by Jane Smiley
The hotel dining room was a pleasant combination of seedy and beautiful, a place where nothing was new but everything was well taken care of. She sat down at her brilliantly white and sparkling table, former seven-pound, two-ounce female baby with only the lightest down of hair on her head. Fifty years on. Hard to believe.
Just then, one of those handsome, blue-eyed men appeared with a basket of something warm, and set it on the table. He said, “There you are, then, dear. Its nice currant scones this morning, and the butters right there. Coffee or tea this morning?”
“Tea, please,” said Rosalind, lifting the napkin on the basket. Five or six square buns were tumbled in their nest. She picked one up. Both its flat bottom and its domed top were deep, crispy golden. The butter that they had been brushed with came off on her fingertips, which she licked. Then she bit off a corner of the scone. It was warm and savory. The buttery shell of the crust, the heavy, soft, crumbly interior. It was just sweet enough to remind you that the marmalade on the table beside the pale, creamy butter would go perfectly if you could pause long enough to smooth it on. Rosalind closed her eyes. The fragrance was delicious, too—biscuity and fruity and buttery. Her grandmother had been a great baker of biscuits—big tins of biscuits coming out of the oven every morning for her grandfather and her father’s brothers who worked the farm, who were just coming in the door from the first milking as Rosalind came down the back stairs from the sleeping porch. She would have been, what, five, maybe six, and it would have been summer, because that’s when they went out to the farm. Her father’s brothers were big men, three of them, heavy in the belly and the shoulders, all waiting to get married in those days, and so bulking large around the farm. As they came back to her, she saw all of their rounded, heavy accoutrements, too—black Buicks, black-and-white cows, tractors, bales of hay, everything big and dangerous, everything that she was supposed to stay away from and be careful of. The farm was supposed to be fun—that’s how her mother and father presented their annual trips to herself and her sisters—but the fields were full of cowpies, the blackberries had thorns, the pond was slimy, they weren’t allowed to climb the trees, and her grandfather was short-tempered with all of his sons, who, she realized now, should have been long gone by that time. She bit into the scone again, and felt a stab of anxiety at how they would all come in, tromping, stepping out of their boots, already arguing among themselves by breakfast. They ate heartily and with a lot of banging of silverware and glassware, with yelling and growling. None of it was ever directed at her or her sisters, of course. They were treated like special company, delicate and easily damaged, but among themselves, anything went—table-pounding was routine. She and her sisters would look at each other under their bangs and lose their appetites, and so they would be required to sit there all the longer, until they finished what they had taken onto their plates—no waste was the rule around the farm. Eventually, after the men went back out to work, they would choke it down. Rosalind bit off another piece of the scone.
She opened her eyes, and her tea was in front of her, and in addition to that, a woman was sitting at the table with her, a slender young woman of about thirty with dark hair, in a black suit with a white, high collar. She was smiling. She said, “Hullo, do you mind if I sit? There’s absolutely not another spot in the place, and I have to wait for this woman I’m interviewing. She’s a great poet, and very particular and all that, and her publicist told me I mustn’t be late on any account, and so I’m twenty minutes early, can you believe that? But all the tables are taken, and the maitre d’ won’t let me wait inside the restaurant at all, so I told him I was with you, because you looked so lovely here, like a beach in the Caribbean, if you know what I mean.”
Rosalind laughed aloud, and said, “That’s the nicest compliment I’ve had in years.”
“Ah, so you’re American, then. I thought so. You were enjoying your scone quite a bit.”
“Was I? Would you like one?”
“Oh, yes. With a bit of this marmalade, it would be divine.”
“I was remembering my grandfather’s farm. My grandmother made what we call biscuits. They’re very like scones. But it wasn’t a happy memory. Sort of frightening, really.”
“And so you hate breakfast? That’s what happens. You find yourself hating something simple, like breakfast, and then you pay thousands of pounds to have it traced to how your parents once leapt across the table at one another with their forks raised. That’s what happened to me, except that it didn’t.”
“What didn’t?”
“That fork incident. No one, none of my brothers and sisters, none of the aunts or uncles, ever remembered my parents trying to gouge each other with forks, and really, that sort of thing isn’t in them. So, after talking about this fork-gouging incident with my psychoanalyst for weeks, I found out it didn’t happen, so she said, ‘Well, lets pretend that it did.’ So we did that. I must say there was great weeping and gnashing of teeth that day! And then she said, ‘Now lets remember that it didn’t, and so you can eat breakfast anytime you want,’ and so I said good-bye to that fork-gouging thing, and I must say that was a relief to everyone in the family. Yes, the thousands of pounds to the psychoanalyst happened, but not the forks. But, you know, after that, we saw that you could entertain any thought as a memory, and then get rid of it, and it worked perfectly well. I thought it was quite a breakthrough myself, not being attached to any idea that these things you remembered had ever actually happened. Lovely. And all of that stuff that really happened, well, you could get rid of it, too, because you can’t remember, so it’s just a story.”
Rosalind laughed.
The young woman said, “I do believe that I’ve had the only successful psychoanalysis in the history of the world. Ah. There she is!”
Across the room, a woman with great upswept gray-blond hair whooshed into the restaurant. She was wearing a purple garment and in every way taking advantage of her artistic status. Rosalind said, “I met her at a party once. Have a good interview.”
“She’ll say anything, you know. That’s the brilliant benefit of interviewing her. You turn her on, write it down, give it a little continuity, and you’re finished. Thank you for the scone.”
“Thank you for the tip.” But the young woman had already turned her attention to the poet, and Rosalind was alone again. She finished her tea and ate another scone. Really, that was enough. It left her feeling light and eager for the day. The day. Her fiftieth birthday! She looked at her watch. Still not born yet. But soon.
Maybe it was these thoughts that prevented her from understanding a word the concierge said when she asked him about taxis. When he was done talking, and smiling at her again, as helpful as could be, she realized that she had not been listening at all. He might as well not have been talking. She was sufficiently embarrassed that she said, “Thank you. That’s very helpful.” And she went out of the hotel. There was a park across the street and whizzing traffic passing right in front of her, so she turned right and began walking down the street, an unknown street in an unknown country on a sunny day in some direction she hadn’t bothered to ascertain. She felt happier than she had in years.
She came to the light and crossed, for the traffic seemed actually to stop. In any case, she had no sense of danger. Quite the contrary. There was a rightness about every step she took. She turned again and crossed again, and came into a busy walking street paved with bricks. It was lined with all sorts of shops. Ah.
Shoppers, especially wealthy woman shoppers, got very little respect, but it was clear to Rosalind that shopping made the world go round. She and Al, for example, appeared to be at distant ends of a particular continuum. He erected factories for the manufacture of giant heavy metal objects. He employed strong sweaty men, and went to places like Eastern Europe and Siberia, because those were the last bastions of strong sweaty manhood. The only giant heavy metal object Rosalind ever touched was her Mercedes. Carryable and beautiful things made up her world, and knowing where
they were meant to be situated and getting them there was her art. But, in fact, usually she had lost interest in the object itself as soon as she bought it. What others thought was the product, beautiful rooms, was only the by-product. The product was the flow itself. She paused and looked down the street before her, knowing that at the end of a couple of blocks she would have modified in a significant way the flow of objects around the world. What was now resting, in windows and on counters, would soon take flight, borne, like all objects, upon the current of money. The current of money had a little vortex right in her house with Al, right in their bank account. So much came in and so much went out that their bank account generated a little Gulf Stream, a warming current of consumption that eddied around the world. Nor was she a purely economic woman, however. Doing her bit for capitalism was only serendipitous. The real payoff, for her, was rediscovering, every moment of every shopping experience, what a good appreciator she was. That was her real privilege. Of course, you could certainly appreciate uniformly manufactured large heavy metal objects. They were useful and often gracefully formed. But a born appreciator needed variety and singularity to really develop her talents.
Rosalind crossed the street again and perused a window full of finely made wooden boxes and cabinets. Next to that window was a window full of Belleek china and Waterford crystal. She saw that there were three styles that she hadn’t seen before; a set of water goblets, opaque, with a clear feathery design, was the most charming. Next to them were shoes. Shoes were interesting, having both a functional side and an artistic side, and both sides being linked to price only in a slippery, undefined way. She went back to the box shop and entered.
For Rosalind, mercantile relationships were always happy ones, and the more expensive the shop, the happier she and the proprietors were to see one another, because as soon as she walked in the door they knew she was the person they had been waiting for. In this shop, for example, three people were standing behind the counter. They looked up, they saw Rosalind, they smiled, and the man came out from behind the glass case. He, Rosalind thought, would be the manager, or even the owner. His smile was not even mercenary. He was truly happy to see her; that’s how she knew what a great shopper she was. She said, “You have some lovely things in here.”
“Thank you, darlin’,” he said.
“Are they handmade?”
He grasped her left arm above the elbow, the friendliest of gestures, and said, “Watch the carpet here, luv, it’s a little uneven. Here we go.” He had gotten her into a little nook toward the back of the shop, a nook full of chests. They rose in front of her, tall, narrow, silky amber-colored, knobbed in what looked like garnet-colored stones. He said, “Now, look at these, dear. Padraig Mahoney makes these out in Galway. He makes one a year. I’ve got four here, that’s four years’ work. This is 1993. This is 1994. This is 1996. And this is 1997. I sold 1995 last year and 1992 three years ago, and I’ve made arrangements to get 1998 here, but I haven’t got it yet.”
“They are quite interesting.”
“Aren’t they, though? Absolutely useless, of course.” He grasped a little knob between his forefinger and his thumb, and pulled out a drawer. “Now, what would you put in that? It’s too shallow.”
“It’s not for putting into,” said Rosalind, “it’s for looking at.” And indeed it was, because the bottom of the drawer contained a whole inlaid scene in various shades of wood. Up in the left-hand corner was a wolf, and down in the right-hand corner was a man. Crossing a hill between them, in various attitudes of excitement, was a pack of wolfhounds. The “drawing” of the animals was astounding, not only in detail but in line. Each hound, or part of a hound (some were partly hidden behind others), was distinct and full of energy and movement. “May I touch it?” said Rosalind.
“Thank you for asking. Yes, you must.”
But there were no edges. The inlay had been sanded and smoothed.
She stepped back. The outside of the chest was simple until you looked at it and saw that the boards had been split and bookmatched, so that the deep golden grain of the wood formed a helical pattern up the side of the chest, and then a sunburst pattern over the top, but it was subtle.
“I’ll tell you this, if you don’t mind,” said the proprietor. “Padraig Mahoney never makes a mistake. You see how smooth these corners are, all the corners? The average cabinetmaker gives himself a bit of decoration here and there so he can make a mistake, but this lad Mahoney, he does every bit with antique planes he’s restored, and he never makes a mistake.”
“They don’t look stark, though,” said Rosalind.
“Ah, well, he has a sensuous eye, doesn’t he?”
Rosalind turned her head and looked at the proprietor, who was looking at the chest with manifest pleasure. She said, “Yes, he does.”
“Yes indeed,” said the man. The shop bell rang, and the man glanced around. Someone had come in, so he said, “I’ll leave you to admire this piece, then. Take your time.”
And she did. Beginning at the top, she opened every drawer. There were twenty of them, twenty episodes of the story that included the man and the dogs and the wolf, and also a woman combing her hair, and a pair of horses trotting between the shafts of a carriage. The marvel was not that this Padraig Mahoney took a year to make one of these, but that he took only a year to make one. Even so, she felt her spirits sink as she closed the bottom drawer. It was marveling that did it, in the end. Of course she was not, she thought, an artist of shopping, or a first-class appreciator; it was all too evident that she was not an artist of anything. She got down on her knees then and bent down and twisted her head to see underneath the chest. Sure enough, there was yet another scene, this one a portrait of a man with an aquiline nose and heavy eyebrows. Above her, the proprietor, who had returned, said, “Ah. There you go. That’s the artist. He puts that on the underside of every piece. I had one customer—he bought the chest from 1975, I believe—he called me a year ago and said that he’d only just discovered the picture. And they’re all different, too. You could stand them all up, from all these years, and see Padraig mature and age.”
“I’m amazed at this.”
“He does that to us all. Let me help you up, dear. Yes. It’s no use comparing ourselves to Padraig Mahoney. Or to any of them. I grew up comparing myself to Laurence Olivier. My goodness, I wanted to be an actor like that. An English actor, mind you, though we have some fine Irish players, but being an Irish player wasn’t good enough for me. I’m happier now, as a useful sort of man who opens the shop and does the books and closes for the night.”
“Has he made any with a racing theme?”
“Ah, yes—1994. He lost a bit of money at the Curragh, and tried to recoup it over at Cheltenham. You know, when they run the Gold Cup, they take enough away from the Irish punters to finance English racing all the year round.” He opened a drawer, then another one. No narrative, this time, but a myriad of racehorses, running, jumping, falling, jumping, rearing, bucking, running, jumping, chestnuts, blacks, grays, bays, browns, all rendered in glorious detail. Rosalind said, “How much?”
“I’ll not tease you, they don’t come cheap.”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand pounds for the racing one, fifty-five for the other one.”
And here was where everyone became happy, because it did seem cheap to Rosalind, both because of how much money she had and because of the care and inspiration that had gone into what she was buying. She said, “I’ll take the racing one, for my husband. He’s a racing man.”
“Wonderful. Mr. Mahoney will be pleased, indeed, as he rarely has a sale. He will come to Dublin himself to oversee packing and shipment, and if it arrives with the least damage, which has never happened, he will fly to your home and repair it himself.”
“Thank you. I feel truly as though I’ve never seen or bought anything like this.”
“You haven’t, darlin’.” And it was true. And Al, who came as close to having everything as anyon
e in the world, most assuredly did not have one of these. There couldn’t be a more perfect culmination of her work, Rosalind thought, than to give Al something on her own birthday that he did not have and could not have found and didn’t know existed and that wasn’t in the least useful to him.
Sometime later, she found herself out of the shop, standing in the street again. There were urchins and people playing music and general happy chaos. The weather actually wasn’t bad for the time of year. There was even a bit of sun. She continued walking and looking into windows, but then she thought, having had a peak shopping experience, she might as well knock off for the rest of the day. No china, no item of clothing, no painting, no musical instrument, nothing was going to beat this.
And so Rosalind proceeded down the street, looking into the shop windows still, but doing as others did it, and she herself once did it, separated, as if by glass, as if by no money. After a while she crossed. After a while she turned, walked down another, less busy street, turned again. What a sunny day it was. Everyone she passed commented on it. First sunny day all winter. She looked at her watch. She was born now. Her own birth, of course, was the only one she had ever experienced. Perhaps, she thought, that was an odd thing. Especially odd here in Ireland, of course.
If there had been a time when Rosalind wanted children, she couldn’t remember it. When she married Al, who was forty-five to her thirty, part of her relief had been that of course there would be no children; Al, as he said then, needed some God-damned rest. Melissa would have been thirteen or fourteen, Al Junior a senior in high school, and Georgina a senior at Wellesley. Now, of course, it struck her as odd that this choice on her part had gone unexamined, had not even seemed like a choice. There were so many things in her life like that, weren’t there? How she put up her hair. What she put on in the morning. Whom she had lunch with. Even where she lived. After moving into Al’s house all those years ago, she had redecorated it from top to bottom, but it had never occurred to her that they could live somewhere else. Maybe Al had even asked her if she wanted to build another place, but maybe she hadn’t even heard the question. Maybe the only things she had ever chosen were purchases after all. She looked up. She was coming to some large, official-looking buildings. She had no idea what they were for—some sort of government offices, perhaps. She paused and stared at them, not because she wanted to know what they were, but because she wanted to know why she had never chosen whether to have children or not.