Dreams of the ’68 housewife

By that hour of the afternoon when the day, having exhausted itself upon the fields and roads and the endless repetitive human usages of washing and sweeping and carrying and preparing food for appetites which tomorrow would return unchanged and insatiable, seemed to sag slowly earthward beneath the accumulated weight of all the yesterdays that had preceded it, she stood before the mirror hanging above the washstand — crooked lo these 15 years because nobody had ever quite remembered nor cared enough to straighten it — and looked not at herself alone but at the whole slow and secret history of diminishment and endurance written there with a cunning so patient that no eye could perceive its progress from one morning to the next and yet all at once one afternoon the face appears altered forever, as though Time itself had entered silently during the night carrying its invisible stylus, and she touched with two fingers the faint pleated skin beside her mouth and thought suddenly, with that curious violence by which memory descends not gradually but entire and terrible like weather, of the young man she had almost married before she married the one whose boots even now would soon sound upon the porch boards, the young man with the fierce bright careless eyes and the hat forever tilted back upon his head as though no burden heavier than sunlight had ever rested there, and she wondered — not idly but with the grave and almost ceremonial melancholy of one standing among ruins — what he would see if he saw her now: whether beneath the softened jaw and the veins beginning blue beneath the skin and the hands roughened by hot water and winter air and the labour of years repeated so often they had ceased to be distinguishable one from another, he would still perceive the girl who had once moved among Saturday evenings and picnics and dances with that unconscious sovereignty peculiar to the young women of small towns, who do not yet know that beauty is not possession but only temporary stewardship.

Then the apron strings loosened beneath her fingers almost of their own accord, in that absentminded and curiously girlish motion as though some forgotten self had momentarily repossessed the body before age could object, and the room itself — the kitchen with its blended aroma of starch and onions and yesterday’s coffee lingering in the curtains — seemed to recede and thin like scenery painted upon theatre flats while from somewhere, perhaps the neighbour’s transistor radio or perhaps merely the inward acoustics of recollection itself, there drifted music faint and scratchy and infinitely distant, and she began to move, not dancing at first but merely swaying there upon the worn linoleum whose pattern had been erased by decades of feet crossing always from stove to sink and sink to table, until gradually the body remembered what the mind no longer dared remember directly, the old instinctive turn of the waist and lift of the shoulders and measured placement of the feet learned before marriage and childbirth and disappointment had settled upon the flesh like successive winters, and now the years collapsed not backward in sequence but all at once and simultaneously, so that she was at the same instant the aging woman alone in the kitchen and the girl beneath paper lanterns strung across the courthouse lawn while boys in pressed collars lingered in restless clusters waiting only for permission to approach her, the very air alive then with perfume and dust and tobacco smoke and the furious sweet ache of youth believing itself eternal.

And afterward — or perhaps before, since in memory there is no true chronology but only accumulation — she took from the closet the photograph album swollen at the spine and furred with dust, carrying it with both hands like something liturgical, and seated herself beside the dimming window where the evening gathered slowly among the trees outside while inside the house objects emerged into that peculiar hour when chairs and lamps and folded garments appear already touched by the stillness they will possess after death, and she turned the brittle pages carefully because time had rendered everything fragile now: the photographs with their sepia faces gazing outward from vanished summers; the corners cracked and curling; the names written in fading ink by hands long since stilled beneath cemetery clay; until from between two pages there slipped the flower, flattened and dry and so delicate that even her breathing threatened it, the first flower he had given her, not the almost-husband but the actual one, the man whose life had become so entangled with hers through mortgages and illnesses and children and reconciliations and long seasons of silence that love itself had ceased to resemble feeling and become instead a kind of shared endurance, and holding the flower she closed her eyes and touched unconsciously the faded housedress at her throat and immediately the coarse fabric vanished, dissolved utterly beneath the immense authority of recollection, and she stood once more clothed in that pale gown which had once caused whole rooms to alter subtly upon her entrance, men lowering their cigarettes halfway to their mouths, women watching with admiration sharpened faintly by envy, the gown itself luminous as though woven not from fabric but from the very substance of youth and moonlight and expectation.

And the house around her — the sink crowded with plates, the ticking clock, the screen door waiting for the husband’s return, all the humble and repetitive apparatus of ordinary domestic existence — seemed then no more nor less substantial than the remembered dances and vanished voices, because she understood at last with that deep inward knowledge beyond speech that the dreams of such women never perish, not truly, but merely descend below the surface of days and duties where they persist intact and sleepless beneath the drudgery and tenderness and resignation of ordinary life, waiting patiently through years of meals prepared and beds made and tears concealed, until some accidental conjunction of light and silence and memory summons them upward again like drowned things rising at last through dark water.