Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  Close to the dry cleaner’s establishment—her brain drifts and skitters as it refills with oxygen—is a florist’s where she sometimes buys cut flowers, and next to the florist’s is a delicatessen where rare honeys and olives can be found. She is a woman whose life is crowded with not-unpleasant errands and with the entrapment of fragrant, familiar, and sometimes enchanting items, all of which possess a reassuring, measurable weight and volume.

  Not that this is much of a handrail to hang on to—she knows that, and so do I—but it is at least continuous, solid, reliable as a narrative in its turnings and better than no handrail at all.

  ILK

  By now everyone’s seen the spring issue of Ficto-Factions, page 146, in which G.T.A., whoever he/she may be, summarizes the various papers that were presented at the recent NWUS Conference on Narrativity and Notation. Put your finger on the third paragraph of the summary, move it halfway down, and you’ll see that the astute and androgynous G.T.A. refers to me by name. The bit about “the new theory of narrative put forward at NWUS and how it illustrates the atemporal paradigms of L. Porter and his ilk.”

  It happens that I am L. Porter—but you already know that. It’s printed right here on my name tag.

  I prefer to be direct in my responses, so I’ll admit straightaway that an inexplicable gust of sadness passed through me when I came across G.T.A.’s pointed but oblique mention, and I realized too after some reflection that I was subtly injured to see myself accompanied by a faithful, though imaginary, pool of “ilk.” By the way, that should be her ilk, not his, the L in my name standing for Lucy, after my no longer living and breathing Aunt Lucy. (Traditionally, of course, Lucy has been a female name, and one that comes embedded with complementary echoes of lacy, and also the lazy-daisy womb of its final y.) Nevertheless, my good friends, as distinct from my “ilk,” have persuaded me that if I’m really serious about getting tenure I’d better sign my published articles with my initial only. In these days of affirmative action, Lucy Porter gets interviews, plenty of them, but L. Porter gets people to read her “ilkish” ideas about narrative.

  So where exactly do I stand, then, on narrative enclosures? Or, to put it another way, how small can ficto-fragments get without actually disappearing? First, forget all that spongy Wentworthian whuss about narrative as movement. A narrative isn’t something you pull along like a toy train, a perpetually thrusting indicative. It’s this little subjunctive cottage by the side of the road. All you have to do is open the door and walk in. Sometimes you might arrive and find the door ajar. That’s always nice. Other times you crawl in through a window. You look around, pick yourself a chair, sit down, relax. You’re there. Chrysalis collapses into cognition. You apprehend the controlling weights and counterweights of separate acts and objects. No need to ask for another thing.

  All right, most of us know this instinctively. Where Dick Wentworth (R. S. Wentworth, teacher/scholar/critic) goes wrong is in confusing narrative containment with sequentiality and its engagé/degagé assumptions concerning directedness, the old shell game, only with new flags attached. “Look,” I explain to him at the ANRAA Symposium in January—we collide while checking our coats at the opening night wine-and-cheese reception—“a fictive module doesn’t need a fully rigged sailing vessel. A footstool is all it needs. Or a longing for a footstool.”

  And I’m not just talking minimalism here. I’m saying that fiction’s clothes can be folded so small they’d fit inside a glass marble. You could arrange them on those little plastic doll hangers and hook them over the edge of Dick Wentworth’s name tag. There’s a bud of narrativity opening up right there behind the linked lettering, as there is beneath all uniquely arbitrary signs. There’s (A) the dickness of Dick, all it says and gestures toward. And (B) the sir/surname, Wentworth, with its past-tense failure rubbing up against the trope of privilege, not to mention (C) the underground wire pulling on Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Like it or not, Professor Wentworth’s name bursts with narrative chlorophyl. His beard, his belly, they’re separate stories. His pale face too. A wide bashful puzzled face. His wife killed herself. Someone told me that at last year’s meeting.

  I watch him draw his scarf slowly into the tunnel of his coat sleeve before handing it over to the coat-check person, all the way in, with the little fringed ends hanging out at the shoulder and cuff. His scarf is a cheap tan scarf and doesn’t deserve this kind of care. He turns to me. His mouth opens. “As Barthes says—”

  “Excuse me,” I say. “I’m starving. That looks like shrimp over there.”

  “So, how’s the job search going?”

  “And real champagne,” I say gushingly. Ilkishly.

  My Aunt Lucy, already referred to, had a short life, thirty-six years, then cancer got her, grabbed her. She lived in Bedford, New Hampshire, where she worked as a secretary-receptionist in a piano factory. She couldn’t play the piano herself, not a note. She wasn’t very bright. She wasn’t eccentric either. She almost never remembered to send me birthday cards or small gifts. The alignment of her teeth was only so-so. So why do I insist that her skinny maladroit cancer-eaten body housed an epic, a drama, a romance, a macro-fiction, a ficto-universe? Because narrativity is ovarian, not ejaculatory as so many of our contemporary teachers /scholars/critics tend to assume.

  I give you my poor old relation as an example only, putting my trust in the simplifying afterlight of metaphor which is all we have. The point is, as I try to explain to Professor Wentworth: “Narrative fullness thrives in the interstices of nano-seconds. Or nano-people, like my aunt. Though oddly enough, Professor Wentworth, I was crazy about her.”

  “It’s Dick. Please. Don’t you remember our last conversation when we agreed—?”

  “Dick, yes.”

  “Ovarian? You were saying—?”

  “I should have said egg. Egg’s a good word. A single cell—”

  “A single cell—hmmm.” He strokes his chin at this point, stroke, stroke.

  “—holds the surfaces of the real.”

  “But. But, Lucy, tension absolutely cannot be created in a vacuum.”

  Is this a trick? Starting a sentence with a double “but”? I call that aggressive. Or else aggression’s reverse side, which is helplessness. “Look, Professor Wentworth, Dick. There’s plenty of high-octane tension flowing between the simple states of being and non-being—”

  “Which points,” he says, “to the other side of this discourse.”

  “Every discourse is born of a micro-discourse,” say I, wanting to press his sad effusions into something ardent and orderly. Something useful.

  “Uh-huh.”

  There is only one shrimp left on the plate. It lies curled on its side, paler than a shrimp should be, and misshapen. I feel a yearning to know its story.

  Also, I can’t help noticing that its ridged shrimpy curl matches almost exactly the configurative paisley splotches on Professor Wentworth’s tie. I stare at that tie, something makes me. The mixed blues and reds strike me as boyishly courageous, but it is the knot that brings a puddle of tears to my throat. Or rather, it is the way he, Dick Wentworth, keeps touching that knot as he speaks, applying pressure with his thumb, pushing against the spread stiffness of buttoned oxford cloth and into the erect column of the neck itself. A good enough neck, soapy, a forty-year-old neck, or thereabouts. I remember that his wife hanged herself. From a water pipe. In the basement of their house. In Ithaca, New York.

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite see—” he begins, his thumb rising once again, preparing to push.

  His whole life seems gathered in that little silky harbor. Mine too, for some reason. Probably the champagne fizzing up into my nose.

  Did I make up that part about the water pipe? Me and my ilk and I, we’re given to such exiguous notation. Doublings. Triangu lations. Narrativistically speaking, our brushstrokes outreach our grasp.

  “You’ve probably heard,” says Dick Wentworth, “that we, ahem, have an opening in the department for next year. I
t’s, hmmmm, in composition and rhetoric, but reassignment is always an option,” he continues, “once tenure is confirmed,” he goes on, “and you might, if you will excuse me for saying so,” he concludes, “be ready for—”

  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.