The Age of Hope (13 page)

“What are you doing, Paul? Why?”

“I’m sorry.”

She was shaking. “That’s just stupid. Did I say something? Did I ask you to kiss me? Is that why you let me come here, because you thought this was more than it was?”

He turned to face her and she saw a trickle of blood on his temple. He said, “You should be more careful, Hope. You flirt and laugh and you leave your husband once a week to spend time with me and then you talk about having your clothes on. What am I supposed to think? That you’re simply naive?”

“We ‘re friends. That’s all.”

He waved a hand, then turned away again. She took this to mean that she should leave, and so she slipped out of the woodshop. She drove around town, not going home quite yet, aware of her beating heart and the humiliation that floated at the edges of her confused thoughts. Perhaps she was naive, going over to another man’s house in the evening, talking and laughing with him. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to recognize the feelings Paul produced in her, of being appreciated. He had paid attention to her. And she had accepted the attention.

That night, after Roy came to bed, she waited until he had settled in, and then she said, “You’re gone too much. I want you to be at home more in the evenings. The kids miss you. I miss you.” She had showered but she imagined that the smell of sawdust still hovered in her nostrils and she wondered if Roy could smell it as well. “Everything feels topsy-turvy.”

“Are you taking your pills, Hope? Are things dark?”

“No darker than usual. And I
am
taking those pills. Though I’m gaining weight, haven’t you noticed?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe if you were here, watching me get ready for bed, you would see that I’m fatter.”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Hope.”

“Am I? Melodramatic? Hmm. Am I a flirt as well? When you see me talking to other men, do you think I’m a flirt?”

“I don’t know. When do I see you talking to other men?”

“Oh, Roy. You’re impossible.” She went up on one elbow and turned towards him and saw the dark shape of his head against the pillow. He was looking at the ceiling. She knew that he hated these late-night talks. He was tired and wanted to sleep. She said, “Men find me attractive, you know.”

He chuckled. “Sure they do. What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” She was seated on the bed now, legs crossed. “When you meet other women, at work or at meetings, or you’re served by a certain waitress, do you wish you were with them instead of me?”

“Don’t be silly, Hope.”

“Oh, now I’m silly. Have you ever kissed another woman, Roy? Since we were married?”

“Judith, Penny, Melanie, your mother. Just on the cheeks though. Hah.”

“Emily has a lover, a man with lots of money and his own restaurant.”

“Is that what this is about? You want to be Emily, to have her life?”

“When I was in the hospital for three months, you must have been lonely.”

“I was too busy to be lonely.”

“And now? You never get lonely?”

“I don’t, I’m sorry.” He sighed. “Can we talk about this in the morning?”

“Sure. Go to sleep.”

She sat there and did not have to wait long for Roy to fall into a deep sleep. She wondered again what she had said or done to Paul to make him act like that. Perhaps she
was
a flirt. Perhaps she did not know the strength of her own sexuality. She was thirty-five years old. The years were picking up speed, beginning to fly by. How long had it been since she bought a new bathing suit? She recalled that lovely romantic week in Hawaii with Roy. Or was it just romantic in hindsight? Was everything better when tinged with nostalgia? There was even something nostalgic about her time at Winkler. It was a shadowy corner of her life, a dark painting that had lost its darkness with time, become even a little unreal. She had come to understand that everything in life, even sadness, eventually flattened out and floated away.

In the morning Roy had a men’s breakfast and had left the house by the time she rose and walked downstairs. The week following, on a Thursday evening, she opened the front door to go outside and place the garbage cans at the front of the driveway, and she found a breadboard leaning against the doorjamb. There was a little note attached that read, “To Hope. From your friend, Paul.” She saw him on the streets of Eden as well. It was inevitable, the town was small and crowded. Once, she saw him walking towards her and she scuttled into a nearby shop. She felt bewilderment and shame, as if she had done something wrong, though she wouldn’t have been able to say what her error had been.

As the children grew over the next five years, they became more and more foreign and at times downright intractable, and Hope longed for the time when they had been innocent and malleable. Judith, now a young woman of seventeen, brought home various boys who sometimes ended up at the dinner table, and Hope did her best to make each consecutive boy welcome, though they frightened her, with their long hair and monosyllabic grunts. For a time, she disallowed these boys entrance to Judith’s bedroom, insisting that the rec room was a fine place to hang out, but inevitably Judith would end up in her bedroom, and there were times, late at night or after school was out, that Hope would stand outside her eldest daughter’s closed bedroom door and listen to the music from the stereo and strain her ears for the sound of voices. She imagined that if her daughter wasn’t talking, she was having sex. She arranged for Judith to see Doctor Krahn, in order to receive a prescription for the Pill. She had told Doctor Krahn that Judith suffered horribly from menstrual cramps, and it was he who had suggested the Pill. When she spoke to Judith about this, she told her daughter that she shouldn’t see this as licence for licentiousness. She actually used this phrase and smiled as she spoke, hoping that Judith would appreciate the humour. She didn’t.

Judith had become callous. If she was ruthless with the boys, she was even more so with her mother, whom she saw as the enemy. She had little respect for wisdom or experience. At some deep and unspoken level, Hope applauded her daughter’s rebelliousness, though she would have vigorously denied it. She wondered if she was envious of Judith’s freedom.

Hope, after all, was only forty. She was not dead yet. She was still beautiful. At 3 p.m. every afternoon during the school week, she changed into a blouse and skirt and rearranged her hair and put on makeup, and then she descended to the living room where she landed on a chair, bare legs up on the ottoman, and picked up a book and pretended to read. And always, though it happened only once or twice a week, she found that she was excited when Judith entered with one of her boys. And inevitably, because the boys were polite and well brought up, they called out, “Hello, Mrs. Koop,” and she raised her head, as if in surprise, and she waved hello, or she asked if Darren or James or Cass or Daniel would like something to drink, perhaps some pop, and if he wanted, he could stay for supper. She rose and walked to the kitchen and stood at the edge of the linoleum, as if she had been banished from her own personal space, and she
presented
herself. Judith ignored her. And the boy, aware that Hope was extraordinary in the way that mothers of forty are to teenagers, hovered for a while and addressed her in an enthusiastic manner until Judith pulled him impatiently towards her bedroom.

She found that it was best not to be too analytical about all of this. She had brief and fleeting images of Judith’s small breasts in the hands of Darren or James or Cass or Daniel, and she knew the various designs of Judith’s underwear because she had helped her purchase them, but this is where her mind stopped, at the design of the underwear, and perhaps the colour. What was the point in driving yourself crazy? She asked Judith one day, as they were driving into the city, if she was, you know, active with boys.

“What are you talking about?” Judith asked.

“Are girls your age having sex?”

“You mean, am I having sex.”

“Yes, I guess that’s what I mean.”

Judith looked at her in horror and said, “If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

“Of course not. I’d be surprised if you did.”

“But you thought you’d ask anyway?”

“It was hypothetical, in a way. Sort of like, ‘If you were having sex, even though you probably aren’t, are you aware of what you are doing?’“

“You’re not making any sense, Mom. I don’t want to talk about it.”

And so, based on that short and absurd conversation, she assumed that Judith was sexually active.

She told Roy none of this. He was building a brand-new dealership at the edge of the highway that led out of town, and so he was too preoccupied to have thoughtful discussions about the children, though had he known that Judith might be sleeping with Darren or James or Cass or Daniel, he would be nonplussed and then he would try to foist himself upon the situation, as if it were some sort of business problem, and then, failing to get anywhere, he would throw his hands in the air and call it impossible. And then forget about it.

She understood that Roy, like all men, believed circumstances and events could be controlled. This is why men went to war, and this is why they married, and this is why they invented machines, and all of this in order to stave off a fear of failure. The failure of a marriage or a business, or the failure of a child, was a symptom of some deeper personal collapse. Hope, on the other hand, was quite capable of accepting her limitations, her insignificance—though it wasn’t exactly insignificance, which implied irrelevance. She wasn’t irrelevant. She just wasn’t that important in the larger world, which was spinning faster. She felt helpless. True, she had her children, but Judith ignored her, and when she didn’t ignore her, she treated her as invasive and disgusting. And Conner was always outside riding his dirt bike or snowmobile, or he was down in the basement tearing an engine apart. And Penny deliberately and neatly disappeared between the cracks of the house, silently sliding from room to room, always with a book in hand. And so Hope tried to focus on Melanie, who was six and had just started school, and who seemed willing to listen to her mother talk. Hope made a point of baking cookies and making tea for an after-school snack, and when Melanie arrived home, the two of them would sit at the kitchen table and talk about their days.

Melanie was a mystery, the girl who had driven her to madness, the baby she had never truly learned to love, and still there was a space between them, and Hope did not know if this was her doing or Melanie’s. She was willing to take the blame. She saw how easily Melanie fit into Roy’s lap in the evenings, what camaraderie there was between them, and she wondered what the trick was. How did Roy manage? He was rarely home, did not pay much attention to the children, and then suddenly he popped up, like a jack-in-the-box, and the children fell all over him, especially Melanie, who watched hockey with her father.

Hope couldn’t stand hockey games. The sound drove her batty and she had to leave the room. Besides, television in any form was uninspiring. She allowed her children one hour of TV a day, and after that it was reading (no comics—who do we think we are, cavemen who require hieroglyphics?), games, playing outside, or just generally lying about and staring at the sky. She had a rule that applied to books, especially novels: if her children were reading, they didn’t have to do chores. A book in the hand was of extraordinary value, which is certainly why Penny walked around the house holding an open book—her time of frantic cleaning had passed, and these days she did her best to avoid housework. Hope knew that her thinking regarding books went contrary to the general sentiment of the people of Eden. Books were seen as a waste of time. What was the point, unless you were reading for information? To lose oneself in a book was to be slightly wacky, a little greedy, and ultimately slothful. There was no value. You couldn’t make money from reading a book. A book did not give you clean bathrooms and waxed floors. It did not put the garden in. You couldn’t have a conversation while reading. It was arrogant and alienated others. In short, those who read were wasteful and haughty and incapable of living in the real world. They were dreamers.

When her mother, at the age of seventy-seven, fell and broke her hip, Hope found herself spending afternoons at the hospital, reading to her at her request from William Blake or Robert Frost. Poetry was her mother’s first love, and with great ease she would recite whole stanzas of, for example, Wordsworth. The broken hip led to x-rays and the x-rays revealed inoperable cancer. Hope told Roy that she wanted to care for her mother at home. “The hospital is so cold and unforgiving. The nurses try their best, but Mother should be surrounded by family.”

And so the last months of her mother’s life were spent in the guest room on the main floor of Roy and Hope’s home, and Hope’s life was changed. She couldn’t just leave the house and drive down to the grocery store, or take a day trip into Winnipeg. And she didn’t mind. The responsibility, the routine, grounded her and she found, unusually, that she looked forward to the mornings, to feeding her mother and changing her bedding and talking softly to her. After school, the children stuck their heads into Grandma’s room to say hello. Penny was the least squeamish of the children and would do her homework at the desk beside Grandma’s bed, pausing to answer whispered requests for water or a bedpan.

The day came when Grandma was too ill to remain in the house and so she was moved by ambulance back to the hospital, where, within a week, she died. Hope was with her. One second her mother was breathing and then she wasn’t. How easily she had slipped away. Hope touched her hands and kissed her forehead and sat and watched her. She wanted to say something but she could think of nothing profound, and besides, there was no one to hear, except Hope. Ever since her stay at the psychiatric hospital, Hope had been unable to cry, and even now, sitting with her dead mother, she found herself without tears. This did not dismay her, nor was she upset by the lack of dismay. Her mother had once told her (this was after the time, years before, when she had run away from home for a few days, leaving Roy to take care of the children) that one could run away from home, from husband, from children, from trouble, but it was impossible to run away from oneself. “You always have to take yourself with you,” she said. And now, bending towards her mother, Hope wondered if in death you were finally able to run away from yourself. This might be death’s gift. She knew that the thought wasn’t terribly profound, but she was moved by the notion of completion and of escape.