Dressing Up for the Carnival (7 page)

I did say, didn’t I, that my Aunt Lucy was thirty-six when she withered away? Exactly the age I will be in four years and three ilkly months.

Cross that last bit out. There’s no room for self-pity in the satellite-bounced fictions of today. Ellipsis, though crownless, is queen. I remind Dick Wentworth of this insight.

“I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch what you said. This noise, all these people, that execrable music.”

“I said I’d give it some thought.”

“What?”

“The position. The post. The post/position.”

“Oh.”

He was away attending another conference when it happened. The combined SWUS/NWUS biannual, the year he gave his paper on “Stasis and Static in Early Twentieth Century Cowboy Imbroglios.” Brilliant. Shedding light on. Now it seems he can’t forgive himself for signing up for the post-conference mini-session on the couplet.

“Really? The couplet?”

“The line, actually.”

She’d been dead, apparently, for just twenty-four hours when he got home. The police, even in off-the-map places like Ithaca, are good at figuring out things like the amount of water left in the body cells after the heart stops. It decreases at a known rate. Experts have considered this, done graphs and so on.

“The line, you said?”

“Well, perhaps I should have said the word.”

Of course she left a note. On the kitchen table probably. Or pinned to her bathrobe. It doesn’t matter where. What matters is what the note said. Only one word, rumor has it. Scratched in pen or pencil or chalk, scratched into the laminated tabletop, into the wood paneling of the basement rec room, with a nail, with a nail file, with a piece of glass, scratched on her wrists—it doesn’t matter.

“Salary?”

“Small.”

“How small? Do you mean, hmmmm, ridiculously small?”

“Annual increments, though. And benefits.”

“Benefits!”

What matters, at least to L. Porter and her ilk, is the exact word she left behind. Its orthography, its referents. The word is the central modality, after all. The narrational heart.

There are infinite possibilities. A dictionary of possibilities. You’d think that little scratched word would come scuttling toward me on jointed legs, wouldn’t you, eager to make itself registered. It might have been something accusing (betrayal). Or confessional (regret). Or descriptive (depression), or existential (lost, loose, lust)? or dialogic (a simple good-bye). No, all too predictable. Reactive rather than initiative.

My guess is that she left some kind of disassociative verbal unit: leaf, water, root, fire, fish.

“Love.”

“What did you say?” To narrativize is to step back from spontaneous expression, even as one consolidates the available, accessible, amenable material of the world.

“Love,” he says again, looking down, sideways, then up at the ceiling fan, ready to withdraw his narratival disjuncture and press forward to other, wider topics.

“Pardon?”

“We’d love to have you aboard.”

The spine of the final shrimp is parked between his front teeth now. Sitting there rather sweetly, in fact, though it makes it difficult to catch his next words. “My ilk is your ilk” is what I think I heard.

STOP!

The Queen has dropped out of sight. At the busiest time of the court season too, what with the Admiral’s Ball coming up, and the People’s Picnic. No one knows where she’s disappeared to. Has she gone to the seaside? Unthinkable. A person who is sensitive to salt water, to sand, to beach grass and striped canvas, does not traipse off to the seaside. Well, where, then? It used to be that she would spend a few days in the mountains in late summer. She loved the coolness, she said, the grandeur. But now her sinuses react to balsam and pine. And to the inclines of greenness and shadow.

No, she is a stay-at-home queen. A dull queen. Not exactly beloved, but a queen who is nevertheless missed when she is absent. People are starting to talk, to wonder. They understand that the pollen count is high, and so it is not unreasonable that she remain enclosed in her tower. But why have the windows been bricked in? Can it be that she has developed an intolerance to sunlight too? Poor soul, and just at the turning of the year with the air so fine and pale.

Music, of course, has been anathema for years. Bugles, trumpets, and drums were confiscated in the first triannulus of the reign, and stringed instruments—violins, cellos—inevitably followed. It was heartbreaking to see, especially the moment when the Queen’s own harp was smashed by hammers and the pieces buried deep in the palace garden.

Simple nourishment has always been for her a form of torture. Fruits and vegetables, meat and milk bring on duodenal spasms, but, worse, she is unable to bear the shape of a spoon in her mouth. The finest clothing rubs and chafes. The perfume of flowers causes her to faint, and even oxygen catches in her windpipe so that she coughs and chokes and calls for the court physician.

Ah, the physician! What grave responsibility that man bears. It was he, after all, who first recognized the danger of ragweed and banished it from the realm. Then roses. Then common grass and creeping vines. It was he who declared the Queen to be allergic to her courtiers, to her own children, to the King himself.

But at least life went forward. Acts of proclamation. The Admiral’s Ball, already mentioned. And the Spring Rites on the royal parade grounds where the Queen could be glimpsed by one and all, waving her handkerchief, bravely blessing her subjects with the emblem of her disability. People are fed by that kind of example. Yes, they are. People find courage in stubborn endurance.

But recently the Queen has disappeared, and matters have suddenly worsened. There has been an official announcement that clocks and calendars are to be destroyed. It is forbidden now to utter the names of the days and months, to speak of yesterday or tomorrow or next week. Naturally there will be no Spring Rites this year, for the progression of seasons has been declared unlawful. Meteorologists have been dismissed from their positions and weather disallowed. The cause of Her Majesty’s affliction has been identified. It has been verified absolutely. It seems the measured substance that pushes the world this way and that, the invented sequentiality that hovers between the simple raising and lowering of a teacup, can no longer be tolerated by the Queen.

At last the people understand why the palace windows have been closed up. The temporal movement of the sun and stars must be blocked from her view. Rhythmic pulsations of light threaten her existence, suggesting as they do the unstoppable equation that attaches to mass and energy. She lives in the dark now, blindfolded, in fact. Her ears too have been covered over for fear she will hear the cries of birds, a cock at dawn, a swallow, or an owl hooting its signature on the night sky. She no longer speaks or thinks, since the positioning of noun and verb, of premise and conclusion, demands a progression that invites that toxic essence, that mystery.

But they have overlooked her heart, her poor beating queenly heart. Like a mindless machine it continues to add and subtract. A whimsical toy, it beeps and sighs, singing and songing along the jointed channels of her blood. Counting, counting. Now diminishing. Now swelling. Insisting on its literal dance. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Filling up with deadly arithmetic.

MIRRORS

When he thinks about the people he’s known in his life, a good many of them seem to have cultivated some curious strand of as ceticism, contrived some gesture of renunciation. They give up sugar. Or meat. Or newspapers. Or neckties. They sell their second car or disconnect the television. They might make a point of staying at home on Sunday evenings or abjuring chemical sprays. Something anyway, that signals dissent and cuts across the beating heart of their circumstances, reminding them of their other, leaner selves. Their better selves.

He and his wife have claimed their small territory of sacrifice too. For years they’ve become “known” among their friends for the particular deprivation they’ve assigned themselves: for the fact that there are no mirrors in their summer house. None at all. None are allowed.

The need to observe ourselves is sewn into us, everyone knows this, but he and his wife have turned their back on this need, said no to it, at least for the duration of the summer months. Otherwise, they are not very different from other couples nearing the end of middle age—he being sixty, she fifty-eight, their children grown up and married and living hundreds of miles away.

In September they will have been married thirty-five years, and they’re already planning a week in New York to celebrate this milestone, five nights at the Algonquin (for sentimental reasons) and a few off-Broadway shows, already booked. They stay away from the big musicals as a rule, preferring, for want of a better word,
serious
drama. Nothing experimental, no drugged angst or scalding discourse, but plays that coolly examine the psychological positioning of men and women in our century. This torn, perplexing century. Men and women who resemble themselves.

They would be disinclined to discuss between them how they’ve arrived at these harmonious choices in the matter of play-going, how they are both a little proud, in fact, of their taste for serious drama, proud in the biblical
pride
sense. Just as they’re a little proud of their mirrorless summer house on the shores of Big Circle Lake.

Their political views tend to fall in the middle of the spectrum. Financially, you might describe them as medium well off, certainly not wealthy. He has retired, one week ago as a matter of fact, from his own management consulting firm, and she is, has always been, a housewife and active community volunteer. These days she wears a large stylish head of stiffened hair, and he, with no visible regret, is going neatly bald at the forehead and crown.

Walking away from their cottage on Big Circle Lake, you would have a hard time describing its contents or atmosphere: faded colors and pleasing shapes that beg you to stay, to make yourself comfortable. These inviting surfaces slip from remembrance the minute you turn your back. But you would very probably bear in mind their single act of forfeiture: there are no mirrors.

Check the medicine cabinet in the little fir-paneled bathroom: nothing. Check the back of the broom cupboard door in the kitchen or the spot above the dresser in their large skylighted bedroom or the wall over the log-burning fireplace in what they choose to call “the lounge.” Even if you were to abuse the rules of privacy and look into her (the wife’s) big canvas handbag you would find nothing compromising. You would likely come across a compact of face powder, Elizabeth Arden, but the little round mirror lining most women’s compacts has been removed. You can just make out the curved crust of glue that once held a mirror in place.

Check even the saucepans hanging over the kitchen stove. Their bottoms are discolored copper, scratched aluminum. No chance for a reflective glimpse there. The stove itself is dull textured, ancient.

This mirrorlessness of theirs is deliberate, that much is clear.

From June to August they choose to forget who they are, or at least what they look like, electing an annual season of non-reflectiveness in the same way other people put away their clocks for the summer or their computers or door keys or microwave ovens.

“But how can you possibly shave?” people ask the husband, knowing he is meticulous about such things.

He moves a hand to his chin. At sixty, still slender, he remains a handsome man. “By feel,” he says. He demonstrates, moving the forefinger of his left hand half an inch ahead of the path of an imaginary razor. “Just try it. Shut your eyes and you’ll see you can manage a decent shave without the slightest difficulty. Maybe not a perfect shave, but good enough for out at the lake.”

His wife, who never was slender, who has fretted for the better part of her life about her lack of slenderness—raged and grieved, gained and lost—has now at fifty-eight given up the battle. She looks forward to her mirrorless summers, she says. She likes to tell her friends—and she and her husband are a fortunate couple with a large circle of friends—that she can climb into her swimsuit and walk through the length of the cottage—the three original rooms, the new south-facing wing—without having to look even once at the double and triple pinches of flesh that have accumulated in those corners where her shoulders and breasts flow together. “Oh, I suppose I could look down and
see
what I’m like,” she says, rolling her eyes, “but I’m not obliged to take in the whole panorama every single day.”

She does her hair in the morning in much the same way her husband shaves: by feel, brushing it out, patting it into shape, fixing it with pins. She’s been putting on earrings for forty years, and certainly doesn’t require a mirror for that. As for lipstick, she makes do with a quick crayoning back and forth across her mouth, a haphazard double slash of color. Afterward she returns the lipstick smartly to its case, then runs a practiced finger around her upper and lower lips, which she stretches wide so that the shaping of pale raspberry fits perfectly the face she knows by heart.

He’s watched her perform this small act a thousand times, so often that his own mouth sometimes wants to stretch in response.

 

 

They were newly married and still childless when they bought the cottage, paying far too much, then discovering almost immediately the foundations were half-rotted, and carpenter ants—or something—lived in the pine rafters. Mice had made a meal of the electric wires; ants thronged the mildewed cupboards. Officially the place had been sold to them furnished, but the previous owners had taken the best of what there was, leaving only a sagging couch, a table that sat unevenly on the torn linoleum, two battered chairs, a bed with a damp mattress, and an oak dresser with a stuck drawer. The dresser was the old-fashioned kind with its own mirror frame attached, two curving prongs rising gracefully like a pair of arms, but the mirror it had once embraced was missing.