Read Unless Online

Authors: Carol Shields

Tags: #General, #Fiction

Unless (10 page)

BOOK: Unless
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“Generally,” I told her quietly, “it’s not good translation practice to alter the names of foreign publishers.”

Who makes these rules, she wanted to know, but I could tell she was going to trust my judgment in the long run. Loving life as she does, she has no patience with puritans. She and I have worked together for years now, but even in those early days we’d come to understand each other, dangling our little proposals and resistances gracefully so that they veered away from actual confrontation. We disagree on quotation marks but are in accord when it comes to levels of usage. For instance, she refuses to employ the word
ass
when referring to someone’s rear end, and I am with her there. Oh, how the two of us hate that word! Ass, ass, ass. We get along, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t. We each know, but in slightly separate ways, about the consolation of the right word perfectly used.

We’re two women
au fond
—this is how she frequently expresses the intellectual gas that surrounds and binds our separate energies—and each of us is equipped with women’s elemental anatomy, women’s plumbing and deployment of soft tissue, with women’s merciless cycles that bring on surprisingly similar attacks of inquietude. In addition, the two of us share a love for the hard bite of language and a womanish (in my opinion) tolerance for the moments when words go swampy and vague. She knows the importance of rigorous scholarship, and, at the same time, how to keep her intellect uninflated.

But her life is not my life. She’s worked harder and been braver because she’s had to, and for a long time she hid her political agenda behind a lace of literary conventions. Suddenly, her traditional phase terminated, and she was left with her rucksack of hard questions, some of them aimed straight at me. How do I permit myself to live with a man? she’s asked me more than once. She’ll never understand how I’ve come to accept the tyranny of
pénétration
. This word, for some reason, is always pronounced as though it doesn’t exist in English. She gives it full front-of-the-mouth fervour, even though she’s grown to be quite fond of Tom, and even though she is no stranger to penetration herself—but that was another chapter of her life.

And our three daughters; she knows each of them, and loves them fully, but has no real idea of my investment in
their lives, how my body, my consciousness, has never, even for a moment, been separated from them. She worries about Norah’s homeless state, phoning me every second day to see whether she’s returned. She’s even taken a taxi to Norah’s corner at Bloor and Bathurst, alighting with a giant basket of fruit and addressing her loudly, as though through a megaphone, calling her foolish and misguided, a stupid girl who is keeping her mother from getting ahead with her work. Norah refused to lift her head, Danielle reported with an exhausted shrug.
Qu’est-ce qu’on peut faire?

At least Danielle Westerman does not, like many of my acquaintances, refer to Norah’s behaviour as a “developmental stage.” She believes that Norah has simply succumbed to the traditional refuge of women without power: she has accepted in its stead complete powerlessness, total passivity, a kind of impotent piety. In doing nothing, she has claimed everything.

“Say that again,” I said. And she did.

“Say it in French,” I pressed her, wanting to be sure of what she said.

She obliged at once.
“Norah s’était tout simplement laissée aller vers ce refuge traditionnel des femmes qui n’ont aucun pouvoir. Elle avait ainsi fait sienne cette totale impuissance, cette passivité absolue. Ne faisant rien, elle avait revendiqué tout.”

I half agree with her, but belief slips away. I don’t want to think Norah is concerned with power or lack of power,
not as we usually describe that essence. She’s in a demented trance of some kind, and any minute—next week, next month—she’ll snap her fingers and bring herself to life again. Yes,
yes
, says Danielle Westerman, Norah is too intelligent for extravagant fantasy, especially the clever inversion she has devised, claiming her existence by ceasing to exist. Nevertheless she can’t understand why I’m not getting on with the translation of her memoirs or why, instead, I’m writing another novel. She has, though she would never confess to it, a deep, almost eighteenth-century suspicion of fiction.

I’m not sure I understand myself why, at such a troubled time, I’m headed off in the frivolous direction of comic fiction. It was Mr. Scribano at Scribano & Lawrence who urged me to get started on another novel. And, difficult as it is to believe, he wasn’t thinking of publishing profits to be made in the wake of
Thyme
’s success.
Profit
is not a word that would come out of his distinguished old fleshy mouth. He is a fragment that’s drifted away from a lost world that honoured, perhaps too worshipfully, the act of writing. An old-fashioned publisher, an old-fashioned man, he was thinking, instead, that a woman with a disturbed daughter would do well to distract herself with a project that occupies and consumes another plane of existence. “Something airy,” he said on the telephone from New York. “Something, dear Mrs. Winters, to take you away from your sadness for an
hour a day. Perhaps two hours.” And then he said, “The world is hungry for amusement.”

I write now in the afternoons, carrying a pot of tea and a mug up to my box room. I am trying to be more disciplined about this. Natalie and Chris have basketball practice after school today. Tom will bring them home around six o’clock. Pet has settled down for a nap in the kitchen sunlight. He loves to lie on his back like a big hairy rug, back legs splayed, front paws neatly folded in, while gazing at you with a coyly wolfish grin. I try to breathe lightly as I climb the stairs, as though a willed quietness in my chest might connect with the points and edges of all I’m attempting to put out of my mind. Then I switch on my computer and get down to work. I have the sense that if I am serious about this business of “being good,” this is the only place in the world I can begin, snug in my swivel chair, like a hen on her nest.

I’m not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I’ve had a look, and there’s nothing down that road. I wouldn’t reply, as Anna Karenina does when asked what she’s thinking about: “Always about my happiness and my unhappiness.” The nakedness of that line of thought leads to a void. No, Ms. Winters of Orangetown much prefers the more calculated protocols of dodging sadness with her deliberate manoeuvres. She has an instinct for missing the call of grief. Scouring the separate degrees of innerness makes her shy. A reviewer writing about
My Thyme Is Up
two years ago
charged its author—me—with being “good” at happy moments but inept at the lower end of the keyboard. Well, now! What about the ripping sound behind my eyes, the starchy tearing of fabric, end to end; what about the need I have to curl up my knees when I sleep? Whimpering.

Ordering my own house calms me down, my careful dusting, my polishing. Speculating about other people’s lives helps, too. These lives hold a kind of tenancy in my mind, tricking the neural synapses into a grand avoidance of my own sorrow. The examined life has had altogether too much good publicity. Introversion is piercingly dull in its circularity and lack of air. Far more interesting, at least to a fiction writer going through a bad time, is the imaginative life projected onto others. Gwendolyn Reidman in Baltimore has just come out as a lesbian; the news arrived via a note from a bed-and-breakfast place called the Inglenook, and so far I’ve put off my reply. And there’s Emma Allen off with her daughter and daughter-in-law to a spa, where the two younger women will give themselves over to mud wraps and massages and leave Emma, who’s forty-four, the same as me, to feel guilty about falling into the vanity trap. Then there is Mrs. McGinn, who whispers her loneliness through the floorboards and who, in all probability, shook her dust mop on the same porch railing I banged on this morning, doing my daily rounds. There’s the violet late-afternoon autumn transparency entering the box room from the skylight,
precise and square, and the creak of ancient tree trunks bending in the gusty October wind. Up here, on the third floor of the house, my senses sharpen and connect me with that other Reta, young Reta, not really so far away.

There’s my dead mother, who taught me French and also thrift. Every day her image rises up in one form or another, brushing against me with a word or gesture or sometimes the remembrance of a simple recipe:
mousse au citron
, Chantilly cream.
Doucement, doucement
, I hear her say; use the fork and only the fork, be gentle, be patient. Who else? There’s Lois, my still-living but silent mother-in-law, and this is a silence I must deal with soon, or get Tom to deal with. And, of course, there is the immense, hovering presence of Danielle Westerman with her European-based culture, her thin, distinguished chin, her boxy knuckles and long crimson nails. Would Danielle approve? I scarcely ever budge from my habitual stances or perspectives without causing that stern question to flap against my ear. Last week I disappointed her by using the word
veggies
. She had thought better of me, I could tell.

These human mysteries—cleaning my house, fantasizing about the lives of other people—keep me company, keep me alert.

But more than anything else it is the rhythm of typing-and-thinking that soothes me, what is almost an athletes delight in the piling of clause on clause. Who would have thought this old habit of mine would become a strategy for
maintaining a semblance of ongoing life, an unasked-for gift,
une prime
. On days when I don’t know which foot to put in front of the other, I can type my way toward becoming a conscious being. Writing a light novel is very much as Mr. Scribano promised: a diversion, a forgiving place with fine air and moisture and attractive people seen through nicely blurred light. I can squeeze my eyes shut, pop through a little door in the wall, and stand outside my child’s absence. I can hush the critical voice in my head that weighs serious literature against what is merely entertainment. A quick read. A beach book. Light, lightly. The kind of shallow invention this particular genre demands is as healing as holy oil. “Deep down we’re all shallow”—who said that?

The pages of the new manuscript add up quickly, though narrative coherence is in short supply in the early chapters. I’ve already blocked in the happy ending, but now I have to throw a few hurdles in the way. Roman and Alicia have set the date for their wedding. The invitations have already been mailed to their families and friends, beautifully lettered on rice paper by Alicia herself, who has a gift for calligraphy. But there are complications, and some of these I have yet to work out. I don’t want to overburden my people with neuroses; I want to suggest a rumple of complication disturbing their psychic normalcy. Alicia has one or two remaining doubts about marriage to Roman. She’s seen the way he gets itchy and feverish when he’s around her friend Suzanne. This is
her second marriage, after all, and she’s been warned that musicians are unstable. Roman plays trombone in the Wychwood Symphony, Wychwood being my fictional city, a self-important, swaggering cousin to Toronto. Alicia has noticed that Roman is inattentive to his personal hygiene, and has to remind herself that his odour of musk was attractive to her in the early days. His forthright chin suggests conceit. When he’s in the presence of men who are taller than he is, he becomes faintly obsequious, and touches his mouth rather a lot, like the Mrs. McGinn of my imagination. This is beginning to get on Alicia’s nerves, and she’s thinking of mentioning it to him. Meanwhile Suzanne—Suzanne does something, something unpardonable, but finely modulated in its intent. Or perhaps it is Sylvia, the symphony’s bassoonist. The details must be worked through.

In all probability Roman is having second thoughts about the marriage, too, but I am not inside Roman’s massed angular head. It is Alicia’s skin I wear. I see through her woman’s eyes, reach with her woman’s fingers, stroking the thick and rather sticky wool of Roman’s brushed-back hair. Should something be said to him about his brand of hair gel? Soon. And how painstakingly must I describe Alicia’s apartment? Fiction demands such pitiless enumeration; I’ll try to get away with light wood furniture, tall windows, a palette of sunny colours, and a few pieces of Polish amber scattered here and there just so, catching the natural light. And the
matter of cars? This has to be settled. Alicia doesn’t own a car; she thinks a car is too expensive to keep in a city like Wychwood. Roman has a car, a Honda Civic, a model from the early nineties. He looks after it beautifully. Just a week ago he replaced the rubber floor mats instead of scrubbing the old ones.

I can deconstruct Alicia’s acute feminine sensibility for an hour or more, depending on whether I can keep myself from coasting into a secondary fiction, the compacted imaginative ravellings that collect around the end of each writing hour. A fantasy of mine: Norah is sleeping downstairs in her bedroom. In my mental movie she has come home, exhausted, hitching a ride from Toronto. Every rerun is the same. She appears, suddenly within the protection of our walls. She is slightly feverish with flu, but nothing serious, nothing a few days in bed won’t fix. In a few minutes I’ll take her some lemon tea. My daughter, my sick daughter. I don’t want to wake her, though. Waking a sleeping person seems to me a particularly violent act. This is how political prisoners were tortured in China—or was it Argentina?—with an intricate and automatic alarm system cutting in five minutes after sleep commenced so that the already tormented bodies were shocked by sleep deprivation and whipped with chronic distrust.

No, let her sleep. Punch the delete key. I must get back to Roman and Alicia, my two lost children, and their separate branches of selfishness.

Tom often speaks about the oddness of trilobite evolution. No one knows a thing about the trilobite brain or even how they reproduced sexually. All the beautiful soft-tissue evidence has rotted away, leaving only the calcium shell. But it is known that most trilobites developed huge and complex eyes on the sides of their slick heads. The fossil remains are clear, right down to the smallest lens. All trilobites possessed eyes, except for one species which is blind. In this case the blindness is thought to have been a step forward in evolution, since these eyeless creatures lived in the mud at the bottom of a deep body of water. It seems that nature favours getting rid of unused apparatus. The blind trilobites were lightened of their biological load, their marvellous ophthalmic radar, and they thrived in the darkness. When I think of this uncanny adaptation, I wonder why I can’t adapt too. All I wanted was for Norah to be happy; all I wanted was everything. Instead I’ve come to rest on the lake bottom, stuck there in the thick mud, squirming, and longing to have my eyes taken away.

BOOK: Unless
4.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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