Alone in the Classroom (27 page)

I can still see the expression on her face, unapologetic, forthright.

She said, “I loved Dad and felt loved by him. Michael doesn’t understand it. But then Dad was horrible to him. We all knew that. Always putting him down, treating him like he was stupid.”

It took me a moment to absorb how firm yet clear-eyed she was in her loyalty to her father.

She looked away from me. “He never forgave himself for what happened to Susan. That’s what all his drinking was about.” She sighed. “But he was good to me. Always.”

She had been his favourite. I’ve never met a favourite child who wasn’t forgiving of the parent. Either they see more generously or can live happily with their blindness.

“Maybe in being good to you,” I said, “he was making up for past sins.”

She didn’t disagree. She acknowledged that he had been harsh to her mother too. “But then my mother fought back and left him. There’s a lot of sadness in my family. Michael should be a father, he’s wonderful with children. But he has a harem instead.”

I laughed because it was so true. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was just alerting me to the lay of the land.

Michael also drank too much. He was a tortured sleeper, rocking, twisting, jerking, coughing, scratching. But his touch remained unhurried and skilful, intuitive, as it was with any animal within reach, even if he could no longer always depend on his equipment, he said, gesturing towards his groin. He kissed my neck not high and on the side, but lower down and towards the back, calling me baby, and had me eating out of his hand every time I turned around.

About four months after that last visit to Maine, I had phoned Connie to tell her that I was moving in with Michael. “Maybe he’s told you himself,” I said, hoping he had. But no.

She was quiet at her end.

“The kids are with me,” I said, “except on the weekends. Their father is talking about moving to Toronto.”

“It must be hard to see everything come apart.” Her voice was less itself, as if she were holding herself away from me.

“Men are quick to adjust. He’s angry, but he’s already making a new life for himself. Men are good at that.”

“Hard on you, too, Anne. And on the children,” she said. “Just don’t stop writing. Don’t lose that.”

I did lose it for the better part of a year. My productivity had always been slim, some poems, a few stories, but now it stopped altogether. It’s something you can get used to, inactive, unmoving air inside, as we do when we shut ourselves up in an air-conditioned house during an endless heat wave. In a photograph you might very well look happy, and no doubt your descendants would assume you
were
happy, but you are not exactly happy.

I imagined phoning Connie dozens of times as the months passed, but I didn’t call and neither did she. I took her silence as a rebuke, of course. (Now I would say that it was nothing more than natural.) When finally I dialed her number, she responded with such pleasure (saying she was better already now that she was talking to me) that I had to dry my cheeks with the back of my hand. I told her I had been picking the second crop of raspberries, my fingers were bright red. It was interesting, I said, talking too much, to see how raspberries ripen, one perfect berry on a cane of otherwise green berries, like members of a family, one beauty and the rest runts.

“Annie, how are you?”

“I’m exhausted. I can’t sleep. I don’t make him happy either.”

“I think you do.”

“Why?”

“He told me your times together are an utter joy.”

“An utter joy. He said that?”

“Don’t make me repeat it,” she said with a short laugh.

“He must mean so long as there are big gaps in between.”

“Well, that’s who he is.”

“That’s who he is. Now who on earth am I?”

I wasn’t Connie, who had trained herself to be self-sufficient in love. But I began to work at it.

I took to sleeping in another bed after we made love. I found an apartment in Ottawa and my children and I spent weekdays there - it was easier for them to go to school, and it was easier for me to work, to resume doing a little writing before the kids got up and before I headed across the city to teach English at Woodroffe High School. Even so, Michael referred more than once to the tar baby story, how in pulling one hand away, the other gets stuck, until before you know it, all of you is stuck.

“Am I tar?” I said, prodding his chest with my finger.

“Not in the last hour,” he said with a smile.

The single time we went to see my parents, my mother took him into her studio to show him what she was working on, then out into the garden where she was grafting fruit trees: pear and plum to apple. Her father had grafted
many trees in their big garden in Argyle; she had the knack. Michael’s affection for my mother was something else that held me. He identified with her as a fellow experimenter in working by hand, with wood in his case, paint in hers. She told him something I had never heard before, about swimming as a girl and claiming the rock afterwards: she and her brothers and their pals would come out of the lake, blue from the cold, and race to the glacial rock as big as a room that had soaked up the sun all afternoon. It had ledges like little thrones and they would claim their thrones, pressing their bare and shivering skin against the sun-beaten rock, and those who arrived last would climb to the top and crowd into whatever spot wasn’t in the shade. By the time of this visit, my mother had moved from painting lichens on rock to painting rocks unadorned, and they would occupy her until she stopped painting altogether.

“Annie,” she said to me on the phone later, “he’s as old as I am.”

“I know.”

A moment passed. “My mother married a man twice her age,” she said.

I considered this. “Did you ever know why?”

“I suppose she wanted what he had to offer. He had an established business. He was a fine-looking man. He gave her the admiration she craved.”

“So he loved her.”

“He did. He adored her. And he was very partial to me, and I was very partial to him. I don’t know how much my mother reciprocated his feelings. I disliked her,” she said, “vastly.”

My grandmother never remarried. She didn’t want to be bothered with another man, or so she told my mother. “Meaning sex,” my mother said with scorn. “She didn’t like to be touched. She wore her precious pince-nez and if you came within a foot of her, she’d cry, ‘Watch my glasses! Watch my glasses!’ “

I felt I’d slipped in my parents’ estimation when I became involved with Michael. I’d slipped in Connie’s estimation. And in Michael’s. In everyone’s, except my own. It had taken a lot for me to do something unconventional, and no matter how badly I had done it, I had done it. I felt stronger, less predictable to myself, and split a dozen ways. I can see now that I was trying to say goodbye to certain over-influences, weaning myself off Connie with the tender ruthlessness that governs so much love; we admire, we move on. Except that doesn’t begin to capture the strain of it or the emotional price that everyone pays. Connie and I were in touch, but carefully so. We phoned each other a couple of times a year and skirted many topics. Theft is aggressive, and I had taken up with Michael, not stolen him so much as borrowed him through the back door.

His dance card became full. I would wait for him to phone me, to confirm that he wanted us to come out for the weekend, and he wouldn’t call. I would call him and find out more than I wanted to know, about some woman who hoped he would father her child, for example. I imagined
a calendar in which I marked off each day I resisted phoning him. Imagined a story where the suspense is whether she can resist calling and whether he will call. I wrote the story. He called. I took up the Buddhist strategy of letting your heart break, breathing in the pain, then letting it go as relief and compassion in this groundless world. What was happening was in a way what I had hoped for, that his behaviour would let me off the hook I was on. But there is pain in being removed from a hook.

He insisted every time we spoke that I was happy. “You sound happy.”

“Do I?”

For a while I was able to carry it all inside me, like a big bouquet of peonies, and then I couldn’t anymore. The moist, plump peony heads got to be too heavy. They were like pounds of raw hamburger hanging upside down.

I moved to the other side of the country and took my children with me. They spent parts of every summer with their father, who was well ensconced in Toronto by then. The pleasure of being in Vancouver came from the shift to a milder climate within the same country. You lived without any need of storm windows against the cold, or screens against mosquitoes, in a land that offered a complete transformation but gently, naturally, without any shock.

The difficulties were on another level. My children entered classrooms where friendships were fixed and they never really found a way in. I worked as a teacher, but I
had never been a good teacher. There is a special confidence, a strength of character all good teachers have. They enter a classroom and you feel their power. They aren’t (at least in the classroom) divided against themselves. They love their material. And the best of them make their students almost forget themselves in favour of the subject at hand. But I wanted to be a writer, not a teacher. Just as my mother had wanted to be a painter, not a nurse.

Connie passed through Vancouver just once. She had booked herself on a boat trip up the west coast to Alaska. It was September of 1991 and we were to meet for a late lunch; we hadn’t seen each other in eight years. I walked down Robson Street and there she was, standing on the sidewalk outside a small cafe. She welcomed me with open arms, engulfed me in a hug, and said she had been afraid that I had written her off. She had even lost sleep over it.

I was moved and didn’t know what to say. It’s true that I hadn’t initiated a phone call in a long time. It was she who had called the night before to see if I was free for lunch.

“My life is different now,” I said in lame apology.

“I know, but you are brave, and years from now you will look back and be glad you broke away and came out here.”

I admired everything about her, as always. Her hair was completely white and cut short. She wore a silver bracelet and, almost invisible, a hearing aid in each ear. She was eighty-one.

“I miss the East,” I confessed once we were seated and I had collected myself a little. Her generosity had shaken me. Is that really how she saw me? Brave?

“Come home.”

“Mountains. I want to look at little things.”

” ‘Little objects for the soul.’ “

I nodded, looking into her eyes. “You’re quoting someone.”

“That’s what Michael calls stones and shells and feathers and so on and so forth. Things he picks up and puts in his pocket.”

His name felt like a small punch. She reached across and took my hand when I stared at the floor. I could tell by the firm way she grasped my fingers and then released them that she wanted me to buck up.
You are brave
.

“How is he?”

“I’m sure he’s fine. I haven’t spoken to him in quite a while.” Then she leaned forward. “Get on with
your
life, Annie.” And she asked about my children, my writing, my personal life. I told her that I had been careful to find a man several years younger than myself. “You would like Leo. He teaches history. He loves the woods. He’s learning to play the piano.” I paused. “I think of you all the time, Connie, even if I don’t phone.”

“It’s all right. I understand.”

Awkwardness kept us company no matter what we talked about. She told me about a new interest of hers that had started as curiosity then expanded into a serious project. She pulled a few pages from her handbag and introduced me to the many branches of her mother’s family - the Douglas line of descent went back centuries to the Black Douglases of the Scottish borderlands, she said. In Alaska she would be meeting for the first time a distant cousin who would fill in some of the blanks.

I looked at the diagrams of generation upon generation and found them impossible to follow. You needed a degree in physics, it seemed to me, to keep all the names and connections straight.

“But what about
your
personal life?” I said.

“I’m not lonely, Anne.”

She spent most of the year in her house in Maine, and winters in New York, staying with a close friend. They were out nearly every evening at one thing or another.

“Who is the close friend?”

“If you think I’m going to introduce you,” she said, “you can forget it.”

It was a relief to laugh, even if darker feelings lay behind the quip. What I saw in her face was mostly affection - affection laced with wit and self-respect and the same assertive spirit that I had always seen in her. Before, I would have teased her about taking up genealogy, and asked if bridge was next. Now I kept the thought to myself. Was it because she had no children, I wondered.

It was while we were having our coffee that we talked about my parents. I told her I had been having many dreams about my mother.

“I’m sorry she hasn’t been all that well,” she said.