| still at home volume 5 part 2 - 1962 december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[La Glace] December 24 1962 Today is the night before Christmas and I am sitting here in the living room with my slip showing and in my lovely orange sheen dress with holly pinned to my shoulder. Judy is beside me in the pink dress and my gold necklace. She's lovely. I wonder if I am? Frank is in the kitchen with mother talking intimately. I feel rather left out. Over my shoulder is the tree, gifts piled beneath. This has been a peculiar Christmas, as all Christmases are - Frank being here has made it warmer, more joyeux! Karen was at church, it was good to see her and do some of what F calls "jawing." Dave Doerksen gave me a supreme compliment tonight - he said "Boy you look sharp!" Nothing F could say now could cap it. On the first night here we felt strange, but yesterday when I was sick on the couch it was warm. What is he? I say to myself, Frank, not you, not you. And yet he seems very dear, very dear, young and sweet. I'll remember him forever. - If only you could be content with remembering, if I could only make you a friend-only. December 27 "You were always a gentleman; no passes." The living room, it is past midnight, the album of Schumann's Concerto in A Minor in the background, because Mother and Father were sleeping. Earlier there were regular squeaks from the bedroom. Everything he said and I said, and everything I learned from him, and every time we touched, and all of this, entirely, I want to keep. I want terribly to keep. There is both the weary desolation and the thrusting spearheaded panic, fluctuating and at one, overtone, undertone. I have lost you. I have given you up. This morning in the dark I woke momentarily to a single awareness of the window scattered with snow, streaked, the wind. A blizzard. I thought of Frank sleeping in the basement and wondered if he heard it. He came in for breakfast late, nearly at eleven. I had been up for a small while; I was wearing my box-pleated brown skirt and Judy's brown sweater with the 1961 silver dollar necklace he gave me last Christmas on Christmas Eve when we sat close together on the couch and it was so good and happy. When I looked down from his eyes I could see my skirt falling in straight lines, the brown sweater curving over my body, fuzzy, knit, soft. My sleeves down long over my wrists and my fingers twisting; the points of my brown shoes. I love you. I've never loved you so terribly before. I never knew anything about it before. The record player is on; Concerto in A Minor - we heard this soft haunting passage last night and every time it played it caught up some of our feeling - and now every time I play it I shall hear a little of us, we two, sitting together in a corner of the brown sofa with our arms about each other and our secret smiles and the fact that we loved each other. He said when I laughed, "Why are you so gleeful?" "Frank, I'm not. Wait, I'll show you what it is." I found the book and let him read:
"But this is present tense," he said. "Yes," I said. And we sat without saying anything until I stirred - we were sitting a little apart - and said "Telling you things by letting you read things like that isn't very demure and ladylike. I'm just not shy any more." His face looked the way mine felt - how can I explain it? Open, sorry and at once glad because we were still together and still communicating. And he said, "Doesn't that mean we were meant for each other?" And how can I tell about him at all, how wonderful he is? I wish I had called him by his name often, said "Frank, hello" and "Frank, good morning." His name. I am desolate without it. "I won't remember your face five years from now, no matter how hard I try to memorize it now." "You have a beauty spot here on your chin and there is another one, here on your forehead" (his hands brushing my hair away from my forehead, softly, softly, the piano fingers of the record and his ragged, working, tender, fingers under my hair), he said. "Yes. I know. I have been staring too." His very odd face, his bristly chin (I ran my fingers over his chin so often last night. Now never again. Gobble love greedily then. He is gone now; he is on that road going toward home in the cold with his brother wrapped in the car blanket that I was wrapped in) with its cleft, his small wistful mouth moving when he talks, somehow conscious of itself when he looked down at me and we were close. (Do you remember all the corners, Frank? Chicken netting fence at the roller rink; antique shop window; corner with the carriers in the strawberry hut one summer; now, leaning against the snowy straw stack in yesterday's snowy field; the dusty corner of George's car, racing over hills to Cultus, we two, nous deux, caught together.) "Do you remember those first few dates?" he said yesterday, smiling in his green coat with this strange corner-tilting wry smile - I want to keep it, I want to keep it, that smile, all of him, I want him. But not enough. "Do you remember those first few dates? I was crazy about you." "Even that first afternoon when we wanted to climb the hill Frank?" This bare smile - I can see it, I don't want to lose it! - This strong restrained twist of mouth that shows happiness in his mind, and his nod following it quickly. His hair curling over his forehead, strong, wiry, without hairdressing, his short crooked nose with the bump on the side and the skin stretched taut over it, the blue eyes with their straight lashes, each lash stiffly individual and light-tipped. And even in the corners of his eyes his eyelashes are long and stiff and strange. His eyebrows wandering, one of them scarred, his skin rather pale, his rough square hands, his neat narrow hipbones and his square chest, his boyish thin legs in their blue jeans, his brown knotted thick-veined arms under the teeshirt, all of this Christmas the red plaid shirt, the thick socks, the blue jeans, the high boots. The suit on Christmas Eve. He looks good in it. The way he moves his mouth when he talks, his strange small mouth twisting in the corners, pulling into a close-lipped smile, his eyes warm, speaking, communicating, warm, questioning, warm. Five years! In five years he said he would look me up - would there be any of what is Frank and Ellie now left in five years? When he is twenty seven and I am twenty two. Not long in university years but vastly long in years of not seeing you Frank. A birthday card for you in April Frank. Goodbye Frank. I love you. Last night closely held, lightly held by each other, we listened in the one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock silence to hearts moving, our shoulders shifting and rasping on the couch back, our feet brushing the floor, the tearing-sad, agonizing-sad movement of music. There was even a joy. We couldn't help laughing as we lay against the corner early in the morning of the day that he left, laughing because we were together and entirely together. "Do you think there was ever anyone like us?" "We're unique Frank. We're entirely new. There wasn't ever anyone like us." "Everyone thinks they'll be different." "But maybe we would be." And even tho' I knew as well as ever and know as well as ever that even with Frank dish washing is dish washing, I wonder if I didn't make the biggest mistake in my life when I let him go. His faith, his affection, his unselfish warmth - all those make me wonder if even marriage couldn't be different if it were Frank and I. But I know better. And still I wonder. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" he says sometimes - he says it often. We leafed through my English book, the poetry section, last night, nous deux, reading bits and culling meaning for ourselves. My cheeks sting with salt tears, they are a soft wet. I am seventeen. In five years he shall be twenty seven. I shall be twenty two. We won't know each other. "Frank if it were five years from today I don't think aspirations would make any difference." He had said, "If only I were different, if only my aspirations were different." "What difference would five years make?" "I'm too young, I don't know what I want." "Are you ever afraid, the way I am, that you'll never find out?" "Yes Frank."
Frank chuckled at this ("chortled" is a word he likes) because both of us had just been declaring in an argument with Mr Dyck how we knew nothing. "I like this" he said, his finger pushing lines of type, and I will remember it because he liked it - On His Blindness - Milton "God doth not need either man's works or his own gifts." Frank loves poetry and understands it, and his odd quiet voice smooths lines as it passes over them. Do you know, it was never like this. I love him! I love him to desperation and distraction. So why do I let him go? I am seventeen, too much too soon. If we could only remember each other. Last night again. The record had played through. I said, "Shall I change sides?" So he released me and I went away to the phonograph and turned the record, came back and sat with my hands in my chin; "Fairy tales - the princess and the prince buy a record player and set up house-keeping and live happily ever after." "But that is a fairy tale." "Yes." "When we were small we used to have ceremonies when it rained, rain ceremonies. I wore a maroon bathrobe, an old one, and took a tin cup and had parades and muttered things." I told him about it when I was sick on Sunday, in the afternoon, when we sat on the kitchen couch, I wrapped in my blanket, he sitting nearby and holding my hand. We are so delighted with these things from each other's past, we want to keep hearing. "A timbering process," he mentioned about today's final goodbye - all of these five days of Christmas have been a timbering process. I don't know how long this new feeling will last, but I feel as tho I'd fallen in love with him again and newly. I feel so lucky that he loves me. He still does, and he will for a while. Timbering process - that is what happened to all my feeling for him. It was becoming feeble, but now it is intense and wild, timbered by losing him. Perhaps if I were sure of my reasons, sure that it was good, I could feel less desolate about this. What are my reasons? 1. It is unfair to ask him to wait so long for me when in all probability I could end in not wanting him, and already he has a formidible desire for a sweet wife and sons, several sons, an extension of himself. >> 2001 2. The fact still remains that I think I was not meant to wash dishes only, and to cook and scrub - but here, where I thought there would be no wavering, there is a wavering and a hesitation. Love does blind, like a scented humming mist that blots away real shape and smell and sound. Can you live in a mist? Yes, if you continue to believe in the mist. 3. I want to go to Europe and to help some boy in trouble. And here I think - but what if I could help him, Frank, to find his way thru these seed years into stability and roots and everlasting joy of life. While we were playing palm reader last night he picked up my hand and traced the line running across my palm to my forefinger. "It is forked here at the base. I like to think I'm the other fork, and see, it's strong right to the outside of your hand." "But look at my other hand - if I had two lives it would be the other one. The line is alone, see, with only three small crossings, and it sputters out early." "Wouldn't you rather go over the brink with me?" And what can I say? I love you. But it wouldn't work. "We're star-crost." Lovers - we? For five days of Christmas, yes. 4. He doesn't know what he is going to do, he just doesn't know. Marvin will be married on December 28, tomorrow, and Frank will have lost every friend he has in the world. Every best friend. He will be desolate too. What can I do? What do I know now about love? 1. It is warm - hands and eyes; it doesn't constantly ache for the touching; it is friendness. 2. It wants to know about everything in you, in your mind and soul and body. It wants to know who you are, to explore, to get into situations with you. It is curious. 3. It is maternal and paternal also. It is concerned that you remember your things and are warm enough and don't get the smallest slice of ice cream. It reassures you about fires and Hereford bulls, it says smilingly, as he said yesterday, "I want to protect you" and it throws an arm around your shoulders or cups a hand over your cold ear to warm it. (And him saying "Yes, I'd give you all I know. I'd give you the shirt off my back." - Said as we read poetry together in a corner of the table and Mr Dyck argued with Father.) 4. It doesn't care if you don't wear Ivy League clothes, or if you substitute red plaid shirts and blue jeans for them. It doesn't care if you don't shave. It doesn't care if you are sick and a grey-green color on the Sunday before Christmas. When you ask it (I did, sitting in the kitchen yesterday) "What does a man really think about a thing like a physical handicap?" "If a man loves a woman, he just doesn't care. It isn't repulsive Ellie." "But it is, anything grotesque is repulsive." "It isn't, Ellie." 5. It wants to tell and to communicate constantly, even now I am most desolate because of all the things I want to tell him that he will never know. That is why I had to show him my scrapbook of summer '61 this morning (he touched my souvenirs). And think of all the things he'll want to tell me - I'll never hear them. Is there ever again going to be anyone I love as well, who loves me as well, who is so near to me, so unified with me? Last night was like a honeymoon. And after the funeral today, there is grief for a perfect human relationship that ended. Remember Frank, that I loved you best when I let you go - I told you, remember it and remember why, and tho' it is crazy I hope some day something could happen. "Yet if you should forget me for a while, and afterwards remember, do not grieve. For if the darkness and corruption leave a vestige of the thoughts that once I had, better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad." "Remember," Christina Rossetti This morning again he came in for breakfast late, and didn't look at me or say good morning until he had his back to me and was washing. When he turned his head I said my good morning softly and he answered softly, sadly, shyly almost, altho' we were no longer shy, not ever. We can't be shy. We are hardly separate individuals. We are brothers, friends, parents, lovers, at once. We cannot be shy. We had breakfast alone together, nous deux. I poured his coffee and my hand shook. We had to put the cup down together to keep it from spilling. He drank it and his hand shook. Nervous reaction and strain. We were all alone on the corner of the table, shaking and dreading what now is. - He must be driving now, on the dark ice, in the cold, in the snow. If he died - but he won't - we'd have had our goodbye. How many times did I tell him what was on top of my mind - "Take care of yourself." I can't remember what we talked about this morning, besides the shaking. Then we began to gather up his stuff. I had piled his records and his books - he's taking 1984 and an extra copy of "The Age of Analysis" - and his two extra shirts. I dabbed perfume on their collars quixotically, I want him to remember in spite of the whole purpose of this. Ironical. And as we stood by the piano he packed his beautiful leather bag and I plunked on the piano. On last Tuesday we thumped a bit, he and I - he taking the low B note as himself, I taking a shrill B. They were dissonant together, and yet the same note. We kid around a great deal with symbolism, we always have, right from the June 27 afternoon when we began all this. Ships that pass in the night, love? How could it begin so beautifully and then end? Frank, Frank. You kept saying "It's not fair." I love you, I love you, I love you. And I said "I feel so lucky to have known you." But the end? Your record of the Jamaicans playing their sad songs, one of them "Danny Boy" - I remember it with ice cream in Clearbrook, then here, and last night when you told cocky Mr Dyck, "It is lowbrow, but I like it." And I found myself constantly moving closer to him and I found myself saying "I like people who can say 'I like it, even if it is lowbrow.'" You came, Mr Dyck, when I wanted to spend the evening with Frank. But we all moved into the living room and Frank played checkers with himself while Wienses blinked at the agnostic bent of the arguments that Mr Dyck had with everyone. We argued "I think therefore I am," Frank and I pro, Mr Dyck vehemently con. Once I thought there was actual anger in his face. It was difficult to be civil to him, altho' I had been looking forward to seeing him a long while and I enjoy talking to him, and I've liked him for a long time. But last night I nearly hated him. He gave me a bit of advice, good advice, tho', "Good grief, girl, you are trying to run before you can walk. Don't take it all so seriously; you'll pull yourself to pieces. Worrying about it isn't going to help, is it? Where's your sense of humor?" And he is absolutely (absolutely - what a word) right, I am pulling myself to pieces by taking things too seriously. We played with the word "glug" - I'd explained it to Frank in the afternoon while les parents chatted with Chupas and we cracked nuts on that couch. Now in the argument, after ideas had bludgeoned the table between us for an hour, there was a sort of cessation and the place came to say glug. And it was very apt. We got his stuff together, poured out nuts from his sack into our boxes. We stood in the living room together, he pulled his watch out to say "Am I a man or a mouse? I'm a mouse" so we could be together just a bit longer. I don't remember what we talked about there either. I don't think we did much, we just stood. And then he went to La Glace to get his brakes fixed - I remember one thing now. He said, "You are my love. It may be trite but I'll say it anyway." And you are mine Frank. While he was gone I burst into tears and came to Mother to talk to her. "I just wish you could tell me if I'm doing the right thing or not, when I say schluss. What if he's the only one I'll be able to get along with? Maybe this is the biggest mistake of my life." "I can't know. But if you were to get married now it would be the worst thing for both of you. I don't know. He wants to be serious." "He says it doesn't have to be immediate - it isn't urgent." "But you want to be fair with him and you couldn't unless you cared for him." "But I do care for him, so much." (I was surprized when I heard myself say it, but oh, I do.) And again there were tears all down my cheeks. Then I saw him thru' the window, home from La Glace, and I rushed away to clean up my eyes. Strange, they don't show tears as much as they used to. Perhaps they'll get used to tears and never mind. I've got a long time to live yet. When I had put on more lipstick (my face today: pale, eyes direct as they always are with a brown sweater) I came to look at him thru' the door. He was sweeping out the back of his truck and looked up, called almost happily, "Gonna come out and help me?" So I put on my snow boots and threw his green lovely coat around my shoulders and went out to him. He said, "I didn't mean it," but I said "I wanted to anyway," and he smiled and we went down to the basement to get his stuff. His hands were cold; I held them to warm them. We were cheek to cheek a bit. ("Some people dance cheek to cheek." "And their fannies stick out." "Do they?") But I had to blurt out what I had decided. "Frank, I was thinking this morning." "Yes?" And he put his arms around me. "Wait a minute, and I'll tell you. It is ironical - here's another 'ironical' for us - but knocking it - this feeling of ours - out, now, is actually giving it a chance. If we let it drag on it will surely be killed (my fear will kill it) but if we shelve it entirely it has a chance to begin all over again 5 years from now or anytime later." We got his stuff together. "There's just one thing in this basement that I want most to take along -" with a wide exuberant movement of his arms, swooping joyously - "you." "You wouldn't know what to do with me if you had me." And I smiled serenely from inside his arms. "If it were five years later I would." Last night again, shifting on the sofa with our haunted sad eyes, he said "Could you sort of explain to me just what it is you are afraid of? It might be easier for me if you did." "It's very simple really; I'm afraid that what happened to my mother will happen to me." "Oh Ellie - I do come from a long line of wifebeaters, don't I!" And more of last night. He was again teasing me to kiss him. "There isn't any danger now of it getting out of hand." But giddy-sad in his arms, I could only say "Save it for your eventual Somebody," and he could only say, "We've sure made a lot of miles to the kiss haven't we?" How strange and tremendous and sudden - I trust him, I respect him (yesterday as we wound through the fields on the cowtracks he said "Maybe we've had too many rules." "Why? How?" "Well from somewhere I've gotten an awful lot of respect for you." A tribute to be accepted with a vast pride in both of us. Is something going to be different when I go back to Sexsmith? Here was a man who loved me, and university Ivy Leaguers are going to be far outshone by this poetry-loving, aware and tender human being that I know. If five years from now. Pro: trust and confidence in each other, the fact that he loves me and I love him and feel I'd like to risk whatever to take care of him, we both seem to become better and less selfish people because of this loving, our ability to communicate, respect for mental abilities, mutual knowledge and poetry and thought, his solitude and need of me, my solitude and need of him, concern for each other, no fear of him as a person, large desire in both for a successful marriage. Con: time changing people, his uncertain aim, his and my uncertain religious convictions, age difference, my sexual coolness - this I'm not sure of and can't be. "I was crazy about you." That was when I was still sizing him up, looking at him with a bit of a squint, scrutinizing. This strange, dear, individual. ("I tho't that summer would just end, we'd say goodbye and it would have been just a summer over." "Oh Ellie, how could we have been so stupid." - Sofa again.) When and how did these five days of Christmas begin? Friday, went to town with the parents, had donuts in Joe's with Mother, among our many packages. December 21, long waited for, holidays begun. Hilda in the morning had been both surprised and pleased by her Christmas breakfast in bed. It was a good day. I had a note from Frank, a small one to say he was glad he was coming. Coming! Saturday nite I slunk around in my brown skirt and the brown sweater buttoned up front. The living room was drip-wet with my blouses drying over chair backs. 10:30 at night, Paul sleeping on the living room floor, Rudy asleep with his face turned away, on the couch. A knock, and Mother at the door. Frank in the doorway, hands cold, ears red. Strange. I never remember his face from one time to the next. How can I remember it now? Incredibly dear. ("You're incredible. You're too good to be true." "I'm not." "Then it is, we are. Too good to be true.") Dave there, Paul awake soon and working models with him, giggling, eating oranges in bed, Frank and I left alone, talking until two. (He had coffee in the living room, and mousse.) He sat on the edge of the large chair near the hot stove, I sat on my cold bed in our room and we talked thru the hole (heater-hole) in the wall. He held my hand, cold as it was, touched my wrist. I don't have a clue what we talked about. (Remember his square hands with thin ragged small working fingernails. His yellowed palm with the lines traveling thru the skin deeply, a rough patch just beside the main up and down line. But warm dear hands. Moving over my face, lifting my hair to blow against my neck, raising my shy arms over his shoulder and around his neck, loosely around my waist and resting, palm side, on my hip bone under his jacket in the basement, arms fiercely and crushingly around me, fingers tracing my eyelashes. Adeptly shifting gears and driving with one hand only, in the crowded berry truck, fingers creeping toward my fingers and always, ever, transmitting tenderness. "You're young and tender." "And you're old and tender - no, not old; but you are tender." - On the kitchen sofa on Sunday when I was sick.) One of the things we said - "Here I'm roasting and there you are shivering." "Symbolic" - one word, said lightly. I would never have said it, feeling as I do now. But it shows the reserve I felt, the tread-lightly wariness, the arms'-length raillery. When I knew he was gone and no threat to me my love exploded boundariless, warinessless, and I had no reserve left, I had to tell him in every way I could, I had to make a foolish female of myself, to let him know how it was. My eyes speaking, my elbow touching his, my hand on the back of his chair - he looked up and said "Hi!" softly. And I put my head down for a while on his arm, - oh there is so much I want to tell you now that I can say it to you! - rested it there as I did the first touching day in the berry patch at dinner when we sprawled under the swaying branches and he held my hand and I wanted so terribly to put my head on his shoulder, on his arm, and I finally did, while he stroked my hair. (Finally I closed the wall window with the sheet of plywood, because I was so cold. He was into his sleeping bag before I knew it and my feet were icy cold, my knee hurt, my foot hurt, I felt rather sad, saying slowly to myself "I'm sorry but I think it is gone." Tossing, creaking, winding and unwinding, I fell asleep. In the morning I was sick. However, up and into the brown skirt and my green sweater still damp. No breakfast. It was Sunday morning. I felt worse and worse, gave him 1984 and let him sit on the couch and read it while I fled to the bedroom, threw up my supper from the night before, lay under the cold cover listening to Paul and Dave. Just before dinner I moved to the kitchen and lay the length of the couch under the green coverlid while he ate dinner - pink ice cream - and he would speak to me over Father's head and smile and I see his vivid bemused face now, eyebrows raised to speak to me, mouth posed. I love that strange face. After dinner the family went to church to practice for the Sunday school concert. He sat with me on the couch; I curled my legs up under the cover and he held my hand. The strangeness was gone and we were such extremely good friends again. Dave was in the living room, bored. I told Frank about Indra, and I said, "I wish I had told you about Stratford" - it was part of my life he wasn't in at all - "but it's too late now." I didn't think of how too late it could be. The long afternoon vanished. The parents came home. I felt much better. Alvina came over and while Frank was outside the window she played piano and I sang (remember how Judy Doerksen used to sing in the car? "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" "the corn is as high as an elephant's eye and a lit-tle brown mav'rick is wink-ing her eye!") and as his face lifted to the window and I saw him thru' the window I wondered what he tho't. John Fast came to spend Christmas with us, lank-shinned, lop-haired, content to sit beside our fire and belong a little. He hadn't had a Christmas present for three years. He gave Mother and Father a picture, framed, like the calendar one that used to hang on our wall. He gave Rudy a fire truck. He gave the rest of us pens and seemed touched by our thanks. I was glad he came to us. Judy went carolling with Frank's big leather boots laced to her mid-calf. The carollers came, we cracked nuts. I don't remember a word anyone said. That last night is lost. We stayed up late again, he on his side, I on mine. I took my skirt off while he wasn't watching and crawled under, and set my hair as he watched. (On Wednesday night I tho't, this is our honeymoon. And so these nights were. A honeymoon closeness. Honeymoon intimacy of holding his hand through the boards before I was out of bed on Sunday morning.) Again cold feet and sore knee and tossing. While we talked and brushed faces John had gone to sleep on the floor. Frank's sleeping bag was beside his. Darkness and quiet while I tossed. Morning, glimpse of his red shirt, he up before I was. Monday. The day before Christmas. Brown skirt again, slim one, and green sweater. Paul, Dave and he went out to get the tree, tramping thru' crusted snow. While they were gone I was domestic - ironed. He came home and packed the tree away efficiently. Dinner, the turkey came over carried by Danny, a naked monster. Frank and I singed him, I held his wings and we built a smoky paper flame on the snow outside. Auntie and Uncle arrived while this was happening. Then the boys and I went to Sexsmith with him, sliding on icy roads without brakes. We parked by the post office while I dashed in, putting marks of ourselves on even those things in Sexsmith that I see every day. Drugstore - he found a toothbrush and watched as I chatted with Jim (Wednesday night - "I thought you were a flirt!" "I am; but ..." into his shoulder, "... not with you, not ever with you"). Larsen's - he stood and waited by the door while I checked out my groceries. The corner store - he met me by the door there. Our La Glace post office - he waited outside the truck for me to climb in thru the driver's side. This road this town this doorstep; he has been here. We left other marks too. He sat here. We stood here, we walked here, he touched this note on the piano. This shaving lotion - Mennon - is his scent. His fingers moved on this sweater, he touseled this hair, his hands held this book, his shoes sat here by the door, his luggage, his fine leather bag, here, his truck stood here - and look! here is a newspaper that fell into the snow when he unpacked. I love you, newspaper. My darling Frank. His bottle of Listerine was here, so, on the piano, his coat hung here, his suit next to my clothes in my closet; here by the piano we stood close, and here on the piano is a letter with a word in pencil scribbled on the margin - poignant. ("That is what this is, Frank: poignant." "It's more than poignant.") We left it here, with fragments of conversation, with the invisible press of our footprints on the floor, here by the piano. Poignant. And in the poetry we read together, and in every topic of conversation we have ever touched and in eating apples, in church where you stood by the door. In my orange dress, my school clothes, my white high heels which you saw briefly, in my gloves that you held, in your gloves that you took off to touch my hand to your lips, in words - "anticipation" (a secret smile at that - anticipation of a kiss), "see you." In my silver dollar on the chain that you gave me last Christmas ("You better not wear it too long or you'll get bumps on your skin again. You'll keep it for a long time but then you'll lose it - I lost that keychain from Marvin - and it will mark the end of something.") On this Oberkirchen Children's Choir recording ("If a record can wear out, that one will."), in oatmeal at breakfast ("My kids are going to have oatmeal at least once a week if I have to stand over them and make them eat it." He said it and his face grew red ... Ironical - this pain saves me cooking oatmeal.) Even on the faces of clocks ("Twelve o'clock - am I a man or a mouse." "Eleven - twenty to. This really helps things!" "I say we get there about twenty to eleven - on the dot."). On songs - Climb the highest mountain, Bernadine, a silly thing called "It's Time to Cry" ("I didn't mean to bring it; I didn't know I'd need it"). We came home again and had lunch and began to get ready for the program - my heels, the orange dress with all its silk and sheen and miles of hem. I "did" my face and backcombed my hair while he watched, and he drove off to church with the boys. The minute outside the door wondering if I should go with him, the minute of turning from the dim mirror to see his eye in the crack in the door and glower at him for peeking. Singing in the truck, a hoarse "Deck the halls with boughs of holly" as Dad and Esther and I and Judy drove together. Knowing his eyes were on me as I walked upstairs in my heels. Dave's small compliment when I appeared for the first time in the dress - "Boy, you look neat!" Then the program at church, sitting and knowing he was behind me, seeing his face briefly when I turned. Then swiftly home to see him on a chair cracking nuts, and smiling. Christmas Eve. I remember sitting in the big chair with my skirts spread about me and the tree dropping tinsel onto my shoulder. (A squat, heavy-branched tree that bulges out into the room on one side and hangs its balls and tinsel out over the floor. He brought it over his shoulder.) We whiled away time sitting - he on the chair, I on the chair cushion on the floor with those skirts all around and shining in the lamplight. We ate a hurried dagwood-ham bun and Judy came with us to Mass. The green blanket tucked about our legs, driving slowly and carefully to Sexsmith. The church, the chimes from the belfry, the people entering. I took his arm when we crossed the slippery street and he gave it a hug. We found a seat in the back, Judy by the aisle, then he, then me beside a massive Ukrainian woman with a wrinkled brown face, clawing fingers on her rosary, lips moving constantly throughout. The ceiling lit, the choir behind me, the serene nun's faces with their curving caps, the glowing madonna in the front wall niche, the candles being lit by altar boys, the strange regular crash of an instrument clacking throughout the music, swung by an altar boy, the "Excelsius Deo" of the choir; Frank's silent uncertain face, his friendly fingers around mine; Pat's lean length on a chair by the wall, his still face. We walked out almost last of all, into the lit cold, holding hands through the snow, to the red truck. We warmed the motor and were so cold until it warmed that we had to partridge up, Frank and I and Judy, under the green blanket and arms around. We ate the oranges and banana in my big bag, teased and laughed, eventually drove home again, slowly enough for one hand driving. On the yard we stopped near the door. It was late, long past one o'clock. I had his clock in my bag. We didn't go in. The truck was warm, peaceful, and he had one arm around me anyway. So he put the other one around too. I pulled Judy down too, "C'mon, join the fun Judy." Close, close. "You're a pet. You're my very bestest girl." "Will you promise?" I asked. You see, I had been trying to persuade him to write me only once a month; I know I must give him a chance to become free of me. "That's dying by inches Ellie. No." I don't remember just how we came to it, but he said "I love you so!" And I asked him when he had decided and he said near the end of the strawberry season. "Why? What did you see? I can't understand it." "Does that really bother you?" "Yes." "It was your personality Ellie. Not anything else. I don't know." (But no, love isn't because of what I am or what he is, it is just a conjugation of two solitudes bumping accidentally - I'll remember that and not be so afraid next time.) Then I don't know how it was but I told him again that I am out of his reach. "How far?" "Completely." That is what I said. I don't believe it now. I'm crazy. I'd like to be the mother of his strange children. He'll have a son who'll be like him. What a son that would be if I were his mother. I've got to work this thing out in my mind somehow. Completely out of reach. "Then I'm afraid it's goodbye, my friend." Convulsive hug. Then into his ear I said what I tho't I'd never be able to say, and it was easy. "I love you." "But not enough." Not enough to leap into your arms and so push us both into life-ever-after-despair. Love! Crazy! I can see his face tilted against the window. "I wish I could see the bottom of a bottle." "No!" "Tip it up and forget." "No! No!" I was afraid, desperately. He was so despairing and so desperate and I was still satisfied then, that I was doing what I had to. We lay slumped in the corner of the warm truck, his arms around me, one of mine lightly around his neck, Judy almost asleep against my side. "I've been steeling myself for this. I knew it had to happen." A year and a half I've been his life! "What do people do when they break up?" "Not this, Ellie," but there was no move to draw away. And dry sobs against my shoulder. I was moved. Dry soft half-kisses (half his mouth and half of mine), and then a frantic demi struggle with my one hand clutching Judy's arm and the only passionate full kiss that ever happened between us. I could feel his teeth pressing against my lower lip and all my mind could say was, this is really the end, this seals it, and I need breath, breath! It was almost a frightened sensation. ("Why did you let me kiss you?" "It was a sort of climax, I guess.") I'm glad I did let him tho'. I am now. "It was really a very angry kiss," he told me afterwards. Judy ran inside abruptly and while he was curving his arm to gather me up even a little more his arm bumped the horn and we had to hurry inside. It was dark. With Auntie and Uncle sleeping all over the kitchen and the kids in the living room the house was full of breathing. We had to find Frank's sleeping bag in the living room with Auntie's flashlight (she woke to tease me) and while we blundered around Mother demanded if that was us and when Frank went out to the basement to sleep I explained very feebly that we had had to hash something out. And then I stumbled into bed with my dress thrown into the chair and woke crying, early in the morning. That was Christmas morning 1962. And when I got up and into my brown pleated skirt and the green silk "tent" shirt I waited forlornly until late in the morning. Everyone else came in. Would Frank? They began to open gifts in the living room. My 4 parcels were brought to the kitchen table - I told Mother with tears what had happened - and I was untying blue tissue paper packages to pull out my suit when he came in and we faced each other bleakly across the table. Few words. (Later in the day when we were friending he said "I think I'll stay as long as I was going to anyway.") Then I put on my red suit with prickly holly on my shoulder and was duly admired. But Frank said, when he sat on the arm of the big chair, "If I hadn't fallen long ago I'd fall now." We were friends all day. Before dinner while Frank read I taught little cousin Ruthie to one-finger "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Suddenly - I was standing behind her chair - my knee "knaksed" again, sudden writhing pain and I collapsed into the chair. When he noticed he was beside me in a minute and a comfort. Yah! Threatened that they'd take it off if I wasn't careful! We had dinner, I on the children's table, he with the adults. Symbolic? ("Mother, am I a child or an adult? I mean, where should I sit?") We burned incense at the table, had candles on each. ("Now I've seen you with candlelight on your face.") Ice cream and cake, turkey. It seems to me that Christmas afternoon vanished too fast. I remember shredding innumerable leaves of holly, changing the suit top for Judy's furry brown sweater and the silver dollar (wore it with the suit too, incongruous tho' it was), talking endlessly beside the piano and scribbling there the word poignant, sitting close in the kitchen again saying words of feelings and writing on my fileboard the things it was hard to say. I hobbled all afternoon. And what else do I remember? Paper strewn, myself moving in the red woolly skirt and the brown shag sweater, holly pricking on my shoulder. Him in the red shirt again, and his blue jeans. In the evening, nebulae, then standing in the kitchen in the dark with his arms lightly around me and our heads together, breathing gently, nous deux, pooling our warm breath and drawing it up again, peace. Christmas night. Tears in bed, sleep. Morning of the 26th. I was up before he was in, again. He went to La Glace to see about repairs for his brakes. We had dinner. Then in the afternoon I went outside (wore J's turquoise sweater that day) over the hill, and when I came back stood outside the window where he was reading and played with the dog. He knocked on the window - I see his face teasing-but-earnest behind the curtain - and we went for a walk. Through the cattle and horse - "So you are afraid of Hereford bulls? I'll protect you!" and the arm clasped around my shoulder, over small hills along cow paths, hands swinging, down a gully talking about things, thru' trees and scratchy branches to the straw pile. Behind the straw stack where 3 calves slept was a sheltered spot. We stood straw-shouldered against the stack. I felt snow against my cheek. His was stubbly, cold. The tip of his nose was as cold as mine was. We bumped heads joyously - the whole walk was a happy one - and he held me - he likes to, I like him to, but talking was paramount - showing a certain "maturation process" - and we laughed. This is when he said "I was crazy about you." Every once in a while he took out his kakhi handkerchief and I took out my kleenex and we had a "coffee break." Eventually we went home again. My legs were red-cold but nix! Had to roll under the fence above the house. Chupas were there. Sat in the living room cracking nuts. He was in much better spirits. We moved to the kitchen with our nuts ("You are feeling better now. Remember how you used to get blue and then I'd get blue and then you'd try so hard to cheer me up that you'd cheer up in spite of yourself!" "I couldn't bear to see you blue - I'd knock myself out trying to cheer you up!") In the evening there was a knock on the door. "I fear the worst," I mumbled. Peter Dyck! All good grooming and shiny vocabulary and Christmas polished manners. "Santa Claus!" I said - hey, y'know what? The idiot gave me a subscription to National Geographic mag! "Merry Christmas past," he said and shook my hand, then was ladled into the living room. Frank and I did dishes. Frank had a worried look - "Marry an old coat twenty years older than yourself if you like, but don't let it be this one!" he said. Then we all went to the living room and the two argued fiercely on "I think therefore I am." He was condescending to Frank. Mother said they glowered. I found myself moving always closer to Frank's chair tho' he virtually ignored me. Said Frank later, "The guy's too smart for me." When Judy came home from a tobogganing party, she reports Harold, driving, said, "Yeah, this is Peter's car all right, boy would I like to see this!" So we muttered about absolutes and verbally banged tables and I saw a contrast. Then at midnight he left. The rest went to bed. Frank and I were alone on the living room couch. We played Concerto in A Minor rather endlessly and celebrated our honeymoon and said "maybe in 5 years I'll look you up anyway. It hasn't really hit me yet. Maybe it will tomorrow or when I'm home. Ellie, I want you." At two thirty there was the most peculiar sound in the kitchen. We investigated. Only Rudy, small-boned childish Rudy sleepy curled up without his cover. And so he pulled me into his arms beside the stove and nearly squashed all fear out of me. Fierce and breathless and terribly painful this last-embrace idea. "Ellie!" "Frank. Your name will hit me everywhere." And when he crushed me against his body again it seems boneless, shapeless, organless, only a pressure against my shapeless, boneless, organless pressing body. "Easy." A sound. Father emerging from his bedroom and we started apart; he quickly to the door. And through the open door I leaned toward him. Thursday morning early. "Now that I've finally learned to say it I can't stop! I love you. Goodnight. Oh, take care of yourself!" Into my bedroom. Rocking on the bed sobbing with my arms around my knees and the cold drawing up bumps in my skin. Tears and sleep. The rest you know about. Poetry -
"I think it is the vapor rising to make clouds, unbuilding the sea."
Friday Dec 28 For days there had been a large apple sitting in the living room, red and yellow and glowing like a waxen apple sitting in the path of sun across a table. Yesterday at breakfast I held the apple, cupped it in my hands, and when he had eaten breakfast I said, "Shall we share it - Adam?" "I must be able to read your mind. Alright." So I cut the apple in half and gave him the biggest half - I always truly want to give him the biggest half of things - and we sat with our halves cupped in our hands, counting the brown shiny seeds. "Do you like the seeds too?" Then we ate them slowly. "We'll have a ritual. Every Christmas we'll cut an apple in half and eat one half, then bury the other. Or something." And standing in the dim basement beside the heater we touched hands as friends, brothers, lovers, and he said "I won't make any wild oaths, but I think I'll remember. Five years." I couldn't help but skip, going out the door before him into the sun, because just being with him was such gladness, I with his green-grey wool coat over my shoulders and my feet light and my hair mussed by his warm hands. Going up the slippery snowy slope from the basement door and skipping ahead of him in the sun. We went for dinner and I felt no wincing at all when I walked away and his eyes followed my bare feet. I know he doesn't care and it doesn't hurt him. And again, down in the basement. "If it is still the same in five years, who'd fight it?" "And I'll come to see you." "And I'll be so overwhelmed that I'll fall into a little heap." "Good. Then you'll be at my mercy." "That is the whole trouble with falling. It puts you at someone's mercy." His very tender smile again. "I'll be merciful." We went in and had dinner. I served the ice cream and gave him the biggest dish. I heard his bemused murmer about unfair helpings behind me. While at the table we talked about world-weariness, the tiredness of living. Father said, "I felt it first when I was sixteen or seventeen." Mother said she'd felt it when she was perhaps eighteen. Frank said he had been eighteen. "I wanted to just stop breathing for a while. I tried. It doesn't work." And I am just now beginning to know what it is. I am becoming an adult. I'm afraid of it, I'm afraid I won't be good enough. I want to be a truly good person and I want to find a few absolutes. (On Wednesday night Mr Dyck said "I know what your trouble is," and he scribbled the one word, Relativity, onto the paper. "But you can't get away from it.") After dinner there was again an assembling of stuff. Nothing forgotten? Nothing but what has to be left behind, Herzallerliebstes. "I want you Ellie," on the early morning couch, once long ago by a kitchen cold window. And "So you believe in the 4-letter word now?" "Yes." "What is it, where does it come from?" "From the soul I think, wherever it is." "It isn't just chemistry is it?" "No Ellie. It isn't chemistry." "I'm not going to marry for convenience, not even for companionship, like some people. If I can't have a perfect marriage I don't want one at all." "I'm going to marry a kind old man - about twenty years older than I - a kind absent-minded old guy who never knows what I'm doing and who writes articles for National Geographic Magazine and he'll travel all the time and he won't be interested in having children and he won't need dinner on time and he'll only want coffee and toast and eggs." Frank was shocked at this. "I don't know how serious you are about this - and what about your twelve boys and one girl?" "I guess I do want a son - but I can adopt him." Only now can I understand how he has been feeling all these years when I was too young to know how to love at all. Now I'm old enough to love him well - now that I'm old enough to know world-weariness, life-weariness and old enough to give him up because I love him. I'm glad we were strong enough to cut each other off and it is his courage in facing pain that I respect more than ever. It was because he loved me that he let me go, and for these five days of Christmas his jaw has trembled just as my eyes have continually filled and refilled, and while I slept he lay awake. Marvin will be marrying today; your sister Judy is in Vancouver and never comes home; I am cut off from you. You will be so alone, Frank, so alone and desolate. As I am alone and desolate, but I have my mother. When his things were all put away in the truck he came back to the house and sat on the arm of the kitchen couch. Neither of us said anything. I looked down, he looked at the floor. Dave stood awkwardly. Then Dave said goodbye all around, he shook my hand and I said "Goodbye Dave" much too loudly. Frank stood up to shake my mother's hand. She had been standing around not knowing what to say. Awkward and earnest and dear. "I don't know what to say. Just may God be with you in whatever you decide to do." He stood holding her hand. Slim in his tight jeans with his boots laced up, his jacket to his hips (the beige reverse side of the black jacket he wore when he came to see me in Yarrow). His small head with its small unique features, his grey-brown hair curling over his forehead and over his head. (It was quite short, very crisp - but what color was it? I've never really tho't of it before.) Pain - it isn't the worst thing that could happen to a friend because it isn't the worst thing that could happen to me, but this pain of not being able to communicate with him is so huge! "I just want what is best for you kids" Mom said intensely and then she went away to the living room and left us. Perhaps she had a tear too. By now I had pulled back tears again. Frank took my hand and said "Goodbye Ellie" and I choked again and said a very small "Goodbye Frank." And we stood silently again. He took my hand (last night: "How are we going to say goodbye tomorrow? Will we shake hands or will I kiss the back of your hand?"), kissed the back of it. I had to tell him again what I told him before in the basement. "We're giving it a chance, Frank," because it seemed agonizingly important to find a small hope again. And he went to the door quickly and outside, and his mouth was trembling. He said "When you feel like not breathing any more remember other people have felt that way and will feel that way." And he looked up with his foot on the steps and a light in his eyes and said "I think I'll remember." And all I said was "Take care of yourself." "You too, Ellie." And he pulled shut the door, and I ran with my face tear-wet to the frosted window. The red truck standing before the door, two dark shapes behind the ice-covered windows, the white exhaust fluffing snow behind it, and then the movingness. He pulled down the window and I can see his sharp face still, staring back at me as he left. I feel myself kneeling on the chair beside the cold window, face wet and naked staring back at him with my mouth a little open, like a grieving fish. His yellow-gloved wave, his face once more, and then this aloneness stinging in all the fissures and pores and scars of me. "No one my grief can tell." Run to your bedroom female and cry desolate tears into your pillow with your acid-lanced body rigid around you on the bed. Frank is gone. Saturday nite December 29 Last night was not so bad. But tonight! I've finished my history, all the bittersweet story of Frank and Ellie. And tonight I feel so overwhelmingly alone. And he, at home now, perhaps just going to bed, must be as alone as I am. What will happen to us? We are entirely alone now, without a tie that has been friend-security for a year and a half. Only that long? Only a year and a half? It seems aeons. If five years were a year and a half, tho' but five years is over three times as long as this has been, and he wants sons soon. What have I learned? I've learned about tenderness, and about what it is to be truly loved by a man. I'll not be easily satisfied next time. Perhaps I'll carry a torch for a while to protect myself from the next time. Will I be afraid of love next time, because of pain? Not as much because of pain as because of irrationality. I may do something completely stupid. If it had been five years later I might have, this time. So I'll be edgy and I'll avoid Mr Dyck plaguishly because he has no tenderness and I'm not responsible - and now I know I can fall in love to the point of losing reason, just to save myself from losing a precious and dear person with whom a year and a half of my life are so tangled. This shared background and shared days and adventures are the things that seem hardest to cut off. It seems impossible to stop. And even now I keep wanting to tell him things, about bells I hear ringing and things I did when I was young and everything that is important to me I want to share with him. Was it strong of us to separate? Would it have worked itself out? Now like a coward I say, oh, why couldn't we leave it to happen by itself? But I still can't let him dangle and hang his heart upside down to bleed out when I will surely grow away from him and shake to be free? You are free now Ellie. Be a little happy. No, grieve, because you have lost something that happens only very few times. A best friend, a herzallerleibstes freund who was the one violator of your terrible aloneness. Janeen long ago, and Frank now. The only two people who have ever been that kind of friend. "I hope we always remember each other" you said. I hope so too. I'm sure we will. And everything I remember about you is pure good. You were such a good person and such a good friend and now I am so alone. Double crossing fate. If you were going to university and studying to become a social worker or a high school teacher, and if you were yet what you are - as dear - we could have had a steady friendship throughout all my youth and then you and I could have bought some books, a portable stereo set and double sleeping bags and set up housekeeping and gone somewhere to work and lived happily ever after. Why did all of that happen if we weren't meant for each other? But I'm glad; it was glorious. Thanks for everything love; I'll remember you. We did do what was best. But right now it is very sad. I have a long while to be alone. I'm not going to pieces. I want to be
as sweet and honest as you made me - I'll remember your standards. I love
you and goodbye.
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