Unless (11 page)
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.
G
OODNESS 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 anything 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
.”
“A lot of people did write, they got quite excited about it—for Canadians, I mean—but she was flogged anyway.”
“God, this is a brutal world.”
Annette, born and brought up in Jamaica, is a poet and economist, divorced from her husband, who turned violent after his bankruptcy. She lives alone in a tiny cottage-like house in Orangetown, working part-time for a dot-corn, shuffling statistics on her screen.
Lynn lives with her mensch of a husband, Herb, and their two children in a sparkling new house on the edge of town. She has a busy law practice, but she still takes off two hours every Tuesday morning to come to coffee.
And Sally is at home for a year with a baby son, born on her fortieth birthday, a miracle baby, a sperm bank success. She used to bring Giles in a backpack thing, but now he’s weaned and she gets a Tuesday-morning sitter. She’s thought about suing her obstetrician—Lynn advises against it—because he wouldn’t let her wear her glasses during the delivery, and so she missed most of what happened. The doctor said it wasn’t safe to wear glasses, but she’s convinced herself it was a matter of aesthetics, that she and her “eyewear” disturbed his painterly vision of what the Birth of a Child should look like.
The four of us have been meeting like this for ten years now. We order cappuccinos; three out of four of us ask for decaf. Once in a while we order a scone or a croissant.
We don’t have a name; we’re not a club; there’s no agenda. We prefer not to think of ourselves as holders of opinions, that is, we do not “hold forth” on our opinions, because such opinions are arbitrary and manufactured in an unreal world with only fifty per cent participation. We know almost everything there is to know about each other. We talk about all kinds of topics, although we don’t talk about our sex lives—I think we avoid this subject out of a very old taboo, the need to protect others. Nor do we do much cooing over children because of Annette, who doesn’t have any. If Annette happens to be travelling, as she sometimes does, Sally, Lynn, and I get in our kid stuff then. Sometimes we drop in gender discoveries: the fact that men like wind but women don’t very
much, they find it worrying. The observation that men won’t, if they can help it, sit in the middle seat of a sofa, but women don’t seem to care. In France it’s thought that menstruating women are incapable of making a good mayonnaise. No! Surely, not anymore. We discuss the public library crisis, since both Annette and I sit on the board. Has our old friend Gwen, now Gwendolyn Reidman, always been a lesbian or is this a discovery of her middle age? And will Cheryl Patterson, the librarian, marry Sam Sondhi, the dentist out at the mall? Art is a courtship device, Annette says, at least poetry is. We wonder if the innocence we are born with is real, and try to imagine a case in which it isn’t destined to be obliterated. What then?
Tom has asked me once or twice what it is we talk about on Tuesday mornings, but I just shake my head. It’s too rich to describe, and too uneven. Chit-chat, some people call it. We talk about our bodies, our vanities, our dearest desires. Of course the three of them know all about Norah being on the street; they comfort me and offer concern. A phase, Annette believes. A breakdown, thinks Sally. Lynn is certain the cause is physiological, glandular, hormonal. They all tell me that I must not take Norah’s dereliction as a sign of my own failure as a mother, and this, though I haven’t acknowledged it before, is a profound and always lurking fear. More than a fear—I believe it. They tell me it’s all right to be angry with Norah for giving up, but I can’t seem to find the energy for anger.
We know what we look like: four women in early middle age, hunched over a table in a small-town coffee shop, leaning forward, all of us, the way women do when they want to catch every word. Two years ago when I went to New York to receive the Offenden Prize, the three of them gave me a send-off gift of purple underpants in real silk. I wore these to the ceremony under my white wool suit, and all evening, every time I took a step this way or that, shaking hands and saying “Thank you for coming” and “Isn’t this astonishing,” I felt the rub of silk between my legs, and thought how fortunate I was to have such fine, loving friends. Lynn, coming from Wales, calls underpants knickers, and now we all do. We love the sound of it.
I have been careful to give Alicia a few friends. It’s curious how friends get left out of novels, but I can see how it happens. Blame it on Hemingway, blame it on Conrad, blame even Edith Wharton, but the modernist tradition has set the individual, the conflicted self, up against the world. Parents (loving or negligent) are admitted to fiction, and siblings (weak, envious, self-destructive) have a role. But the non-presence of friends is almost a convention—there seems no room for friends in a narrative already cluttered with event and the tortuous vibrations of the inner person. Nevertheless, I like to sketch in a few friends, in the hope they will provide a release from a profound novelistic isolation that might otherwise ring hollow and smell suspicious.
Alicia’s best friend is Linda McBeth. Linda, an art consultant who toils at the same magazine where Alicia works, had a role in
My Thyme Is Up
, and so she also appears in the sequel. The two women have side-by-side cubicles at work, and they go together to a yoga class every Thursday night, and then out for a drink. They talk and talk and sometimes get a little drunk. Linda has a weight problem. She has a man problem too, a lack-of-man problem, that is. She requires Alicia to reinforce her self-confidence. But she’s funny, gifted at her work, and highly perceptive when it comes to other people. “I don’t know about Roman,” she says to Alicia at one point. “He’s such a great guy, but sometimes he comes on just the tiniest bit kingly.”
“You mean sitting-on-a-throne kind of kingly?” Alicia asked.
“Yes,” Linda said. “He always seems to be sort of surveying his vast domain, if you know what I mean. And looking over the heads of his subjects, who are bowing down before him.”
“Hmm,” said Alicia. “Yes.”
Roman has a good friend too, I’ve seen to that. Michael Hammish will be best man at Roman and Alicia’s wedding, which is coming up soon, unless I do something quickly to prevent it. He was Roman’s roommate at Princeton, a slightly menacing stockbroker and weekend soccer player, married to the demure blonde Gretchen, who does publicity for the
Wychwood Dance Company. Michael Hammish, who has hamlike thighs and big square mannish knees, has taken Roman aside and warned him about this marriage he’s about to enter. “If there’s anything you want to do, do it now, Roman, because once you’re married you haven’t a hope in hell, even married to a great woman like Alicia. Things get in the way, couple-type things. You’ll see. It happens all the time, it’s even happened to Gretch and me to a certain extent. But you’ve got a chance to think this over. You’ve been wanting for months to find out where your family comes from. I’ve noticed, I’ve taken note of it. Albania, Albania, that’s all you talk about. Take my advice, pal, and do it now. You won’t be getting another chance.”
N
ORAH WAS ACCEPTED
at McGill back in 1998. Of course she was, with her marks. There had never been any doubt about it. Our foolish worries were only a test of our certainty. The letter of acceptance glowed with welcome. But by then “the boyfriend” had come along, a twenty-two-year-old named Ben Abbot who was a second-year philosophy student at the University of Toronto. Of course that changed everything. She cancelled McGill, enrolled at Toronto, moved into a basement apartment off Bathurst with Ben, and opted for a major in modern languages. Good girl. After her mother’s heart.
But I worried: because she wasn’t under our roof any longer, like Natalie and Christine, and because I didn’t know if she was having a decent breakfast in the mornings and because she was having sex all the time with a person who had been a stranger a short while ago and who now was intimate with every portion of her body; just thinking of this brought on a siege of panic. First they were together a month, then six months, then a year, then a year and a half. I was beginning to get used to it. But not really, not completely.
I recognized that I was one of those mothers who has difficulty with her child’s becoming a woman.
Almost through her second year, the first day of April, she was home for a weekend, drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table while I, snug in my warmest robe, stirred up some eggs for breakfast. The kitchen in this ancient house is exceptionally airy and bright, and I was reminded of all the mornings of Norah’s childhood when she sat here at the window overlooking the bare brown winter woods, eating her buttered toast and chattering about the day ahead. She had been wakened in those days with a buzz from her own small wind-up alarm clock, a gift for her tenth birthday, something she had particularly asked for. Being woken by an alarm clock one has set for oneself was a sign of maturity, she believed, and she was anxious, perhaps, as the oldest child in the family, the big sister of Natalie and Christine, about maturity—what it meant and how she could get there fast. More important than being good and pleasing and adorable was the wish, early in her life, to be mature. That little plastic clock became a part of her perpetualism, a doctrine, as in the Church, of everlastingness. She took it with her to camp as a child, and then she carried it back and forth in her backpack to the basement apartment in Toronto where she and her boyfriend lived. Had she set the alarm last night?
