Dancing in the Dark (20 page)

Did he, with me, think of her?

He let me lie beside him in the dark and say “I love you,” and he said it back, and all the time he knew.

Who can imagine so much cruelty? A Hitler of the spirit, my loving Harry.

I can’t see what it was. I picture her and all the times I saw her and all the times we spoke, and I can’t imagine at all what it was that let her skim so carelessly over me and through my life.

Was it just that she was convenient and young? Was it only years that made the difference?

Here I have not exercised for months. There’s no possibility of watching my diet, I eat what I am given. I have no use for make-up, no one to impress or from whom to hide lines. There is no reason to wear scarves around my throat, or darker shades of stockings to make my legs look slimmer than
they are. I don’t need, in the late afternoons, to change my clothes for something more attractive. I do not even need to be sure that slacks and blouses match.

There is no reason to look into a mirror. Except to notice changes.

I am, perhaps, coming to look my age. I am sure I must look more than forty, and I may look forty-three. As I suspected, it happens quickly, when it happens.

I can’t quite make out the whole effect. The woman who comes around each week to wash and set my hair (and all the others’, too) twists it back with flying hands until it’s all pinned down and set there. “Very chic and smart it makes you look, dear,” she tells me, standing back and looking at her work. I don’t know. I see only dark and greying hairs pulled back.

I can see, though, that for all the stuffy food and lack of exercise, there does appear to be some drawing in of skin around the bones. The skin itself is almost translucent, a kind of glowing paleness that might nearly shine in the dark, one would think. There is a caving in of sorts. I find my clothes hang oddly, loosely; like my mother stumping around in her oversized boots, going out to hang the wash. My eyes, blue in the midst of brownish-grey skin around them, peer. And in return, I sometimes notice people, visitors, staring at me.

What are they looking at? What do they see? Something odd, off balance? Some mark of what I did?

I try to count my grey hairs to see if there are more, but I keep losing track. It’s so frustrating, not to be able to do what should be such a simple thing.

Sometimes I do get angry, having to start again and again.

V
ery soon now, it’s going to be spring. This will be the third season since the event, which seems to have moved back so far in time, and also to be rolling up ahead again. I am a different person. Like being born in a late July night. An ugly birth that is, my life from his, a terrible thing. I should feel guilt and grief. I feel a little badly that I can’t feel those things. The newborn Edna seems somewhat deformed.

It is difficult to remember that other one. Who spent years thoughtlessly and randomly, for all their order. At the time, it wasn’t so hard. It’s seeing that’s hard, not blindness. I had my books and magazines and work and Harry, and the music, and it gets easier, not harder, to take for granted and not think. You don’t even notice.

Now here I am, reduced to me, this pen, and this notebook, which appears to be less but may be more. And a great problem approaches: that this place, which looked so large and limitless when I began, is now becoming tight and dull. I don’t quite know where to go from here.

I have examined enamel in sinks, complexions of people, myself minutely. I have kept up with imperfections. I have
written precisely, if too often off the track. My notebooks are stacked neatly in the drawers of my half of the bureau. I have considered leaves and roses and the doctor. I have taken apart a pen to see how it works. I have peered until new lines have sprung up around my eyes. I have noted paint chipped from the corridors and the black numbers on the doorway to this room. I have kept my posture straight, my ankles neatly crossed. I have walked and run and noted the muscles pulling in each move. I have eaten hundreds of meals, I have eaten every kind of meal they have here, and the textures, colours, the variations are so minute now that despite myself I begin to wonder.

Was there a missed spot, an unremarked detail? Or something else entirely: Harry and me. Or only me.

I know there are tinier details, much smaller things to notice. But with human eyes, there is a point beyond which it is impossible to see. Human eyes do not reach the limits of vision. There are microscopic bits; and maybe even further bits, beyond the powers of a microscope.

The bedspread—just one thing. It is white and rough. But when I look more closely, I can see the fibres twisting all together, and from the fibres still smaller strands of thread, and I expect if I had stronger eyes I would see them furring out individually as well, and eventually down to the very atoms, and then the nucleus itself of each of them. Then to draw back a little and see that although the bedspread is white, there is variety, shading, some fibres not as pure as others, some more worn, a shifting of whiteness. So that not even a bedspread is allowed to be what it appears at first and easy glance.

Before, I might wander my perfect home admiring light catching on a gleaming table, flat tugged-neat bedspreads,
pure windows. I was enchanted by flawless glass, thought that to see through such panes was undistorted vision.

What would I see now? Now that I have learned to look more closely?

The trouble here, right now, is just how far my vision can extend. I would not, before, have rewashed a just-washed dish, or revacuumed a just-vacuumed carpet merely to be filling hands and time. And now I cannot re-observe and re-describe something already impaled by this pen in this notebook. There is only one time I can hear an old woman down the hall calling out “Help me, help me,” again and again, and have it new. I investigate, go to see the body behind the calling, and am surprised at how tiny and frail it is to have such force in the voice. I write, today a small woman called all day for help. Her voice is loud and desperate and has a scratching sound in the throat. All she says is “Help me, help me.” A nurse has gone to her at least three times, but when she leaves, the woman begins to call again, “Help me, help me.” I don’t know what kind of pain she has.

I sit writing in this chair; I walk and watch and what I write is a constantly diminishing possibility.

Before, when everything that could be done was done, I took a bath, changed my clothes, and changed directions for the evenings with Harry. But also I did wander, I did look for some perfection, a confirmation in the polished, dusted pieces of my home. I also had moments of blankness when it seemed nothing would ever be completed. But I knew Harry would be coming home, sometime.

It is a shock when something absolute does happen.

I have harvested details like a crop and stored them here. There can’t be many left, and what shall I do?

The trees and snow are changing as spring comes, the snow diminishing and dirtying, a lightening in the air visible even through the glass. More a smell than something to see. Rough bark and soon, sweet grass. Flowers. Outside, there would be a thousand things to touch, examine, and describe minutely. Outside, it might take years to exhaust the possibilities.

Still, would it not end here again, with more notebooks and a dwindling field of vision?

I watch the doctor as I sit across the desk from him in his office. His walls are blue and so is the chair I sit in. His desk is oak, I think. On it there is a picture of his family: a blonde wife leaning over two small blonde children, all smiling up at the camera; at him, if he looks at them on his desk. Would he forget them if there were no picture, is that why he has it there?

He is watching me, patient as ever, stringing out his endless questions. “Tell me about Harry, Edna,” he is asking, but without much hope; mere habit by now, I guess. “Tell me what he looked like.” I write down his questions.

“Was he tall? Thin? Stout? Did he have a beard? Blue eyes? Brown? Dark hair, blond, bald? Tell me about Harry, Edna.” He’s asked all this before; but the words, as always, flow meticulously across the lines of my notebook.

Could I ask him to let me go outside? Because I have surely learned at least to investigate alternatives before something happens. One should have all the facts one can get. I do not learn quickly, but it seems that I can learn.

It’s hard, though, to ask. Changes this man with whom I’ve spent so many hours. He will become, the moment I put the question, a mere man, a doctor with authority, no longer someone against whose collarbones I would sometimes like
to rest my head. The figure will be transformed, Edna the magician, altering substances with words. But an improvement over knives.

I take a deep, brave breath. “Could I go outside?”

He’s jolted, I see his body jerk just a little to hear me speaking. I see him hoping and interested once more.

“Did you want to go outside?” and his voice is now alive, expectant.

“If I could.” It is important not to waste words. They seize on words and try to turn them around, spare words are their weapons here.

“What would you do out there if you could? What is it out there you want?” He, now, he uses too many words, throws them around too easily, plays with them. The advantage is with me and my tighter, tinier weapons.

“I’d see what’s there.”

He’s puzzled, it seems. “You mean you just want to go out and look around? Or are you saying you want out of here entirely. Did you want to go home, Edna?”

He is not so clever. He doesn’t see so well. I was right, he was more interesting and important before I spoke.

“Outside.”

He sits back in his chair, steepling his fingers beneath his chin, looking at me. He’s pleased, I see. He thinks he has me some place where he wants me.

Is that true? Or do I see everything out of kilter and off-balance now?

“Well, Edna, I’d like to be able to tell you that would be fine. I understand of course that you’d be wanting to get outside, especially now with spring almost here. The trouble is, I can’t really give you that permission because I don’t believe you’re ready yet.”

Does he not think I see well enough? How would he possibly know all the things I can see now?

“Ready?”

Now he’s leaning forward, hands clasped together on his desk, intent on me; even a doctor, who must make so many hopeless attempts, is hopeful. But I am not here for his hopes. I’m just trying to find out what to do.

“You see, you haven’t been well, Edna. That’s why you’re here, why the courts sent you here. Do you remember the courts and what the judge said?” I do not answer, and write the question down.

“Do you understand you haven’t been well? Do you know what happened? Can you tell me what happened?”

He tries to go too far too fast. My eyes are down again, and I am writing. I will not look at him again. I can be silent and I can wait. He has no idea how much practice I have, how many years I perfected those skills, being silent and waiting.

“When you’re well, of course you’ll be able to go outside. And when you’re really well, there’s always a chance you’ll be able to leave here altogether. We can work together on that, Edna. If you want to go outside, we can start to work on it. You can, if you let us help you to get well again.”

I had a warm vision of him, and it turns out he, like Harry, is both ordinary and no match for me.

If I don’t look at him, he must know it’s finished. But no, he is stupid and still hopeful. “We could start right now. You could start by showing me what you keep writing all the time. Would you show me your notebooks now, Edna?”

More and more questions, that’s what I’m writing at the moment.

“Well, Edna,” he says finally, and sighs, “we’ll talk about it again tomorrow. We’ll find a way to get you outside, if you’ll help. It’s a shame to miss the fresh air and the flowers.”

Like Harry, he is sly. But he is not my husband, and my purposes have altered.

At least I’ve found out what I needed to know: that I can’t go outside. So my choices are clear. I can pursue the smallest of the bedspread fibres, peering my way to blindness, my handwriting getting tinier and tinier, like the details; or I can face the moment and the white and yellow daisy clock. Tunnelling in or spiralling out.

I call it a choice; and yet like many other things, I can see it isn’t.

What difference does it make? I am still Edna sitting in this chair.

But you can sit and sit and still be a different person, sitting.

I am only Edna, all by myself, and not important or strong. That must be something, although I can’t say what.

It is reasonable that fear should be slipping away. There’s nothing more to be lost, and nothing terrible, nothing left that deserves terror. I have done my worst.

And yet I miss fear, mourn it, try to keep a grip on what remains of it. It has protected me for so long, and from so many things. I get lonelier and lonelier as it escapes. A more constant companion than Harry, my fear has been, and I am losing it, too.

It’s that white and yellow daisy clock. It dances on the bedspread and obstructs the other vision. There seems to be no getting around it.

L
ies and lies and lies.

Who was she to be more than me?

Oh, I have tried not to see precisely. But there it is, the sweating bodies rolling and touching.

And then he could come home to me, join me in our bed and lie.

Did they talk about me? About us? If he could go into her bed and her body, what else? What did he keep from me to give to her? Bodies slithering together, words and touches.

He was wrong. He did wrong. If we may have said lies to each other, or left truths unsaid, they were our lies and truths. He should not have taken them outside to someone else.

It didn’t occur to me that he might do that. And that’s trust, isn’t it? It’s the same thing, isn’t it?

But he did it; he betrayed belief.

What if I had said to him calmly, “I know. I know all about it.” What might have happened? I think he would have said, “I’m sorry, forgive me, it will never happen again, I’m sorry, forgive me.” And no doubt I would have. What else would there have been to do and go on living? I would have bitten
and chewed and swallowed the rage and we would have gone on. The pain would all have been inside me, instead of inside him. But we would not have looked at each other again. We would have skirted and been polite, and I would have been alone. Either way, I end up alone.