A Jest of God (3 page)

We were fortunate to be able to stay on here, Mother and I. We sold the place outright, but for much less than it was worth, for the right to stay. Hector Jonas got a bargain. He already had a house. He didn’t want the top floor of this one. At least we live rent free in perpetuity, or near enough to suit our purposes. I sometimes wonder what I’ll do when Mother dies. Will I stay, or what?

“Hello, dear. Aren’t you rather late tonight?”

“Hello, Mother. Not especially. I had some clearing up to do.”

“Well, I’ve got a nice lamb chop, so I hope you’ll eat it. You’re not eating enough these days, Rachel.”

“I’m fine.”

“You
say
you’re fine, but don’t forget I know you pretty well, dear.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You’re too conscientious, Rachel, that’s your trouble. Other people don’t allow their work to get on their nerves.”

“It’s not. I’m fine. A little tired, perhaps, but that’s normal.”

“You fret about them too much, whether they’re doing well or not. But mercy, you didn’t bestow their brains on them, did you? It’s not up to you. Small thanks you’ll get for it, if you ask me anything.”

She stands beside the stove. Her heart is very tricky and could vanquish her at any moment. Yet her ankles are still slender and she takes pride in wearing only fine-denier nylons and never sensible shoes. Her hair is done every week, saucily stiff grey sausage curls, and the frames of her glasses are delphinium blue and elfin. Where does this cuteness come from, when she’s the one who must plump up the chesterfield cushions each night before retiring and empty every ashtray and make the house look as though no frail and mortal creature ever set foot in it?

“What are you having tonight?”

“Asparagus rolls, I thought,” she says earnestly, “and that celery and ham mixture. I’ve got it made. All you have to do is spread them. Can you do the asparagus rolls or shall I do those first?”

“I can do them. It’s all right.”

“Well, we could do them and put them in the fridge. It might be easier.”

“If you like. We’ll do them after dinner, then.”

“I don’t mind, dear – whatever you like,” she says, believing she means it.

How strange it is that I do not even know how old she is. She’s never told me, and I’m not supposed to ask. In the world she inhabits, age is still as unmentionable as death. Am I as far away as that, from the children who aren’t mine? She’s in her seventies, I can guess with reasonable accuracy, as she bore me late, but the exact positioning is her wealth, a kept secret. And it matters. It means something. Does she think someone cares whether she’s sixty or ninety?

I could have gone to Willard’s for dinner. I could have gone with Calla. I wish I had. Now that it comes to it, I do not know why I didn’t, one or the other.

It’s her only outlet, her only entertainment. I can’t begrudge her. Anyone decent would be only too glad.

As I am, really, at heart. I’ll feel better, more fortified, when I’ve had dinner. I don’t begrudge it to her, this one evening of bridge with the only three long long friends. How could I? No one decent would.

Thank God, thank God. They are finally gone. The last cup is washed and put away. The living-room is tidied enough to suit her. It might be the midsummer gathering of a coven, the amount of fuss we go to, lace tablecloth, the Spode china, the silver tray for sandwiches, the little dishes of salted nuts to nibble at. Well, it’s only at our place once a month. I can’t complain, really. And it
is
nice for her. She enjoys it. Her face grows animated and her voice almost gay – “Verla, you’re not
going into no-trump – you wouldn’t dare! Oh girls isn’t she the meanest thing you ever saw?” She doesn’t have much to interest her these days. She never reads a book and can’t bear music. Her life is very restricted now. It always was, though. It’s never been any different. Just this house and her dwindling circle of friends. She and Dad had given up conversing long ago, by the time I was born. She used to tell him not to lean back in the upholstered chairs, in case his hair oil rubbed off. Then she put those crocheted doilies on all the chair backs. And finally on the chair arms as well, as though she felt his hands could never be clean, considering what he handled in his work. Maybe she didn’t feel that way at all. Maybe it only seemed so to me.

This bedroom is the same I’ve always had. I should change the furniture. How girlish it is, how old-fashioned. The white spindly-legged dressing-table, the round mirror with white rose-carved frame, the white-painted metal bed with its white-painted metal bow decorating the head like a starched forgotten hair-ribbon. Surely I could afford new furniture. It’s my salary, after all, my salary we live on. She’d say it was a waste, to throw out perfectly good furniture. I suppose it would be, too, if you think of it like that.

I always brush my hair a hundred strokes. I can’t succeed in avoiding my eyes in the mirror. The narrow angular face stares at me, the grey eyes too wide for it.

I don’t look old. I don’t look more than thirty. Or do I see my face falsely? How do I know how it looks to anyone else? About six months ago, one of the salesmen who was calling on Hector Jonas, downstairs, asked me out and like an idiot I went. We went to the Regal Café for dinner, and I thought every minute someone I knew would see me and know he sold embalming fluid. Of course someone has to sell it. But when he told me I had good bones, it was too much. As though he
were one of the ancient Egyptians who interred the pharaohs and knew too intimately the secrets of the core and marrow. Do I have good bones? I can’t tell. I’m no judge.

Go to bed, Rachel. And hope to sleep.

The voices of the girls, the old ladies, still echo, the prattling, the tiny stabs of laughter making them clutch their bosoms for fear of their hearts. They feel duty bound to address a few remarks to me, remarks which have fallen into a comfortable stability. “How’s school, Rachel?” Fine, thank you. “I guess they must keep you pretty busy, all those youngsters.” Yes, they certainly do. “Well, I think it’s marvellous, the way you manage – I always think that anyone who’s a teacher is marvellous to take on a job like that.” Oh, I enjoy it. “Well, that’s marvellous – don’t you think so, May?” And Mother nods and says yes it certainly is marvellous and Rachel is a born teacher.

My God. How can I stand –

Stop. Stop it, Rachel. Steady. Get a grip on yourself, now. Relax. Sleep. Try.

Doctor Raven would give a few sleeping pills to me. Why on earth don’t I? They frighten me. What if one became addicted? Does it run in the family? Nonsense, not drugs. It wasn’t drugs with him. “Your father’s not feeling well today.” Her martyred voice. That sort of thing is not physical, for heaven’s sake, not passed on. Yet I can see myself at school, years from now, never fully awake, in a constant dozing and drowsing, sitting at my desk, my head bobbing slowly up and down, my mouth gradually falling open without my knowing it, and people seeing and whispering until finally –

Oh no. Am I doing it again, this waking nightmare? How weird am I already? Trying to stave off something that has already grown inside me and spread its roots through my blood?

Now, then. Enough of this. The main thing is to be sensible, to stop thinking and to go to sleep. Right away. Concentrate. I need the sleep badly. It’s essential.

I can’t. Tonight is hell on wheels again. Trite.
Hell on wheels.
But almost accurate. The night feels like a gigantic ferris wheel turning in blackness, very slowly, turning once for each hour, interminably slow. And I am glued to it, or wired, like paper, like a photograph, insubstantial, unable to anchor myself, unable to stop this slow nocturnal circling.

This pain inside my skull – what is it? It isn’t like an ordinary headache which goes through like a metal skewer from temple to temple. Not like sinus, either, the assault beginning above my eyes and moving down into the bones of my face. This pain is not so much pain as a pulsing, regular and rhythmical, like the low thudding of a drum.

It’s nothing. How could it be a tumour? It’s nothing. Perhaps I have a soft spot in my head. This joke doesn’t work. I can’t hold on to the slang sense of it, and its other meaning seems sinister. Fontanelle.

Something meaningless, something neutral – I must focus on that. But what? Now I can’t think. I can’t stop thinking. If the pain is anything, then I’ll see Doctor Raven, of course. Naturally. It wouldn’t hurt to go in for a check-up soon, anyway. It might be a very good idea. I can’t afford to let myself get run down.

I can’t sleep.

– A forest. Tonight it is a forest. Sometimes it is a beach. It has to be right away from everywhere. Otherwise she may be seen. The trees are green walls, high and shielding, boughs of pine and tamarack, branches sweeping to earth, forming a thousand rooms among the fallen leaves. She is in the green-walled room, the boughs opening just enough to let the sun
in, the moss hairy and soft on the earth. She cannot see his face clearly. His features are blurred as though his were a face seen through water. She sees only his body distinctly, his shoulders and arms deeply tanned, his belly flat and hard. He is wearing only tight-fitting jeans, and his swelling sex shows. She touches him there, and he trembles, absorbing her fingers’ pressure. Then they are lying along one another, their skins slippery. His hands, his mouth are on the wet warm skin of her inner thighs. Now –

I didn’t. I didn’t. It was only to be able to sleep. The shadow prince. Am I unbalanced? Or only laughable? That’s worse, much worse.

I feel myself sinking at last into the smooth silence where no lights or voices are. When the voices and lights begin again, in there where I am lying, they are not bright or loud.

– Stairs rising from nowhere, and the wallpaper the loose-petalled unknown flowers. The stairs descending to the place where I am not allowed. The giant bottles and jars stand there, bubbled green glass. The silent people are there, lipsticked and rouged, powdered whitely like clowns. How funny they look, each lying dressed in best, and their open eyes are glass eyes, cat’s eye marbles, round glass beads, blue and milky, unwinking. He is behind the door I cannot open. And his voice – his voice – so I know he is lying there among them, lying in state, king over them. He can’t fool me. He says run away Rachel run away run away. I am running across thick grass and small purple violets – weeds – dandelions. The spruce trees bend, bend down, hemming in and protecting. My mother is singing in a falsetto voice, the stylish tremolo, the ladies’ choir voice.

Bless this house dear Lord we pray, keep it safe by night and day.

B
rushing away the curtains with my hand and leaning a moment out my window, I can feel the fineness of the day. Even the spruces look light, the needled boughs having lost their darkness in the sun and now looking evergreen as they are meant to, and not everblack as they seem when the sky is overcast. The sky today is the colour of the turquoise in the bracelet my father gave me as a child.

I must hurry or I’ll be late. That’s one thing I can say for myself. I’ve never been late for school in all this time, never once. When I first began teaching, Mother used to call me every morning, but now I waken before she does.

My underwear is all getting that shabby too-much-washed look. I must get some more. I always think what does it matter – who sees but me? But that’s a wrong attitude. It’s not even the thought of being run over and taken to hospital and pried into, everything underneath seen and sized up. It’s self-respect, really. When Stacey was here the last time she came into my bedroom while I was dressing. She never knocked or said could she come in. Maybe in her house everyone is so casual they never bother. She saw me putting
on the same things I’d worn the day before, the same everything. She said, “Don’t you change every day?” And then, as though she believed she intended it only to explain or pardon me, “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter quite so much if you’re not living with anyone.” But it was only because I hadn’t got my laundry done over the weekend, and I hadn’t got it done on account of her, for she’d just arrived then. Usually I changed. It hardly ever happened that I didn’t. I told her so. My voice was not upset in the slightest. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

I didn’t, though. I didn’t say a word. I don’t know why I didn’t. Stupid. Stupid. How could I not have?

What is more stupid is to think of it now. As if it mattered. I’ve been very careful ever since then, though. A person could let themselves go, without noticing. It could happen.

Hurry, hurry, Rachel, or you’ll be late for school. All right. All right. I’m hurrying.

Mother has a letter in her hands and is unfolding it.

“One thing about Stacey,” she says, “she is always very good about writing. I don’t think she’s ever missed a week, has she? It can’t be easy, with the four children to look after, and that big house.”

“No, I suppose not.”

Considering that Stacey does nothing else for Mother, writing once a week doesn’t seem such an exorbitant effort. When Stacey was here that time, seven years ago, I asked her at the end of the one week if she wouldn’t consider staying a month. The children would be all right with Mac’s sister, and it would mean a lot to Mother. Stacey wouldn’t, though. “I guess it must sound crazy to you, Rachel, but another three weeks and I’d be up the walls – I don’t mean because of anything here and that – it’s just missing Mac – not only around
and to talk to – I mean, in bed.” What made her so certain it would sound crazy to me?

Mother is reading Stacey’s letter aloud. She always does, as though not entrusting it to my hands and eyes. Sometimes I think she occasionally leaves parts out. Stacey can be extremely outspoken, and if it was a reference to me, Mother wouldn’t let me see.

Oh Lord – I’ve no evidence, none, of any pitying or slamming phrase.

“… less than a month till summer holidays – horrors! Although I guess Rachel will be glad. Her free season starts when mine finishes. But I have to admit the kids are pretty good generally these days – the boys already making plans for putting up tent in back yard and sleeping there – mighty woodsmen and all that – perfectly safe, Mother, so don’t panic –”