Unless (12 page)
Yes, probably she had, even just coming home to Orangetown for the weekend—and here she was, awake—
while Tom and the other girls were barely stirring upstairs. No one asked her to be this intense; no such demands were ever made on her by anyone other than herself.
I enjoyed having company in the kitchen in the early morning. I loved her sleepy, yawning, mussed look, merging with what I thought of as the careless use of herself in the world—the untidy Bathurst apartment, Ben, the passion for Flaubert—all of which I would never understand completely because it was unhinged from my own frame of time, the sixties child, the nineties child. For the moment, though, she was home; I had her to myself. She was wearing one of my cast-off robes that zipped up the front, that awful burgundy colour, her body lending grace to the awkward lines. But I was suddenly alerted to something about her presence: the fact that her face looked oddly fallen. Her eyes were swollen, filled, though not with tears. What I glimpsed there was something hard, fixed, chitinous. What was it? “We are real only in our moments of recognition”—who said that? I was recognizing something now. I put on my reading glasses and looked at my daughter again, closely. I made her turn toward the window so that the light fell across her eyes and on her hard little upper lip. She blinked at last, then closed her eyes against the light and against me.
“Is it Ben?”
“Partly.”
“You don’t love him the way you did.”
“I do. And I don’t. Don’t enough.”
“What do you mean, not enough?”
She shrugged and made a grab for my waistline, just hooked her thumb over the belt of my robe and hung on, with her forehead pressed into my stomach. I would give anything to have that moment back.
“Try to explain,” I said.
“I can’t love anyone enough.”
“Why not?”
“I love the world more.” She was sobbing now.
“What do you mean, the world?”
“All of it. Existence.”
“You mean,” I said, knowing this would sound stupid, “like mountains and oceans and trees and things?”
“All those things. But the other things too.”
I had eased myself into a chair and was massaging the tender place between her shoulder blades. My thumb fit there perfectly, doing its little circular motion. I had no way of knowing this would be her last visit home, that she was about to disappear. “Go on.”
“There’s literature,” she said. “And language. Well, you know. And branches of languages and dead languages and forgotten dead languages. And Matisse. And Hamlet. It’s all so big, and I love all of it.”
“But what—?”
“And whole continents. India. Especially those places like
India that I’ve never seen. Every little trail running off every hidden dirt road branching off from every major trade route. The shrubbery, the footpaths. The little town squares. There must be millions of town squares. I’ll never see them all, so what is the point?”
“You could spend a year travelling, you know, Norah.” I could hear Natalie and Christine moving about upstairs, shouting from bedroom to bedroom, tuning a radio to the local rock station.
“And the tides,” Norah said. “Think of the tides. They never forget to come and go. The earth tipping in space. Hardly anyone understands them.”
“Has Ben moved out?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are you living?”
“I’m still there. For the time being. But I’m thinking about going on my own.”
“Your classes. Your spring courses. What about them?”
“What about them?”
“You’ve dropped out of university.” I couldn’t believe this thought that popped into my head so suddenly and had to say it again. “You’ve dropped out of university.”
“I’m thinking about it. About not taking my exams.”
“Why?”
“It’s just—you know—sort of pointless.”
“What about your scholarship?”
“I don’t need any money. That’s what’s so astonishing. I can give up my scholarship—”
“Does Ben know what you’re thinking of?”
“Moving out or not taking exams?”
“Both.”
“No.”
“You don’t intend to tell him.”
“No.”
“Will you talk to your father?”
“God, no.”
“Please, Norah. He went through some—some phases—when he was younger. Way back. Please talk to him.”
“No. I can’t.”
“Please, Norah.”
“All right.”
Injury, when it comes, arrives from so many different directions that I don’t even attempt to track it. News from Indonesia or Jerusalem, Bush heating up for the election, breakthrough advances in cancer research—none of this had anything to do with this beautiful first daughter of mine with her light, fine hair, who was good, who was clever, who spoke in a low musical voice unusual for her age, who was living obediently and reading Flaubert and provoking no one who might do her damage.
I felt the kitchen walls swell outward, everything curved as in a TV cartoon, and then shrink inward, pressing against the two of us. “You do realize this is serious,” I said to her. “You are in a serious psychological state and you need help. It is very likely that you are depressed. It may be you have some mineral or vitamin deficiency, something as simple as that.”
“It’s not one big thing. I know that much. It’s a lot of little things. I’m trying to get past the little things, but I can’t.”
“Norah,” I tried. “The world often seems to be withholding something from us. We all feel that way at rimes, but especially at your age. You have to face up to it—”
“But that’s exactly what I want to do. I’m trying to face up to it. But it’s too big.”
“Has something happened, something you haven’t told us about?”
“No. It’s just—everything.”
I heard myself shouting into her face, making a rough knot-hole in the centre of the world, rude and out of control. “You have to talk to your father today,” I told her. “Today.”
“I said all right.”
“But you must talk to someone else as well. Someone in the counselling area. Today.”
Did I really say that: “in the counselling area”? No wonder she stared at me.
“It’s Sunday” she said.
“Well go to the hospital. Emergency will be open.”
“It’s not an emergency.”
“Norah, you need help.”
“I’m trying to find where I fit in.”
She held on to me desperately then. I was thinking quickly. Drugs. Some awful mix-up with drugs. Or a cult, I tried to picture cult members I’d seen hanging around the university, grey robes, sandals. Or those awful born-again Christians who won’t let women wear makeup and cut off their hair if they talk back. I stared at Norah’s mouth: no lipstick. But, no, it was breakfast time; no one would be wearing makeup at this hour. Still, mere had to be some perfectly logical explanation if I could just think my way through to it. Something had scrolled backward in her consciousness, giving her a naked naïveté about life, that it can be brought to a state of perfection, though we know this can never happen. Or maybe it was a temporary imbalance of the inner ear. I’d read about that recently. Mononucleosis, the old bugaboo, the particular enemy of students; people used to think it was passed around by kissing. Or maybe a brain tumour, massive but not inoperable. A misalignment in the spine, which would require the merest adjustment by an expert in Boston—we could fly down there in less than two hours, a breeze.
These were sensible ideas, examples of the kind of sideways thinking I’ve learned from Tom. My heartbeat, though, kept drilling straight through my calm speculations. I knew. Right away I knew this was the beginning of sorrow. In fact,
it must have been less than an hour later that Norah left the house, just slipped out the front door with her orange backpack, hitching a ride, probably, into Toronto. I couldn’t believe she left without saying goodbye. I looked all over the house for her and for her things. No one. Nothing. Then I knew how wildly out of control she was, how she’d become dangerous to her own being. She was lost.
Lost. A part of my consciousness opened like the separation of a cloud onto scenes of abrupt absence. Sunlight fell with a thud on streets that Norah would never walk down, the stupid, dumb, dead sun. Her birthdays would go on without her, the first of May, ten years from now, or twenty. Somehow she had encountered a surfeit of what the world offered, and had taken an overdose she is not going to be able to survive.
Or else not a surfeit, but its opposite, as Danielle Westerman seems to understand. A trick of perception may have fooled Norah into believing that life is too full to be embraced and too beautiful to bear. But the truth is something very different, and I am trying to figure out what that truth might be. Sometimes I am close to knowing.
Other times I feel I’m just another anxious mother who quarrelled with her daughter, a daughter who was merely depressed, fed up at the end of a long winter and probably worried about her first love affair going stale. I’ve overreacted, that’s all. And projected my own fears and panics onto Norah. What evidence do I have? None. She
will be fine in a few days, home again, feeling a little foolish and apologetic.
I go back and forth between complacency and worry. No one gets through this rime of life unruffled. It’s impossible. On the other hand, I remember the look in her eyes as she sat at the kitchen table, and my thoughts become more and more reckless. It sometimes occurs to me that there is for Norah not too much but too little; a gaping absence, a near-starvation. There is a bounteous feast going on, with music and richness and arabesques of language, but she has not been invited. She is seeing it for the first time, but now she will never be able to shake it from view. A deterioration has occurred to the fabric of the world, the world that does not belong to her as she has been told. Again and again and again. She is prohibited from entering. From now on life will seem less and less like life.
No, I am not ready yet to believe this.
October 8, 2000
Dear Sirs:
I was feeling more than usually depressed last night over personal matters and I happened to be sitting in a big armchair skimming through the latest issue of your magazine, which my spouse thoughtfully picked up for me at the local Mags & Fags. (We don’t subscribe, because we already feel there is too much paper flowing into our house, and we do try to be good citizens and only take the occasional nick off the planet.)
I couldn’t help noticing that you have sold one of your very expensive advertising pages to what appears to be a faux institution of some kind. The density of the typography and its brown uncurling script are attempting to avoid the usual four-colour commercial blast, but without success. There’s actually a lot of hustle on this page. The product, in any case, is Great Minds of the Western Intellectual World: Galileo, Kant, Hegel, Bacon, Newton, Plato, Locke, and Descartes. Small but very authentic-looking engravings of
these gentlemen’s heads form a right (let us say
impregnable
) band across the top of the page, and what is suggested is a continuum of learning, a ceaseless conveyor belt of noble thought, extracts of which are recorded, as you explain further down on the page, in eighty-four (84) half-hour lecture tapes, which one may listen to as he [assumed pronoun] walks or jogs or commutes or does the
CHORES
[my emphasis].
That’s a great number of half-hours given over to learning, you will agree, but at least a subscriber will be saved, according to the advertising copy, “years of intense reading and study” and, even worse, “complete withdrawal from active life.” You can awaken your mind “without having to quit your job or become a hermit.” A hermit! The scholar will be guided in his study by the Faculty; that’s Darren (skipping last names), Alan, Dennis, Phillip, Jeremy, Robert, another Robert, Kathleen (Kathleen?), Louis, Mark, and Douglas. My question is: How did Kathleen make it to this race?
I might as well admit that I am troubled these days (and nights) by such questions. I have a nineteen-year-old daughter who is going through a sort of soak of depression—actually her condition has not yet been diagnosed—which a friend of mine suspects is brought about by such offerings as your Great Minds of the WIW, not just your particular October ad, of course, but a long accumulation of shaded brown print and noble brows, reproduced year after year, all
of it pressing down insidiously and expressing a callous lack of curiosity about great women’s minds, a complete unawareness, in fact.
You will respond to my comments with a long list of rights women have won and you will insist that the playing field is level, but you must see that it is not. I can’t be the only one who sees this.
I realize I cannot influence your advertising policy. My only hope is that my daughter, her name is Norah, will not pick up a copy of this magazine, read this page, and understand, as I have for the first time, how casually and completely she is shut out of the universe. I have two other daughters too—Christine, Natalie—and I worry about them both. All the time.
Yours,
Reta Winters
The Hermitage,
Orangetown, Canada
T
HERE IS A PROBLEM
all fiction writers must face if they want to create unique and substantial characters. Characters, at least those personages who are going to be important to the developing narrative, require context They can’t simply be flung onto the page as though they had metamorphosed from warm mud. Darwin put an end to that. Freud too. Parthenogenesis doesn’t work for human beings, not yet and probably never, unless being human becomes something other than what we know. Characters in books need to be supplied with a childhood of some sort, with parents at the very least, sometimes even grandparents. These genealogical antecedents may be dead or lost, in which case they need not be introduced into the ongoing narrative but simply alluded to. Ancient Granddad Barney with his war medals. Grandma Foster and her fixation on bodily functions. The old genetic mutterings press directly or subtly on the contemporary character and how he/she responds to life’s vicissitudes. The distinctions may be shaded in with a rub of graphite:
WASP
or Jewish, old money or new; a novelist must
recognize that the gene pool is part of the plot, and that even my spacey, romantic Alicia is a bundle of chromosomes, precisely engineered. Parents influence children, stiffening or weakening their resolve, and no credible novelist is going to reverse that assumption. Even in the most Kafkaesque dreamscape there are certain elements that cannot be subtracted from substance, geography, family, blood. Everyone is someone’s child, and a novel, in the crudest of terms, is a story about the destiny of a child. There is always a bank of DNA pressing its claim. The question is: How far back does a novelist have to go in order to stabilize a character and achieve solidity?
