For a long time I wandered aimlessly. It felt like a long time. It didn’t feel aimless, however, or not in any carefree way: I was being driven by necessity, by fate, like the characters in the more melodramatic novels I’d read in high school who would rush out into thunderstorms and lurk around on moors. Like them I had to keep moving. I couldn’t help it.
I had an image of myself trudging along a dusty or lumpy or ice-covered road, carrying a little bundle on a stick, like the hobos in comic books. But that was much too droll. More like a mysterious traveler, striding inexorably forward, entering each new town like a portent, then vanishing without a trace, mission accomplished.
In reality I had no mission, and I did not trudge or stride. I went on the train, or – a treat at that time – on an airplane.
-
I would welcome each new dislocation, unpack my few belongings with alacrity and even joy, then set out to explore the neighborhood or district or city and learn its ways; but soon enough I’d begin to imagine what I’d become if I stayed in that place forever. Here, a stringy-haired intellectual; there, a self-satisfied matron, shut up in a cage or a house that would not be recognized as a cage until it was too late.
Too late for what? To get out, to move on. Yet at the same time I longed for security. It was a similar story with men. Each one was a possibility that quickly became an impossibility. As soon as there were two toothbrushes – no, as soon as I could even picture tow toothbrushes, side by side on the bathroom counter in trapped, stagnant, limp-bristled companionship – I would have to leave. My books would go into cardboard boxes and be shipped by bus, some getting lost on the way; my clothes and my towel – I did have a towel – would go into my small tin trunk. I hummed while I packed. Yet every time I began packing, it would feel like leaving home: my humming would alternate with fits of tearful nostalgia about the place I was doing the packing in, but that I hadn’t even vacated yet.
As for my real home, the one I’d grown up in, I seldom thought about it, or not in any detail. I was dimly aware that I was a worry to my parents, but I resented their worry. I was doing fine. I was supporting myself. Every once in a while, an inner window would pop open and I would glimpse my parents, far away and very small, rushing through their daily activities as in a sped-up film: doing the dishes in a blur of soapy hands and cutlery, throwing themselves into bouts of maniacal gardening, making trips to their summer place with the car whizzing along as if jet-propelled; then doing the dishes there, then the gardening frenzy there, then back again, then into bed, then up with the dawn, round and round. They were immersed in mundane affairs, they were not contemplating any higher truths. I’d feel superior to them. Then I’d feel homesick. Then I’d feel like an orphan, a barefoot waif in the chilly night, peering in at scenes of cozy family life while filching a potato or two from the back plot. I would torture myself with these pathetic scenarios, then hastily shut the window again.
I was not an orphan, I told myself; I was not nearly enough of an orphan. I needed to be more of one, so I could eat food that was bad for me, stay up all night, wear unflattering clothes, and hang out with unsuitable companions, without the anxious running commentary this behavior would call forth inside my head. Why are you living in this dump? What are you doing with your time? Why are you with that creep? Why can’t you accomplish anything? Get enough sleep! You’ll ruin your health! Wear less black!
None of these were things my parents would have said out loud – they knew better – but I believed in thought rays. These rays were shooting out from my parents’ craniums, directly into mine. It was like radio waves. The farther away from home I got, the weaker the rays that were silently beaming at me would become. So I had to put a lot of distance between us.
Set against my desire for fecklessness was an opposite and more shameful desire. I’d never got over the Grade Two reader, the one featuring a father who went to a job every day and drove a car, a mother who wore an apron and did baking, two children – boy and girl – and a cat and a dog, all living in a white house with frilly window curtains. Though no house I’d ever lived in possessed such curtains, they seemed foreordained. They weren’t a goal, they weren’t something I’d have to strive for: these curtains would simply materialize in my life because they were destined. My future would not be complete – no, it would not be normal – unless it contained window curtains like these, and everything that went with them. This image was tucked away in a corner of my suitcase, like an emergency wardrobe item: nothing I wanted to wear at the moment, but worse come to worst, I could take it out, shake out the wrinkles, and step into it.
I couldn’t keep up my transient existence forever. I would have to end up with someone, sometime, someplace. Wouldn’t I?
But what if I missed a turn somewhere – missed my own future? That would be frighteningly easy to do. I’d make one hesitation or one departure too many and then I’d have run out of choices; I’d be standing all alone, like the cheese in the children’s song about the farmer taking a wife. Hi-ho, the derry-o, the cheese stands alone, they used to sing about this cheese, and everyone would clap hands over its head and make fun of it.
Even I had made fun of the solitary cheese during that game. Now I was ashamed of myself. Why should being alone – in and of itself – be such a matter for derision? But it was. The alone – the loners – were not to be trusted. They were strange and twisted. Most likely they were psychopaths. They might have a few murdered corpses stowed away in their freezers. They didn’t love anyone, and nobody loved them either.
In my more rebellious moments I asked myself why I should care about being shut out of Noah’s ark of coupledom – in effect a glorified zoo, with locks on the bars and fodder dished out at set intervals. I wouldn’t allow myself to be tempted; I’d keep my distance; I’d stay lean and wolflike, and skirt the edges. I would be a creature of the night, in a trench coat with the collar turned up, pacing between streetlights, my heels making an impressively hollow and echoing sound, casting a long shadow before me, having serious thoughts about topics of importance.
Still, I was haunted by a poem I’d read at the age of twenty, written by a well-known poet much older than myself. This poem claimed that all intellectual women had pimples on their bums. It was an absurd generalization, I realized; nevertheless I worried about it. The frilly curtains I was destined to obtain and the pimply bum I was doomed to develop did not go together. Yet neither one had happened, so far.
-
Meanwhile I had to earn a living. In those times you could pick up jobs, do them for awhile, put them down, then pick up something else, somewhere else. There was a shortage of labor, or a shortage of my kind of it, a kind that did not exactly have a name. I thought of myself as an itinerant brain – the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute. I also – I felt – had the disreputability that came with such a position. At parties – faculty parties, during the times when the jobs I had were at universities, or company parties, when I peddled my skills in other sectors – I caught the faculty wives or the company wives eyeing me as if I had lice. Perhaps they thought I had designs on their husbands, though they needn’t have worried about me.
The husbands were another matter. Any woman without a wedding ring, no matter how dourly dressed, was free for a tryout in their books. Why did I never see them coming? But I didn’t, I didn’t edge away fast enough, and then there would be scuffles, in the kitchen perhaps where I’d be helpfully tidying up, or in the bedroom where the coats were piled, and then there would be outrage and hurt feelings, on everyone’s part, it seemed. The husbands got angry because I’d drawn attention to their furtive trial gropings, the wives because I’d led the husbands on. As for me, I was less outraged than astonished. How could these pudgy or rancid elderly men possibly think they had any sort of allure? (This kind of astonishment is a function of youth. I got over it later.)
These attitudes and encounters were the norm in the early years of my ramblings. But then things changed. At the time I’d set out, all women were expected to get married, and many of my friends had already done so. But by the end of this period – it was only eight years, not so long after all – a wave had swept through, changing the landscape completely. Miniskirts and bell-bottoms had made a brief appearance, to be replaced immediately by sandals and tie-dyed T-shirts. Beards had sprouted, communes had sprung up, thin girls with long straight hair and no brassieres were everywhere. Sexual jealousy was like using the wrong fork, marriage a joke, and those already married found their once-solid unions crumbling like defective stucco. You were supposed to hang loose, to collect experiences, to be a rolling stone.
Isn’t that what I’d been doing, years before the widespread advent of facial hair and roach clips? But I felt myself too old, or possibly too solemn, for the love beads and pothead crowd. They lacked gravity. They wanted to live in the moment, but like frogs, not like wolves. They wanted to sit in the sun and blink. But I was raised in the age of strenuousness. Relaxation bored me. I thought I should be making my way in the world, wherever that was. I thought I should be getting somewhere – in my case, as things so often were, somewhere else.
During this period I lived in rooming houses, or in shared apartments, or in sublets. I had no furniture of my own: it would have slowed me down. I bought makeshift items at thrift stores in each new location and sold them when I left. I had no tableware. Now and then I’d indulge myself in a frill – a vulgar, colorful vase, a flea-market curio. I acquired a carved wooded hand holding a sort of chalice with the words Souvenir of Pitcairn Island on it. I splurged on a Thirties perfume bottle minus the stopper.
The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn’t fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst. I knew they were worthless clutter, but they made it into the tin trunk whenever I packed up again.
-
One year I got a job teaching grammar to freshmen at a university, which meant I could afford a real apartment, all to myself. The job was in Vancouver; the apartment was a top floor the family had built onto their bungalow for the purpose of renting it out. It had its own staircase, very steep and plain, with rubber runners and no banister or windows – more like a vertical tunnel than a staircase. It even had a few pieces of furniture – things the family below no longer had any use for. There was – for instance – a bed, covered with a bright green slippery satin bedspread of a kind that must have been thought glamorous twenty years or so before. There was a dressing table in a style that might have been Thirties. There was a gigantic gold-framed mirror. All of the furniture that came with the apartment was in the bedroom, which was like an old move set or the cover of a paperback murder mystery of some years before. Satin bedspreads have been a feature of those. The corpse of the woman would be displayed surrounded by artfully rumpled satin, like a big flesh confection in a luxury box. In the gold-framed mirror would be the reflection of a man – just part of a man, his back turned, making his exit after the crime.
The apartment had a living room with a dining nook, and another room into which I put a Salvation Army desk and chair and a typewriter. In the living room I set up a borrowed card table that acted as a dining table whenever I had any guests. For these affairs I used plates and cutlery, also borrowed.
I had a painting, bought from a friend of a friend because that person needed twenty-five dollars. The painting was an abstract, and showed some reddish blobs and scratches. When I’d had a few drinks I could see something in it, but without that sort of enhancement it looked like a damp patch on the wallpaper where something had leaked through. I hung it over the fireplace, which was not functional.
In this apartment, free at last from the eyes of roommates and far from the thought rays beamed out by my parents, I cycled through my most extreme versions of in and out, yes and no, stay and go, high and low, alone and together, elation and despair. One day I’d be flying through the clouds, drunk on cloudy possibilities; the next, up to my neck in mud, dragged down by the sodden prospects of the here and now. I walked around through the various rooms without any clothes on; I wore myself out reading until late in the night, then slept till noon, waking up entangled in the glossy green satin spread, unsure of where I was. I talked to myself; I sang out loud, silly defiant songs I’d learned in school playgrounds a long time ago. Hi-ho the derry-o, I’d sing. The cheese stands alone! Tried the other place, tried the other place, tried the other place last night . . . There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea, there’s a hole in the bottom of the sea . . . I care for nobody, no not I, and nobody cares for me! Or, deprived of all speech and song and even of motion, I’d find myself lying face down on the wall-to-wall carpeting of the hallway, through which I couldn’t help hearing the derisive television laughter from the dwelling below. What if I died from starvation, right there on the carpet, through a simply inability to crawl to the refrigerator and get myself something to eat? Then all those fun-filled, roistering people on television would be sorry.
In the evenings, when I wasn’t twittering with glee or prostrate on the floor, I’d go for long, pensive walks. I’d start out purposefully, marching forward as if I had a destination. I was conscious of being watched through the windows of the floor below by the husband and wife who owned the apartment- he with a crew cut and a lawnmower, she with an apron and hair rollers. Although I dressed with relentless drabness, in dark browns and grays and shapeless blacks, they’d worried about renting to me until I’d proved I had a salary. It excited them to believe I was depraved in some way, or so I felt. I did have a lover or two during that time – temporary lovers, just borrowed – and they must have heard, on occasion, more than one pair of footsteps going up the stairs.
But for my evening walks I was alone. I made a point of it. As soon as I was out of sight of the downstairs couple, I would slow down and choose the turnings at random, trying to avoid stepping on the huge black and gray slugs that crawled over the sidewalks as soon as it was dusk. These slugs ate everything, nothing ate them. There were advantages to looking unattractive.
But I wasn’t without social resources. I didn’t take off my clothes and sing in public: I acted in acceptable ways. I smiled, nodded, made conversation, and so forth. I could do a good imitation of a competent young woman. I had a number of friends and acquaintances, both male and female, of the kind that might be accumulated in a life of such transience. They would come for meals, sitting around my card table, drinking bottles of a local wine that dyed the dishcloth red whenever I’d get around to cleaning up. I learned how to make lasagna, a substance that cost little and went far. I also served a thing known as nuts and bolts, made with several kinds of dry cereal mixed with peanuts and Worcester sauce and toasted in the oven. That was a hors d’oeuvre, not a dessert. I had not yet taken up baking, so for dessert there was ice cream, bought at the corner store and so full of seaweed that when it melted it didn’t turn to cream but to a gelatinous blobby substance that maintained its shape and was hard to wash down the drain.
-
One of the acquaintances who turned up to sit at my card table was a man called Owen. I didn’t know him very well. HE would ring the doorbell unannounced – I did have a doorbell – and I would go down the steep staircase and let him in. I might feed him some leftover lasagna, if I had any, or else some nuts and bolts. Then he would sit for long periods, not saying anything, as we both watched the long, lingering northwest summer sunsets turn from peach to pink to dark pink to the dull glowing red of a blown-out match.
Owen wasn’t a lover or even a potential lover: nothing like that. He was in the city temporarily, like me, and had been loaded onto me by a do-gooder mutual connection (concerned, I now suppose, with his state of mind). He was alone, far more alone – I could see – than I myself had ever been. He had a desolation about him that I couldn’t account for: sitting at my card table in the dusk was about the closest he could get to being with anyone.
Why did he keep dropping by? His presence was an enigma. He certainly wasn’t bent on courtship. Neither did he want friendship. He wasn’t demanding anything from me, but he didn’t seem to be offering anything either. If I’d had a more lurid imagination – or if my lurid imagination was of the kind that attached itself to anything in the real world – I might have been afraid of him. I might have pegged him as a potential murderer. But I never made that sort of connection.
Despite the entire nullity of these evenings, it was hard to get Owen to leave. He would sit and sit, barely moving, inert, like a bundle of cloth, though topped with a head that was nevertheless alive, because the eyes moved. It was as if he’d been paralyzed in some appalling accident that had left no outward scars. His muteness was more exhausting than any conversation might have been.
I didn’t want to say “I’m tired, I’m going to bed now.” It seemed indelicate. Subtler hints were lost on him, but he wasn’t a person I could be blunt with. I couldn’t just say “Go home,” as if to a dog. Somehow it would have been cruel. (Where was his home, anyway? Did he even have such a thing?) Eventually, when some inner timer had gone off in him, he’d get to his feet, thank me awkwardly for the lasagna, and trundle off down the stairs.
Finally one evening he told me that his three older brothers had tried to kill him when they were all children. Telling him it was a game, they’d shut him up inside a disused icebox and run away. Luckily their mother had noticed he was missing, and had tracked him down and let him out, just in time: he was already gasping and turning blue in the face. Probably his brothers hadn’t meant to kill him, he said. They couldn’t really have known what they were doing.
Owen related this episode in a flat voice, looking not at me but out the window at the dimming redness of the sunset. I was so thoroughly taken by surprise that I could not immediately think of anything to say. No wonder he was the way he was, I thought: what effect would a thing like that have on a person’s life? To find yourself at an early age in a universe that had demonstrated such hostility would have a dampening effect. More than dampening: crushing. Could Owen be balancing on the edge of suicide? He’d said nothing about it, but people didn’t always, or so I’d heard.
I felt I should respond in some empathetic way, declare a firm position, reach out a helping hand. My eventual murmur of “That’s terrible” didn’t seem nearly enough. Worse: I had a shameful desire to laugh, because the thing was so grotesque, as near-tragedies often are. Surely I lacked empathy, or even simple kindness.
Owen must have felt so too, because after that evening he never came back. Or possibly he’d done what he wanted to do: dropped off his anguish, left it with me like a package, in the mistaken belief that I would know what to do with it.
That image – of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought it was a game – melded with the furtive nocturnal slugs, my solitary pacing and singing, and the separate, claustrophobic stairway, and the charmless abstract painting, and the gold-framed mirror, and the slithery green satin bedspread, and became insperable from them. It was a cheerful composite. As a memory, it is more like a fog bank than a sunlit meadow.
Yet I think of that period as having been a happy time in my life.
Happy is the wrong word. Important.
-
That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I’ve reached now. But how else could I see it? We can’t really travel to the past, no matter how we try. If we do, it’s as tourists.
I moved out of that city, and then into another one, and then another. I had a lot of moves still ahead of me. Yet things did work out after all. I met Tig, and then followed the cats and dogs and children, and the baking, and even the frilly white window curtains, though the eventually vanished in their turn: they got dirty too quickly, I discovered, and were hard to take down and put back up.
I didn’t become any of the things I’d feared. I didn’t get the pimply bum I’d been threatening myself with, not did I become a cast-out, wandering orphan. I’ve lived in the same house now for decades.
But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from waking life. I know this because I continue to have the same dream over and over.
I’m in the other place, a place that’s very familiar to me, although I’ve never lived in it or even seen it except in this dream. Details vary – the space has many different rooms, mostly bare of furniture, some with only the sub-flooring – but it always contains the steep, narrow stairs of that distant apartment. Somewhere in it, I know – as I open door after door, walk through corridor after corridor – I’ll come upon the gold mirror, and also the green satin bedspread, which has taken on a life of its own and is able to morph into cushions, or sofas, or armchairs, or even – once – a hammock.
It’s always dusk, in this place; it’s always a cool dark summer evening. This is where I’ll have to live, I think in the dream. I’ll have to be all by myself forever. I’ve missed the life that was supposed to be mine. I’ve shut myself off from it. I don’t love anyone. Somewhere. In one of the rooms I haven’t yet entered, a small child is imprisoned. It isn’t crying or wailing, it stays completely silent, but I can feel its presence there.
Then I wake up, and retrace the steps of my dream, and try to shake off the sad feeling it’s left me with. Oh yes, the other place, I say to myself. That again. There was quite a lot of space in it, this time. It wasn’t so bad.
I know the green bedspread isn’t really a bedspread: I know it’s some aspect of myself, some old insecurity or fear. I know the unseen child in the dream isn’t my almost-murdered acquantince, but only a psychic fragment, a tatter of my own archaic infant self. Such daylight knowledge is all very well. Still, why do I keep on having this dream? Maybe it served a purpose once, but I ought to be done with it by now.
Then I get up, ask Tig how he slept, and we have toast and coffee together, and go about doing the many mundane and practical things that are to be done.
The dream frightens me, though. It brings with it a nebulous dread. What if it’s not in the past, this other place? What if it’s still in the future? After all?
