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 c
an 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.
Two years ago, off to Washington for a book tour, I was an innocent person, a mother worried about nothing more serious than whether her oldest daughter would qualify for McGill and whether she would find a boyfriend. The radio host in Baltimore asked me—he must have been desperate—what was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. That stopped me short. I couldn’t think of the worst thing. I told him that whatever it was, it hadn’t happened yet. I knew, though, at that moment, what the nature of the “worst thing” would be, that it would be socketed somehow into the lives of my children.
Thus
GOODNESS IS AN abstraction,” Lynn Kelly said last Tuesday when the four of us met for coffee. “It’s an imaginative construct representing the general will of a defined group of people.” As always she speaks with authority, using her strong Welsh accent to crispen each word. “Goodness is a luxury for the fortunate.” As always we occupied the window table at the Orange Blossom Tea Room on Main Street. Only once or twice have we arrived to find someone already at “our” table, which is why, years ago, we decided to assemble at nine-thirty sharp. By ten the place is packed.
“‘Goodness but not greatness,’” I said to Annette and Sally and Lynn, quoting from Danielle Westerman’s memoirs.
Whenever, and for whatever reason, those famous words fall into my vision, I feel my breath stuck in my chest like an eel I’ve swallowed whole.
“How can she go on living her life knowing what she knows, that women are excluded from greatness, and most of the bloody time they choose to be excluded?”
“Going on their little tiny trips instead of striking out on voyages.”
“The voyage out, yes.”
“After all Danielle’s efforts to bring about change.” From Lynn. “She’s still not included in the canon.”
“Except in the women’s canon.”
“Inclusion isn’t enough. Women have to be listened to and understood.”
“Men aren’t interested in women’s lives,” Lynn said. “I’ve asked Herb. I’ve really pressed him on this. He loves me, but, no, he really doesn’t want to know about the motor in my brain, how I think and how—”
“I’ve only had a handful of conversations with men,” I said. “Other than with Tom.”
“I’ve had about two. Two conversations with men who weren’t dying to ‘win’ the conversation.”
“I’ve never had one,” Sally said. “It’s as though I lack the moral authority to enter the conversation. I’m outside the circle of good and evil.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that most of us aren’t interviewed on the subject of ethical choices. No one consults us. We’re not thought capable.”
“Maybe we’re not,” Annette said. “Remember that woman who had a baby in a tree? In Africa, Mozambique, I think. There was a flood. Last year, wasn’t it? And there she was, in labour, think of it! While she was up in a tree, hanging on to a branch.”
“But does that mean—?”
“All I’m saying,” Annette continued, “is, what did we do about that? Such a terrible thing, and did we send money to help the flood victims in Mozambique? Did we transform our shock into goodness, did we do anyth
ing that represented the goodness of our feelings? I didn’t.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Me neither,” Sally said. “But we can’t extend acts of goodness to every case of—”
“I remember that now,” Lynn said slowly. “I remember waking up in the morning and hearing on the radio that a woman had given birth in a tree. And I think the baby lived, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” Annette said. “The baby lived.”
“And remember,” Sally said, “that woman who set herself on fire last spring? That was right here in our own country, right in the middle of Toronto.”
“In Nathan Phillips Square.”
“No, I don’t think it was there. It was in front of—”
“She was a Saudi woman, wearing one of those big black veil things. Self-immolation.”
“Was she a Saudi? Was that established?”
“A Muslim woman anyway. In traditional dress. They never found out who she was.”
“A chador, isn’t it?” Annette supplied. “The veil.”
“Or a burka.”
“Terrible,” I said. I was toying with the plastic flowers in the middle of the table. I was observing the dog hairs on my dark blue sleeve.
“She died. Needless to say,” Annette said.
“But someone did try to help her. I read about that. Someone tried to beat out the flames. A woman.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“It was in one of the papers.”
“And what about that other young woman in Nigeria who got pregnant and was publicly flogged? What did we do for her?”
“I was going to write a letter to the Star.”
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