KATE
God, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do now. I threw up this morning. Maybe not, but. . . maybe. It might be. But it can’t be. Brian’s fault, of course, because he absolutely, categorically, 100% refuses to use a condom. We’ve been using withdrawal and rhythm, which Mums calls “Vatican Roulette”, and she’s probably right, but what about sensation? It matters, Mums, I say to her. It affects the quality of the act.
Not too many mothers and daughters even talk about this stuff, or at least not in this kind of detail, but we do. She’s pretty earthy under all that supposed aloofness. Even bought me a vibrator for my sixteenth birthday. (What would her church friends think? Sometimes I think she doesn’t give a rip.)
As a matter of fact I suspect that under her reserve, Mums
can be quite a volcano. Just look at her
now, going out with this Rafe guy who must be 50 years old if he’s a day, and
married twice before! I can tell she
lusts after him and I wonder if they’ve slept together yet. If not, it’s only a matter of time. There’s a thing like a bolt of lightning
between them that can only mean one thing.
Between this Rafe and her obsession with
the violin, I don’t get to see her or talk to her much any more. Talked to Dad on the phone the other night;
funny how he always asks after Mother, not realizing how much he’s giving
away. He got out of the marriage five
years ago, to save his own neck , I guess, when Mums was barely into
recovery. He still loves her. I think he’ll always love her. The rare time he comes over and I see them
together, they’re like two porcupines making love, extremely careful. Not wanting to step on each other’s hearts.
I’m half-convinced I should buy one of
those home pregnancy tests to get this thing sorted out – I mean, I can’t be,
can I? As Mums never fails to tell me, I
have my whole life ahead of me. I love
Brian and he has adorable puppy-dog eyes, but I don’t know if I want a kid who
looks like him. Not now, anyway.
It has to be a false alarm, like the last two times. Mums, are you there? Put down that violin. Get that dreamy look off your face. Stop talking about charismatic Zoltán for once, or that cute no-brainer, Rafe. I need to talk to you, now.
HARRIET SMITHSON
Lucy is preoccupied. We know with what. It’s sex.
(Violins are not naive.) She has
latched on to a good-smelling man who shares her innate attachment to the
pleasures of being alive. It’s only a
matter of time until they get beyond that stage of groping and sighing and
nibbling in the car. Then we will see if
doors have truly opened for Lucy through the playing of me.
It’s slow going. She has already just about reached the level she attained as a child, which was not very advanced. Zoltán recently gave her a first concerto by Rieding to work on, three simple movements, six pages long, and right now she’s working on memorizing it. She hates it. I’ll admit I don’t like it very much myself: the way she bristles when she makes a mistake, tenses her spine and shoulders, tipping me over and throwing Hector wildly askew so that she actually plays worse than she did before.
I don’t like the high-pitched shriek she lets
out when she doesn’t like the sound I make.
I hate making that sound too, but it’s involuntary, because she is
drawing the bow completely wrong, too stiffly, not freely enough. Her right arm is still nearly locked with
inhibition. And that’s not her only
problem.
I hate to sound cruel, but our Lucy has
bad hands for this instrument, knobbly and short-fingered, with a dwarfed,
intwisted left pinkie that might cause serious problems when she finally
graduates from the safety of first position.
Zoltán looked gravely at her hands for a long time during the second
lesson, his silence ripe and heavy as a pear.
Then he asked her very gently, “Did you have a difficult childhood?”
Lucy’s pupils dilated wildly, then
shrank. Zoltán already had his answer.
“How did you know?”
“Little finger. Stops growing,” he said sadly. “Is very bad.”
“It was
very bad.”
“I see this. I see also you have very strong will. Is here in this fate line.”
Lucy’s paling face cracked into a
grin. “You’ve just found my greatest
weakness,” she confessed.
“And your greatest strength.”
“But what about my hands. . .”
“You see these?” He held out his hairy mitts for her
inspection. “If I play with these
sausage-fingers, then you can play with those.
No worries.”
Given her own unlikely equipment, Lucy was reassured to find that Zoltán has the hands of a veterinarian, thick and short-fingered, innately sensitive but undeniably earthy; she could almost picture him probing cows with those solid fingers (which can also read human auras with all the delicacy of braille). He could pull a calf with hands like that, tear open the birthing-bag, remove the steaming placenta.
Not for the first time Lucy felt as if she had landed in the middle of a Chagall painting, voluptuous and mystical at the same time. Merry bells ring in Zoltán’s joyous black eyes, but the earthiness of village life is profoundly stamped into his tissues. She could picture him glugging sunwarmed red wine from a leather flask, wiping his brow with the back of his hand, then going back to the rhythmically sweaty dance of pitching hay.
Where does this come from? Why does she hear the unstable beauty of a
hammered dulcimer when he enters the room? Echoes of a past life? Lucy is a Christian and insists she does not believe
in them. A genetic memory? That’s more like it. Old
Lucy is drawn to life, life abundant, life
astounding. She needed Zoltán’s vigor
quite badly. I’m happy about the match,
even though her musician friend David sharply disapproves because Zoltán is probably
the least linear thinker who ever lived. He thinks in voluptuous, three-dimensional,
spiral-shaped curves. David is the
master of flyspeck precision and particularly excels at playing the baroque
repertoire. What drew Lucy to him? The attraction of opposites?
Every once in a while, when she is least thinking of success, Lucy draws her bow exactly right, and notices in her right hand a certain very pleasing vibration. Yes! I want to say to her. Don’t stop now! Hector is finally getting turned on.
But then she loses it again, swears, stamps
her foot. Zoltán shakes his head and
tells her she’s trying too hard, that she should not even be thinking about
success or failure, but only immersing herself in the process. He can hear potential even in her most
dreadful squeaks and groans, and even I can’t fail to notice her fine sense of
pitch and rhythm, which are indicative of a shockingly powerful
sensuality.
Under the prim exterior, she bubbles with
sex. There may be hope for our union
yet.
Rose
at
Had Lucy over yesterday for listening session. We did the Barber and the Brahms violin concertos to please her; then she noticed the long solo oboe passages in each of them. Haven’t seen her in more than a month. Missed her. She’s all wrapped up in these violin lessons, was picking my brain for musical advice, musical philosophy. Looked like she’d lost some weight. I think she’s seeing someone, though she didn’t say much about it.
The weight loss doesn’t look good on her (she
never gained it back after being so sick a few months ago). She’s all bones and angles and obsessive
blue eyes. She calls me a wild-eyed fanatic, but I told her
it takes one to know one. Warned her
that the only instrument more demanding than the oboe is the violin. Myself, wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot
pole. Don’t know why she’s doing this to
herself, what with her father complex/complex father. For Lucy, violin equals Daddy, and by playing
again she’s trying to get Daddy back.
It’s all so transparent But of
course Lucy didn’t want to hear it.
Don’t like the sound of this teacher of hers either, this Zoltán. One of those eclectic types, not systematic at all. I’m surprised he’s from the old European tradition; they’re usually so meticulous. Lucy will get totally screwed up if she doesn’t follow a strictly linear procedure. She doesn’t have a logical enough mind for this Molnàr Method she keeps babbling on and on about. How he is his method, etc. etc.
I’ve heard it all
before. Didn’t tell her this, but Lucy
isn’t really cut out to be a musician and should stick to her writing, even if
probably none of it is ever going to see the light of day. “Oh, I wish I could actually play something,” Lucy said to me
once. “Well, I wish I could write,” I
said. But this is the brain I was born
with. Each to each. Let’s not pollute
things with cross-pollination.
Broke out in hives again after three-and-a-half-hour rehearsal in very hot hall. Wearing wool; must stop, switch to cotton. Under too much pressure to crack the Vaughan Williams concerto for next month. Lucy tells me I need a good wife or at least a steady girl friend. I’ve heard that one before too, too many times. Haven’t had my head fucked around by a female in a couple of years; don’t miss it. Cassie called recently, and I was polite to her. She asked after the cats. But enough is enough. Told Lucy I’m married to my art. She said that something as cold and hard as an oboe must make a lousy bedfellow. Very funny, Lucy, I told her. Hardly har-har.
LUCY’S JOURNAL
Spent yesterday afternoon in a listening
session with David. Every once in a
while I need to go hang out with him.
He’s like biting into a fresh lime, deliciously astringent. I’ve always loved musicians – maybe because I
grew up surrounded by them – and David’s a musician’s musician, almost monastic
in his dedication.
He’s the type of man who doesn’t have sex
for three years running, devoting all his energies to his precious
instrument. Then suddenly something
touches him off, like that encounter in the rehearsal hall with Cassandra
Martin a few years ago, and it’s like a powder keg. He becomes absolutely voracious until he
remembers that he’s married to his instrument and goes running back home to her
again, chastised, even guilty. He has
this fanatic thing about not spilling his seed and probably whacks off wearing
white gloves (if in fact he ever whacks off at all).
Poor David. I swear he looks like he never gets out in the sun, what with that slightly peely, freckly, redheaded skin that looks like it’d burn if you glared at him. He goes go out, but I think he wears a #70 sunscreen or something. He reminds me of a kid I had a crush on in Grade Two, Milan Lazarovich, a weedy little shrimp with intellectual blue eyes behind these impossibly thick, Coke-bottle-bottom glasses.
David
doesn’t even wear glasses, but seems to.
His gaze is one of acid scrutiny, keen but perpetually
disappointed. I love David, but can’t
figure out why. Never in a million years
would I even consider sleeping with him.
In fact it took me two years just to figure out for sure that he’s
straight. Not that I thought he was gay
– just asexual, too married to his precious horn to ever get physically
involved with anyone. Then I found out
he’d had his way with Cassie in a back room at the Orpheum. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The folie
a deux turned into a bizarre sort of menage
a trois.
Cassandra’s in “the band”, of course – the VSO- so fate sort of threw them together. And I know that oboeists and flutists are just fatally attracted to each other So for a little while he was sleeping with Cassie, a neurotic creature who was experiencing a period of what she described as “divine discontent”.
Her solution was to answer an ad in the Georgia Straight placed by a
“bisexual lesbian Mensan artist” out to experiment with the “bi-curious” (bored
heterosexual women who were teetering on the brink). When David found out, as he naturally did, at
first he wanted to rip Zoë’s throat out.
But he ended up sleeping with her, too.
I thought all the tattoos would put him off, but apparently not.
I love David’s place – sort of like an
artist’s studio, all in spotless white, open and airy, with three cats running
all over the place. Girl cats. David openly adores them and gave them names
laden with musical significance. He has
a little shrine set up for practicing, and another corner for his “hobby”,
reedmaking. David always has the finest
espresso, freshly pressed (though he’ll reluctantly water it into Americano for
me), makes his own health bread with no salt or fat, and spends two or three
hours a day doing nothing but listening.
I’ve listened with David before and it is
an experience. Of course it goes without
saying that there is no talking allowed.
Even the cats stop yowling and galloping around and go loaf quietly in a
corner while he cranks up his incredible sound system. If it’s the Dvorák cello concerto, David
becomes the body of the cello, resonating in complete accord, his eyes in the
fanatic unfocused trance of a born musician.
Once I made the mistake of crying during the slow movement (it was,
after all, Jacqueline du Pré) and his eyes flew open with offended
astonishment. To him, music is beyond
mere emotion. It simply is, the essence of all things.
We met at Smith’s Music several years ago,
when I was trying to find a particular piece of piano music (the Notturno from the Grieg Lyric Suite) for Kate. David was standing in the checkout line behind me wearing a look
of closed introversion like the clerks in classical music record stores, an “I
know something you don’t” look. His
hands were full of tiny cardboard boxes which turned out to be reedmaking
parts. To ease the boredom I started to
hum, hardly noticing I was doing it, and at a certain point lost the thread of
the piece and trailed off. But the
melody carried on. It spooked me. I looked around. The man behind me didn’t even react, but kept
on humming.
“What is
that?” I asked him.
“You don’t know?”
“No.
Hey, I just hum ‘em, I can’t identify ‘em.”
“It’s from the second movement of Mahler’s
Symphony No.
“The Resurrection.”
“See, you knew.”
“Are you a musician?”
“Oboe.”
“Really?
Professional?”
He looked a little miffed, but pleased
underneath it all. “VSO.”
“Really!”
I knew I was behaving like a stupid groupie, but couldn’t stop
myself. “My brother Eric plays the
clarinet for the Okanagan Symphony.”
“Clarinet.” David let the three syllables drop in a
triple clunk to the floor. It was an
editorial comment. Obviously he felt
that clarinet didn’t quite qualify as a musical instrument.
“Oboe must be ferociously difficult. All that air forced through such a tiny
little space.”
“It’s a way of life.”
“I think it makes one of the loveliest
sounds in the orchestra.”
“Esthetics are the least of it.”
“What’s all that stuff?”
He paid for his little boxes, half-smiling
indulgently, as if he were talking to a small child, but one he felt rather
fond of. “I make my own reeds. Don’t
trust anyone else’s.”
“No kidding! Eric repairs instruments on the side.”
“Interesting,” he said, with a complete
lack of interest.
“Which way are you walking?” I wondered what on earth I was doing coming
up to a strange man (I mean really
strange; didn’t oboeists develop brain damage from chronic lack of air?) and
striking up a conversation. He wasn’t
even very nice or approachable in the usual way, but something nevertheless drew
me to him. As it turned out, he walked
miles a day for fitness like I do (I could tell by the backpack), and we were
headed the same way, at the same vigorous pace.
The conversation flowed easily. When we parted, I wondered for an awful
moment if he thought I was trying to pick him
up. I had the wild thought that
I’d never see him again and, before we said goodbye, I impulsively handed him
my card.
“’Lucy Sandner’. Good violin name. ‘Writer’.
Ah, an optimist!” His long white
face broke unexpectedly into a delightful, almost pixieish grin.
“Call me a music lover. Look, I hope you don’t think this is too
forward of me, but do you think we could have coffee sometime? I mean, I’m not trying to pick you up or
anything. . . “
He suddenly barked with laughter,
startling me. “I like you, Lucy. You come right out with things. Sure, I’ll take your card. I’m totally ganged up with rehearsals right
now, but. . . “
I never expected him to call, and had
almost forgotten about him, when nearly three months later, Desi Arnaz left a
message on my answering machine:
“Loo-see. . . I deed not forget you. . .
Come to Murchie’s downtown for tea. I
teach you a lesson you never forget! No,
seriously. Is Wednesday at three
okay? See you, Loo-see. Babaloo!”
I collect broken souls as if on a
string. It interests me, the way these
deeply-cracked crystals crookedly refract the light. They’re drawn to me, too, because I long to
lay my hands on them for healing. Oh,
that’s a load of horseshit. I’ve been
hanging around Monika too long. David
and I just naturally liked each other from the start, and in spite of his
oddness, or even because of it, I took to him right away. And so we quickly became good friends: a thing that seldom happens with David, I
surmise. He doesn’t realize this, but he
helps fill the Andrew-shaped space in my heart.
She saw me in the press of people at the
back of the Mean Bean Café and started to wave:
“Monika! Monika!” Then she started jumping up and down like
Baby Roo. Frankly it was a little
embarrassing. For someone who can give
off such a feeling of aloofness, Lucy sure can act like a nut.
When we hugged I had that same old
feeling, like we’d known each other for a couple hundred years. I noticed she scowled with disapproval when I
lit up (I told her I’d quit for good last time we talked). Then she ordered her usual, which must have
at least 400 milligrams of caffeine in it, and dumped half a cup of sugar into
it. She seems to like that syrupy sludge
in the bottom. I know she’s an alcoholic
and compulsively sucks on substances in whatever form she can get. But must she so openly crinkle her brow at my
one and only vice?
We found a booth, and before I even got a
chance to ask her about the new boy friend (who sounds like her polar opposite,
an anti-intellectual, salt-of-the-earth AA type), she wiggled her hand down
into her jeans pocket and fished up an object.
“Monika. How much can you tell
from a pen someone’s been carrying around in their shirt pocket?”
“Is
this Rafe’s?”
“No.”
‘I don’t think it’ll work. A ring or a watch would be much better.”
“Sorry, but I couldn’t quite bring myself
to take Zoltán’s watch.”
“Oh, him.”
‘Try to show a little enthusiasm.”
Lucy gets obsessed. I’ve seen it all before. Obsessed with helping hopeless misfits in AA,
obsessed with the underlying messages in scripture (she goes to two Bible
studies a week and has actually read the whole thing cover-to-cover several
times), obsessed with Kate and her usual round of adolescent turmoil. So now it’s Zoltán, the latest mystery to be
cracked.
“I have to tell you, Lucy, this won’t
yield very good results. You’ve had it
in your jeans pocket, for one thing.”
“But Zoltán carried it around with him for
months before I stole it.”
I reluctantly took the pen, a nice black
retractable model with Allegro Music
School stamped on it in gold ink.
The place was far too noisy for me to properly concentrate.
“It feels warm,” I said.
“Zoltán’s a warm person. Besides, I had it in my pants.”
“Quiet.”
I tried to still my mind to a meditational level amid the babble of
voices. Nothing. I shifted the pen around in my hands. Still nothing.
Then a slight thrill of shock, an almost imperceptible
quiver of energy. “Foxes,” I said. “I see foxes on a farm.”
“Are you sure?”
‘Red foxes. I’m just going to tell you what I’m picking
up without trying to judge it. A woman’s
face, very seamed but kind. She smells
of tea and is wearing a collar made of pale blue lace. I hear something. Someone is pounding on a door. . . “
Lucy sat quietly, for once in her life,
all eyes. When Lucy is all eyes she
looks like a space alien. Those ice-blue
orbs of hers swallow up her entire face.
“I can see this old-fashioned bathtub, the kind with brass feet on it, and it’s all stained brown on the inside. And – I know this doesn’t make sense. People dancing. A whole lot of people. It looks like a wedding or something – yes, I see a couple standing at the front of a small church, both with
dark hair – "
“Zoltán?”
“Shhh.”
I felt a cold ripple of nausea pass through me. I wanted to drop the pen immediately to stop
the rush of impending impressions.
“I can hear the pounding again only this
time it’s louder. He’s standing at the
door and yelling in a language I don’t understand. Then the door bursts open and he runs into
the room.” The smell of fresh blood was
clinging to the back of my throat and I almost felt like gagging. “There’s someone sprawled out on the floor by
the bed. He’s lying on a blue carpet
with a diamond pattern on it. The man
almost throws himself on top of him.
He’s sobbing uncontrollably.” I
dropped the pen on the floor and Lucy jumped.
It took a few minutes for me to pull
myself together. Lucy was biting her
tongue to keep from asking me what it all meant.
“There must have been some sort of tragedy
in his family. The man on the floor
looked like he was dead. I know there
was blood. I’m thinking from a gunshot
wound, but that’s only a guess. I can’t
say for sure.” I lit another cigarette
to calm myself down.
“Could it be Zoltán? The man pounding on the door, I mean.”
“I can’t tell you for
certain. The impressions just come and
it’s hard to analyse them without stopping the flow. I did get a palpable sense of terrible loss,
as if this person went through a long period of despair.”
“Who was the man lying on the floor?”
“I don’t know that either. But the two men were closely connected in
some way. I think they loved each
other.”
“Anything else you picked up?”
“Just the presence of an overwhelmingly
kind older woman, maybe a grandmother.
Somehow I get the feeling she was central to his life, maybe even saved
him in some way. Look, none of this is
set in stone, Lucy. Don’t go drawing the
wrong conclusions.”
“I just want to know more about him.”
“Lucy, the great detective.”
“Or the spy. Mata Hari’s got nothing on me.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Oh God, no. This is much better than love. Love’s a dime a dozen. Cheap, compared to what we have.”
‘Which is?”
“Damned if I know what to call it.”
“Ah, the sacredness of the teacher-student
relationship!”
“Goodbye, Mr. Chips.”
“Dead Poets Society. Oh, Captain!
My Captain!”
Lucy suddenly broke into song: “To sir. . . with. . .love. . . “
Which broke us up completely. Nice to know we can suddenly become so
utterly shallow. After that we talked
about the sidewalk sale down at Coquitlam Centre and the $75.00 fake suede
pants that Lucy got for $29.99: “You’d
swear they were real leather.”
“Kinky,” I said.
It was hard to get much out of her about this Rafe, and she seemed preoccupied, even a little distant, once we ran out of conversation about what she calls “girlie things”. Something’s amiss with Kate, I think. Some problem, not yet out in the open.
Lucy feels guilty about it as usual, the old single Mom thing, trying to hold it all together, do several jobs at once and do them all well. I know she hates working for Runcie & Runcie, but goes on doing it year after year like a racehorse hitched to a plough, working on her novel (titled Better than Life) when she can find the time, once in a while selling a book review or a newspaper commentary so she’ll feel like a published writer: “Just enough success to give me a pain in the ass,” she calls it.
I’ve slogged at my writing
for years now too without results, kneading people’s knotted-up bodies for pay
in my “real” job as a shiatsu massage therapist, feeling all their grief and
woe in my fingertips as their muscles scream out their tension, their fatigue,
their problems with their mothers, their disgust for themselves. I offer a little comfort, that’s all, and try
not to get overwhelmed from all their emotional baggage.
I gave Lucy a freebie once and was astounded
at the degree of muscular tension in her neck and shoulders; she’s wary as a
deer even after five years of therapy and total immersion in AA. She still keeps herself perpetually tensed as
if ready to fight or flee. Will her body
ever let go of this shit? I wonder if the
violin can ease this clenching She’s
making this Zoltán into too much of a guru.
He’s good for her, no doubt, but only in moderation. And even after all
this time Lucy still doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
Music can heal her, I think, but only if
she surrenders to it completely. Right
now she’s treating it like one more Everest (and wouldn’t that make a good
title for a novel?), yet another great conquest. This oddball friend of hers, this David who
likes to sleep with lesbians, fills her head with ideas about the pursuit of
music, as if it’s the holy grail or something.
Why can’t she just relax and enjoy it?
It’s like reading too many sex manuals. You forget to abandon
yourself. Come to that, Lucy does read too many sex manuals, and
lives most of her erotic adventures in her head. Can Rafe change all that? I wish him luck. Something tells me he’s going to need it.
Jesus God.
This can’t be true, but it is true, and I’m going to have to tell Mums
soon because we have to do something about it right away. Or at least I think we do. I don’t know.
Brian is in like total shock, and I can’t
seem to snap him out of it. We have to
make a decision right now, I tell him.
Oh why do you always have to be so in charge of everything? he fires back at me. Because it’s my body! I yell at him. I have control of it! But what about the
baby’s body? he says, and my guts cringe and I realize that there’s someone
else actually living inside me now, totally dependent on me for its very
existence.
It was awful at the walk-in clinic. I went in there alone thinking, “this can’t be
happening, that home pregnancy test must’ve been wrong, a mistake, a false
positive.” So I didn’t even bring Brian,
who isn’t much use to me anyway right now because he looks like he’s been hit
over the head with a two-by-four. I sat
there for over forty minutes shaking all over as mothers with runny-nosed
feverish little kids trooped in and out.
What a great place to get sick, I thought to myself. This must be the most contagious environment
in the world.
Then I had the horrible thought that seven
or so months from now I could have
one of those runny-nosed little brats in my care, sucking on my body for
survival.
I don’t want to think about it. It’s just a blob of cells at this point
anyway, I tell myself. And I know it’s
true. Have I become that brainwashed by
society to think that it could be anything more than that? Then the receptionist calls my name and I
pull myself together, suddenly cool, the way I always get in a real crisis. Maybe it comes from all those years of living
with an alcoholic. I’ve seen Mums do it
too, shut herself down in an instant, get control of the situation. But God knows she had to train herself to
shut down her own pain, just to survive her childhood.
Is that what I’m doing? I don’t like the icy-chrome, white-on-white,
remote atmosphere of a doctor’s office, plastic plants added for phony
cheer. It causes an immediate shutdown
whether I’m in a crisis or not. After an
eternity a white-coated Dr. Jaharwahl comes in with my file. He’s seen me before for routine things like
earache and menstrual cramps, and probably expects something similar.
“I think I’m pregnant,” I tell him right
away, trying to get the worst over with.
“Does your mother know?”
“Of course not. First I have to be sure.”
He tries to modulate his voice, but he
can’t censor the small vertical line forming between his thick black eyebrows,
a crease of disapproval or maybe even distaste.
What a jerk, I’m thinking. His
mind is stuck in the last century, or in some culture half a world away.
“When was your last menstrual period?”
“September
“So it has been about six weeks,” he
calculates on his calendar.
“I want an abortion.”
“What does your mother say?”
“I told you, I haven’t talked to her
yet.”
“We do the test. Then you talk to your mother.” His lips are tight with what looks like
disdain. I don’t even know for sure if
I’m pregnant or not, and already I’m meeting with judgement, disapproval!
Of course it turns out positive. There goes my last hope. This must be what it’s like to be told you have cancer. Dr. J. tells me to at least consider keeping the baby, which is none of his goddamn business anyway. The crisis-anaesthesia is beginning to wear off like dental freezing, and my mind is starting to churn like overheated machinery. What do I do now? If I’m going to do this, I’ll have to act fast.
Might Mums’s doctor be able to
help me? She’s won awards from all these
women’s groups. Mums originally started
seeing Dr. Danforth in
Supposedly I take after her. I’m starting to hope so. I can do without the booze and the mental hospitals, but I’m going to need her grit to get through all this shit. I have to talk to Bri first, then I guess I’m going to have to talk to Mums. I guess I just don’t have the guts to do it completely alone. I can’t see myself having a baby – don’t even want to think of it as a “baby”, as right now it probably looks more like a tadpole, a head and a tail and that’s it.
But it would already have a heartbeat, wouldn’t it? I’ve watched too many National Geographic specials. It’s inside me right this minute, just being. Changing a little bit every day. This little blob of a thing has affected my whole body. My breasts are swollen in preparation to give milk. (Milk, for God’s sake. It’s gross.) Some mornings I have to run to throw up.
Why hasn’t Mums heard me? Denial? I thought she was supposed to be over all
that. Is it a boy or a girl? Would it look like a Brian or a Kate? How does Mums feel about being a grandmother? I hate babies. They scare me half to death. Most of them are so ugly and misshapen when
they’re born, you can hardly believe how ga-ga their mothers are over them, as
if they’re suffering from softening of the brain. I’ve never held one. I never even had a doll when I was a little girl. I liked frogs. I mushed around in the creek
collecting tadpoles so I could watch them turn into bullfrogs before my very
eyes.
But I can’t watch while this thing inside
me turns into a person. I’m barely a
person myself, almost ready to start my real life, my career, my future. I’ve waited all my life to be free, to be on
my own. How can I be free with this
little not-quite-person stuck to my insides with an umbilical cord that must be
fine as a thread? Is it a “sin” to
terminate it? What’s a sin, anyway? Mums says it’s anything that divides you from
grace. But what does she mean by
grace? And what could be graceful about
something that could bring my entire
life to a screeching halt?
If Lucy’s friend David is right, and sex is merely sublimated music, then the spirit of music has penetrated this place to the point of terrible mischief, or should I say near-disaster. Lucy didn’t understand it when strange things began to happen in the house about six years ago, at the time that Kate hit puberty.
In fact Lucy had a terrible
feeling that she was becoming spirit-possessed.
She had taken one anthropology course about shamanism and was now
convinced that she knew everything there was to know about possession (face it,
this sister of mine can be an arrogant little pipsqueak). She became almost persuaded that demons were
swirling around her body looking for a place of entry. The psychiatrists were starting to label her
“schizo-affective”, which came harrowingly close to my own condition while I
walked this earth. Lucy began to find
samples of automatic writing all over the house, with no memory at all of
having written them. The appliances in
the house were acting strangely: the FM radio would suddenly stop playing when
Lucy entered the room. (Kate’s or
Michael’s entry had no effect.) The TV
turned off randomly by itself, which seemed like a mere mechanical failure
until it suddenly began to turn itself on.
One day Lucy’s old computer, a stone-age Tandy which she affectionately
nicknamed “Jessica” after one of her favorite actresses, began to spew out
random gibberish, as if the very printer were possessed. Then the fax machine received a garbled
message from the planet Nowhere, impossible to comprehend or trace.
A queer electric current crackled in the
air: the unstoppable force of sex. Kate’s puberty hit early, and it hit
hard. It was a strange and stormy time,
throwing her body and mind into complete chaos for a time. Michael was still on the scene, though frazzled,
and was able to lend his calming energy to the searing, snapping atmosphere. Which was a good thing, because Lucy quite
frankly was then as mentally unstable as she would ever become. She brushed up against the black shadow of
schizophrenia, the great unraveller, and it chilled her to the core. She would never quite forget how it felt to
breathe the very air of madness.
Kate’s stormy puberty marked the beginning
of a raw new energy in the house. I
could certainly feel it, and as I hung around near the ceiling (causing Max the
mad Manx to go completely crazy), I didn’t like what I felt. The whole house was vulnerable to intrusion
from wickedly playful trickster-spirits who sometimes have a rough and nasty
sense of humor. Lucy landed in hospital
again after a particularly awful bout of self-mutilation and the doctors began
to talk about long-term care in Riverview.
At least it would stop her drinking.
She snapped out of it as usual, but barely, and at that point I truly
feared that the frail thread of her sanity was about to snap for good.
It didn’t happen, paradoxically, in part because of the roaring avalanche of sexual energy which now coursed through Kate’s body and sang in the air all around her – a force which insists on striving towards wholeness and health. Kate and Lucy always kept talking, at least when Lucy was clear-minded enough to communicate, not too bogged-down in the Mellaril she was forced to take to keep her mind more or less in one piece.
But Lucy feared this raw thrust of
freewheeling libido, mainly because her own sexual nature had been so deeply
fractured by abuse. Literally, her body
was split, her rectum torn wide open by repeated and merciless sodomy. Not exactly something you talk about around
the dinner table, so it went unnamed for decades. The trauma split her physical being like an axed
log in a branching upward crack that penetrated right through her heart. It is this Valentine-shaped crack that Zoltán
notices when he teaches her. With his
extraordinary degree of psychic sensitivity he cannot fail to be aware that the
pain for Lucy can still be excruciating.
Zoltán senses a numbing Arctic chill in this small and icy crack, along
with the voracious suck of an intense psychic vacuum which may never be
completely filled.
Over the years, a lot of things have been
sucked down into that crack: all kinds
of addictive substances (particularly alcohol, Lucy’s favorite poison),
self-help books, elderly European psychiatrists with heavy accents, religious
belief systems (including that “New Age crap” she scorns), abandoned
manuscripts of novels and plays, multiple causes (Lucy loves the downtrodden),
and even one foolhardly extramarital fling with a 19-year-old boy. Predictably, none of it worked. Lately she has begun to feel that the hollow
space where her heart should be is in the exact shape of a violin, like the
sculptured and curvaceous cutout inside her green-velvet instrument case. Zoltán isn’t too sure about all this, but
will try to help in whatever way he can, being large of heart (not to mention a
natural healer). In another culture he
would have become the Shaman, a medicine man, purveyor of sacred music and
personal physician rolled into one.
Zoltán also knows that something is terribly wrong at home, but is far too considerate to ask about it. He senses a hard lump in Lucy’s throat, an attempt to close down a boil of panic. The overwhelming force of Kate’s sexuality has crystallized into an infant – or at least the mere beginnings of one, the hope of a person. But not all hopes can be realized. It just doesn’t happen that way. Lucy has a terrible time with the idea of deliberately terminating hope.
But she
also knows that Kate can’t handle a baby.
Not on top of a traumatic childhood.
Brian the boyfriend, sweet but not particularly bright, isn’t much good
for anything at this point. I can’t
influence events or even decisions, except in the most subtle and indirect
way. The thought of death, the death of
a tiny potential grandchild, triggers in Lucy a panic-stricken memory of my own
death. Grief can be like a game of
dominoes, the first flicked tile ploughing down the entire structure from
beginning to end, each toppled square representing a hardened mass of denied
pain. Think of the energy it takes to
keep it all precariously balanced, prevent it from crashing down in the storm
of a crisis.
Lucy, Lucy! Sometimes I think I was the lucky one. Though my death was supposedly an accident,
it was a way of fleeing the scene. Lucy
has decided to stay and tough it out.
And now it becomes hard. She
wants to call Michael, will probably call him soon because she still feels
something for him (another domino). She
agonizes for Kate, who will find her own brave way through the wilderness. She is afraid to talk to anyone and doesn’t
want to go back to Elsie at $90 a pop (because why pay for something she can
handle herself? Lucy is nothing if not
practical.)
I won’t be far away. Love bursts the bonds of earthly time and the
fragility of the body, and our connection is indestructible. She needs my essence hovering near as a
reminder that, no matter what she might be thinking, there is no such thing as
death.
Lucy hasn’t come in to talk to me for quite a long time now. Her life has been going along fairly smoothly for the past couple of years, and there has been no need. But things have taken a turn towards the chaotic again. I don’t think I will ever forget the impression she made on me when she first came marching into my office about five years ago, clutching a sheaf of papers almost an inch thick.
She’d just completed writing out
her Step Four in the twelve-step process of AA (“Made a searching and fearless
moral inventory of ourselves”), and was ready to proceed with Step Five (“Admitted
to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our
wrongs”). For Lucy, this was much more
than a confessional of all the ways in which she’d screwed up during her years
of drinking. This was a magnum opus, a
biography, her life on paper, and she was absolutely determined to spill the
poison, gain absolution and get on with the next phase all in the space of
about an hour and a half.
I could see the terror in her eyes under
the mask of steely poise. The people who
don’t cry when they’re doing their
Step Five are the ones who concern me the most.
Lucy isn’t a crier, at least not until she is absolutely squeezed, and
in this case she kept pretty rigid control over herself as she went over all
the details of an agonizingly painful life.
Growing up, Lucy was a child of chaos, the youngest in a brilliant but terribly disturbed family. She had only one ally – Andrew, a near-genius who eventually went irretrievably crazy and died young, I think in a fire. Her mother was a sort of non-presence, a blank, a void, and to get her basic needs met she had to make do with a lick and a promise from her overbearing older sister Allison, whose own life later took a turn for the disastrous.
Her
father was an abomination. I still think
so, even though Lucy loves him deeply and still strains towards
forgiveness. I know that’s the line I’m
supposed to be pushing here – forgive and forgive, not just seven times but
seventy times seven! Keep at it until
you get it right, in other words (which is what the mathematics of that statement
really means). But if this were my own
situation, I’d never forgive that bastard his wickedness in a million
years. I don’t tell Lucy that, but I
think she knows.
You think I never go through conflict as a
minister? I tell her. It pulls me apart sometimes, but the right
path is the right path, and somehow God always helps me when I need Her the
most. Lucy doesn’t want or need me to be
a paragon, so I’ve always levelled with her.
I might as well, because she has the kind of perception that pierces
right through phoniness.
She was tight-lipped and businesslike when
she came in the other day, not crying, and I knew that she was facing a
full-scale crisis. I noticed she’d
seemed white-faced and remote in choir last Sunday, not singing with her whole
body in her usual radiant way. So at
last the problem was coming out. In
typical Lucy fashion she spit it right out:
“Kate’s pregnant. She wants an
abortion.”
It’s impossible to keep emotion out of
this “issue” (as we so laughingly call it), and dangerous even to try. There are alive human nerve-endings running
all through this “issue”, ocean-deep feelings about life and death, love and
continuity, things that Kate won’t begin to fully comprehend for another twenty
years. Yet Lucy still believes fervently
in a woman’s right to choose.
That is what she thinks. What she feels is another matter entirely, a
swirling Pandora’s box that she is reluctant to allow herself to open.
Kate’s a tough little customer, but her mother will never stop worrying about her, agonizing over her secretly because she’s all too aware that she’ll always be the child of an alcoholic. Lucy knows that early unwanted pregnancy can be a sign of unheeded emotional need, a yearning for love in whatever form.
Sometimes I wish Lucy didn’t have the
capacity to understand all this so well, because it tears her apart. At least Kate was able to come to her right
away, as soon as she knew. Lucy sat down
hard on the end of Kate’s bed when she broke the news, but otherwise remained
calm. And she couldn’t help but notice
the contradictory things flickering across Kate’s fresh, expressive face: terror, anger, confusion, awe, excitement, and
even (paradoxically) love. A baby,
growing inside me! Imagine that. “I’ve already made my mind up,” Kate said,
Lucy-like. “I want an abortion. I have
the right to choose.”
It sounded matter-of-fact, but Lucy knew
what was really going on. This was a
decision like a blade cutting through flesh, scalpelling the nerves of doubt. This is the way it will be. Now suture it up.
I see where Kate gets it.
Lucy tries to close the lid on things with finality, even though all
those years of therapy (too many, I sometimes think) must have taught her that
nothing is ever totally resolved. Lucy
thinks Kate should get some counselling, at least short-term, and her only
response to this idea is, “Mums, I’m not like you.” True enough, but Kate’s human, and she needs
to talk, like everyone else. Lucy fears
the impact of her decision will become encapsulated, shoved away in a corner of
the soul where it will cause a thin scream of ache for the rest of her
life. No one would know this better than
Lucy, who is such a veteran of that kind of pain.
“What would Jesus do?” is something Lucy
asks herself over and over again. She
loves the brilliance of the Christ, his subtlety, his tenderness and dazzling
wit. But Lucy’s faith goes far deeper
than admiration. Jesus is God for her,
and when life closes in on her she wonders how he would feel, what his words of
wisdom might be. “He’d probably call me
a sinner and condemn me to hell,” Lucy said in a flat voice, sunk deep in a
despair that was temporarily tearing her away from her God.
“Would Jesus condemn lovely Kate to hell,
Lucy? What do you think?” I asked her.
“Oh no.
Not my Jesus. I couldn’t be a
Christian, Marian, I couldn’t, not if God could condemn my nearest and dearest
to eternal suffering.”
“She’s having her hell right now,” I told
her, not sure where the words were coming from but trusting them. “Jesus weeps with her. And with you.
But he can’t fix it. We’re all
blessed with free will.”
“You mean cursed.”
“Endowed, then.”
“Another thing,” Lucy went on. “I can’t stop thinking about Andrew. The fire.
The way no one knew if it had been a suicide or an accident. The funeral, everyone getting plastered and
maudlin. It was disgusting. And then that jerk of a minister saying his
death was ‘part of God’s plan’.”
“One grief triggers another.”
“Well, the whole row of dominoes is
falling down right now. How do I act
like I’m strong so Kate won’t panic?
She’s afraid I’ll crumble like I used to.”
“You don’t have to ‘act’ strong. You are
strong. Take deep breaths, keep moving
forward, talk to her, and listen. It’s
what you do best.”
She withdrew to the sanctuary by herself after our talk. In a while I heard the sound of weeping and knew that everything would somehow be okay. Or at least as okay as it could ever be after an irrevocable change.
LINK TO PART THREE: A Singing Tree (Part Three of Six)
