Unless (20 page)
“How do you bear it?” I ask her today. I’ve already told her about the New York editor who has bullied me into sending my half-finished manuscript to him. I’ve told her about seeing Norah early this morning, how instead of sitting on the pavement she was on her feet, pacing between the subway exit and the bus stop, back and forth, back and forth, her hands jammed into her jacket pockets, her neck bent against the cold, her sign,
GOODNESS
, hanging crookedly on a string around her neck. I told her about how, last Saturday, Natalie and Chris had decided not to go into Toronto to be with their sister; it was too cold, they said, a little too casually, and there was a volleyball tournament in Orangetown. And finally I’ve told her about the bitter disappointment I experienced reading
The Goodness Gap
and the letter I dashed off to its unreconstructed author.
“And did you mail this letter?”
“Well, no.”
“Ah!”
I explain to her that I sometimes don’t believe what I write. I can’t rely on my own sallies and locutions, my takes on the immediate and devastating circumstances. Often, the next day, looking at what I’ve written, I’m left shaking my head: Who is the self-pitying harridan who has put down such words, who is the person writing pitiful letters to strangers? Last week, at a party, I was introduced to Alexander (Sandy) Valkner, to whom I had “written” a scolding letter, and found him to be humble, courteous, and kind.
So who is this madwoman, constructing a tottering fantasy of female exclusion and pinning it on her daughter? Often—I don’t tell Danielle this—I don’t bother to put the words down at all—I
think
my letters line by line, compose them in my head as I dust under the beds. That’s enough to keep me sane. Yet I need to know I’m not alone in what I apprehend, this awful incompleteness that has been alive inside me all this time but whose name I don’t dare say. I’m not ready to expose myself.
Does Danielle really get it? I thought she did, but now I’m not sure.
She shrugs her beautiful shrug. Thin shoulders, rather narrow, a blue wool knitted vest that should be replaced. A silver bangle on a wrist that looks like it’s made of old wax,
three silver rings, loose on her bony hands. Her beautifully kept nails are long and crimson. How does she bear it? All the words she’s written, all the years buried inside her. What does her shelf of books amount to, what force have these books had on the world?
How do you bear it? I wait for an answer, but none is forthcoming. Tell me, tell me, give me an answer. Give me an idea that’s as full of elegance and usefulness as the apple orchard behind my house, something from which I can take a little courage. She shrugs again. For a split second I interpret this as a shrug of surrender. But no. To my surprise, she breaks suddenly into a bright smile, her false teeth gleaming like tiles. And then, slowly, making a graceful arc in the air, she salutes me with her glass of tea.
O
N A DECEMBER MORNING
I went walking hand in hand with Tom in the Orangetown cemetery. God knows what we were looking for; it didn’t matter, we were here, together, walking and talking. The cold weather had broken, and the tops of the old limestone monuments, sun-plucked in their neat rows, were shiny with melting snow. We wore light jackets and rubber boots. The alignments of stone whisper: quiet, please. This is something we often do on a Sunday afternoon, not out of morbidity but just wanting a quiet place. We’re almost always the only ones here. Years ago, people visited cemeteries regularly, tending graves and supplying them with memorial flowers, uttering words of greeting to those who lay beneath the ground, just as though they believed the dead were really present, just inches away, and eager for a little human conversation. The Orangetown cemetery, cooled by stone on the hottest day, is famous for the quality of its lawn care and the eccentricity of its engravings. Here is an inventory of relics and fashion and a sentimental embrace of death, invoking what may well be
the richest moments in a lifetime, the shrine of tears and aching history. People are astonished to find a piece of granite that has been carved into a life-size kicking infant, lying on his back and smiling and gurgling up at the clouds. “Our Little Jack,” the inscription reads, “Gone to Eternal Happiness.” The sight of this granite baby has always moved my daughters to tears. They always insisted, when they were younger and walking with me in the graveyard, on visiting little Jack, relishing their own tears as they stroked his curly stone head. The tragedy of it. A beloved child, snatched from his parents’ arms. Here’s where memory broke and shattered and was replaced by a frozen cherub, pawing the air with everlasting delight.
On another of the stones, ugly, vast, and arresting, is carved “Mary Leland, 1863–1921.” Underneath are the simple words, “She Took Good Care of Her Chickens.”
This inscription is baffling, which is why people are drawn to it. The stonemason must have meant children, not chickens. That’s what some people think, that the chisel slipped slightly, imprinting a false message. But maybe there were no children for Mary Leland; maybe she really had nothing but poultry to serve and to advertise her charity. Or maybe a husband, embittered by his wife’s neglect, was mocking her in her grave. Lately, I’ve been trying to focus my thoughts on the immensity rather than the particular. This requires an act of will. I steer my thoughts away from Mary
Leland’s chickens and, instead, focus on the rows of humped remains and tipped granite stones, three acres in all. So many people have died.
There are people who make a life out of dislocation. Tenancy is all they demand in their refusal to merge with particular neighbourhoods or rooms. But Tom is different. He burrows into the idea of home. I knew this from the beginning, from the first time we met, though I wasn’t able, then, to articulate the thought.
It is not true that people in long marriages dissolve into each other, becoming one being. I touch Tom’s elbow, the sleeve of his tan jacket; he places his long arms around me and his hands cup my breasts in the friendliest possible way. We are two people in a snapshot, but with a little cropping we could each exist on our own. But that’s not what we want. Hold the frame still, contain us, the two of us together, that’s what we ask for. This is all it takes to keep the world from exploding. There’s that tan jacket of his, a windbreaker with its zipper and smooth microfibres, nothing to call attention to itself, the most generic of garments. On the other hand, there are men, the composed, noisy men from Bay Street, who choose bright colours, teal or tangerine, for weekend wear, or else the skins of animals, goats, sheep, and so forth. They are men spangled with epaulettes, toggles, tabs, and insignias, the breezy rapists from the Nautica ads, cool and criminal in their poplins, shellacked with light, but they
know they’re in costume, that they’ve made an effort that other men, men like Tom, aren’t forced to make.
My husband has only one childhood complaint: that his mother was a lousy housekeeper. Once a year (maybe) she got around to scrubbing the soap dish in the bathroom. He remembers how the melting block of Palmolive sweated with its own bubbled dirt, an object of such disgust that he refused to touch it. No one, however, noticed his avoidance of soap. This went on for years. No one thought it mattered, that every day his eyes met with soupy slop. He told me this in our early days together, wanting me to understand his fastidiousness about our bathroom arrangements and worrying that I might think he was one of those comically neurotic men you read about in novels. Unless you had a mother like that, you wouldn’t understand. And unless you had been given an alternative glimpse of orderliness, you wouldn’t mind. You needed to know about that silken bar sitting freshly in its little porcelain dish, that such an item was a possibility. Anyone’s childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light, but Tom for some reason has fully recovered from his fear of dirty soap dishes, and nowadays his mother has grown obsessive about household cleanliness and even uses that blue antiseptic water in her toilet.
We were talking about his mother as we made our way between gravestones. Lois Winters, née Maxwell, a widow
for twelve years now. She worships her son, Tom, her only child, and adores her three granddaughters. She likes me well enough, I think, but there are great windy gaps between us. She has my books, for instance, all of them inscribed, stacked on her glass-topped coffee table, but she has never read a single one of them. This is something a writer can sense immediately. A wall of numb radar rears up and reveals itself when she hears one of my books mentioned. I understand this refusal of hers perfectly, and the reason for it. It has nothing to do with rejection and everything to do with me being the mother of her grandchildren and her son’s spouse. This arrangement cannot be challenged by my hobbies, my pastimes, my professional life, my passion.
She has changed since Norah went on the street, as though her brain has lingered too long, like a lettuce leaf in oil and vinegar, a slow deterioration. Since she has dinner with us every night—she brings the dessert, something sweet and homemade—we’ve been able to observe her gradual day-by-day withdrawal. There was a time, nevertheless, when she took a lively part in the conversation, asking the girls how they were liking their teachers, how the swim team was doing. Always a nettlesome woman, she had political opinions, rather conservative, it’s true, but opinions nonetheless, and she listened to the radio, kept up with public affairs.
“Where is Norah?” she kept asking. “When is Norah coming home?” Finally Tom told her, making a careful
incremental story of it; Norah had dropped out of university, she had parted from her boyfriend, she was pursuing a path to spiritual goodness, which the family couldn’t quite understand, she was detaching herself from the rest of us, sleeping in a hostel, and yes, begging money at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor in downtown Toronto—but everyone held out hopes that she would return to being the Norah we knew and loved, that she would recover from whatever delusion had seized her, that we were doing everything we could for her and that she, as Norah’s grandmother, was not to worry.
Well, of course she is worried about her oldest granddaughter, her best-loved granddaughter, if the truth were declared, her darling Norah. She grew steadily more passive at the dinner table, then silent. In recent weeks, her growing silence has become an uncanny reflection of Norah’s silence, her posture is as defeated as Norah’s. I wonder sometimes if we have all—Tom, Natalie, Chris, Lois—become actors in Norah’s shadow play, if in these last few months we’ve turned wary, guarded, angered, waiting to be given back what we once had, each of us frozen to the bone and consigned to a place where nothing ever changes. Even Pet has slowed down, his dog-smile retriever’s face draped in acquiescence.
But that’s not true for life outside our house. I look around and I see all kinds of changes, some of them astonishing. For one thing, our friends Colin and Marietta Glass
are back together again; the last thing we expected. She’s said goodbye to her lover in Alberta. The Glasses have forgiven each other for God only knows what transgressions and smoothed out their differences. It is astonishing, such an emotional reversal. Colin is tender and loving in her presence—I must admit, it’s a joy to see him helping her into her chair at the table—and she, in return, awards him a gaze as soft and uninjured as a young girl’s.
And Chrétien is back in power with a huge majority, though the American election results continue to be stalled. Margaret Atwood
did
win the Booker Prize. We
are
going to have a white Christmas, it is guaranteed. Norah has replaced her bedraggled sign with a new one, freshly inked—even this is cheering.
And Cheryl Patterson, the librarian in Orangetown, has married her Bombay dentist, Sam Sondhi. His divorce came through more quickly than expected, and a civil service was held a week ago Saturday, after which we had a reception in our house, a sandwich and champagne lunch for thirty of Cheryl’s friends and our friends too, all in a celebratory mood. Who doesn’t love a wedding! Richer or poorer, better or worse. Tom had fires lit in the living room and the den, and of course there was the Christmas tree in the hall, put up a few days early this year to accommodate Cheryl and Sam’s wedding. The whole house boomed with overflowing spirits. In my long tawny velvet skirt, I passed slices of fruitcake on a
silver tray, a tray I only get down from the top cupboard at Christmastime. There was a tiny silver Christmas ornament poked into my chignon,
une épingle à cheveux
, a gift from Tom some years ago. I was smiling, smiling, as I made my rounds, yes, isn’t it a miracle they found each other, two divorced people, in a place like Orangetown, Ontario, in the great glistening continent of North America. I was smiling and saying: Please, try this fruitcake, my mother-in-law made it, it’s marvellous, an old family recipe. And there was Tom, opening the wide front door to welcome yet another party of guests. He glanced in my direction and smiled broadly. Love of my life. On the buffet table is a salmon, pink and skinned. At certain moments, for no reason—the smell of apple wood burning in the fireplace—I become convinced that everything is going to be all right.
And then suddenly I will be thrown out of the circle of safety, aching all over with pain and feeling a fracture in my cone of consciousness, which is inhabited, every curve of it, by the knowledge (that pale sustenance) that Norah, in the cold and snow of downtown Toronto, has gone as far away as she could go. As was possible to go.
Stop it. Return to the lamplit murmur of now, this minute. Have some fruitcake. There’s coffee in the dining room. I hear the voice in my head saying: careful, be careful.
We only appear to be rooted in time. Everywhere, if you listen closely, the spitting fuse of the future is crackling.
Despite my mood of anxiousness, my novel,
Thyme in Bloom
, is almost completed. Alicia and Roman have been deconstructing their relationship with articulate arguments and with bad behaviour on both sides. Now and then they eat, drink, and make love, but mostly they systematically destroy what they once had between them, grinding down the core of love with their philosophical arguments so that nothing is left but burnt rice—this from a scene in which they, touchingly, desperately, try to cook a Greek meal in Roman’s apartment. Alicia grows sleek, lubricious, and almost beautiful in her independence. We see a steady accretion in her observations, while Roman reveals an irksome antic side, those striped yellow socks, for instance. His strong chin becomes even stronger, and his sexual appetite more voracious. When he practises on his very expensive trombone, he punches great jagged holes in the air. He thinks aloud, and often, about his relations in Albania with whom he has lost touch, grieving for them, everything they’ve been through; yet what can he do? He went to Tirana in 1986 and tried to make contact, but was discouraged. He almost landed in jail, he was threatened, spat upon, but he loved the goddamn place.