Red Girl Rat Boy Part 10

Amiably he winked. "One-two!"

Now we could enjoy our meal, letting the phone ring. After dinner, Henry called her. Jake and she consulted about the stocks they prepared, the sourdough and brioche they baked.

But she'd call me later, too.

On book club nights, my head awhirl from Down Among the Women or Revolutionary Road, I was glad not to hear her voice. "To discuss fiction, what for? Imaginary people do things and do things, then it's over. From biography, memoir, one can learn."

At our last meeting we'd learned that Andrea, trying to conceive, during s.e.x with her husband felt like Atwood's handmaid. Myrna was reporting a former therapist to the college of psychologists. Lesley took water from her kid's school swimming pool to a lab for a.n.a.lysis.

"Lauren, the woman who brings my newspaper hurls it at my door. Cras.h.!.+ Then in her car she speeds away."

My mother did not drive, conduire, so was ignorant of the machine's sweet solitude. Nor did she ever work outside the home. Nor, because of their war wounds, did she and my father fight. They met at a train station in Lyon where his unit wasn't supposed to be. The Liberation, some mix-up. He was short, dark, English. She was tallish and blonde.

"George was so well-spoken. In the war, people cursed very much. You can have no idea. Foul language. The English term is precise."

Sitting on a fourteenth-century stone wall, these two talked in their limited French and English of their favourites, Bacall and her Bogart. Under the stylish cynicism, such tenderness. The dialogue, so telling. They agreed that their own countries were done for. In that soil-soaked in filth, caustics, human blood-no good life could grow. They crossed an ocean, a continent. At home in Vancouver, we spoke English.

In kindergarten, my son Henry said, "Grand-mere, French is pretty." My mother had not approved of our placing him in French immersion ("So North American, pretending to be someone you are not"), but thereafter she spoke only that language to him.

f.u.c.k you, that tape said.

Tape. Looking back, aging technophiles can feel like strangers. Were things so primitive in our own adulthood? Many patrons and a few library staff cried when we tossed the card catalogue. To avoid electronics, some librarians even retired. Not I. Laborious female typing, ribbons that oozed or faded-such waste.

Early answering-machine greetings a.s.sumed callers were deaf or slow-witted. After the second beep, you have thirty seconds to talk. Soon users got cute. Couples spoke in unison, cats mewed, toddlers whined. The CBC's contest for best greeting got hundreds of entries.

Henry thought the best excuse for not getting a message deserved a prize. The tape broke! The machine got unplugged when I was vacuuming! At this my book club laughed, confessed their lies. Rosalind's was The cat stepped on the Erase b.u.t.ton.

"Actually true," she said later at our weekly lunch, eaten quickly as we were both work-addicted. "Would I lie to you?" Her angled smile. At club we teasingly called her Fair Rosalind.

Now, back from a book-evening, I could let my brain cool.

Then, "h.e.l.lo, mother. Can you talk for a bit now?"

"Why not? I'm alone, am I not?" Which took my mind off book club.

The club's discussion always started with the nuts and bolts.

Didn't he realize?

How could they keep up the pretense?

Where'd she think that would get her?

Too soon, my friends uncorked the wine and their own narratives. Same queries, more tears. Infidelity (Andrea's husband), ungrateful children, unprincipled colleagues, migraines (Robin), carpal tunnel and candida (Lesley), debt and renos (Myrna), Rosalind's fibroids, later her infertility, the stressful travel her job required in northern BC. I was the only one not in therapy. Nor did I refer to Jake as my partner, a new term then.

I'd have preferred to stay with the novels, whose codes drew me. Small things, details. Clothes. Metals. Weather paint birds food gestures light clocks stars floors water smells-such language told so much in The Color Purple, Man Descending, A Jest of G.o.d. At our satellite lunches, Rosalind and I often talked of imagery.

What story could I tell my friends?

Jake and I loved Henry like mad, all possible cliches. That love made two pillars that held the marriage firm, and between us our child swung happily. I loved my job, airports, deadlines, the intense management meetings till ten PM. My health was fine.

Jake's nickname was Mr. Suns.h.i.+ne, his temperament perfect for a set designer doing genuine work amid fat theatre egos. No, not love at first sight, he didn't read fiction, had an erratic income. Irrelevant. Over twelve years our interests hadn't converged, but almost daily we gladly found each other in the big bed. I couldn't believe how little s.e.x Myrna Lesley Robin Andrea had. Of such poor quality, too. Rosalind, single, did better.

Was I just boring? Shallow? Once Robin spoke of Hallmark families.

Was I in denial? Andrea felt she'd denied for years her need for o.r.g.a.s.m.

Certainly no one liked my remarking, "Anais Nin is so self-centred."

"But Lauren, we only have one life? We all just want to be happy?" Rosalind. Her rising tone to end a declarative sentence: another 80s symptom.

Again on the tape, Blur f.u.c.k blur you blur.

Replay. Erase.

The hang-ups also increased. Bang. Bang.

"Jake, what do you think we should do?"

"Ask Henry. He's on Madame's wavelength."

Indeed he was. Our son had his own room at her house, and sometimes they apologized for not speaking English to us.

"Let's not drag Henry down with adult stuff."

Jake shrugged. Again he was in between contracts. Maybe a Private Lives? Another theatre sought an angel for Equus. Waiting, he'd repaint our living room. Colour chips brightened the litter of sketched horses, wrought-iron balconies. Henry admired them all.

I did call my mother more often, but our talk jolted. In my ears still ran the music of my parents' conversation, fluent, inquiring.

Soon after Jake and I married, I applied for a new library job. The compet.i.tion, tough. Also male-this still carried weight. Evenings, I polished my resume and my vision (another 80s word). Then too, Jake was between theatre jobs. He'd helped to re-roof Myrna's house, been an extra in a local TV series (Rosalind got him that), tree-planted near Terrace. Now he sulked.

"Jake, I have to finish typing this."

"Lauren, come to bed." That language we spoke fluently.

I got the job. I got pregnant. To baby Henry I talked about everything. Caring for him, Jake and I learned another common tongue. He took that same tree-planting contract for years. We always thought maybe I'd fly up to Terrace, a little getaway. Thus patterns form.

This autumn went on.

Both Henry and Curtis were on the league team.

My book club convened. Home Truths. Myrna raged at her husband's money messes. Robin a.n.a.lyzed her daughter's teacher's personality disorder. For once I too had a tale. At an IT conference, a catalogue specialist from Moncton made a pa.s.s at me.

"At least did you get drinks and dinner?" (Myrna.) "I can't believe you wouldn't take the opportunity!" (Rosalind.) "Not good-looking?" (Andrea.) Once I went to soccer practice. Curtis's mum was lively, humorous, unlike tedious Lesley who was always on about loneliness. Melanie didn't read novels or use a computer, but we both disliked the coach and found Tom & Jerry's hot chocolate too sweet.

On a Tuesday, Henry noted ten hang-ups. Seventeen, Wednesday. That Friday the indicator said 30. Only a few hurt our ears. Genuine messages were interspersed.

"A nuisance caller. I'll notify the phone company."

"Grand-mere," Henry insisted. "With some different bangs for disguise."

No patience remained in me after a day spent managing the sort of librarians who bring stereotypes to life. I called my mother. The old dial phone, how outrageously time-wasting! Two zeroes, a nine, three full rotations.

"You've called here twenty-three times."

"h.e.l.lo, Lauren. How is Henry? How was your work today?"

Wozz. Her p.r.o.nunciation was off. Wobbly.

"Mother, are you all right?"

She cried.

She also cried when at UBC I quit history for electronic languages.

My father rea.s.sured her. "Modern, precise. Like our Lauren."

During childhood evenings when I played and he did crosswords, my mother talked with him while skimming French periodicals. Even in English she was good at anagrams. Or she'd read aloud, translating as she went. These exchanges grew to full converse, allusions, flirty disagreements, laughter-until they remembered their witness to intimacy. Sent to bed, I'd read. That's how I started with novels. Because of their war, my parents slept badly. I'd wake, sensing vacancy in the big bedroom, and from the stairs hear that companionable murmur in the kitchen. In three decades they never ran out of things to say.

Grand-mere's gallbladder surgery was on Remem-brance Day.

Always when I reached the hospital, the patient slept, Henry by her side with homework or a crossword. Later, I dropped him at soccer. Because of Tom & Jerry's, he and Jake weren't home till I'd had enough solitude to be sociable. All the machine's messages were real.

The rains began with The Progress of Love. Lesley's new therapist led her through rebirthing. Soon, weaning. Myrna's lover wanted to try bondage. Dared she? Everyone was supportive.

Andrea took a breath. "Lauren, we all open up. Why won't you?"

A planned intervention, I could tell.

"Acting so superior, holding back," said Lesley. Also, conceited.

Wilfully blind: Rosalind.

Emotionally unavailable, selfish, so left-brainy-Robin had resented me, apparently, "Forever! Time you got the message."

Such cliches. I went home raw. Another.

Necrotique, my mother termed her gallbladder. "Henry can use that adjective at school." From her surgeon she'd got her stones, forty small grey polyhedrons. "For science cla.s.s." She refused to recuperate with us, but minutes after we'd deposited her at home our phone rang.

"You may suffer this too, Lauren. At least there is a predisposition."

Troubling, how soon that call came.

Her recovery seemed slow. She, subdued.

Jake got her housecleaner to come more often, Henry took extra trips to library and video-shop, I blended her grocery shopping with ours. She accepted the changes. Did they make her sad?

Henry reported, "Grand-mere's scar was red like spaghetti. Now it's getting pink."

"Madame showed you?"

"I hope you didn't ask her?"

"She showed me in the hospital!"

"At least she stayed awake, for you."

Henry visibly decided to say, "Grand-mere wasn't asleep. She's scared to be a burden, like her own mother. She hurt for ages before she told you guys. I sat with her."

It came to me: if I went back to book club I could present her. Mother-daughter stuff to share. Kind of heavy. When the child becomes the parent? You know?

A most suitable issue. If.

Rea.s.suringly, when Private Lives opened my mother did her wave thing.

"In the movie I have seen the best. Why spoil the memory?" Nor would she see Equus. "I have read this work. Kinky." This came out Frenchly, quinqui. "Unsuitable for Henry."

My book club went. Jake reported they'd bought him a drink afterwards, praised his set. f.u.c.k those harpies. When Henry and I went, what impressed him was the animal. Jake's twisted aluminum strips only implied an airy shape, yet the tall creature was for sure a stallion, who bore his desperate rider powerfully.

So long ago.

Christmas approached. The Beta/VHS war was over; a new machine would gleam under our tree. I'd bought one for my mother too.

I asked her, "How is it, having your cleaner twice a week?"

"Certainly the house looks better."

Careful. "I meant, how do you feel about it?"

A blank look. No words. No one-two. So much for open communication. I tried! For my report at book club. If.

I drove home fretting, was still fretting when Jake and Henry arrived.

Our son threw his pack on the floor, shouted, "Why do we have to stay so long?"

"Son, you were glued to the TV."

"TV's boring there. I see Curtis every day."

"Stop, Henry! I'm tired."

My parents, watching movies at home, got up to lower the volume if the characters shouted. To demand, to show anger-no, no, unless alone in my room. Grown up, I never swore in my mother's presence. Tried not to in Henry's. At work, such restraints don't apply. The Fiery Mouth of the Seventh Floor, that's me.

"Dad, I'm tired. Of him, of Melanie."

As with any complex problem, first comes meditation, often conscious, sometimes (as here) not. Certainty fills the dark mind then. Even if the solution looks peculiar, correctness s.h.i.+nes. Cliches bounce up. How could I be so slow? Why didn't I read the code? Like other parents, Jake watched the practices. Like Melanie, lively and humorous on Mon Wed Thurs, plus weekends as league play moved on. A charming single mum. Sugary mugs, the boys absorbed. Not a reader. Not computer literate.

Jake and I soothed Henry. We ate, laughed, watched TV with him cosy in the middle.