The Age of Hope Page 12

  The clinic turned out to be a small two-storey house that had no sign on the front. Hope and Maxine were led through a kitchen to a room that resembled a hospital operating room, like the ones Hope had given birth in. She was dry-mouthed and worried, imagining with each step that she would be caught. She wanted to ask Maxine how she had ever managed to find this place, but then a nurse appeared and spoke to her as if she were the mother, and she went along with the charade and signed the consent forms. Maxine had given her the money earlier, to make it look as if she were paying, and she pulled out the envelope and thrust it at the nurse, who took it willingly. This surprised her. The whole scene smelled illicit. She left with Judith and they went for breakfast, returning two hours later to pick up Maxine, who was groggy and pale. They put her to bed in the hotel, and Judith stayed with her while Hope drove around the city aimlessly, imagining herself as a criminal. By the time they arrived home Sunday evening, Maxine was chipper, feeling quite well, and able to walk up the driveway to her parents’ house and disappear inside. For two weeks, Hope waited for a phone call, for the world to crash down around her head, but it never happened. She saw Maxine one afternoon in the kitchen, eating grilled cheese with Judith, and Maxine called out, “Hello, Mrs. Koop,” and for a moment Hope wondered if the whole trip had been dreamed. Was she the only person in the world who suffered dread?

  Two weeks later she drove across the river and up Highway 75 and then west towards Winkler, where she checked herself in and confessed to her psychiatrist that she was an agent of death. She carried in her head a line of poetry: “There’s Grief of Want / and Grief of Cold,— / A sort they call ‘Despair.’“ She thought that this might have come from her mother. Or perhaps Emily, because the words were cryptic and dark.

  She stayed a month at Winkler, had one treatment of electric shock therapy, told her psychiatrist everything about herself—her actions, her thoughts, her fears—worked with him assiduously to find a balance regarding her medication, and returned to Eden only to find that the children were indifferent to her homecoming, as if they suspected that she might leave once again, without warning. At the age of forty-one, a stranger in her own home.

  3

  Age of Profit

  Roy was now making a lot of money. The dealership, with its new location, was flourishing. And so, feeling flush and hopeful, Roy suggested that the family look for a cottage. Eventually, they found one on nearby Falcon Lake, close to the Ontario border, where many residents from Eden already had cottages and summer homes. A motorboat was acquired, and then a sailboat, a sixteen-foot catamaran that Hope attempted to learn to operate one summer and then gave up on in frustration. She preferred to sit on the dock and drink white wine and read while the children played around her. She had discovered John Fowles and Joan Didion. Both of these writers took her to places far from her life in Eden. In 1971, Judith graduated from high school and moved to the city to attend university. She had reattached herself to Angela Shroeder, with whom she would share an apartment. And Hope still saw Emily, who had dumped the restaurateur three years earlier, after, in her words, a glut of fine food and great sex. “The problem was he had no interest in monogamy,” Emily explained. “I prefer a man whose wiener stays at home. If you get my drift.”

  Emily’s vulgarity was refreshing. Hope wondered how she had managed to live in Eden all these years and survive the orderly discussions about linen tablecloths, the latest recipe for marshmallow salad, knitting, or trips south to Fargo. With Emily there might be some gossip, but within a few minutes the talk veered towards the conflict in Vietnam, sexual politics, psychoanalysis, and then, by the time Emily was finishing her third gin and tonic, to confessions and intimacies that made Hope feel she was part of a very small sisterhood.

  Once a week during the winter months, they had lunch in the city. Hope motored there in her Caprice, Emily chose the restaurant, and Hope paid the bill because Emily had been running short in the last while. “The wolves are at the door,” she said, laughing, though Hope knew it was no laughing matter. Emily was working part time at a community paper, going to school, and putting aside some money for Angela, who wanted to study theatre in Toronto the following year. During the summer, on the weekends when Hope was at the cottage, Emily would often drive out and spend two nights, and to Hope these were periods of high expectation, stimulation, and intelligent conversation. Emily was studying psychology, in particular the work of R.D. Laing, and on Friday evenings, at the lake, they sat in the screened-in porch and Emily talked to her about this brilliant man who, she said, believed that madness was the result of background more than an individual psychosis.

  “What about me?” Hope asked, confused. “My mother was to blame for my sickness?”

  “Families are connected. You don’t live alone, Hope. Or maybe it’s Eden. The place has locked you up and your mind is revolting.”

  Hope thought this was presumptuous. What did Emily know about the grey curtain of despair? She said, “I don’t think it benefits anyone to point fingers or lay blame.”

  “But you do blame yourself. You’ve said so.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was probably just shooting off my mouth. Or having a bad day. Let’s not talk about the past. Not on such a beautiful evening.”

  Hope had finally learned to live in the present. Often, when she found herself in a space of tremendous comfort, usually out in nature, or when her children were all safe around her and on the verge of going to bed, she forced herself to take stock. Here you are, Hope, she told herself. What a beautiful moment. You may never again be here, at this spot, enjoying the calm. This habit of hers, to acknowledge the immediate and elusive joy of the present, kept her sane.

  One Friday evening at the cottage, they were alone. Roy was planning on driving out from Eden on Saturday morning, and Conner had taken his sisters out in the motorboat across the lake to the marina. Emily and Hope sat on the dock, surrounded by mosquito coils. The light was dusty. A slight breeze was coming in off the lake. The neighbours to the east were out on their dock and were playing Bob Dylan on a small radio. Emily lit a cigarette and pointed it at Hope and said that Sam had been a great lover. “He did things that Paul wouldn’t have dreamed of. Went down on me, French kissed, just generally worshipped my body.”

  Hope was a little irritated. Emily was a stout woman, less lean than Hope, and with larger breasts. Hope was not generally given to comparing her own body to other women’s. She accepted the variations of the female body and thought that she might be lucky in some ways and less lucky in others. Her breasts, for example, were fairly small, though Roy claimed to like them. Not that this mattered. Clearly, Emily had had too much to drink. The talk about Sam “going down” on her was fine—this was Emily—but it was the line that followed, about the French kiss, that set her on edge.

  She didn’t like to talk about her sex life with Roy. She had done this once before with Emily, years earlier, and afterwards she felt that she had betrayed Roy. But now here was Emily, with her thick ankles crossed and her red nails winking, extolling the prowess of a man she no longer slept with and claiming that her ex-husband, Paul, had had no interest in kissing, and all of this was too much and Hope blurted out, “Paul kissed me. He used his tongue.”

  At first Emily seemed not to hear. She leaned forward and put out the cigarette on the dock. Hope saw the crease of her breasts, heard the creak of the chair. She sat back. “What did you just say?”

  “He kissed me.” She had lost her courage and decided to be less specific.

  “Paul did.”

  “Yes.”

  Emily was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “When was this?”

  “Oh, you had been gone a number of years. I used to spend time with Paul in his woodshop, visiting, and one evening he tried to kiss me.”

  “Did you ask him to?”

  “Of course not. I’m not attracted to him.”

  “Really? He’s quite handsome in his way.”

  “I do
n’t think so.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, don’t be hurt, Em. You left him, didn’t you?”

  “But I still found him attractive. You must have done something to provoke him.”

  Hope laughed. She shouldn’t have, she knew that, but the conversation had turned absurd and she felt the need to laugh. “Yeah,” she said, “I was wearing overalls. Very attractive.”

  “Why were you wearing overalls?”

  “It was dusty. To protect my clothes. Paul gave them to me.”

  Emily was unusually silent. She lit another cigarette and exhaled into the dusk.

  Hope realized that the two of them were on the verge of an argument, something rare in their relationship. Always, she acquiesced to Emily, allowed her the upper hand, permitted her to be smarter, better read, more worldly, and now suddenly she had turned the tables and Emily was fumbling.

  Hope said, “It was nothing. I pushed him away and told him to stop. I don’t even know why I told you this.”

  “You had your reasons. Even if you don’t know them. The subconscious, you know.” She smiled briefly, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile. “You know, Hope, your problem is that you let the world fall all over you. You’re passive. You could choose to act, but you don’t. You just sit there.”

  “That’s just mean, Em. And it’s not true. You’re upset and you’ve had too much to drink and you should stop talking.”

  “I don’t care, you know. You could sleep with Paul, for all I care.”

  “I don’t want to sleep with Paul. What are you talking about? One time he tried to kiss me, and I said no.”

  “That’s what I mean. You tell the story as if you weren’t involved, as if Paul attacked you and you were just this inanimate object who happened to be in the way. You must have had conversations with him, moved in a certain way, perhaps even flirted.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “How would you know?”

  Across the lake a boat appeared, speeding towards them. The kids were returning. She was relieved. She stood and moved to the end of the dock as the boat slowed and stopped. Penny clambered out holding the rope. Her long legs, the green-and-white striped bikini. Judith and Melanie wore bikinis as well, even though Hope thought that Melanie was far too young. There was something so beautiful and healthy about them that Hope wanted to cry out, “Stop. Enjoy.” When she turned, she saw Emily walking unsteadily up to the cottage with her drink, a towel tied around her thick waist. Hope sat on the dock with the children, who talked about teachers, specifically the phys. ed. teacher, Mr. Gattling, whom the students had named the Gun.

  “What a creep,” Judith said. “He stood over the girls when we did sit-ups. Looked down our tops.”

  “He still does,” Penny said. “He was terribly mean to you, Conner.”

  “What do you mean? What did he do, Conner?” Hope asked.

  Conner shrugged. He hated school and only did well in shop class. He never talked about what went on in school. Hope recalled one time, at a parent–teacher meeting, when she had challenged the math teacher, Mr. Brown. “Catering to the smart kids isn’t teaching,” she had said. “That’s just lazy.”

  “It’s your boy who is lazy, Mrs. Koop. And dull. He’d be better off working in the salt mines.”

  Only later, back home, had she come up with a good response—something to do with Mr. Brown’s sagging lips, and how only a bully would feel good about picking on someone younger and smaller. But she was always too late and too slow with her responses. Now, as she watched Conner, she saw a healthy tanned boy who had an easy and forgiving smile. She felt a twinge of guilt and thought that Conner was like her. He let the world fall over him. He was passive.

  Melanie went over and sat down beside Conner and laid her head on his shoulder. He patted her head. Eventually, the mosquitoes became too much, and they all ran for the screened-in porch of the cottage.

  That night she lay in bed listening to the children in the main room, and at some point she fell asleep and woke much later and heard Conner and Judith down by the dock. She smelled cigarette smoke, though it was pungent, sharp, and only in the morning did she think that her two oldest children might have been smoking marijuana, but by then they were deep in their beds, sleeping the morning away, and at some basic level she was happy not to have to confront them. At night, unable to sleep, she had thought about her life and had created two lists. The headings for the lists were Acting and Sitting There. Under Acting she put marriage, having babies, Maxine’s abortion, Penny’s molestation, making love to Roy, baking, meeting Emily once a week, teaching Sunday school (she had taught for one year, when Judith was two, but hadn’t really liked it), Harlin and the wedding dress (he had washed it in a machine and returned it two sizes smaller—she had given it to Goodwill), caring for her mother when she was sick, and finally, walking out into the field. She hesitated to include the last one but thought that it had been a decision of sorts, though it might just as easily fall under the heading Sitting There. And when she began to create the second list, Sitting There, she realized that everything in the first list could be switched over to the second. Choosing to do something resembled so closely Emily’s notion of “letting the world fall all over you” that Hope became confused. In the end, the lists that she created in her head became a massive jumble of words that meant very little, in fact the whole notion of choice had been called into question. Exhausted by her thoughts, she fell asleep.

  Roy appeared early in the morning, around 7 a.m., smelling of the interior of his brand-new Oldsmobile. He crawled into bed and quietly made love to her and then talked to her of work and how many units had been sold that week and his golf game the evening before.

  She waited until he was finished talking and then said, “Emily and I fought last night. She finds me passive.”

  She knew Roy didn’t know what to make of Emily. He put up with her only because she was Hope’s best friend. Emily called herself a feminist, especially making this point in front of Roy, and this annoyed him.

  “Am I?” she asked.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Roy said. “She’s an unhappy woman.”

  He kissed her neck. Her ear. And then he made love to her again. As she closed her eyes the second time she was not unhappy, but she was wondering if this was what Emily meant by the world falling all over you. It wasn’t so bad, was it? At least she had someone who wanted her.

  Mid-morning she fried bacon and made pancakes with blueberry sauce and she fed the children as they appeared, one by one. Roy left to play golf. Penny joined him. Emily eventually walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table. Hope poured her coffee and made her three pancakes. Emily ate silently and read the Saturday paper. Hope changed into her bathing suit and sat on the dock and read, and this is where Emily found her later, around lunch. Emily stood in her clothes on the dock and she said that she was going back to the city. She had things to do.

  “Okay,” Hope said. “Drive carefully.”

  “I was a little cruel last night,” Emily said. She grimaced. “Too much to drink.”

  “That happens.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Hope lifted her head. She was wearing sunglasses and her legs were crossed and her right foot moved up and down. “I forgive you,” she said.

  “It’s just that I want the best for you, Hope. You’re special, and I think you should know that, and sometimes I wonder if you do know that.”

  “I know that, Em. But thanks anyway. Drive carefully.”

  After Emily had gone, Hope closed her eyes and felt the sun warm her face and chest and thighs. Melanie, the child she had learned to love, came down to the dock carrying a small bag that held nail polish and clippers and an emery board. She sat cross-legged at Hope’s feet.

  “Would you like the full pedicure today, miss?” she asked.

  “That would be perfect. Thank you.”

  Hope and Roy had never been diligent about taking photographs, and though ther
e were a few family photos, black and white, from the sixties, and the odd photo of a child at play (one of Judith on horseback, wearing tall riding boots, her hair pulled into a ponytail), there had been little record keeping. Nor did Hope keep a diary, though Emily always urged her to. And so the past was like a vacant lot of the mind, a place where one might scrabble about looking for something of value, a remembrance of perhaps the trip to Disneyland or the family vacation in Portland, or of Christmas 1966. As the children grew—they now ranged from nineteen down to nine—she realized that if she did not begin to record the precious moments in their lives, she would eventually reach old age and have nothing to stir her memories. She decided to buy a camera, and purchased a Kodak Motormatic from a shop on Portage Avenue in Winnipeg. She was immediately baffled, what with all the bells and whistles, the depth of field, the flash, the shutter speed, the light meter, et cetera, et cetera. Roy, who should have been mechanically inclined, was even more stumped, or perhaps he just feigned uselessness because he didn’t want the responsibility.

  For a month after she had discovered the simplest manner of taking the most basic photos, she charged about the house snapping pictures of the children, who ultimately became impatient with the intrusions. The first roll of film was a dud because she had installed it incorrectly. The film never did advance. The second roll of thirty-six images, 100 ASA, turned out to be mostly blurry, though there was a lovely clear shot of Penny and Melanie standing by the front door, on their way to school. Penny looked distracted and impatient and Melanie was grinning madly. It turned out that Conner had taken that shot. Recognizing Conner’s ability, Hope handed him the camera and several rolls of film and asked him to be in charge. Over the next month, fourteen rolls of film were used up and then stored in the fridge and at some point Hope carried them down to the drugstore to be developed. She picked up the photos a week later and went through them, only to discover that most of them were of Conner’s friends and of various motorcycles standing in the street, or of cars, sometimes a grill, other times a dashboard showing a tachometer. There was a photo of Conner smoking, standing with his arm around a very beautiful girl whom Hope didn’t recognize. She was disconcerted by this beautiful girl who was leaning so coyly against her son. She also didn’t understand why he needed to smoke, though she didn’t have the strength to confront him. There wasn’t one photo of the family. Disheartened, she retrieved the camera and gave it to Judith, who was leaving for Europe.