Whatever the neighbourhood may once have been, we will both grow old and die there, of course, Henry and I—in an earnest little house in the middle of a gently sloping road lined with houses that face each other across the pavement like well-behaved dinner guests. Lucy says she envies me. Rose disapproves of my lack of enthusiasm. Rose believes melancholy is a function of narcissism, since it based on a point of view held by one who believes his or her own perspective to be paramount. Easy for her. She found a man who doesn’t drive her mad, lives in a modest little home in a modest little neighbourhood, and remains blissfully unimpregnated. There is a second child growing inside of me. I am never ever alone! And I shall soon be confined to a respectable house in the middle of the slope that is Barn Rise, with a door with no jolly bell announcing the arrival of a customer, those dear eccentric souls who held off as long as they could, lighting their evenings with gentle ancient flame rather than livewire. The hours will, I reckon, stretch long and amorphous between Henry’s departure in the morning and his return in the evening. In the morning he will be full of purpose and glad to go to work, where he is lord and master. At night, perhaps after a visit to the pub or to the girlie shows at Betty’s Burlesque with his old cockney mates, he will come home self-righteously weary. I will have watched him go, and watched him come back again. He will ask what I did all day to keep myself busy, and I will want to reach out and slap him, but will likely mumble something daft about doing laundry instead.
The baby yowls and yearns, its odd toothless mouth gaping. Gums can be as fierce as teeth, when you consider the hardness and the inherent power of the jaw. He nips, sometimes, when I go to change his nappy. And my god, there are a lot of nappies. They fill the room with a strange clean stench. Mum says if the smell isn’t hideous it’s because I only breastfeed. I say, why worry about yet another implement when there’s a perfectly good dispensary permanently attached to my body? God forbid that we should want to go anywhere, the world of paraphernalia it takes to leave the house.
Suddenly, just like when I used to meet my own eye in the glass counter at the store and think about modern art, and in that moment feel myself to be part of something bigger and more grand than what I know, with this child I feel my religion. The ache in my back speaks to me in Yiddish. The animal noises I made when I went into labour sounded like they came from deepest Lithuania, not North London. And oh God the circumcision. After I fainted they took me to the sunroom at the back of the house, only it was late already and I could only stare through the ivory lace curtains at the dark sky. Sunrooms, if kept well warmed, are effective by moonlight as well; indeed it was the first time I felt the new house truly embrace me.
Rose’s babylessness isn’t because they want one and it hasn’t happened yet—she says they simply can’t be bothered. He’s got his council job and his chess club and his Socialist meetings. She’s got her job at the library. She goes to the meetings too, meets all sorts of lively people and learns all sorts of worldly things. She tries to explain some of it to me when we meet for our lunches and films. I try to follow, but the ideas seem so hard and clear, like shards of crystal, and I am so fleshy and soft and milky right now that there doesn’t seem to be anywhere for me to put things like that. But I hold onto them as well as I can, and take them out later after the baby’s been fed and lolls peacefully in his cot, and I try to link them together into something that makes sense. Rose is so sweet and patient with me sometimes, and I can’t imagine why. I would never be like that if I had such a silly goose for a twin sister, I’m certain of it. I would distance myself and shun her and pretend she wasn’t mine.
Henry’s parents are coming to tea tomorrow. I shall have to see to it that everything is perfect or face a massive row. Hair, nails, house, child. Bloody wretched tea set with a pattern of blue roses. Events like this make me want to flee. I know I’m supposed to rise to the occasion but sometimes I honestly can’t be bothered. (Can’t be arsed, hisses the imp at my ear.) There’s still tension between Henry and his dad despite everyone’s best behaviour, and I wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to toss propriety aside just for once, in the name of Sanity, to eschew (that’s another new word from Lucy—she came round yesterday) the usual get-togethers that only seem to make things worse. Just once. Just for a change. No one ever suggests it out loud, though I can’t be the only one thinking it.
The cause of the tension is that Henry’s father believes that Henry tried to replace him with a machine at the family cabinet-making business, which Abie started himself. Brought it over piecemeal, in fact, much like the old chandelier, in his proud little Polish cart with the name emblazoned on the side in gleaming black Yiddish letters, though of course Henry later modified the name so it sounded more English. I don’t think Henry ever really meant to replace his dad. He just wanted to modernize, but the old man took it as an attempted coup, and I doubt that he will ever change his mind. He’s an old man with old ways from the old country, and he sometimes fires off such a look from across the table you’d think Henry would notice, flinch, blush, indicate some sort of subservience—but he never does. The boy is oblivious as a cinder block, always has been. It’s one of the things that attract me to him the most, as it did Mum. He’s so terribly unlike me.
Henry’s mother remains a bit of a mystery. She straddles the conflict like some insentient bridge, managing to avoid the anger of either husband or son. If Abie ever saw her as a willing accomplice in the machine-purchasing incident, he never lets on. Or maybe Henry waved some sort of red cape, attracting all the old man’s bullish rage onto himself, so sparing her. I dream that one day Henry will spend some of that gallantry on me, and it will revive me so much that I will shed all knowledge of bitterness and of the fierce little animal with the sharp, sharp claws; my girlish self will be returned to me, and the brackish waters in which I swim will be suffused with light – rendered translucid.
December 15, 2008
Goose Lane Editions Launches New Online Media Resources
December 15, 2008
New From Gaspereau Press
