is loose and loud and showy and Lizbett loves how she attracts attention. And Lizbett knows she and her mother think alike, have the same aspirations. She knows her mother is ambitious for her. She is ambitious for herself and she likes having an ally. Ever since she was very little she and her mother have chatted easily and laughed, exchanged feelings and ideas. Lizbett shares all her plans and misgivings with her. They have walked together, shopped together, gone to art galleries and films and the theatre together, cooked together, watched TV together. Before Lizbett was in school all day they even “lunched” together at spiffy restaurants. Though she knows it’s maybe inappropriate, she likes to think of her mother as her best friend.
With her father, her relationship is more confined. She does not find him easy to talk to, but he is more affectionate than her mother. He is always available for a tight hug. And until recently, she could climb on his lap and snuggle into him with his arms around her and stay for an indefineable time. He was fun and funny. They used to have a silly game. They’d play it over and over. She never got tired of it.
He would ask, “Lizbett, what’s the difference between a duck?”
“Oh, Daddy, that doesn’t make sense.”
“Then what’s the difference between a duck and a train?”
Lizbett would laugh harder. “That’s ’dicilous,” she’d say.
“Okay, then. What’s the difference between a duck and cheesecake?”
As the comparisons got more and more absurd … “What’s the difference between a duck and a dinosaur, a sofa, a hamburger with ketchup?” Lizbett would be shrieking and giggling uncontrollably.
She loved their reading and playing the piano together. They just didn’t talk much.
In her acting, Lizbett has the ability to enter the character she is playing, slip into her skin and become her. Take on her identity. At the same time as she does this, she also animates the character with her own sensibilities and vitality. The two meld. For this she is praised: for her naturalistic, un-self-conscious portrayals.
Meredith volunteers every second Saturday morning at a settlement house that provides daycare for single mothers. Most of them are teenagers who go off and do teenage things while their small children are looked after. Lizbett sometimes goes and helps out and the thing that most overwhelms her is not how shabby and unclean — even a bit smelly — the children are, but how passive. Their only stimulation has been the television, which they’ve been plopped in front of from their earliest months. No one has read to them, played hand and face games with them, coloured and drawn with them, performed puppet shows for them. Lizbett does all this with pleasure, but she feels, sadly and with some early cynicism, that it means very little. It bothers her to return to her privileged life when the children have to return to their deprived ones. She doesn’t know how to reconcile the imbalance.
Down in the kitchen, she pours herself a glass of milk, then goes into the family room, sits at the piano, and begins to practise. First she does some hand stretches and then she begins the scales, then the arpeggios. She brings out a book of exercises and plays each one, diligently, though not effortlessly. She is a good pianist, but she is a careless one, going through the pieces the same way she goes through life, with enthusiasm and endurance, but not necessarily focus, concentration. Her head is in too many places at once.
She begins a Schubert piece she has been working on for some time.
Upstairs, lying in bed, a Huey Lewis song is running through Thompson’s head. “Doin’ It All for My Baby.” He really doesn’t like sex in the morning. He feels groggy, subpar, as if all his neurons aren’t firing. He doesn’t like the bad taste in his mouth and he doesn’t like the smell of Meredith’s. He doesn’t like that his body feels stale, raunchy. But he is particularly aware right now of Meredith’s need for responsiveness and this morning was the best he could do. He knows she has been having an affair or rather he keenly suspects something extraordinary has been going on. Her euphoria, her frequent absences with odd explanations, her heightened attentiveness to family, her increased sex drive, her more than usual garrulousness all suggest this. He was once the object of such excess. Not that Meredith isn’t always a bit excessive, but in love she’s almost manic.
That’s how it seemed when they were in university. She was an exchange student from Australia doing her junior year in Fine Arts as a painting major. He was majoring in photography. They had a seminar together, “Food in the Paintings of the Baroque Era,” which they both loved.
He wasn’t sure exactly what he had done to attract her. He was handsome in an unassuming, untidy way, but he wouldn’t have thought so. He had an ungroomed beard and his dark eyes under heavy eyebrows gave him a gruff look.
He was not used to female attention, having gone to an all-male boarding school from age ten. And he was diffident, a late only child with parents so engrossed in one another that he felt he was a basically a distraction to them. His only contact with his mother — his father only came on weekends — was summers at their island cottage up north. Being alone with her in that isolated setting, in deep silent woods by active, glistening water, Thompson learned something about women … or his own intimate version. His mother exuded care, but she was removed and he would watch her move about the cottage, on their walks, while they swam, in awe, as if she were something “other,” a mystical being. She was elegant and gentle and convivial; she treated him not as a son, but as a companion. She never hugged him, but somehow seemed to embrace him in a respectful, solicitous way. She engaged him, seemed interested in his thoughts. What he felt from her was a kind of power, an intelligent, creative, thoughtful power that reinforced his life, but did not enter it. She was unknowable.
So Meredith’s initial undisguised ardor, especially her physical overtures, overwhelmed, but also pleased him. It seemed to require so little effort on his part.
“I’m not used to so much fuss,” he said.
“You just don’t know how to deal with …”
“With …?”
“Love.”
“It’s not anything I ever imagined having.”
She took over his life.
“I’m not sure what you see in me,” he said after a session of particularly fervid sex when Meredith was so loud he was afraid the upstairs tenants, a group of earnest student teachers, would hear.
“I’m not sure, either.”
“Is it because I’m so eloquent?”
She laughed. “No, you only speak when you have something to say …”
“Which isn’t often,” he interjected.
“Which isn’t often. Right. My father is a church minister who never stops talking. He preaches and proselytizes and lectures and tells the same stories over and over and we have to listen, my sister, my mother, and I. We weren’t allowed a voice. All he had to do to get us to shut up was give us a withering, destructive look.
“He was mean?” Thompson asked.
“Oh, no, never! He was … is a gentle, kind man, but he was a stern lecturer and so boring and repetitive. And from early on, I thought what he said was such bullshit! You have no bullshit in you. I … love how grounded you seem. I always feel as if my feet never hit firm ground … as if I’m … not flying … but moving just above the surface of things, never
