“Was it any good?” Judith asks. “The grass seed, I mean?”
“Within three days,” I tell her, making an effort to speak with detachment, “the first, pale green, threadlike points of grass had appeared. I watered them with a sprinkling bottle, the kind Mother used to dampen clothes on the kitchen table. Every morning and again at night. Sometimes Seth took a turn too.”
“And then you wrote to thank Brother Adam for the grass and that was the start of your friendship?”
“Actually I made myself wait two weeks before I wrote. I wanted to make sure the grass was going to survive. By the time I wrote, all of it was up. Some of it was over an inch high. And I cut two or three shoots with my manicure scissors and Scotch-taped them to the letter.”
Judith smiles dreamily; I have managed, I can see, to delight her. “But what,” she asks, “does one do with a box of grass?”
“It’s strange, but I’ve become very fond of it. It’s divinely soft, like human hair almost. And brilliant green from all that water. I have to trim it about once a week with sewing shears. Sometimes I sprinkle on a little fertilizer although Brother Adam says it’s not really necessary.” I also like to run my hand over its springy tightly-shaved surface, loving its tufted healthy carpet-thick threads, the way it struggles against the sides of the box, the industry with which it mends itself.
“And you’ve been writing to each other ever since?”
“Yes, more or less.”
“Often?”
“Every three or four weeks. I’d write more often but I don’t want to wear him down.” There is also of course, the fact that an instant reply would place Brother Adam in the position of a debtor—and to be in debt to a correspondent is to hold power over a creditor, a power I sensed he would not welcome.
“What do you write about, Charleen?”
I have to think. “It’s funny, but we don’t write much about ourselves. He’s never asked me anything about myself—I like that. And I don’t pester him either. He usually writes about what he’s feeling at the moment or what he’s seeing. Like once he saw a terrible traffic accident from his window. Once he wrote a whole letter about a wren sitting outside on his fire escape.”
“A whole letter about a wren on a fire escape!”
“Well, yes, it was more on the metaphysical side.”
“And you do the same?”
“Sort of. I don’t so much write as compose. It takes me days. I’ve hardly written any poetry lately. All of it seems to go into those letters, all that old energy. Writing to him is—I don’t know how to explain it—but writing those letters has become a new way of seeing.”
“Therapeutic,” Judith comments shortly, almost dis missively.
“I suppose you could call it that.”
“I wish you wrote to me more often.”
“I wish you wrote to me too.”
“We always say this, don’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Charleen?”
“What?”
“What does Eugene think of your ... your relationship with Brother Adam?”
Judith has always been clever. A bright girl in school, a prizewinner at university; now she is referred to in book reviews as a clever writer. But her real cleverness lies not in her insights, but in her uncanny ability to see the missing links, the ellipses, the silences. Like the perfect interviewer she asks the perfect question. “What does Eugene think?” she asks.
Eugene doesn’t know, I tell her. He doesn’t know Brother Adam even exists.
After a while Judith asks me if I’m feeling hungry. “We could make some toast,” she suggests.
I nod, although I’m not so much hungry as emptied out; a late night hollowness gnaws at me, the grey, uneasy anxiety I always feel in this house. The rain is coming down hard now, leaving angry little check marks on the black window, and the house has grown chilly.
In the breadbox we find exactly one-third of a loaf of white, sliced bread. The top of the bag has been folded down carefully in little pleats to preserve freshness. “A penny saved ...” our mother had always said. Meagreness.
A memory springs into focus: how I once asked for a piece of bread to put out for the birds. “They can look after their own the same as we have to,” she replied. Ours, then, had been a house without a birdfeeder, a house where saucers of milk were not provided for stray cats. This was a house where implements were neither loaned nor borrowed, where the man who came to clean the furnace was not offered a cheering cup of coffee, where the postman was not presented with a box of fudge at Christmas. (Such generosities belonged only to fairy tales or soap operas.) In this house there was no contribution to the Red Cross nor (what irony) to the Cancer Fund. Meagreness. I had almost forgotten until I saw the bread in the breadbox.
“Maybe we’d better not have any toast after all,” Judith says, tightlipped. “She’ll be short for breakfast.”
Instead we make more coffee, stirring in extra milk and sugar. I turn to Judith and ask if she has bought a wedding gift for our mother.
“Not yet,” she says clutching her hair in a gesture of frenzy. “And it isn’t because I haven’t thought and thought about it.”
“I haven’t bought anything either,” I admit. “Not yet anyway.”
“Do you have any idea what she’d like?”
“Not one.”
“Why is it,” Judith demands, “that it’s so hard to buy our own mother a present? It isn’t just this damned wedding present either. Every Christmas and birthday I go through the same thing. Ask Martin. Why is it?”
I’m ready with an answer, for this is something about which I’ve thought long and hard. “Because no matter what we give her, it will be wrong. No matter how much we spend it will be either too much or too little.”
“You’re right,” Judith muses. (I marvel at her serene musing, at her willingness to accept the way our mother is.)
“She’s never satisfied,” I storm. “Remember when we were in high school and put our money together one Christmas and bought her that manicure kit. In the pink leather case? It cost six dollars.”
“Vaguely,” Judith nods. (Fortunate, fortunate Judith; her memories are soft-edged and have no power over her.)
“I’ll never, never forget it,” I tell her. “We thought it was beautiful with the little orange stick and the little wool buffer and scissors and everything all fitted in. It was lovely. And she was furious with us.”
“Why was that?” Judith wonders.
“Don’t you remember? She thought we were criticizing her, that we were hinting she needed a manicure. She told us that if we worked as hard as she did we would have ragged fingernails too.”
“Really? I’d forgotten that.”
“And the things we made at school. For Mother’s Day. I made a woven bookmark once. She said it was nice but the colours clashed. It was yellow and purple.”
“Well,” Judith shrugs, “gratitude was never one of her talents.”
“Eugene suggested I give her an Eaton’s gift certificate. But you know just what she’d say—people who give money can’t be bothered to put any thought into a gift.”
“That’s right,” Judith nods. “Remember how Aunt Liddy used to send us a dollar bill for our birthdays, and Mother always said, ‘Wouldn’t you think with all the time Liddy has that she could go out and buy a proper birthday present.’ ”
“Poor Aunt Liddy.”
“I thought of a new bedspread,” Judith says, “but she might think I was hinting that her old one is looking pretty beat up. Which it is.”
“And Ithought of ordering a flowering shrub for the yard, but she would be sure to say that was too impersonal.”
“On the other hand,” Judith says, “if we were to get her a new dressing gown that would be too personal.”
“There’s no pleasing her.”
“Why do we even try?” Judith asks lightly, philosophically. “Why in heaven’s name don’t we give up trying to please her?
”
This is a question for which I have no answer, and so I say nothing. I drink my coffee which is already cold. We’re on a psychic treadmill, Judith and I; we can’t stop trying to please her. There’s no logic to it, only compulsion; even knowing it’s impossible to please her, we can’t stop ourselves from trying.
I hadn’t intended to talk about Watson; my divorce is a subject I’ve never really discussed with Judith. It should be easy these free-wheeling days to discuss ex-husbands, but it is never easy for me. In spite of the statistics, in spite of the social tolerance, there is nothing in the world so heavy, so leaden, so painfully pressing as love that has failed. I rarely talk about it—I make a point not to talk about it—but somehow Judith and I have got onto the subject.
We’ve crept back into bed, and shivering under a light blanket, I ask Judith if she minded turning forty.
“Yes,” she answers thoughtfully, “but only a little.”
“You didn’t feel threatened or anything?”
“Not really. Of course, it helps that Martin gets to all the terrible birthdays first.”
“But what about Martin? Didn’t he mind?”
“I don’t know,” Judith says, sounding surprised. And then she adds, “But he doesn’t seem to mind.”
“Eugene is forty,” I burst out.
There is a pause; Judith doesn’t know what to do with this information.
“Is he?” she says politely.
“And he doesn’t mind a bit. He insisted we go out and celebrate it. Cake, candles, the works.”
“Well, why not?”
“He likes being forty. I think he’d even like to be older. Forty-five, fifty maybe.”
“That’s nice for him,” Judith comments.
“It’s a little worrying, don’t you think, rushing into old age like that?”
“Maybe his youth wasn’t all that marvellous,” she suggests.
I think of Jeri and agree.
“Anyway,” Judith says, “the saving grace of reaching forty is that most of your friends get there about the same time.”
“I suppose that’s a comfort.”
“It helps.”
“Watson is forty-two,” I say. “Imagine!”
“That’s right,” Judith says, “he was about the same age as me.”
“It must have killed him turning forty.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Remember how he went berserk at thirty? Forty must have been a funeral for him.”
“Of course,” Judith says slowly, “I never knew Watson very well, but it’s hard to believe that a mere birthday could hit anyone so violently.”
“It did though. I saw it coming, of course. Even when he was twenty-seven he was starting to get a bit shaky. Once I even heard him lie about his age. He told some people we met, for no reason at all, that he was only twenty-five.”
“Strange.”
“He seemed to take it into his head that he could go backwards in time if he put enough energy into it. And that was the same year he started hanging around with his students all the time, especially the undergraduates. And talking about the university as ‘they.’ He even had me go and get my hair straightened so I’d look like one of his students.”
“Poor Char,” Judith says softly.
Her sympathy is all I need. Now I can’t stop myself. “Then he really began to get desperate. The first time I saw him wearing a head band I was actually sick. Literally. I went into the bathroom and was sick. I wouldn’t have minded if someone had given him the head band, one of his students maybe, but what killed me was the deliberation of it all, that he woke up one day and decided to go to a store—it was Woolworth‘s—and buy himself an Indian head band. And then picking it out and paying for it and then slipping it on his head. And looking at himself in the mirror. That’s the moment I couldn’t live with, the moment he looked in the mirror at his new head band.”
Judith sounds puzzled. “Lots of people wore head bands at one time.”
“But don’t you see, other people sort of drift into it. They don’t suddenly make a conscious decision to hold on to their youth by running out and buying some costume accessories.”
“And then what happened?” She is right when she says she scarcely knew Watson. She met him only twice and all she knows about the divorce is that Watson suffered a breakdown. A breakdown?
Perhaps not really a breakdown, although that was the term we used at the time, since it was, at least, medically definable. It was Watson’s breakdown which made him a saint to Greta Savage: she saw it as a powerful link between them, as though their mutual lapse from the coherent world spelled mystical union, impenetrable by those of us coarsened by robust mental health.
But what Watson suffered was something infinitely more shattering than poor Greta: more of a break-up than a break down. He broke apart. At the age of thirty he fell apart. Watson broke into a thousand pieces, and not one of those pieces had any connection with past or future.
“When he was twenty-nine,” I tell Judith, “he decided we should sell the house so he and Seth and I could walk across Europe.”
“Walk across Europe.”
“With backpacks and sandals, a sort of gypsy thing. He had this crazy idea that he could earn enough money by playing the recorder, you know, in the streets of Europe.”
“Did Watson play the recorder? I didn’t realize he was musical.”
“He wasn’t. It was another of his delusions. Oh, he could play all right, about three tunes, and one of them was ‘Merrily We Roll Along.’ It was awful. I don’t know where Seth got his musical ability but it wasn’t from Watson.”
“How odd.”
“Doug Savage says he became totally detached from reality. In fact everyone we knew told him he was crazy, but he wouldn’t listen. He actually had this image of himself tootling away in cute Greek villages with all the fat, red-faced fishermen loving him. I was supposed to write poems, Joan Baez style, and he would set them to music. And if this scheme fell through, he wasn’t worried. He was into brotherly love—remember love-ins?— and he was convinced that love was a commodity, like cash, that could take us anywhere. All we had to do was project it.”
“What do you suppose would have happened if you’d actually gone?” Judith asks.
“I’ve asked myself that a hundred times. What if I’d said okay, I’ll come. What if I’d taken him at his word, bought myself an Indian skirt and a guitar and followed him. At one point, you know, I had almost decided to go.”
“Why didn’t you then?”
“Two reasons. First, he stopped wanting me to come. By that time he’d already quit the university. Just walked in one day and told Doug Savage he was finished with Establishment values. He used the word ‘establishment’ all the time as if it was a hairy, yellow dog nipping at his heels. And then, overnight, it seemed I was part of the Establishment too. Wife. Kid. House. We were all part of it. He stopped talking about walking across Europe with us. We just weren’t in the picture any longer. For that last year, in fact, I was his wife on sufferance.”
“So he left alone?”
“The day after his thirtieth birthday. Which we did not celebrate, needless to say. He must have got up at dawn. Later I reconstructed the whole thing—I used to torture myself with it. He probably wanted to see the sun rise on the first day of his new life. He was like that you know, very big on symbols. I could just picture how he must have stood in the doorway of our house, very theatrical, with the sun coming up over the hedge. And the note he left! It was like the head band, very studied, very deliberate. A big, fat gesture. I tore it up. Oh, Judith, it was so terribly dumb. I’ve never told anyone about the note. It was just page after page of youth cult hash. Abstractions like freedom and selfhood, you know the thing. I’ve never had any stomach for words like ‘challenge’ and ’fulfillment’ anyway, but from Watson ... I could have died. I was so embarrassed for him.”
“Oh, Char.”
“I tore i
t up. And I wanted to burn it but of course we didn’t have a fireplace in that house. And bonfires are illegal in Vancouver, so I burned all the little pieces in the habachi out in the yard. And all the time I was burning them I thought how he would have relished the symbolism. He hated barbecues. He always thought they were the altars of North America where people gathered to worship big pieces of meat. He was already into vegetarianism, of course. In fact—and that was what I hated most—he was into everything. Name any branch of the counter-culture and Watson had swallowed it whole. Oh, it was all so desperate. And so badly done. Do you know what I mean? If only he had done it ... gracefully.”
For a minute Judith says nothing. Then she says, “You said there were two reasons.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said there were two reasons you didn’t go with him to Europe. What was the other one?”
“Because,” I say with a short, harsh laugh, “because I was afraid of what Mother might think.”
“What about Seth?” Judith asks after a long pause.
“What about him?”
“I don’t suppose he remembers Watson. He was only three, wasn’t he?”
“No, he doesn’t remember anything. Not even the house we lived in.”
“He must be curious about him. His own father. You’d think he’d want to meet him.”
“No, it’s funny but he’s never mentioned wanting to meet him. But once he told me he was going to write him a letter. He was about ten then, I think, and it was just after the monthly cheque came. Just before he went to sleep he told me he had decided to write a letter.”
“And did he?”
“Yes, he did, and he spent a long time on it. I helped him a little. And it really was a nice kid-like letter all about school and sports and hobbies and his favourite TV programs, sort of a pen pal thing.”