half-ton,” Judy Penner says. “Out near St. Pierre.”

And the pastor of the United Church is having an affair with Mrs. Cornies. She’s the grain elevator manager’s wife. Charlene doesn’t know
her except to recognize her red hair. Mr. Cornies comes in to pay bills sometimes; he’s always dusty and coughing. Serving him makes Charlene sneeze. She’s not happy to hear about someone else’s affair; it saddens her, makes her cynical and scared.

Her mother calls from the city. Though they don’t see much of each other they talk once a week by phone. Sometimes her parents come out to the country for a visit but they don’t really like it. Her mother’s face, especially, becomes this oval of disappointment: with the town, the house, Johnny.

“What about Christmas?” her mother asks. “We’re trying to make plans.”

“Johnny and I were talking about Mexico,” Charlene says.

“Really? That doesn’t sound like him.”

Charlene ignores this. “We thought two weeks right over Christmas. There’s this cheap package I saw.”

“Well, you decide and let us know. Is Johnny still doing that youth thing?”

“You mean the centre?”

“I suppose.”

“Yes, Friday and Saturday nights.”

“What does he do all that time, just hang out?”

“He talks to the kids, gives them a place to be. He’s good with teen -agers.”

“I should hope so, he’s lousy with adults.”

Charlene draws a slow breath and makes little rabbit movements with her nose. She hates to argue with her mother. It’s tasteless, boring, and always slides in the same direction. Still, she says, “I don’t know why you pick on Johnny. You hardly see him, you don’t know where he’s going, where his mind’s at.”

“I look at you, dear. I’m still waiting for you to blossom. I’m sorry, but he grinds you down, I can see it.”

Charlene doesn’t respond. Finally, her mother says, “Are you okay?”

“Yes, sure, why not?”

“Well, last time we talked you and Johnny were going to see a counsellor.”

“It’s better,” Charlene says. “We’ve decided we don’t need to spend money on a counsellor. Johnny’s at home, we’re talking, he’s making meals. We’re happy.”

It is only later, after hanging up, that Charlene thinks about happiness. She lied; Johnny’s happy, she’s not. She knows she will never experience the pure joy Johnny drains out of life. There is not enough of that joy to go around.

She dreams. She is lost, standing beside a deserted road, and a young girl with blonde hair picks her up, stops beside the road and beckons her into the car which smells of orchids. When she gets into the car, the girl at the wheel is dead. She dreams about Loraine Wallace. Loraine is naked and at full term. She is having the baby and Charlene can see the head crowning. Then Johnny is there and he’s trying to push the baby back in.

At first Charlene doesn’t tell anyone about these dreams, even though they scare her. Then, in late November, on a Saturday, she decides to go to the book club. It’s the night of the vote, the decision regarding Avi’s friend. Deb says that before she votes she’d like to see a picture of the guy. Everyone laughs and Mona says she had a dream about him. He was splitting atoms, the way someone would split firewood. “Little explosions were coming off the axe,” she says.

Then Charlene jumps in and talks about her dreams, the one about being lost and the one about Loraine. When she’s finished, nobody speaks. It’s as if she’s stepped over that fine line of decorum—she’s embarrassed the group.

Avi, the new woman, says, “It’s normal. Completely. Dreams allow us to be violent, to murder, to pull heads off, to lust, fornicate. I would say your wish in that one dream, Charlene, is to disappear Loraine’s baby. And not only that, but to have Johnny do it for you.”

“It’s not that I hate Loraine,” Charlene says. She twists her fingers until the knuckles turn white. “I don’t even know her. I guess I’m jealous.”

“Well, of course, you’re jealous,” Avi roars.

“Oh, not only because Johnny slept with her, sleeps with her, see, I’m not even sure about that, though I do know he’s been faithful for at least one month. But, you know, it’s the fact that she’s going to have his baby. That was supposed to be my job.”

“You want to kill the baby,” Avi says.

Charlene nods. “I guess so,” she says, and these three words chill the group for a moment, especially Nancy and Mona, the ones with children, and then Helen titters. She’s sort of friends with Loraine, but still she titters.

“I had a dream too,” Helen says. “I was eating cream cheese cake. Eating and eating and I couldn’t stop so I just kept expanding. Oh, right, and I was eating in bed and I rolled over at one point and smothered Jimmy. He died.” Helen laughs and slips an olive onto a cracker.

Charlene loves Helen, who is a big woman and makes no apologies for it; when she laughs her body rolls and her eyes squeeze and shut and then open again.

Finally Mona says that they have to decide about Avi’s friend Michael. “Personally, I think it would destroy the intimacy of the group. It’s not like we just talk books. Look at us, we delve into personal matters, and with this man around we’d lose that closeness.”

“I agree,” Nancy says. “I’ve always seen this as a kind of coven, a place where magic is possible. A woman’s magic.”

“Hey,” Avi says, “I don’t want to push it. Michael’s new in town and I thought it would be a good entry point. But that’s okay.”

“Why doesn’t he try Phil Barkman’s group? Is he religious?” Helen asks.

The women laugh.

“In a way, I suppose,” Avi says.

“Really?” says Mona. “I thought he was a physicist.”

“Well,” says Helen, making little impatient shooing movements with her hands, “it seems we’ve got nays all around. I guess it makes sense. I
personally couldn’t imagine talking about this poet with Jimmy in the group.” Helen plucks at an elbow and says, dangling the book by two fingers, “What is this?”

“You’re mocking me,” Avi says. She is hurt.

“No, no, love. Jimmy would mock you.”

And so they go around in a circle and talk about the poems. Mona likes the one called “The Pope’s Penis.” “I love it,” she chortles, “and I’m not even Catholic.”

“That’s exactly why you love it,” Avi says.

Deb says she doesn’t like any of them. They’re crude and not really poems anyway.

“Why not?” Charlene asks.

“Because they’re like stories, and not very good ones, and there’s no rhythm or rhyme. I’d like to do an Amy Tan novel.”

Nancy says she had a lot of favourites. “It’s all so explicit,” she says. “I mean, ‘A Woman in Heat Wiping Herself.’ Yuck! Still, I read it twice. My favourite though was ‘It.’ The description of the sex, of being folded over like paper, of being stunned. It was all so honest and strangely familiar.”

“Yes, I liked that too, that one.” This is Charlene talking. Her face is flushed and she’s opening her book to that poem. “Except I didn’t get the last part where she talks about the river and these boatloads of children. Why talk about dead children in the middle of a poem about sex?”

“The river means death,” Avi says. “Kind of like the river Styx.”

“But these children never died, did they?”

“It seems not, but I think we always expect them to die or we don’t expect children at all.”

“Hey, well, that’s me,” Charlene says. She’s smiling but she’s got a pain in her side.

Helen says, “I remember a river we crossed when I was young. In Saskatchewan, on a ferry.”

There is a pause and then Charlene says, “My favourite was ‘Looking at my Father.’ May I read part of it?”

Heads nod. Deb looks sleepy.

“Go ahead,” Avi says.

Charlene folds open the book. “This is the last of it,” she says.

I know he is not perfect but my

body thinks his body is perfect, the

fine stretched coarse pink

skin, the big size of him, the

sour-ball mass, darkness, hair,

sex, legs even longer than mine,

lovely feet. What I know I know, what my

body knows it knows, it likes to

slip the leash of my mind and go and

look at him, like an animal

looking at water, then going to it and

drinking until it has had its fill and can

lie down and sleep.

When Charlene’s finished she says, “I think I know why I like it. I like it because it reminds me of Johnny.”

That night Charlene lies in bed waiting for Johnny to come home. Around midnight she hears the car door slam, then the sound of footsteps up the porch stairs and Johnny’s in the kitchen, pouring himself Cornflakes, and then the rhythmic click of the spoon on the glass bowl. Charlene watches the ceiling above her and predicts Johnny’s moves. Rinse the bowl, blow his nose, run a glass of water, up the stairs, brush his teeth, pee, drop his pants across the laundry hamper, socks in a ball, sigh.

Through all this Charlene is aware, at a deeper level, of having in some
way betrayed Johnny. By baring herself earlier that evening, by holding Johnny up as a picture of parts, old and used, she feels she has dismissed him as a joke. The other women seemed to have missed the longing, the adoration, in the words that she read. What they saw was a sickness, and this is not what she intended. Because, above all, she loves Johnny.

His shape approaches, and now beside her he reaches out and touches her hip, waist, elbow. He warms his feet on her calves.

“Yaiee,” she says, pulling away.

“You’re not sleeping?”

“Not yet. How was it tonight?”

“Good,” he says. “Great turnout.”

Charlene rolls and throws a leg over Johnny’s hip.

“You’re naked,” he says.

“Hmmm.” Charlene puts her nose on Johnny’s neck and breathes in smoke and outside air and sweat and the perfume of the centre where Johnny likes to burn incense. His hands are cold on her head and face. They kiss and Charlene tastes Cornflakes and Crest. “Can we?” she says and pushes herself up so she’s sitting on top of Johnny. She lifts herself slightly and pulls down his shorts. He is not yet hard so she takes him in her hands and coaxes him. When he is ready she slides him inside her and puts her hands on his shoulders. Johnny is quick, and after, when they are lying beside each other, only hands touching, he asks, “Aren’t you going to go to the bathroom?”

Charlene squeezes his hand and says, “No.” Later, when Johnny is sleeping, Charlene tightens her bum and holds her breath, as if by some physical exertion she could wish the movement up inside her. She has an image in her head of frantic babies in white suits trying to break through a rubbery wall and finally one succeeds and then the wall closes again.

Four more times that week Charlene initiates sex. Each time Johnny is surprised, and perhaps it is this surprise that produces a tenderness in him. He is careful with Charlene, lets her have her way. He asks, “Is this okay?” “Does that hurt?” He licks her ears and kisses her eyes. He must
know, but if he does, he does not let on. He slides up from beneath her like a child, face glowing, contented, fists full of candy.