Week Ten
Welcome, faithful reader, to the tenth instalment of
Three Things. This week's offerings: "Sourpuss,"
"Restless," and "Women Who Run to the Wolves."
Sourpuss
This week while waiting to pay for a bag of lemons at the local produce stand, I chanced to overhear a heavy-set man speak the following lines into his phone:
"Was she a sourpuss today? Yeah? Well, she's got nothing to be sour about."
He moved out of my hearing, but the dialogue sample he'd
provided was more than enough to pique my fiction-writer's interest. Just who
is this miserable woman, I wondered, this sourpuss with "nothing to be sour about"? (Unless of course it isn't a woman. It could be spoiled pug suffering
from diverticulitis, or a cranky pet macaw, known for biting – or biting off? –
visitors' fingers . . .) But I digress. For now let's stick with Homo sapiens,
female.
My initial premise involved an infirm mother – a
woman in pain who lives at the mercy of an unfeeling son and the homecare worker
he's hired. Perhaps the two of them are somehow in cahoots against her. Better
yet, maybe they've gone beyond cahoots and fallen into bed together –
indeed, into a kind of self-serving love.
And then I thought, No, the sourpuss isn't his mother.
It's his wife.
Luckily, this poor woman didn't arrive in my mind alone;
she brought with her a fourth character – perhaps even a narrator? – in the form of a
troubled and, until now, absent son. A recovering addict, or so his imagined appearance
would suggest. Twenty-eight years old and unknown to his family for years,
he's unaware of his mother's condition until he returns home, determined to forgive the father whose cruelty sowed the seeds
of self-harm, and make amends with the mother whose heart he's broken a hundred
times.
This son – let's call him Terry – may have been weak when
he was a kid, but years on the street have taught him how to look after himself
and others. Suddenly the sourpuss has a champion. The husband and his
"care-giver" mistress won't know what hit them.
Restless
The other day I passed a teenage couple performing a sad
pantomime in the mall. The boy – sixteen or so and built like a chimp on tiptoe
– repeatedly draped his arm over his girl. Two-thirds his size, she appeared
unable (or at least unwilling) to bear its weight. They'd made a game of him
claiming her, her ducking and wriggling away. The dynamic was difficult to
read. Did he love her passionately, or only long to corral her? Was she playing
hard to get, or was she in fact un-gettable – already gone?
Leaving the young couple to their "play," I
carried on past displays of wigs, bifocals and ridiculous shoes. An ad in the
window of a vitamin shop posed the following question: "Do you suffer
from restless legs?"
Restless. The word combined with the scene I'd just
witnessed to produce a fictional pair: the hulking boy
who's never loved anything or anyone the way he loves his little girlfriend;
the girl who can't wait to get away. What happens when she finally works up the nerve to wriggle
away from him for good?
Women Who Run to the Wolves
This week I heard two separate pieces on CBC
radio about members of the military dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. The first was
a short feature on canine companions trained to help suffering soliders cope (here's the TV version); the
second was a moving round-table discussion on The Sunday Edition. Together they
got me thinking in a narrative vein.
As it happens, I've already dealt with the symbiotic
relationship between wounded soldiers and dogs in my work: Stephen, a character in my
novel, Fauna, is an infantryman on medical release who volunteers as a
dog-walker at the local animal shelter. In any case, it wasn't the military
angle that captured my interest so much as the thought of an animal coming to the aid of
someone who's lived through war.
What I haven't written about yet is a woman I know who suffers terribly from PTSD. After years of abuse, she escaped from her violent
husband, moved alone to a small town and found herself a puppy that was mostly
wolf. When I met that puppy it was all grown up and as tame as it would ever
be – which is to say, half-wild. There was one human being it trusted: a woman
who trusted very few humans herself.
If I wrote a story about a woman based on that woman, a dog based on
that dog, it would be a tale of love and perseverance. And war. Domestic,
devastating war.
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