Dancing in the Dark (11 page)

What did he do in his office every day that earned him fifteen, twenty, thirty thousand dollars a year? What was it that gave his job such value?

You couldn’t gauge my work that way. It wasn’t a matter of dollars that could be spent and touched, but of things that might flash by so quickly they could be missed if one weren’t watchful: a smile, a touch, a cup of coffee, and a moment to try a quiz in a magazine. A house and a name: Mrs. Harry Cormick.

It wasn’t joy I found in housework, but then, there would not be joy in many jobs. Even Harry, in love with his work, felt excitement, not joy. What I felt was—satisfaction, perhaps; duty fulfilled and a debt paid; goodness.

Those magazines with their quizzes and their stories, they underwent small alterations over the years. I began to see small cracks. Once, they spoke of how to keep a husband interested, and gave hints for dealing with household problems. Ways to do things right. More recently they have begun to speak of ways to juggle job and home. They have quick recipes and easy ways of doing housework, instead of thorough ways. I thought, things are being swept aside here. And where would it end? I foresaw chaos, a breaking down.

It seems strange, unfair, that having foreseen that, I should have become the target of chaos and catastrophe. I was so careful. I should have been the last, not the first.

I clipped recipes and glued them onto cards. I went through them, designing dinner, balancing textures and colours and favourites, ingredients and what we had on hand.

It was all organized, and I was comforted to know each step so well. By mid-afternoon a few things would be chopped and simmering, or at least ready to be dealt with. Ingredients would be lined up. I would know where I was going. A couple of times a week, I also baked: cookies, cupcakes, muffins, small things for us to nibble at in the evenings. None of this business of quick dashes of water to
dry packaged mixes, either. There’s no gift, no sign of caring in that, and I’m sure it must show in the taste.

There was a variety store three blocks away, and if we were low on bread or milk I walked over to get them. The other houses looked more or less like ours. It was a good neighbourhood, quiet and clean. The people were like Harry and me: middle class; professional men and wives, some of whom had jobs. Nothing loud or drastic ever happened, and we were all friendly enough. In the summers, people talked over back fences and shared leftover garden seeds. Sometimes we had barbecues together. In winter, out shovelling, there was a shared comradeship of heavy labour in the cold winds, and one came indoors a bit excited and brisk. When it stormed in the day, I shovelled the drive before Harry came home. Sometimes a neighbour with a snowblower, home early from work, would do it for me. In summer, a woman seeing me heading for the store or going out to pick tomatoes and lettuce for dinner might ask me over for a coffee. We would sit at a picnic table in the back yard and chat. The conversations were not intimate. It was partly, I think, because Harry and I did not have children. The others did. It was a big thing to talk about, and a big thing not to have. It made a space. Also I would not talk about Harry, refused to be drawn into shared confessions, admissions of imperfect lives. Where was the loyalty of those women? Then too, people were transferred, in and out, someone always seemed to be moving. One day to the next, people, like the trash, might vanish.

In late afternoon, the whole house polished and warm with kitchen smells, I went upstairs to get myself ready. Every other day I washed my hair. Every day I had a bath. That was a good time. I took a magazine with me, and my cigarettes, and kept the water piping by turning the hot tap on
occasionally with my left foot. I could feel my hard-working muscles unwinding, and my pores opening, cleansing, a drifting possible. But I kept a small clock there, too, on the back of the toilet, in case I drifted too far.

I dried myself, cleaned the tub again, fixed my hair, and dressed. By then it was merely a matter of waiting for the crunching sound of the car in the driveway, the rumble of the garage door opening, the car door slamming, and the garage being closed again, and I was at the door and opening it, a last check of my hair and my make-up in the hallway mirror, and there he was.

Like waving good-bye in the morning: it seemed important to meet him at the door at night. The two acts enclosed my own day.

Really, it’s only in the past few years that the routine has altered greatly. Oh, there were some changes along the way. I started adding exercises before my bath in the late afternoon, in my efforts to keep trim. It seems this becomes more difficult with age, however much hard work one may do.

But it’s only in the past couple of years that the phone calls have become fairly frequent, Harry saying he’d be late. That the job was taking up his time. That clients from out of town had to be entertained and he’d be staying downtown overnight. His company kept a hotel suite for its executives to be used on such occasions. He was promoted to greater and greater responsibilities, he became an important man in that company. He said the work was therefore trickier and more time-consuming, and required sacrifices of us both. “I don’t like wasting my evenings working or taking some dumb asshole out for drinks,” he said. “It’s just this damned job.”

But he was so proud and pleased with himself when he
did come home. I would certainly not want to cloud that, I would not complain.

I thought I was wise.

Now I remember him coming home happy from an evening at work, and I recall his pride, and now I know what he was proud of. How could he look at me then and smile and say, “Hi, Edna,” and bend to give me a quick hello kiss and say, “Sorry I’m so late. I got tied up”?

It was comforting to have such familiar days. Having found my life, I would not have liked changes or surprises. And if the days were sometimes dull, or if sometimes I would have liked to avoid the work, put it off for some other time, I was proud to overcome that and steel myself and go ahead, plunging through it all. The more I did on such a day, the better, more virtuous I felt. And the closer I felt to Harry, because it was done for him, for us.

At the end of a day I was warm with satisfaction.

I seem to have had a great deal of pride, after all.

It is strange now to see those twenty years. A great long chunk of life in the past, it’s like a package. And not, as I might have expected, all ribbons and pretty wrapping; from a distance, stripped of what I thought it meant, brown paper tied with string. And although I know it seemed right at the time, from a distance it weighs a ton. It was made up of such light small things, too—it’s a puzzle.

It also seems primitive, superstitious, and innocent. Each task a kind of ritual abasement, an appeasing of unknown, threatening gods, a sacrifice like slaughtering goats on altars to fool the gods. They are offered gifts and are diverted. Or like saying prayers on beads, or making certain movements in particular ways, a form of worship and of fear. Holding up the cross to a vampire?

And somehow I missed a step, a sacrifice, a bead. I missed something.

I would like not to know. I would take all that weight back if I could be given not knowing again. I could go back and find out what I missed and I could take care of it and none of this would happen. I would be content. And I would work much, much harder to make it perfect.

I
see I still try to hold onto secrets, even when there is no one to keep them from any more except myself, and what’s the point of that?

If Harry had secrets, I had one, too. My addiction, my single lapse from duty. A hidden sweet in the afternoon.

I remain guilty and embarrassed about it. Because it was a self-indulgence? Perhaps because it may have been the flaw.

It was that at some point (when, exactly?) I returned, with a mixture of reluctance and unease and pleasure, to that old habit, my comfort going back to childhood, of lying silent and eyes closed, separated by blindness from where I was, listening to the music and stealing it for myself. I sang on the stage again, and danced around the same old polished floors, this time with an elegant Harry, a face to the figure now, while other people watched admiringly.

I stole to the couch in the afternoon and put albums on the record player and turned up the volume. A grown woman doing this, the same as she had in that old university apartment before Harry arrived to take up the evenings with his hard lean words and body.

But my body and voice were so free and loud in someone else’s body and voice. I might ask, “Why do I do this?” and say, “I won’t do it again, there’s something wrong about it,” as if it were a kind of masturbation, but would be lured back another day by how it felt. Blood rejoicing, muscles shifting beneath the skin as it went on before my eyes.

Oh, I was important: I sang for my family and danced in front of Harry’s friends. Sometimes in a concert, sometimes on a small club stage. Wherever, they looked and admired. I was someone. I was anyone: from Streisand to Baez I could claim anyone’s voice I chose, for my own small neat body. Musicals were best, from the
South Pacific
and
Oklahoma
of the early days to
Hair
and
Jacques Brel
, because I could dance in them as well as sing. Sometimes, when musicals were out of fashion, they were difficult to find and I fell back on the old favourites. Sometimes, as in the dancing, Harry became a voice with mine, because after all, with my eyes closed I could do anything, even make him someone else.

He used to say, flipping through the albums, “Jesus, we have a lot of stuff by women here,” and it was true. I fed my cravings with occasional new albums, and if there was no musical that appealed, I chose something with a woman’s voice that I could transform into mine.

Most often I placed him in the audience, where he sat watching proudly and with amazement, like the others.

Sometimes I found myself smiling. The trick has always been to keep the eyes closed. If they flickered open in the middle of a song, before the time was right, there was a flash of startled pain. It was a shock to see my clean cool living room when I was sweating from the dance inside.

It was never for very long. When an album ended, I resumed my day. The feeling was odd, though, when it was
done: both satisfied and a bit dissatisfied, a little shaken and bewildered and uneasy. But by then it didn’t matter much because there were only easy things left to do: exercise and take a bath and change my clothes, greet Harry. The music was for when the work was done. And maybe it wasn’t so awful a weakness, nothing as bad as drinking or eating a bag of cookies all at once. It wasn’t anything that showed. Just an old familiar dream that gave me, for a little time, my old familiar second life. It was enough; I always knew I wouldn’t like it to be real, all those people staring, and certainly knew that the life I had was the one I wanted.

Still, it may have been the flaw: that for a half-hour or so in a day I was someone else and had those longings. Maybe it was far too often and for far too long. Maybe, most of all, it was a secret.

I wonder if Harry also had some hidden life inside his head. What did he see when he closed his eyes and listened?

And I wonder if she also had dreams of being someone else, just for a little while. Maybe she even dreamed of being me.

T
he magazines said, “Rate your marriage—how close are you
really?”
Or, “The women in his office—what you have that they don’t.”

They had quizzes, which were irresistible: “When your husband comes home from work, do you a) greet him at the door with a smile; b) call hello to him but leave the vacuum cleaner running; c) greet him at the door by telling him what a terrible day you’ve had?”

I scored well on all the quizzes. “How to be more attractive for your man,” I read. “How to be sure he’ll always come home.”

“Men fear age,” they said. “They fear a loss of power, question waste and futility, and may go through phases. Be patient,” they said.

But I was frightened, too. I didn’t want to be old either. What phases did I have? How would his aging be different or worse than mine?

They didn’t say.

When I was not quite thirty, I looked in the bathroom mirror one day and saw suddenly, as if they’d appeared
overnight or had had a special light thrown on them, that my hair now included a few distinct grey slivers. My shining hair already dying.

I leaned over the spotless sink, staring; chose one and plucked it from the surrounding brown. It came out painlessly: a sign of dead hair, death, to be able to pull it without pain. It was a perfect total gleaming silver. I was surely not so old. So much of my time couldn’t be gone. My days were all the same, what had happened, what event, that could make some hair turn silver? Nothing that I could see. I should be perfectly preserved and young.

That curling silver hair clung to my fingers like a prophecy. It didn’t seem right to drop it in the trash as if it could be dismissed. Dangerous, even, to fail to see. Ten years with Harry gone. What did that mean, that there was so little to remember?

I looked at my face and it seemed to have melted somehow; features indistinct, a sort of pudding.

I would have to fix that; start exercising, the pat-patting beneath the chin and all the rest.

When I did turn thirty, Harry, two years older, said, “Don’t worry, it’s a snap.” For him, it had been. He was still gaining power, not yet near the stage when he might fear losing it.

For me, that birthday came at a time when people ten years younger were saying things like, “Don’t trust anybody over thirty.” A dividing line established, a dividing line between me and young. And between me and these strange people coming up behind with their cold and revolutionary eyes.

“Of course,” said Harry, “these kids have a lot to learn. They’ll see.”

Was it not what he’d expected when he was twenty, then?

(That woman, that girl, she would have been only what, thirteen or so, when I turned thirty. A baby, a child. An entirely different world, hers, I suppose.)