The book of eve, p.6
The Book of Eve, page 6
Near MacNab’s brick rear, I navigated carefully around the crowd of garbage tins. Near one of them lay a small plant in a smashed clay pot. It couldn’t have been there long, because it clung still to its clod of earth, and the leaves had just begun to wilt. Rather nice, glossy leaves, elegantly narrow. Finding that purse the day before had sharpened my eye, or I might never have noticed it. Nice to find things. Specially things nobody else seemed to want.
With a quick glance round to make sure no psychiatrists were looking, I scooped up the plant and its earth, a messy handful, and bundled myself inside with it. Anybody watching would have thought me guilty — or crazy. But it was a good plant, too good to throw away. Put it into a jar or tin and give it a drink (then have one myself), and it would do well in the sun over the kitchen sink. Maybe one of these days I might find a whole pot for it. Surprising what you could find if you looked. People threw away the oddest things. Imagine throwing away a plant, when you think of all the dead things carefully kept, like photo albums and hats and furs.…
No, from now on I would keep a sharp eye out for things to find. A hobby. Therapy, Neil.
No doubt there was something wrong — even sick — in a woman who could discard such items as a husband’s pain and a son’s worry, and adopt instead a mute green creature with roots for brains. I didn’t even know the thing’s name. But that was why the life of it was so satisfactory. It was anonymous and impersonal, both great things.
I poured out some sherry and looked into its golden eye. Good-bye, Burt. Good-bye, Neil. Bless you for everything, and good-bye.
The plant looked in good heart, packed into an old soup tin and well watered. My wine glowed all the way down. I looked around and felt grand and snug, wonderfully alone.
A few days later the sky opened and snow began to cataract down on the city. As dusk came on, a raging wind drove the soft fall into blind, stinging clouds. My little radio reported paralysing traffic tie-ups, hundreds of commuters stranded, cars abandoned all along Sherbrooke Street. Even down in my cave, I huddled into several sweaters; the wind hissed and banged against the windows and a little drift of dry snow even managed to invade the bathroom sill.
I was glad I’d done my bit of shopping earlier and had enough in the house to eat for awhile, because without my winter boots I might have to stay inside for days. However, this didn’t bother me much. Had recently used my two bus tickets to visit the public library at Atwater and brought home a nice armful of books — things I’d wanted to read for years, or reread, and somehow never got round to. War and Peace, for instance, and Middlemarch, Thurber’s Is Sex Necessary?, Chaucer and King Lear and Madame Bovary. Felt like a millionaire with these chaps in a row by my bed. Not that it turned out to be escape literature, though. A nice cosy read may have been what I had in mind, but it’s not what I got. A third eye seemed to have opened somewhere in my head, in fact, and I saw things in these books I’d never perceived before — things that were far from soothing. I guess Auden was right when he said a real book reads us. I’d read Lear before, for instance, and never found anything there except an irritating old bugger who caused a lot of trouble. But now I saw that what most writers appear to brood on most is the knotted-together web of responsibility and concern that holds people together in society. All my books seemed to be about what private people do to public things like duty and responsibility. Made me feel literature uncomfortably close to life, for the first time. The last thing I wanted was to know that Emma was me; and this was a hell of a night to be reading about Lear naked in the storm. Poor crazy old thing, throwing away everything he had; the whole universe punished him to death for that. I suppose he became human along the way, but was it worth it? And what if, like me, he’d become detached and neutral — not more human but less? Would that make his story a comedy instead of a tragedy?
Around eleven o’clock the wind seemed worse than ever, and I padded out to the kitchen to see whether snow was getting in at the window there. Not much was, but it was so cold even the bugs had retired. Peering out between my hands to inspect the storm, I made out a rounded shape pressed to the glass outside, and when the current gust subsided, recognized the black tom of the lane crouching there, not engaged tonight in amour, only trying with some difficulty to survive. I forgot Lear thankfully and squinted out again, wondering why the stupid cat chose this exposed place to huddle in, when he might have found a cranny out of the wind. Thought cats were so shrewd. But maybe too much fornication had dulled his wits. Or weakened his legs. I tapped the glass sharply.
“Go round the other side of the house, you sex maniac,” I told him. The tapping roused him; he half stood up, and then I saw why he was in no mood to travel; one of his front paws was a shapeless mass — crushed by a car, perhaps. Poor old tom. He’d never make it through the night, and he seemed to know it. He looked in at me, straight in the eyes — a realist’s hard look that asked for nothing and promised nothing, only said, “I have no hope.”
I went and got my coat. Not a cat-lover by any means, but I’d never be able to sleep with that poor wretch dying right at my elbow. The cellar door giving onto the lane outside was jammed, so after a short grapple with it that failed, I went upstairs, let myself out into the maelstrom, and with difficulty began to flounder through the drifts of snow at the side of the house. It was incredibly cold. The wind sucked away my breath maliciously and tore at my hair. The deep snow gulped my legs to the knee. On a patch of exposed ground freakishly left bare, a slick of ice brought me down with a loud, low-comedy thump. So winded I couldn’t get up for a minute, and what’s more, in the shock I’d wet my pants. Even Lear didn’t lose that much dignity. “Go on back in, you lunatic,” I told myself angrily.
But having made it this far, I thought I might as well go on. A few more yards and through the whirlwind I could see the tom huddled against the window. When I managed to get hold of him in half-frozen hands, he snarled and hissed, the ungrateful bastard, and tore the front of my coat besides, with the claws he could still use. By the time I’d struggled back into the house and got him downstairs, we hated each other as if we’d been acquainted for years.
I dumped him in the kitchen while I got into some dry pants and stockings, and when I went back, he snarled from the remotest corner he could find. Offered him a bowl of warm milk, but he wouldn’t touch it. His coat was staring, the smashed paw bled oozily onto the linoleum. When I got my thickest towel and dried him a bit, he snarled again, but common sense or exhaustion made him accept the favour. Now I looked at him more closely, it seemed improbable that he’d survive the night after all; he crouched there on the floor, eyes half closed, with a look of defeat.
“Well, it’s up to you now,” I told him. “Cheer up, old Romeo. Never say die.” To that end I made him up a bed with a couple of towels on my new extravagance — a cut-rate drugstore hot-water bottle, which I’d planned to use myself that night to defy the foul fiend.
He crept up and crouched on this eventually, with only a perfunctory snarl or two, and seemed to doze. After an interval (when I was safely out of the room) he even lapped a bit of the milk. But his breathing was wheezy. Pneumonia would probably get him, even if nothing else did. And me too, in all likelihood, I thought with a shiver. Nothing more could be done for old tom, so I crept into bed. Dozed off soon. Storm still yelling and banging around in a tantrum out there. Toward daybreak I woke suddenly to wonder where it had all gone. The wind had died at last, and there wasn’t a murmur in the whole paralysed, shrouded city. Only from the kitchen came a fitful, hoarse, rasping purr.
When you’re snowbound and have a stamp, it begins to seem necessary to write a letter. For a while, though, I couldn’t decide to whom. It would have been nice to write to Kim; always easy to be close and frank and natural with her, in spite of our relationship and the half-century gap in our ages. We’d never tried to force each other into roles; it was always possible to talk or be as companionable in silence, and we never trespassed on each other’s sensitive areas, because we had the same ones. But a letter was different; language on paper becomes so formalized and self-conscious; so public, somehow. Kim might even feel she ought to show it to her parents. Certainly they would consider it addressed more to them than to her. So not Kim. As for Burt, what could I possibly send him but silence? And Pat? What a weird notion. He would have forgotten my very name years and years ago. And all I could say to him, anyway, was the sort of thing never said in letters: “It was only vanity. Also, of course, vexation of spirit. But never love.” Never, though it took me forty years to realize that. And I was less prepared now than I ever was before to say what love is, so there wasn’t much point in writing him at all.
“Sincerely not yours: Eva.”
No; there was only one person I could perhaps say something to in a letter.
Dear May,
I have gone underground. Perhaps it wouldn’t occur to them, they are both so literal, but just possibly Neil or Burt has been in touch with you, full of indignation and righteous wrath. Because I ran away and am hiding. Are you shocked? No, you always had too much sense of humour to be shocked at anything. Which is the chief reason I always liked you so much. Of course, to be fair, they can’t afford to see anything funny in their mother and wife behaving in this crazy, stubborn way. But though you and I were so close, we could always laugh at each other; there was always enough detachment for that. Will you ever forget how we met at the school dance, the one when that Chemistry man was your date, and he’d given you the most enormous corsage of blue, red, and yellow flowers all wound up in broad pink ribbon. It was so superbly hideous that the minute our eyes met we both became victims of suppressed hysterics and had to retire to the Ladies’ for half an hour.
But it always was the thing I admired most about you — the detachment that made life a joke to you so much of the time. It kept you safe and made you happy walking in your chosen, narrow way. I used to think, rather enviously, it was not being married that made it possible for you to be so serene. My life with Burt seemed so chaotic, painful, and raw by comparison, and I lost the art of laughing very soon. That’s why, you see, this underground place of mine that I’ve found seems like such an Eden: is it possible that being turned out of paradise is heaven?
It’s the first privacy, really, for me, ever. A grown-up daughter still living at home with her parents has no real privacy. There wasn’t much, either, in the competitive mill of teaching, and less in the race of sex — no time in all that for any real aloneness or detachment, God knows.
As for marriage, what can one say too devastating about its awful proximities and involvements? (And rewards, of course.) Or motherhood with its boring, exhausting servitude? (And even better rewards?) The whole thing is just servitude to some enormous machine. And now I’m free. Alone. Hidden down here. Marvellous.
Remember that awful girl with spots at high school — Blossom? — and how we had fits after she told us that music was the true meaning of life, and then we found out all she could play was a tune called “Whispering Hope” on the G string of her violin? Well, I have a fellow-feeling these days with old Bloss. Almost as pretentious with all my words, and every bit as ridiculous. A beginner at seventy, an amateur of the rawest sort.
But it’s rejecting so much I once valued that I think is so important. And for that you have to be alone. Make yourself alone, that is. Leave all you have and go underground. Of course it’s squalid here. Ugly, uncomfortable. Not respectable. Or moral. Or “Normal.” It’s a totally selfish state of being, negative, even destructive. Don’t ask me what can come of it. “Come, Sweet Death” was Blossom’s second tune, remember. But I’m living.
Or am I in the grip of some kind of aberration? If it is, you’ll understand it. How I’d like to talk to you, one of our long natters I used to enjoy so much. Your talent was for marginal comment on solemn subjects like Art or Moral Re-Armament which took place without words. You could turn the bath taps on with your toes, and play “La Ci Darem la Mano” by blowing into empty bottles, and knacks like these make me feel you would have the right perspective on my little adventure.
I won’t see you again, my dear, but here is this letter with love.
Folded the page up carefully. And then, for some reason, put my head down and bawled, hard, for the first time since all this began.
It was days before the city dug out from the great drifts glittering like salt in an arctic sun. Meanwhile there was frozen silence and stillness everywhere. My place was more subterranean than ever with every window cataracted; I had to keep lights on all day, and it got hard to remember when night stopped and day began.
The old tom was glad enough in this interval to doze and recuperate. For diversion he licked the healing paw and hissed at me if I trespassed too near. When he could limp efficiently, he used a bit of plant earth I put out for him on newspaper, but he did this with an air of condescension, and ate what I provided only when I was out of the room, in case I should think him sentimental. But we were cooped up there together so long, I was glad of even his dour company. Quite normal people, after all, talk to cats where they wouldn’t have a word to say to a bit of ivy in a pot.
Food supplies ran very low. No milk for tom eventually. Then, at last, Findlay’s shovel flashed, a feeble, valiant banner in the pale sunshine, and a hole appeared in the white mask at the bathroom window. Tom yelled at me imperiously, and I managed, by standing in the tub and whacking the window-frame, to open a space wide enough to let him wriggle out. Off he hopped into the snowy day with a jaunty switch of the tail, and never said goodbye. Sensible creatures, cats. No point, really, in gratitude.
He left me with a bit of wanderlust myself, so I bundled up well and ventured an excursion to buy food. Outside, the light was one great dazzle and with the zero wind it all but blinded me. Felt disturbingly insecure because of this and other problems — no sand had yet been laid on the side streets and it was murderously slippery underfoot, specially for a fat old woman without any snowboots. Twice I fell, not lightly, and tore down the hem of my coat; the second time my bag of groceries fell too, and tins rolled off briskly in various directions, to the loud delight of some teen-aged louts on the corner. By the time I got home, a very unpleasant fit of the trembles was on me, and it took quite a while to wear off. The fact was, for the first time I was afraid. In Montreal, winter is the only season. The streets might well stay like this till the end of March. If I couldn’t get out to shop and so on, then I couldn’t stay independent, and would have to admit defeat. Accept the end of it all. And all because I had no goddam boots!
The problem nagged and nagged me. I slept badly. Appetite disappeared. The row of books looked at me primly in their neat, unanimous row. “Well,” they said, “how about it? Is no man an island? Is freedom bootless?” I thought and thought till my ears ached, but there just wasn’t any solution. I had not quite four dollars to spare for essential food till my next cheque, and that would not begin to buy boots. Getting to the Salvation Army second-hand place (even if I knew where that was) would cost bus fare — sixty cents more. A bargain basement would have cheap rubbers or those plastic things to pull over shoes, but there was no warmth in them, and they were slippery too; no use at all. If only Burt had been the kind of easygoing husband with charge accounts here and there, I could have used one, but he’d always refused to have any at all; said they encouraged impulse-buying. Good old Burt, always so right.
No, there just wasn’t any answer I could see. Morale sank to zero. I listened to a lot of FM music, but no inspiration, practical or otherwise, came of it. For the first time this total isolation of mine seemed rather silly: if there’d been anyone to talk to, perhaps an idea might have occurred; naturally the vine and the cockroaches had nothing useful to suggest. Brooded in great gloom till groceries got very low again — so low it was apparent I’d soon have to surrender. Of course, I could have gone home and taken my boots — but there was no use kidding myself I’d ever be able to get away again, not with Burt there filling the place up with suffering and reproaches. Those clocks with prim hands over their eyes would reclaim me, the spinet desk would need polishing, there would be letters for me and my best red wool back from the cleaner’s … the world can’t end twice.
The only practical alternative was a call to Neil — an appeal for help. He’d never refuse a few dollars — no need to agitate him by explaining what for. That would mean seeing him, though. And that was as bad, somehow, as the thought of going back to N.D.G. I’d mended the ripped-down hem of my coat, but tom’s damage to the front was incurable, and flung-up slush from a car one mild day had stained part of the skirt with salt so badly that sponging wouldn’t move it. And even if I could afford it, how could the thing go to the cleaners unless I slept there? I just couldn’t let Neil see me looking like this. It was different before, deterioration hadn’t really set in then, and I had more confidence, too. My old skin still fitted, somehow. But it made me writhe to think he would feel sorry for me; also that he’d have that satisfaction people get when they pity those who deserve their problems. I felt as if I’d pay any price but that.
Eventually, one bright morning, I heard a light rapping noise that brought me in a hurry to the kitchen window in my nightgown. It was water dropping from above in long silver flashes: the sun was melting the fur ledge of snow on window-sills overhead. My heart gave a jump. If it were that mild, I could go out. Even with my talent, it would be hard to fall down in slush. Waited impatiently till noon. Excited, got dressed and stepped out, breathing in the wet, fresh air with greed. The streets were now a mush of sand, salt, and melting snow; walking was quite easy, though of course it completed the murder of the poor old shoes.
