Small Ceremonies (4 page)

Lying there semidrugged, I sensed a new identity: I was exactly like a biscuit set out to bake, just waiting my turn in the oven. I moved my head lazily to one side and found myself face to face, not six inches away from a man, another biscuit. His eyes met mine, and I watched him fascinated, a slow-motion film, as he labored to open his mouth and pronounce with a slur, “Funny feeling, eh?”

“Yes,” I said. “As though we were a tray of biscuits.”

“That's right,” he said crookedly.

Surprised, I asked, “What are you here for?”

“The old water works,” he said yawning. “But nothing major.

Kidneys, bladder, urine; a diagram flashed in my brain. “That's good,” I mumbled. Always polite. I cannot, even here, escape courtesy.

“What about you?” he mouthed, almost inaudible now.

“One of those female things,” I whispered. “Also not major.”

“You married?”

“Yes. Are you?” I asked, realizing too late that he had asked because of the nature of my complaint, not because we were comparing our status as we might had we met at a party.

“Yes,” he said. “I'm married. But not happily.”

“Pardon?” Courtesy again, the scented phrase. Our mother had always insisted we say pardon and, as Charleen says, we are children all our lives, obedient to echoes.

“Not happily,” he said again. “Married yes,” he made an effort to enunciate, “but not happily married.”

A surreal testimony. It must be the anesthetic, I thought, pulling an admission like that from a sheeted stranger. The effect of the pill or perhaps the rarity of the circumstances, the two of us lying here nose to nose, almost naked under our thin sheets, horizontal in midmorning, chemical-smelling limbo, our conversation somehow crisped into truth.

“Too bad,” I said with just a shade of sympathy.

“You happily married?” he asked.

“Yes,” I murmured, a little ashamed at the affirmative ring in my voice. “I'm one of the lucky ones. Not that I deserve it.”

“What do you mean, not that you deserve it?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, you said it,” he said crossly.

“I just meant that I'm not all that terrific a wife. You know, not self-sacrificial.” I groped for an example. “For instance, when Martin asked me to type something for him last week. Just something short.”

“Yeah?” His mouth made a circle on the white sheet.

“I said, what's the matter with Nell? That's his secretary.”

“He's got a secretary, eh?”

“Yes,” I admitted, again stung with guilt. This was beginning to sound like a man who didn't have a secretary. “She's skinny though,” I explained. “A real stick. And he shares her with two other professors.”

“I see. I see.” His voice dropped off, and I thought for a minute that he'd fallen asleep.

Pressing on anyway I repeated loudly, “So I said, what's the matter with Nell?”

“And what did he say to that?” the voice came.

“Martin? Well, he just said, ‘Never mind, Judith.' But then I felt so mean that I went ahead and did it anyway.”

“The typing you mean?”

“Uh huh.”

“So you're not such a rotten wife,” he accused me.

“In a way,” I said. “I did it, but it doesn't count if you're not willing.” Where had I got that? Girl Guides maybe.

“I never ask my wife to type for me.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Typing I don't need.”

“Maybe you ask for something else,” I suggested, aware that our conversation was slipping over into a new frontier.

“Just to let me alone, to let me goddamned alone. Every night she has to ask me what I did all day. At the plant. She wants to know, she says. I tell her, look, I lived through it once, do I have to live through it twice?”

“I see what you mean,” I said, hardly able to remember what we were talking about.

“You do?” Far away in his nest of sheets he registered surprise.

“Yes. I know exactly what you mean. As my mother used to say, ‘I don't want to chew my cabbage twice.'”

“You mean you don't ask your husband what he did all day?”

“Well,” I said growing weary, “no. I don't think I ever do. Poor Martin.”

“Christ,” he said as two nurses began rolling him to the doorway. “Christ. I wish I was married to you.”

“Thank you,” I called faintly. “Thank you, thank you.”

Absurdly flattered, I too was wheeled away. Joy closed my eyes, and all I remember seeing after that was a blur of brilliant blue.

 

“You haven't read it yet, have you?” Meredith accuses me.

“Read what yet?” I am ironing in the kitchen, late on a Thursday afternoon. Pillowcases, Martin's shirts. I am travelling across the yokes, thinking these shirts I bought on sale are no good. Just a touch-up they're supposed to need, but the point of my iron is required on every seam.

“You haven't read Furlong's book?” Meredith says sharply.

“The new one you mean?”

“Graven Images."

 
“Well,” I say apologetically, letting that little word “well” unwind slowly, making a wavy line out of it the way our mother used to do, “well, you know how busy I've been.”

“You read Pearson's book.”

“That was different.”

Abruptly she lapses into confidence. “It's the best one he's written. You've just got to read it. That one scene where Verna dies. You'll love it. She's the sister. Unmarried. But beautiful, spiritual, even though she never had a chance to go to school. She's blind, but she has these fantastic visions. Honestly, when you stop to think that here you have a man, a man who is actually writing from inside, you know, from inside a woman's head. It's unbelievable. That kind of intuition.”

“I'm planning to read it,” I assure her earnestly, for I want to make her happy. “But there's the Susanna thing, and when I'm not working on that, there's the ironing. One thing after another.”

“You know that's not the reason you haven't read it,” she says, her eyes going icy.

I put down the iron, setting it securely on its heel. “All right, Meredith. You tell me why.”

“You think he's a dumb corny romantic. Flabby. Feminine.”

“Paunchy,” I help her out.

“You see,” her voice rises.

“Predictable. That's it, if you really want to know, Meredith.”

“I don't know how you can say that.”

“Easy.” I tell her. “This is his tenth novel, you know, and I've read them all. Every one. So I've a pretty good idea what's in this one. The formula, you might say, is familiar.”

“What's it about then?” her voice pleads, and I don't dare look at her.

I shake a blouse vigorously out of the basket. “First there's the waving wheat. He opens, Chapter One, to waving wheat. Admit it, Meredith, Saskatchewan in powder form. Mix with honest rain water for native genre.”

“He grew up there.”

“I know, Meredith, I know. But he doesn't live there now, does he?' He lives here in the east. For twenty years he's lived in the east. And he isn't a farmer. He's a writer. And when he's not being a writer, he's being a professor. Don't forget about that.”

“Roots matter to some people,” she says in a tone which accuses me of forgetting my own. Nurtured on the jointed avenues of Scarborough, did that count?

“All right,” I say. “Then you move into his storm chapter. Rain, snow, hail, locusts maybe. It doesn't matter as long as it's devastating. Echoes of Moses. A punishing storm. To remind them they're reaching too high or sinning too low. A holocaust and, I grant you this, very well done. Furlong is exceptional on storms.”

“This book really is different. There's another plot altogether.”

I rip into a shirt of Richard's. “Then the characters. Three I can be sure of. The Presbyterian Grandmother. And sometimes Grandfather too, staring out from his little chimney corner, all-knowing, all-seeing, but, alas, unheeded. Right, Meredith?”

Stop, I tell myself. You're enjoying this. You're a cruel, cynical woman piercing the pink valentine heart of your own daughter, shut up, shut up.

She mumbles something I don't catch.

“Then,” I say, “we're into the wife. She endures. There's nothing more to say about her except that she endures. But her husband, rampant with lust, keep your eye on him.”

“You haven't even read it.”

“Watch the husband, Meredith. Lust will undo him. Furlong will get him for sure with a horde of locusts. Or a limb frozen in the storm and requiring a tense kitchen-table amputation.”

“Influenza,” Meredith murmurs. “But the rest really is different.”

“And we close with more waving wheat. Vibrations from the hearthside saying, if only you'd listened.”

“It's not supposed to be real life. It's not biography,” she says, giving that last word a nasty snap. “It's sort of a symbol of the country. You have to look at it as a kind of extended image. Like in Shakespeare.”

“I'm going to read it,” I tell her as I fold the ironing board, contrite now. “I might even settle down with it tonight.”

We've had the book since August. Furlong brought me one, right off the press one steaming afternoon. Inscribed “To Martin and Judith Who Care.” Beautiful thought; but I cringed reading it, hoping Martin wouldn't notice. Furlong seems unable to resist going the quarter-inch too far.

Furlong's picture on the back of the book is distressingly authorly. One can see evidence of a tally taken, a check list fulfilled. Beard and moustache, of course. White turtleneck exposed at the collar of an overcoat. Tweed and cablestitch juxtaposed, a generation-straddling costume testifying to eclectic respectability.

A pipe angles from the corner of his mouth! Its bowl is missing, the outlines lost in the dark shadow of the overcoat, so that for a moment I thought it was a cigarillo or maybe just a fountain pen he was sucking on. But no, on close examination I could see the shine of the bowl. Everything in place.

The picture is two-color, white and a sort of olive tone, bleeding off the edges,
Time-Life
style. Behind him a microcosm of Canada – a fretwork of bare branches and a blur of olive snow, man against nature.

His eyes are mere slits. Snow glare? The whole expression is nicely in place, a costly membrane, bemused but kindly, academic but gutsy. The photographer has clearly demanded detachment.

The jacket blurb admits he teaches creative writing in a university, but couched within this apology is the information that he has also swept floors, reported hews, herded sheep, a man for all seasons, our friend Furlong.

Those slit eyes stick with me as I put away the ironing; shirts on hangers, handkerchiefs in drawers, pillowcases in the cupboard. They burn twin candles in my brain, and their nonchalance fails to convince me; I feel the muscular twitch of effort, the attempt to hold, to brave it out.

Poor Furlong, christened, legend has it, by the first reviewer of his first book who judged him a furlong ahead of all other current novelists. Before that he was known as Red, but I know the guilty secret of his real name: it is Rudyard. His mother let it slip one night at a department sherry party, then covered herself with a flustered apology. We grappled, she and I, in a polite but clumsy exchange, confused and feverish, but I am not a biographer for nothing; I filed it away; I remember the name Rudyard. Rudyard. Rudyard. I think of it quite often, and in a way I love him, Rudyard Eberhardt. More than I could ever love Furlong.

Meredith slips past me on the stairs. She is on her way to her room and she doesn't speak; she doesn't even look at me. What have I done now?

 

“Martin.”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just going over some notes.”

“Lecture notes?”

“Yes.”

It is midnight, the children are sleeping, and we are in bed. Martin is leaning into the circle of light given off by our tiny and feeble bedside lamp, milkglass, a nobbly imitation with a scorched shade.

“Do you know I've never heard you give a lecture?”

“You hate Milton.” He says this gently, absently.

“I know. I know. But I'd like to hear you anyway.

“You'd be bored stiff.”

“Probably. But I'd like to see what your style is like.”

“Style?”

“You know. Your lecturing style.”

“What do you think it's like?” He doesn't raise his eyes from his pile of papers.

But I reply thoughtfully. “Orderly, I'm sure you're orderly. Not too theatrical, but here and there a flourish. An understated flourish though.”

“Hummm.”

“And I suppose you quote a few lines now and then. Sort of scatter them around.”

“Milton is notoriously unquotable, you know.” He looks up. I am in my yellow tulip nightgown, a birthday present from my sister Charleen.

I ask, “What do you mean he's unquotable. The greatest master of the English language unquotable?”

“Can you think of anything he ever said?”

“No. I can't. Not a thing. Not at this hour anyway.”

“There you are.”

“Wasn't there something like tripping the light fantastic?”

“Uh huh.”

“It's hard to see why they bother teaching him then. If you can't even remember anything he wrote.”

“Memorable phrases aren't everything.”

“Maybe Milton should just be phased out.”

“Could be.” I have lost him again.

“Actually, Martin, I did hear you lecture once.”

“You did? When was that?”

“Remember last year. No, the year before last, the year after England. When I was taking Furlong's course in creative writing.”