Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  It became suddenly important that I let her know about the prize. It was as strong as the need to urinate or swallow. How could I work it into the conversation?—maybe say something about Tom and how he was thinking of putting a new roof on our barn, and that the Offenden money would come in handy. Drop it in casually. Easily done.

  “Right!” she said heartily, letting me know she already knew. “Beginning, middle, end.” She grinned then.

  She talked about her “stuff,” by which she meant her writing. She made it sound like a sack of kapok. A magazine editor had commented on how much he liked her “stuff,” and how her kind of “stuff ” contained the rub of authenticity. There were always little linguistic surprises in her work, but more interesting to me were the bits of the world she brought to what she wrote, observations or incongruities or some sideways conjecture. She understood their value. “He likes the fact that my stuff is off-center and steers a random course,” she said of a fellow writer.

  “No beginnings, middles, and ends,” I supplied.

  “Right,” she said, “right.” She regarded me fondly as though I were a prize pupil. Her eyes looked slightly pink at the corners, but it may have been a reflection from the cloth which cut a sharp line across her forehead.

  I admire her writing. She claimed she had little imagination, that she wrote out of the material of her own life, but that she was forever on the lookout for what she called “putty.” By this she meant the arbitrary, the odd, the ordinary, the mucilage of daily life that cements our genuine moments of being. I’ve seen her do wonderful riffs on buttonholes, for instance, the way they shred over time, especially on cheap clothes. And a brilliant piece on beveled mirrors, and another on the smell of a certain set of wooden stairs from her childhood, wax and wood and reassuring cleanliness accumulating at the side of the story but not claiming any importance for itself.

  She looked sad over her coffee, older than I’d remembered—but weren’t we all?—and I could tell she was disappointed in me for some reason. It occurred to me I might offer her a piece of putty by telling her about the discovery I had made the day before, that shopping was not what I’d thought, that it could become a mission, even an art if one persevered. I had had a shopping item in mind; I had been presented with an unasked-for block of time; it might be possible not only to imagine this artefact, but to realize it.

  “How many boutiques did you say you went into?” she asked, and I knew I had interested her at last.

  “Twenty,” I said. “Or thereabouts.”

  “Incredible.”

  “But it was worth it. It wasn’t when I started out, but it became more and more worth it as the afternoon went on.”

  “Why?” she asked slowly. I could tell she was trying to twinkle a gram of gratitude at me, but she was closer to crying.

  “To see if it existed, this thing I had in mind.”

  “And it did.”

  “Yes.”

  To prove my point I reached into my tote bag and pulled out the pale, puffy boutique bag. I unrolled the pink tissue paper on the table and showed her the scarf.

  She lifted it against her face. Tears glinted in her eyes. “It’s just that it’s so beautiful,” she said. And then she said, “Finding it, it’s almost like you made it. You invented it, created it out of your imagination.”

  I almost cried myself. I hadn’t expected anyone to understand how I felt.

  I watched her roll the scarf back into the fragile paper. She took her time, tucking in the edges with her fingertips. Then she slipped the parcel into her plastic bag, tears spilling more freely now. “Thank you, darling Reta, thank you. You don’t know what you’ve given me today.”

  But I did, I did.

  But what does it amount to? A scarf, half an ounce of silk, maybe less, floating free in the world. I looked at Gwen/Gwendolyn, my old friend, and then down at my hands, my wedding band, my engagement ring, a little diamond thingamajig from the sixties. I thought of my three daughters and my mother-in-law and my own dead mother with her slack charms and the need she had to relax by painting china. Not one of us was going to get what we wanted. Imagine someone writing a play called Death of a Saleswoman. What a joke. We’re so transparently in need of shoring up, our little preciosities and our lisping pronouns, her, she. We ask ourselves questions, endlessly, but not nearly sternly enough. The world isn’t ready for us yet; it hurts me to say that. We’re too soft in our tissues, even you, Danielle Westerman, Holocaust survivor, cynic, and genius. Even you, Mrs. Winters, with your new, old, useless knowledge. We are too kind, too willing, too unwilling too, reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don’t even know we want.

  WEATHER

  My husband came home from work in a bad mood. There’d been a sudden downpour as he was driving in the direction of our village, and the rain, as usual, found its way into the distributor of his ancient car. Twice he’d had to stop at the side of the road, raise the hood, and apply a rag to the distributor cap.

  His shirt was soaked by the time he came muttering up the back steps into the house, and his hair, what remains of it, was plastered to his head, exaggerating his already petulant look. To make matters worse, he’d heard on the car radio that the National Association of Meteorologists was going on strike the following day.

  I cheered him up as best I could and fed him a hot meal even though it was the height of summer, his favorite braised lamb chops with mint sauce, the mint coming fresh from our own garden, that wild strip running along the side of the garage. “Never mind about the strike,” I said, “it’ll only last a day or two.”

  How wrong I was!

  We kept tuned to the radio as the hours passed, but learned little more. Heated discussions were taking place, that was all we were told. For some reason these talks were kept highly secret. Conducted behind closed doors. Hush-hush.

  “They’re stuck on wages, I bet,” my husband said. “This world of ours is getting greedier every year.”

  He likes to think he is above ordinary greed and materialistic longing, and he is. The neighbors are forever trading in their lawn mowers for bigger and better models, or investing in swimming pools, which he believes are pretentious and foolish, though I myself would be happy to think about installing a small concrete pool next to the porch, a glint of turquoise water meeting my eye as I glance out the window in the early morning; even a goldfish pond would give a kind of pleasure.

  He cares nothing about such luxuries. He has his job at the plant nursery, his decent-though-troublesome car, his paid-for house, his vegetable garden, and he has a glassed-in porch from which he can watch the backyard trees as they bend in the wind, a sight that never fails to rouse his spirits. I think—indeed he confided this to me in one of our rare tender moments—that he likes to imagine the immensity of the trees’ root systems, plunging downward beneath the surface of the complacent lawn, then branching sideways, and adding foot by fibrous foot to a complex network of tentacles that grab at the earth’s clumped particles, securely anchoring the great oaks and maples, never mind how rambunctious the wind gets, never mind the weather warnings. Roots, he said to me the evening we had this strange conversation, perform the job they’re designed to do, no more, no less. They don’t take time off for coffee and a smoke, and they don’t bellyache about remuneration. (You need to understand that my husband is the sort of man who appreciates a high degree of application and tenacity. He wishes that his fellow human beings were just as dutiful and as focused in their day-to-day lives as he himself is.)

  The first twenty-four hours of the strike stretched to forty-eight and then seventy-two. My own opinion was that the meteorologists were holding out for a better pension plan. Retirement and pensions are all everyone talks about these days, though I’m frightened of retirement myself, my husband’s retirement that is. What will he do with himself, a man with his ever-present tide of irascibility? “It’s probably working conditions they’re quibbling about,” m
y husband barked. His own work conditions suit him perfectly, since he is an outdoors man by nature. I sometimes sense, but then I have known him for a long time, that he can barely distinguish between where his body stops and the elements begin—though he does, as I say, hate getting soaked in the rain.

  The first week of the strike affected us both. There was talk about arbitration, but, as is often the case, it came to nothing. Meanwhile, without weather, we struggled against frustration and boredom. I had never before thought about deprivation on this scale, but I soon discovered that one day is exactly like the next, hour after hour of featureless, tensionless air. We were suddenly without seasonal zest, without hourly variation, without surprise and complaint, dislocated in time and space. There was nothing to press upon the skin, nothing for the body to exert itself against, nothing that satisfied. The idea of umbrellas was suddenly laughable (though we didn’t laugh, at least I don’t remember laughing). And there was no thought of drawing the living-room blinds against the sun.

  The garden more or less disowned its responsibilities. The row of tomato plants—Mexican Ecstasy was what we were trying out this year—bore well enough, though the tomatoes themselves refused to ripen. Ripeness requires long periods of bright, warm light, as everyone knows, but for the duration of the strike we were stuck in a bland width of grayness with day after day of neither heat nor cold. “At least we don’t have to worry about frost,” my husband grumbled in one of his reasonable moments, but his forehead was warped with anger, and his patience further tried by yet another extension of the strike. Deadlocked, they said on the eleven o’clock news; the two sides still miles apart.

  A neighbor—he owns one of those satellite dishes and is therefore able to tune in to five hundred news sources—told us the government was thinking of calling in the troops. What good would that do? I thought. “What good would that do?” my husband said loudly. He’d gone off his food by now. Nothing I put on the table seemed right, not my special potato salad, not even my New Orleans gumbo. Winter fare, summer fare, it didn’t matter. The cherry vanilla ice cream we like so much withheld its flavor during this weatherless period, as did my spiced beef stew and dumplings. Our own green beans from the garden, needless to say, shriveled before we could pick them.

  Like children, we were uncertain as to how to clothe ourselves in the morning. Longs or shorts? Wool or cotton? Denim or polyester? My green short-sleeved rayon dress that I’m quite fond of—and so too is my husband, if I can read his eyes—seemed inappropriate, out of place, too loaded with interseasonal deliberation. As for his own work shirts, should he put on the plaid flannel or the boxy open-weave? How were we to decide, and what did it matter anyway? This lack of mattering smarted like a deer-fly’s sting. I found it impossible to look directly at my husband during those early morning decisions.

  Something that surprised me was how much I missed the heft of daily barometric reassurance, and this was particularly curious since all my life the humidity index has felt obscurely threatening, informing us in a firm, masculine radio voice that we were either too wet or too dry for our own good. For our health and happiness. For the continuation of the planet. No one ever indicated we might reach a perfect state of humidity/dryness balance, and perhaps there is no such thing. But to be unsituated in terms of moisture, without either dampness or aridity to serve as a guide, is to be nowhere. The skin of my inner thighs was suddenly in a state of ignorance, not knowing how to react. My breasts itched, but the itch could not be relieved by scratching or by the application of calamine lotion. I mentioned to my husband a rustic barometer I remembered from childhood, a mechanism consisting of a tiny wooden house with two doors. When the humidity was high and rain imminent, the right-hand door opened and a little lean boy-doll, mild-faced and costumed in alpine dress, appeared. When it was dry, a smiling little girl swung into view, promising sunshine.

  My husband, his elbows on the kitchen table, listened. His nicely trimmed beard twitched and vibrated, and I thought for a minute he was about to ask a question, raising a point that, in fact, had just occurred to me: Why should the little boy signify rain and the girl sunshine? Did humidity and dryness possess such specific and biologically assigned qualities, each of which could be measured and interpreted?

  But all he said was, “You never told me that before.”

  “You never asked me,” I said, exasperated.

  The strike was into its third week, and I found myself impatient with the dulling and rounding of each twenty-four-hour segment, marked by a pencil check on the calendar and nothing else. Our lives have always been uncertain owing to my husband’s disposition, and mine too perhaps, but at least we’d had the alternate rhythm of light and darkness to provide continuity.

  To live frictionlessly in the world is to understand the real grief of empty space. Nostalgically I recalled the fluting of air currents in the late afternoon hours, hissing against the backyard shrubs and the fetid place where we stashed the garbage cans. And the interlace of heat and coolness on my cheeks as I carried home my sacks of groceries. I wondered if my husband remembered how, only days ago, the wind used to slide against the west side of the porch, arriving in chunks or else splinters, and how it rattled the glass in the window frames, serving up for us a nervous, silvery sort of evening music that produced, simultaneously, a sense of worry and of consolation.

  I felt an urge to voice such thoughts aloud, but, as usual, was uncertain in my husband’s presence. To speak of propulsive sunshine and solemn shade, and the jolts of expectation that hang between the two, would be to violate a code of intimacy we had long since established.

  What I remember most from that painful, weatherless period is the sky’s mute bulk of stillness. Day after day it continued in its building up—pressureless, provisional, and, most heartbreaking of all, exhibiting a cloudlessness that was unrelieved. Clouds. After a month I began to think that perhaps clouds were something I had only imagined. How could anything exist as lovely and as whimsical as these masses of whipped cream that transformed themselves an hour later into bright rapturous streamers of scratched air?

  I dreamed one night of a tower of cloud rising in the vivid setting sun, its fringed edges painted the deep-fried gold of apple fritters, and, at the center, shading inward with a sly, modulated subtlety, the dense pewtery purple that announces a storm either approaching or receding, it didn’t matter which. By morning I was sobbing into my pillow, but my husband, who had risen earlier, was not there to offer comfort.

  We woke and slept. My husband’s job was canceled for the duration of the strike, and so we were thrown more and more together. We tended to bump into each other around the house, getting on each other’s nerves, and one day I discovered him on the porch staring out at the vacant air; he was stooped and looked older than he is, and on impulse I laced my hands around the bulk of his back, pressing the side of my face against his shirt.

  Later that same day we heard the news about the settlement of the strike. It seemed the meteorologists had wanted nothing all along but the public’s appreciation and gratitude, and this now had been unanimously promised and even written into their contract.

  My husband and I slept in each other’s arms that night, and it was shortly after midnight when we were stirred out of profound unconsciousness by a breeze loosened in the elms and carried to us through the mesh of the house’s various window screens.

  Then, after an hour or so, drifting in and out of wakefulness, we heard, or perhaps imagined, the ballet-slipper sound of rain-drops on the garage roof. A bank of coolness and damp arrived together at first dawn, and entered the valved darkness of our lungs, mine and his.

  I touched his mouth with my thumb then, rubbing it back and forth. We held on to each other tightly during those minutes, feeling the essence of weather blow through us, thinking the same thoughts, and I remembered that thing which, for stretches of dull time, I tend to forget. That despite everything, the two of us have learned the trick of inhabiting parallel
weather systems, of making for ourselves—and no one else—snowstorms in August, of bringing into view the air of autumn, whenever we wish, the icy pain at the bottom of every breath, and then arriving at the gateway of illogical, heat-enhanced January, and imagining the April wind on my face, and his too, which is no louder nor more damaging than a dozen friendly bees, but giving us curiosity enough to rise and begin another day.

  FLATTIES: THEIR VARIOUS FORMS AND USES

  A traditional flatty is composed of flour, fat, stillwater, and salt. The flour commonly used in our islands derives from bjøerne, a hearty local barley, almost black in color and longer in the grain than Elsewhere barley. Bjøerne is gathered by the young boys of the isles in middle or late summer, depending on wind and weather conditions, and winnowed on the first three days following St. Ulaf ’s Night, except during those years in which the full moon precedes the usual holy oblations. On these rare occasions winnowing may occur at any hour or day, provided a hollyberry candle is first lit in the barnplace opening. Ordinary tallow will suffice should hollyberry prove scarce.

  In the old days flour for flatties was ground in a stone quern. Today the intercession of wind or water is more frequently invoked, and it is said that the Island of Strell mills a goodly portion of its flour nowadays with the assistance of wavelight.

  You will already be acquainted with the longitude and latitude of our archipelago, as well as its annual rainfall, and so I will confine myself here to a few domestic particulars. The islands of our homeplace are: Naust, Spoy, Strell, Upper Strell, Cailee, Papa Cailee, Nack, Breen, Little Breen (where the barelegs live), and Lum, my own place of birth and lifebeing. Flatties are consumed by the peoples of all these islands except for Naust, where inhabitants decline to eat them. They fear even to touch them. Instead, a small loafbread constitutes their chief nourishment, a mixture of crumbled meal and milk over which a prayer is uttered so that its volume doubles and trebles. The people of Naust fasten horseshoes to the hooves of their draft animals in order to protect the beastfeet from poisons that are stirred up by the action of plow and harrow.