Small Change (9 page)

Norma goes into Joyce’s room, pulls her out into the kitchen and tells her to apologize. She won’t. Her mother shakes her. She still won’t.

“You’ll apologize tomorrow then,” and she pushes her back towards her room.

On the outs. It’s almost a crack down the side of your body, a shade you occupy while others sit in the sun. A dark brassiness, metallic, exposed, abandoned to the weather. And
yet you choose it, and not just because it’s familiar. You formulate plans – not plans of action, plans of emotion.

The streetlight comes on and I imagine Joyce raising her gaze. She looks out the window at Linnea’s house and pictures a special tea party, just the two of them, with ice cream and real tea and sugar cubes.

Someone she recognizes – Matthew’s mother – goes into Linnea’s house. Linnea has been playing with Matthew, and now he is coming out with his mother. Tall skinny Matthew has been playing with tall skinny Linnea.

Her mother comes into the room. She is urgent, emphatic, determined, worried. “You can’t treat your friends that way, or you won’t have any friends.”

But Joyce knows this isn’t so. She knows that Annie will always come running.

My mother comes to visit. One evening she helps Annie with her homework. I lie on the sofa and listen to her soft relentless voice. “What does this say? Sound it out. What sound does this letter make? What letter is it? What sound does it make?”

The soft patience which at any moment will turn sharp. And here it is. “How did you get
that?”

Annie begins to chew on her hand. She puts the side of her thumb into her mouth, then the side of her hand, making small wet teeth marks. Her grandmother says, “Don’t,” and pushes her hand out of her mouth. “It will get sore.”

I look at the furniture while this goes on. The light from the standing lamp falls through the mesh on the big armchair
and makes a pattern on the soft velvet seat. I don’t interfere any more than I interfere with Joyce. I listen, and relive my mother’s voice directed similarly at me. The quiz, where the adult knows the answer and you don’t. Where the adult pretends she is helping when, in fact, she is testing.

I hear my voice (it is my mother’s voice) quizzing my daughter and my mother quizzing me – the pattern has splayed wider – and I feel pain on my child’s behalf, and on my own behalf, and on my mother’s behalf, since although she appears to be the source of this unreasonable and unnecessary unhappiness, how can she be? Someone came before her too.

In the morning I make coffee, and try to say something that Ted won’t dismiss as extreme. I don’t say that I feel as if I’m in the presence of evil. I don’t say that Joyce is full of raw newborn malice. I say that Annie doesn’t seem to have as much stamina as her two-year-old brother. Ted looks at me.

“Don’t you remember?” he asks. “When Annie was two she had just as much stamina.” And he describes the way she would get up at five in the morning and run around the kitchen with arms held high.

It comes back to me then, a vision of happy exuberance. I feel the size and weight of that plump little body, remember the expressions on her face, the irrepressible personality. Bright, tough, funny, tender. Now, three years later, here she is. Taller, skinnier, and burdened, somehow, with temperament.

“Her life is much harder and more complicated now,” he says. “She’s much more aware of the world out there, and she has friendships to deal with.”

A phrase goes through my mind. The stress of friendship. How early that kicks in.

When I finally react, I overreact. Perhaps it’s because so many peaceful months have gone by. Perhaps that’s why I can’t bear the next falling out. It’s summer. School has ended. The two girls haven’t seen each other for two weeks because my daughter has chosen a day camp that offers swimming, and Joyce doesn’t want to swim. Annie hasn’t asked to see Joyce until now. She goes upstairs to play, and after twenty minutes comes back. “Joyce told me to leave,” she says. And the tears begin.

For the next two weeks Joyce is deliberately cold and punitive. Annie is pensive, but how unhappy it’s hard for me to say. I am fierce. I tell Annie that Joyce is not welcome in our home. I say, “Her sort of behaviour isn’t allowed.”

Ted objects. “Are you sure it’s wise?”

But I am strident, determined. Annie has to learn to steel herself. She has to learn what I was never taught. She has to learn not to be taken for granted.

Annie wants to know if we are never going to invite Joyce again.

“Not until she invites you,” I say. “Let her take the first step. I won’t allow you,” I say, “to invite her.”

Several times over the next week Annie broaches the subject. We will be in the street and she will say, “We’re never going to invite Joyce?” Then she will say that Joyce is her oldest friend and she is Joyce’s oldest friend. “We knew each other since we were babies. We’ve been friends since we were one year old, two years old, three years old, four
years old, five years old. Joyce and Linnea are just friends since they started going to school.” She is building a faith as she skips along beside me.

We pass a fruit store and she is framed by fresh tomatoes, oranges, the first strawberries. I look down at her and see her trying to soften and reassure me. My attempt to harden her makes her even softer. She is handling me the way she handles Joyce.

A few days later Joyce initiates a visit and it goes completely smoothly, as does almost every visit after that.

When I think back on the whole period, I know that most of the time – eighty percent of the time – the two girls were fast friends. A pattern of intimacy controlled and periodically broken by Joyce. I don’t know whether they adjusted to each other or whether Annie adjusted – gave way – to Joyce. Whatever happened was invisible and miraculous and temporary. They would be down by the river, fishing out leaves, nuzzling a lunch of orange slices on a blanket – grazing, I thought, as I heard their wet little mouths working – and I would be impressed by their diplomacy and affection, by the simplicity and sophistication of their forgiveness. I would feel relieved and wary. Months would go by without a break, months when the friendship was the most stable part of their lives and whatever troubles they had they resolved themselves. And then something would happen.

What happened, I realize, was always the same. Joyce would pull away and Annie would wait for her to come back.

“I wait for the other day,” she told me.

“For another day?”

“Yes. She says she’s never going to be my friend, and the next day she’s my friend again.”

One child knew all about power and the other learned all about patience.

I should have expected the final trouble, but it took me by surprise. A cool summer preceded this last episode. One morning Norma came down with a bag of clothes. All week she had been packing and setting aside warm things as unnecessary. Joyce was on her heels. She insisted on keeping several things and uncharacteristically her mother gave in. Suddenly there was an area of yielding that hadn’t been there before, an eagerness to compensate for all the upheaval. They were moving south.

I watched Joyce enter this new emotional territory. Her grandmother catered to her more than ever, her parents softened their criticism, friends made arrangements to see her for the last time; they brought gifts, they cried. It seemed to me that Joyce enjoyed the narrowing of focus, the paring away of possessions, the simplifying of life even as it became more complicated. This was a process she was adept at, riding a storm in a narrow and purposeful boat.

That summer my daughter learned several hand games. She played them fast and with tremendous merriment. There would be the slapping of palm against palm – knee – shoulder – palm in patterns that were ingenious and rewarding. Her face was brown, attentive, relaxed.

Joyce was good at not playing, at making you feel foolish for wanting to play.

This would be their final summer together.

Two days before they moved away, Norma and I talked about our daughters. It happened the morning after the going-away party, after Annie’s confused sorrow and my relief that there would be no more of this. I walked upstairs and knocked on Norma’s door.

Norma was packing. She listened and said, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It’s not all bad,” I said. “Annie has to learn how to protect herself. She has to learn not to wear her heart on her sleeve.”

“But that’s the wonder of her,” said Norma, and she leaned against the doorway, slender and tired and worried.

Annie and I had left the going-away party early to sit on the lower bunk in her room. It was dark outside. The window was open, sounds from the party drifted down. It had been raining all day. Annie listened to my voice – low and hesitant – say that Joyce was about to move and would miss her very much. She didn’t believe me. She said, “She won’t even remember me because I didn’t sign the book.” And she cried quietly.

She meant the guest book. It was on a small table beside the large table of food, and friends had been writing down their names, addresses, sentimental farewells. For most of the party Joyce wouldn’t speak to Annie. She wouldn’t acknowledge her presence. Linnea was there, and several of Joyce’s cousins. Even after Linnea left, even after the cousins went home, Joyce wouldn’t speak to Annie or look at her.

“I know Joyce doesn’t like me – she’s sick of me – she didn’t play with me all night – she won’t even remember me because I didn’t sign the book.”

“You can sign the book tomorrow.”

“She didn’t even talk to me.”

“You know what Joyce is like. You know how nasty she can be sometimes.”

“I know she can be nasty, but I don’t know
when.”

I sat on the edge of the bunk and didn’t know what to do. Should we take Joyce’s cue and not bother to say goodbye? Should we wait until moving day and expect her to say goodbye then? Should we let her define the friendship?

This last thought was the one that cut through my anger, and I heard myself suggest that Annie make a going-away card for Joyce.

“Would you like to?”

Annie said she would. The suggestion seemed to relieve her. She put her head on the pillow and fell asleep.

The next morning I went upstairs. My heart felt loose inside me and I said too much too apologetically. It shouldn’t be so hard to be straightforward.

Around us was the chaos of the move. Norma was wearing a dress she had intended to give away, but under the stress of the move she had lost so much weight that it finally fit. It looked lovely on her and I said so.

“What should we do?” I asked.

“What if I made a time for the two of them to play together by themselves? Later this afternoon? I’ll extend an invitation.”

In the afternoon the sisters came down to invite Annie and her brother to watch a movie. They came down alone, then they came back with Joyce because they wanted to start the movie right away; they wanted Annie and her brother to hurry up.

“Hi, Joyce,” Annie said with a small and hopeful smile.

Joyce didn’t reply. She stood out in the hallway and looked away.

Annie waited a moment, then repeated, “Hi, Joyce.”

Joyce, without looking at her, said hi.

Annie looked at me then with the same hopeful smile, but wider, even more hopeful, and full of relief. She was reassuring me that everything was all right.

The next day Joyce’s family moved away. In the hour before their departure, Joyce and Annie played. Quietly, at first, and on the sofa. They sat side by side. Then they went outside onto the street where the moving van was being filled. They hung on the fence, they ran and scampered and laughed.

Just before they left, Norma gave me a card that Joyce had made for Annie but “forgotten” to give to her. Joyce didn’t forget to show Annie Linnea’s gift of writing paper. This she made a special trip upstairs to get; this she displayed, full of smiles; this she hugged to her chest.

Now I look up from grating a cabbage and see Norma through the window – same hair, same sweater. I start, and the woman catches sight of me and smiles. It’s the sweater. A heavy dark brown and white sweater that Norma used to wear in the fall. And the loose thick hair.

I see Joyce too, but not in the same way, or in any way that I could have predicted. I see her in Annie.

A new family has moved in upstairs. One of the children is Annie’s age and they are in the same class. In the morning the new girl, Marcela, runs up to Annie and Annie turns away.

Norma at the window, and Joyce in Annie – the absence of a smile, and something more than shyness.

I think of my mother, a woman with no protective shell. She is porous to everyone she meets, and this is difficult for them as well as for her. They feel invaded by an innocent country, she feels taken aback to learn that she isn’t welcome. There is no end to her when she is with other people, no solitude. She wants, like a child, to be included and at the centre of everything. And yet this doesn’t occur out of egotism, at least not of the usual kind, but out of friendliness; the egotism of the shy perhaps. Not that she is shy, but shyness shaped her, and the desire to be liked.

I have seen my mother treated the way Joyce treated Annie. Seen her greet someone with great friendliness, someone dark and shy and reserved and cruel, and seen that person not respond. Seen my mother repeat her cheery greeting more cheerily: “I said hello.” And seen the response: “I know.”

A cool and rude young man irked by her overeagerness. It wasn’t just his coolness, his rudeness; it was her effort, her inability to be easy about friendship, her obvious need to have people like her. The new girl upstairs has this quality, this willingness to be hurt.

Joyce so small, so concentrated, with those hunting headlights in her eyes, and the highway so wide and dark. Her
cruelty took the form of savage silences, calculated, cool, sophisticated. Women treat men this way – men they want to punish, men they want to keep.

“Such a mean streak,” Norma said once.

And I softened it, reassured her. We all have mean streaks, she’s not a mean child.