Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (27 page)

Sitting at the dinner table with us, where she so often sat, she told us she wanted to be called Margaret, not Marg any more. Marg is what most people call her, what the other teachers call her. She teaches English and Physical Education at Hugh's school, the school where Hugh is Principal. Marg Honecker, they say, she's a great girl when you get to know her, really Marg is a wonderful
person
, and you know from the way they say it that she isn't pretty.

“
Marg
is so gawky, in fact it's just like me. I think
Margaret
would make me feel more graceful,” she said at the dinner table, surprising me with the modest hope behind the droll tone. I was concerned for her as I would have been for a daughter and I always remembered, afterwards, to say Margaret. But Hugh did not bother, he said Marg.

“Margaret has quite nice legs. She should wear her skirts shorter.”

“Too muscular. Too athletic.”

“She should grow her hair.”

“She has got hair growing. On her face.”

“What a mean thing to say.”

“I didn't pass judgment on it, I stated a fact.”

It is a fact. Margaret has a soft down growing in front of her ears, at the corners of her mouth. She has the face of a fair, freckled, twelve-year-old boy. Alert, intelligent, bony in a delicate way, often embarrassed. There is something very attractive about Margaret, I would often say, and Hugh would say yes, she was just the sort of woman about whom other women would say there was something very attractive. And why did they say that? he asked. Because she was no threat.

No threat.

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

We entertained the young teachers. Young men in jeans, young girls in jeans too, or tiny leather skirts. Longhaired, soft-spoken, passive but critical. Teachers have changed. Margaret wore her knee-length rose wool, sat on a hassock for which her legs were too long, helped with the coffee, did not say twenty words all evening. I was in one of my long, peacock dresses, I tried for rapport. I was not above congratulating myself on my flexibility, my
au-courant
-ness, yes, my un-middle-aged style. I was flaunting myself in front of somebody. Margaret? Hugh? Hugh's real pleasure came from Margaret, when everybody had gone.

“The trouble is I just don't know if I
relate
. I don't know if I relate to all this interpersonal
relating
. I mean, sometimes I think all I am is head tripping—”

I laughed at her too, I was proud of her in the perverse way a parent will be proud of a demure child who imitates self-important guests after they have gone home. But it was between Hugh and Margaret, really, that such bracing airs of boundless skepticism blew. He loved her for her wit, her cynicism, her deceptions. Less than lovable these seem to me now. They are both shy, Hugh and Margaret, they are socially awkward, easily embarrassed. But cold underneath, you may be sure, colder than us easy flirts with our charms and conquests. They do not reveal themselves. They will never admit to anything, never have to talk about anything, no, I could claw their skin and it would be my own fingers that would bleed. I could scream at them till my throat bursts and never alter their self-possession, change the look of their sly averted faces. Both blond, both easy blushers, both cold mockers.

They have contempt for me.

That is rubbish of course. Nothing for me. All for each other.
Love
.

I am coming back from visiting relatives in various parts of the country. These are people to whom I feel bound by irritable, almost inexpressible, bonds of sympathy, and whose deaths I dread nearly as much as I do my own. But I cannot tell them anything and they cannot do anything for me. They took me fishing and out to dinner and to see the view from high buildings, what else could they do? They never want to hear bad news from me. They value me for my high spirits and my good looks and my modest but tangible success—I have translated a collection of short stories and some children's books from French into English, they can go into libraries and find my name on the book jackets—and the older and unluckier among them, particularly, feel that I have an obligation to bring them these things. My luck and happiness is one of the few indications they have now that life is not entirely a downhill slide.

So much for kin, so much for visiting.

Suppose I come back to the house and they are both there, I come in and find them in bed, just as in the Dear Abby letters in the paper (at which I do not intend to laugh again)? I go to the closet and take out my remaining clothes, I begin to pack, I talk diplomatically to the bed.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, I imagine you're awfully tired?”

To make them laugh. To make them laugh as if they were reaching out their arms to me. Inviting me to sit on the bed.

On the other hand, perhaps I go into the bedroom and without a word pick up everything I can find—a vase, a bottle of lotion, a picture off the wall, shoes, clothes, Hugh's tape recorder—and hurl these things at the bed, the window, the walls; then grab and tear the bedclothes and kick the mattress and scream and slap their faces and beat their bare bodies with the hairbrush. As the wife did in
God's Little
Acre
, a book I read aloud to Hugh, with a comic accent, during a long dusty car trip across the prairies.

We may have told her that. Many anecdotes, of our courtship and even our honeymoon, were trotted out for her. Showing off. I was. What Hugh was doing I have no way of knowing.

A howl comes out, out of me, amazing protest.

I put my arm across my open mouth and to stop the pain I bite it, I bite my arm, and then I get up and lower the little sink and wash my face at it, and put on blusher and comb my hair, and smooth my eyebrows and go out.

The cars in the train are named after explorers, or mountains or lakes. I often traveled by train when the children were small, and Hugh and I were poor, because the train allowed children under six to ride free. I remember the names written on the heavy doors, and how I used to have to push the doors and hold them open and urge the scrambling unsteady children through. I was always nervous between cars, as if the children could fall off somehow, though I knew they couldn't. I had to sleep close beside them at night and sit with them climbing around me in the daytime; my body felt bruised by their knees and elbows and feet. I did think then that it would be lovely to be a woman traveling alone, able to sit after a meal drinking coffee and looking out the window, able to go to the club car and have a drink. Now one of my daughters is hitchhiking in Europe and the other is a counselor at a camp for handicapped children, and all that time of care and confusion that seemed as if it would never end seems as if it never was.

Somehow without my noticing it we have got into the mountains. I ask for a gin and tonic. The glass catches the sunlight, reflecting a circle of light on the white mat. This makes the drink seem pure and restorative to me, like mountain water. I drink thirstily.

From the club car a little staircase goes up to the dome, where people have been sitting no doubt since Calgary, waiting
for the mountains. Latecomers hoping for seats climb part way up the stairs, crane their necks, come down disgruntled.

“Them that's up there's going to stay for a week,” says a fat woman in a turban, turning around to address a procession of what may be grandchildren. Her bulk fills the whole stairway. Many of us smile, as if the size and loudness and innocent importance of this old woman were being offered to us, as encouragement.

A man sitting by himself, further down the car with his back to the window, looks at me, smiling. His face reminds me of the face of some movie star of a past era. Outdated good looks, a willed and conscious, yet easily defeated, charm. Dana Andrews. Somebody like that. I have an unpleasant impression of mustard-colored clothes.

He does not come and sit beside me, but keeps looking at me from time to time. When I get up and leave the car I feel him watching. I wonder if he will follow me. What if he does? I haven't time for him, not now, I can't spare him attention. I used to be ready for almost any man. When I was in my teens, and later too, when I was a young wife. Any man looking at me in a crowd, any teacher letting his eyes pause on me in a classroom, a stranger at a party, might be transformed, some time when I was alone, into the lover I was always searching for—somebody passionate, intelligent, brutal, kind—and made to play opposite me in those simple, satisfactory, explosive scenes everybody knows about. Later on, a few years married, I took steps to solidify fantasies. At parties, with my push-up brassiere, my tousled Italian cut, my black dress with the shoestring straps, I kept on the lookout for some man to fall in love with me, involve me in a volcanic affair. That did happen, more or less. You see it is not so simple, not so plain a case as my grieving now, my sure sense of betrayal, would lead anybody to believe. No. Men have left marks on me which I did not have to worry about hiding from Hugh, since there are parts of my body
at which he has never looked. I have lied as well as I have been lied to. Men have expressed ravenous appreciation of my nipples and my appendix scar and the moles on my back and have also said to me, as it is proper for them to do, “Now don't make too big a thing of this,” and even, “I really do love my wife.” After a while I gave up on this sort of thing and went secretly to see a psychiatrist who led me to understand that I had been trying to get Hugh's attention. He suggested I get it instead by kindness, artfulness, and sexiness around the house. I was not able to argue with him, nor could I share his optimism. He seemed to me to have a poor grasp on Hugh's character, assuming that certain refusals were simply the result of not having been properly asked. To me they seemed basic, absolute. I could not imagine what tactics could alter them. But he was shrewd enough. He said he assumed I wanted to stay with my husband. He was right; I could not think, I could not bear to think, of an alternative.

The train stops at Field, just inside the British Columbia border. I get off and walk beside the tracks, in a hot wind.

“Nice to get off the train for a bit, isn't it?”

I almost fail to recognize him. He is short, as I believe those handsome movie stars often were, too. His clothes really are mustard-colored. That is, the jacket and pants are; his open shirt is red, his shoes burgundy. He has the voice of somebody whose dealings bring him into daily and dependent contact with the public.

“I hope you don't mind me asking. Are you a Leo?”

“No.”

“I asked you because I'm an Aries. An Aries can usually recognize a Leo. Those signs are sympathetic ones to each other.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I thought you looked like you would be an interesting person to talk to.”

I go and shut myself into my roomette and read my
magazine, down to the ads for liquor and men's shoes. But I feel sorry. Probably he meant nothing more than he said. I am an interesting person to talk to. The reason is that I will listen to anything. It may be because of those articles in magazines I used to read as a teen-ager (when any title with the word popularity in it could both chill and compel me), urging the development of this receptive social art. I don't mean to do it. But face to face with anyone who has a conviction, a delusion—which most people have—or only a long procession of dim experiences to share, I feel something like amazement, enough to paralyze me. You ought to get up and walk away, Hugh says, that's what I would do.