Dancing in the Dark (15 page)

And after all that, wasn’t it just like Stella, landing on her feet. What did she know about suffering, for her it never lasted. And I wondered just what I meant by that, when I had no suffering at all to do.

Hard to picture her new life. At least before, I’d had a setting for her when I thought of her. Now all the background, where she was and what she did and who this man was, it was just a blur.

They got married, naturally. Stella would not be alone for long. She said in her letter that it was just going to be a quiet civil ceremony and she didn’t expect any of us to travel so far to be there. “Maybe some time you’ll take a holiday out here and we can get together. Or we’ll come east. Let’s try, anyway.

“Kurt and I are buying a house, so there’ll always be room for company. He’s paying out a lot in alimony and child support, so I’ll be keeping on working, at least until his ex remarries which she’s showing signs of doing. Anyway, I’d miss working now. I like having my own money and knowing it’s there if anything happens. Not that Kurt’s anything at all like Frank, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that you never know. Anyway, it makes me feel different to know I can afford to get out if I have to.”

I said to Harry, “It sounds like a strange way to go into a marriage. Thinking of getting out again.”

“Different, anyway.” He sounded so uninvolved and noncommittal. “Listen,” I wanted to say. “I’m interested in this. I feel strange things, I want to understand what’s happened to Stella and what she’s done. She’s so far away. I listen to you all the time, can’t you, for just a little while?” I wanted to bang on the table or his chest, to get his attention.

But of course I wouldn’t have wanted him to pretend to be interested if he wasn’t. And what exactly was it I wanted to say, or him to tell me? I was beginning to forget.

Later she wrote to say she was pregnant. “Finally,” she said. It was a boy. A letter enclosed a picture of her, Kurt, and the baby, named for him. “As you see, both my Kurts are handsome fellows.” The photograph was taken with the camera facing into the sun. Stella was holding the baby, and both her face and Kurt’s were turned down, looking at the child. There was light around their heads. Kurt’s bald spot shone. The background was furry, an impression of green and bushes. She didn’t say where it was taken, but by then they’d bought their house, so I suppose it was there. Stella was still slim and still blonde, that much I could see and not much more.

I sent a gift, a little outfit for the baby, with my congratulations. Later when she had a little girl, I did the same. Stella kept working and her children were in day care before they went to school. She became her lawyer’s personal assistant. We continued to write letters. Hers were never the same again as that one outburst, that single attempt; mine were never different from what they’d always been.

Now, in a perverse sort of way, I feel a little free myself.

So I might ask her how it felt to bear a child and how it was to raise one. How it was to start again, to have two men instead of one, to earn a living. How it was to have had the right hair and the right smile and the right words for so long
that she could take for granted a leap to the coast of the country, assume she would survive. How she could have all that and the babies, too.

I might ask her why it was she got to start again, and how she knew the way to reach for a second chance and not a knife.

P
eople stared.

I remember them, our neighbours, gathered out in the darkness on their lawns, wrapped up in housecoats, wearing slippers, watching, listening. I can hardly blame them. Harry and I would have been out doing the same thing if it had been one of them. If I had not been fully occupied watching the tedious movement of the clock, and then the wallpaper again, and then having all those strange people in my house, I would have been out there watching too.

I would also have been attracted to blood: sign of passion and also of fortune. Because if this happened to someone near, less chance of it happening to oneself. Statistics and odds. It must have cheered our neighbours to have it happen next door, across the street, not in their own living rooms or kitchens.

A lovely day, today. Fresh snow, unmarked. The sun sparkles off it and it looks like jewels, maybe rhinestones, planted across the grounds. Tree branches are stark and still.

For all the missed corners inside, for the moment it is clean and clear and brisk outdoors.

Other places were brisk, but not so clean.

In the first place I went afterward, there were dustballs in the corners, black grime on the windowsills, and untidy heaps of paper on the single big wooden desk. The metal filing trays on it were overflowing. There were two men and a woman in that small cramped room, and me. They kept talking and asking questions and their hands pressed their eyes and foreheads wearily. The sun came up on all their talk and questions.

At home they had told me to change my clothes. So I did; but chose not something special, nothing for an occasion, but another housedress, the kind I did my work in, a small floral print. A dress for my ordinary moments.

All my dresses are here now, and my underwear and robes. Someone must have gone to get them. Someone must have gone into that house.

Oh, but I’m being stupid. A lot of people will have been in and out of that house by now.

Later I was in a small room, still in the same building as the grimy office. The woman there and I had trudged down two flights of stairs from that office to the small room. It had fluorescent lights behind a mesh arrangement in the ceiling, and dull green walls. There were no windows. There was a toilet in a corner, a cot against one wall. I lay down when the woman told me to, and she pulled a scratching grey woollen blanket over me. Was it cold then? It should have been warm, it was July.

It wasn’t bad to be there. I was tired, and while the cot sagged and slanted and wasn’t like my bed at all, it was a place to lie down. I felt like the colour of the blanket, but not scratchy or rough.

I think I could maybe have just lain there forever, but of
course they don’t leave you alone. It seems in these circumstances, there is a great deal to be done. The woman came back and made me stand and we walked along a light green corridor, up a different flight of stairs with heavy wooden banisters, along another hallway, this one light-brown-panelled, and into a big room. Like a ballroom or a conference hall, except that it had rows of benches. Like a church, maybe. And like a church a man sitting high up at one end, one had to look up at him. A lot of words were being said.

It wasn’t that I could not see or hear. Just that my mind was elsewhere. It seemed to have suspended itself back there a bit, and couldn’t get itself here.

I was prepared to wait. The vacuuming wasn’t finished, and other things that had to be done hadn’t even been started; although the downstairs was as finished as it would ever be. It was a little irritating to be kept away, but I was used to waiting.

It was dark again, which I supposed meant a day gone so I was even further behind, when I was taken to a van outside. The air out there was different from the mustiness inside, but I was only out for a few moments. There was a short ride and then more halls, a different room but with a similar sort of cot, a toilet, and this time, a sink and a chair. They brought trays of food and took them away again. People came and went. Voices went on and on.

The lights did not go out, but I fell asleep. When I woke, I was surprised to find my face damp, tears on my cheeks and soaked into the pillow. I couldn’t tell what might have caused that.

Now there were so many rooms, large and small ones, and so many different people and voices and questions, so many places they wanted me to sit and things they wanted me to do.
Many men, and a few women. I could feel them: sometimes they were impatient, sometimes angry; but mainly tired, bored perhaps. There was a sense of people sighing all around me.

I could have told them, I suppose. It wouldn’t have taken so much effort or concentration. But it was not their business. Harry and I were just the two of us, we always had been. We had no room for strangers. Besides, they were dangerous. They may have been weary and bored, but they also wanted me not to be safe any more. They wanted to put me outside, when I’d been so careful and worked so hard to get inside and stay there where I’d be safe.

I closed my mind against them, folded it over on itself.

More words, more people, more talk, more questions. I came here, to this room. I have only left here once, and that was to go back to one of those big rooms with a man sitting high up at one end. There were a few people watching, scattered along the benches, but I don’t think I recognized any of them.

Maybe my parents were there. Or Harry’s. Or some of our friends, or her. But I surely would have recognized them. If I had seen her, I surely would have known.

This was all going on too long. The vacuum cleaner was still lying upstairs in the bedroom, switched off but still plugged in. I hadn’t even started on the bathroom. The mirrors would be smudged. I wanted to have it finished.

“Is there anything you’d care to say at this stage, Mrs. Cormick?” the looming man at the end of the room, high up, was asking. He must have been surprised when I spoke up firmly, so they’d all hear and nobody would be able to ignore my wishes.

“I want to go home now, please,” I said. “I didn’t get the cleaning done.”

I know, I understand now, how strange that must have sounded. But it was what was on my mind. It was what I wanted, and when they did take me back out into the sun and we got back into the car, I thought, “Well finally. I should have spoken up before.”

But of course the car came right back here.

Oh, I was angry. I was just seething. That night they gave me pills to make me sleep. And where was Harry when I needed him? When he should have helped me, he wasn’t there. That I was the cause of his absence, his failure to defend me, was not the point. It was because of him that I was here.

Which was true enough.

If he could fail me, anybody could. The world was once again populated by snapping beasts with their eyes on me.

Never trust. Never relax. Never consider yourself safe. Never speak if it can be helped. Here, especially, words are weapons.

Sometimes, of course, they can’t be avoided. When I saw a nurse writing in a notebook just like this one, I had to ask, “Can I have one please?”

She was startled, her head snapped up from her notes.

“What? Did you want something, Mrs. Cormick?”

“Your book. And your pen.”

“Oh, well, you can’t have this one, I’ve been using it, but I can see if I can get you one of your own. Would you like that?”

I didn’t think she would bring one. Apart from broken promises, they would be leery of pens. But maybe would consider the promise greater than the danger? They would have to weigh that.

It was the doctor, not she, who brought me the first pure, perfect notebook. I don’t know what I thought of when I first
saw the one in the nurse’s hands. A poem maybe. Or some other way to put events in place. Flatten them out with words, or straighten them, or look at them. Or just get rid of them. Put them some place where covers could be shut on them.

They thought a notebook might be an opening? It has built a new wall instead. And this time it is just my wall, I don’t have to share it. So no groping fingers are going to poke through this time. In either direction.

This notebook, I can touch it, hold it, it doesn’t waver and it has no will of its own, outside of mine. It alters only when I make an alteration in it, in my perfect handwriting.

Often it does not contain what I want it to: which is every small thing here, all written down, identified and pinned. Too often I wander off into the other time. But that is not the notebook’s fault, but a failure of my will. Whatever is here, I have made.

Some nights I go to sleep holding it. Not that I mistake it for something else, because it’s chilly and smooth. It couldn’t possibly be confused with something warm and embracing in return.

But chilly smoothness does not lie; whereas embraces may.

E
mbraces may lie. But I admit, some days I miss the illusion.

I may not be able to recall precisely how Harry looked, but I can recall the feel of him. His arm across my body in the night, his shoulder beneath my head. His legs stretched alongside mine. The warmth alone, just that, I miss. I still waken sometimes in the night and turn to the warmth and find it is not there.

I don’t remember him as well inside me. That part seems deadened now. There is no stirring or heat in remembering him. There used to be. There used to be something almost sacramental about it. For a few months when I was a young girl, I became religious. Taking communion had a shuddering effect: the bread and the wine that was really grape juice, I would stare at them and try to see in them the actual blood and the body of Christ and shiver at the thought. Harry inside was something like that: sacred in a way, symbolic of the whole, and a link with some unity greater than either of us apart.

I would have liked to consume him in this communion; to draw him whole inside my body, to make us a proper unity.
It seemed that must be what he was striving for as well, with all his efforts and strainings.

I suppose he wasn’t though. I suppose it must have been something else as far as he was concerned. When the telephone rang, when I found out this was not a sacred act at all, that must be when that part of me lost feeling. Unplugged, another loose end in my body is dangling disconnected.

If Christ came back and said something like, “Oh no, did you think I really meant all those things I said?”, people’s souls would surely shrivel. Think of all the things that would collapse. And wouldn’t the people hate? Wouldn’t they kill Christ?

It was not necessarily sacredness I felt at the time, when we were actually together. It was what I felt about the idea of the thing. It was what brought my own passion to our bed.