Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [98]
What do women want, Freud asked. The old fool, the charlatan.
He knew what women wanted. They wanted nothing. Nothing was good enough. Everyone knew that. Everyone but me.
The reason I was on my way to Ottawa was to offer consolation to an old friend in distress. She had written to me telling me not to come, that she had her niece Beverly to look after her, that she was not fit company at the moment, but of course I went anyway. I thought, wrongly, that I could carry her back to sunnier times, dredging up old stories, foolish or sentimental or touching on some spring of affection between us. And I believed we might, after a few days, open up this forbidden topic of sex, letting our thoughts out loose and fresh.
There comes a time, I’ve seen it happen, when women offer to decode themselves. All of Alice’s shrewd sympathy would be nothing compared to a moment’s shared revelation between old pals.
The self is curved like space, I tried to say to my girlhood friend, and human beings can come around again and again to the sharpness of early excitations. The sexual spasm, despite its hideous embarrassments and inconvenience, is the way we enter the realm of the ecstatic. The only way. It’s a far darker and more powerful force than we dreamed back when we were girls chattering on about "climaxes" and saline douches. I wanted to tell her about Professor Popkov who was my first seducer, about Georgio with his endless sportive variations (The Royal Gonad, I called him), about poor Mel who lasted only four years before drifting off in his wispy way. I intended to hold nothing back, not even my pitiable little encounter on the train. I persuaded myself that an open confrontation would dislodge whatever it is that has shut off Daze’s happiness and made her into a crazy woman.
But the week was a disaster. She would not be coaxed out of her dark bedroom; she lay flat on her back, her neck and shoulder muscles in painful contraction and her queenly pounds dropping away one after the other. "Don’t make me pretend to be lively," she said to me once when I brought her a lunch tray. "It takes too much effort."
I went home to Bloomington and wrote her a note of monstrous good cheer. About the future. The sun breaking through. The joy of future generations. On and on.
A week later an envelope came addressed in her writing. No note, only my little pocket diary with its cryptic entries. I must have dropped it on the carpet when I was closing my suitcase.
Cousin Beverly’s Theory
Ten years ago back in Saskatchewan I got myself into hot water. It wasn’t enough that I was a divorced woman, and, boy oh boy, that was a real crime back then, let me tell you, but worse was to come.
Two short years after I kicked my husband Jerry out (a drinker from Day One), I got boinked by Leonard Mazurkiewich who worked in the pickling plant (married, natch) whose idea of lovemaking was—well, I get the willies just thinking about it—but anyway it wasn’t worth it, three minutes of grunt and bad breath, and, bingo, there I was in the family way.
I would have gone to Calgary but I was too scared. Imagine, me scared, me who served with the WRENS during the war, way over there in Britain. Bombs and everything. I lived through that. I was full of courage when I was young. And then I came home to Saskatchewan at the end of the war and the puff just went out of me.
There was Jerry, hounding me to get married. And my parents.
And my sisters. Everyone. Somehow they tore me apart, it happened fast. The funny thing about being married to Jerry was not being able to get pregnant no matter what kind of stunts we got up to. Ha!—and after one midnight roll with Leonard Mazurkiewich, just one, I was up a stump. Some girls will turn to suicide when they get themselves in a fix like that, but I never thought of it for one minute, the reason being I could still shut my eyes when I wanted and remember what I was like over there in Britain,