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“But she doesn’t seem to care one way or another about us being there. It’s like she thinks it’s our right to be there if we want to be there.”
Natalie is sleeping badly. Chris is falling behind in math. But neither of them will admit it. They want to believe, and they want us to believe it too, that nothing more has happened than a detour from “the story thus far.” They are co-conspirators in this effort of faith.
For Norah, the story of a childhood won’t become human ballast as it will (maybe) for Chris and Natalie, and even for my idiotic two-dimensional pop-fiction airhead, Alicia. Norah seems lodged in childhood’s last irresponsible days, stung by the tang of injustice, nineteen years old, with something violent and needful beating in her brain. It’s like a soft tumour, but exceptionally aggressive. Its tentacles have entered all the quadrants of her consciousness. This invasion happened fast, when no one was looking.
October 17, 2000
Dear Alexander Valkner:
I’ve been feeling somewhat despondent lately (general malaise, concern over a teenaged daughter, and so on) and it was a relief to come across your long, brilliant piece in a recent issue of
Comment
, namely “The History of Dictionaries.” The material felt exceptionally fresh and was set out with vigour and irreverence. I, too, love words and spend my working day chasing after synonyms. Particularly diverting was the way you leapt up and down from the lecturing platform, speaking sometimes with thrilling historical echoes booming from the page and other times whispering like the curly-bearded man who sits in our public library and tries to write novels with a thesaurus at his elbow. From intimacy you travelled to grandeur, then back and forth, like a marvellously controlled metronome. I admired the way your essay builds on itself so meticulously, and the way it is anecdotal, accessible, and, finally, shading toward the confessional. I recognized only too well the
moment in which you were tempted to approach some of our great writers to see whether or not they “indulge,” keeping a thesaurus hidden in their desk drawer, the equivalent of a mickey of gin. John Updike, Saul Bellow, Richard Ford, Tom Wolfe, Anthony Lane are some of the names you suggested—wouldn’t that lot be taken by surprise to be questioned about their dictionary usage or non-usage! Just imagine their abashed scramble to hide the volume from view! And who else?—Calvin Trillin, William F. Buckley, Robert Lowell, Anthony Burgess, Julian Barnes.
That’s quite a list. A high list and also, you will agree, a rather low list. I am sure you realized when you were reading over your proofs that you had neglected to mention Danielle Westerman or Joyce Carol Gates or Alice Munro, but perhaps it was too late by then. I’m sure you felt a tickle at the scalp; a little stick figure shaking a finger at you saying—
something is missing here, Mr. Valkner
. You might have dropped in the name of Sylvia Plath? It’s well known that she really did use a thesaurus in the composing of her poetry, which seems rather shocking when you think about it. You don’t imagine poets leaping up from their chairs and consulting a mechanical device, which a thesaurus ultimately is.
Perhaps you were tired when you ran through your testicular hit list of literary big cats; trying to even out the numbers may have seemed too much of a reach or too obvious in its political correctness. But did you notice something
even more significant: that there is not a single woman mentioned in the whole body of your very long article (16 pages, double columns), not in any context, not once? As though these great literary men came into the world through their own efforts. Bean counting is tiring, and tiresome, but your voice, Mr. Valkner, and your platform (
Comment
) carry great authority. You certainly understand that the women who fall even casually under your influence (mea culpa) are made to serve an apprenticeship in self-denigration.
This will explain my despondency, and why I am burbling out my feelings to you. I am a forty-four-year-old woman who was under the impression that society was moving forward and who carries the memory of a belief in wholeness. Now, suddenly, I see it from the point of view of my nineteen-year-old daughter. We are all trying to figure out what’s wrong with Norah. She won’t work at a regular job. She’s dropped out of university, given up her scholarship. She sits on a curbside and begs. Once a lover of books, she has resigned from the act of reading, and believes she is doing this in the name of goodness. She has no interest in cults, not in cultish beliefs or in that particular patronizing cultish nature of belonging. She’s too busy with her project of self-extinction. It’s happening very slowly and with much grief, but I’m finally beginning to understand the situation. My daughter Christine grinds her teeth at night, which is a sign of stress. Another daughter, Natalie, chews her nails.
Women are forced into the position of complaining and then needing comfort. What Norah wants is to belong to the whole world or at least to have, just for a moment, the taste of the whole world in her mouth. But she can’t. So she won’t.
Yours,
Renata Winters,
The Orangery, Wychwood City
M
Y DAUGHTER IS LIVING
like a vagabond on the streets of Toronto, but even so I had to have four yards of screened bark mulch delivered to the house this morning, $141.91, including haulage. The last weeding’s done in the garden, and now we’ll spread this dark woody-smelling stuff between the shrubs and perennials, raking it as evenly as we can, inhaling the slightly unnatural scent, which is pitched halfway between rot and freshness. By spring it will have worked its way into the soil, all the splintery bits reduced to fine dust.
This thought brings on a metaphor blitz that cracks my head in two, so I get rid of it in my usual way. Think of something else, do something else. Immediately.
I wrote a cheque for the deliveryman, a boy, really, with a fine face and lovely straight teeth. I’ve been too preoccupied to pay attention to the calendar lately, and I had to ask him to remind me of the date.
“It’s my birthday,” he beamed. “I’m twenty-eight today.”
“That’s a good age,” I said, for what else really was there to say?
“Yeah, I think so,” he agreed. Mr. Amiability. “I’m hoping they’ll take me on regular.” He nodded in the direction of his truck. “Then I can quit my night job delivering the
National Post
and that’ll make it easier to see my girlfriend, who’s out in Lake Inlet, and then we can think about getting married and having a family, yeah.”
I could see, if I had nodded or smiled, that he would tell me everything, every little wavelet of thought that lapped between his ears and kept him alive. What power I had over him; I could turn him on and off like a radio; it shamed me somewhat. He stood, his arms crossed over his chest, bursting with his life chronicle and the importance of this particular day to him and how much he hoped for—which was really so little, so pathetically little. It wasn’t until he was walking back to the truck that I noticed something wrong with his legs; they twisted inward, kneeing together oddly, producing a bounce instead of a smooth stride.
“Have yourself a good one,” he called back to me in his outrageously happy voice.
Tom and I spread the mulch late in the afternoon. The clean look of it was pleasing, as though we’d done the earth a good deed. We stopped and observed the tussle of dark and light on the few remaining leaves, and then went together into the warm, orderly kitchen, which seemed like a rebuke of some kind. We had failed in our effort to live our
happy life. Never mind our careful arrangements, we were about to be defeated. This despite the sweet burnt-tomato smell of lasagna rising from the oven. Chris was playing the piano in the living room, Mozart, absorbed for once in the music’s deepening repetitions. Natalie was sprawled on the floor in front of the TV in jeans. Tom settled down on the chair next to her, and Pet, who willingly serves as a footstool, seemed to be saying: isn’t this heaven!—why isn’t it like this all the time? They were watching the six-o’clock news, not avidly, not with eagerness, but attentively enough. They were amiable and groggy. Natalie regarded the screen with her where-have-all-the-flowers-gone? look, while Tom actually registered what was being announced. A federal election had been called at the insistence of the prime minister, and this tiny election news, not unexpected, fluttered alongside the immensity of the Gore-Bush dance in the States. “I don’t like him anymore,” Natalie said lazily from the floor. Jean Chrétien, she means. She spoke with an astringency that was almost asexual. “Pompous. A kronkhead.” Chris in the next room launched into another round of Mozart, knowing that any minute she’d be called to set the dinner table and wanting me to know that she was more usefully employed getting prepared for her lesson tomorrow. I checked the oven and set the table.
Seven o’clock. I reached in the oven and removed the foil from the lasagna, then shut the red kitchen curtains,
which is my signal to my mother-in-law next door to put on her coat and walk up the hill and across the leaf-strewn lawn for dinner. She takes her evening meals with us, and we have used the curtain signal for close to twenty years. She’ll be watching from her darkened sunroom, waiting patiently, her nose already powdered, a dash of lipstick applied, her bladder emptied, her house keys in her pocket, and it will take her exactly four minutes to travel the hundred yards uphill to our back door, which I leave unlocked. Why do I have red curtains in my kitchen? Because Simone de Beauvoir loved red curtains; because Danielle Westerman loves red curtains out of respect for Beauvoir, and I love them because of Danielle. They serve, when nothing else quite does, as the sign of home and comfort, ease, companionability, food and drink and family.
I set the steaming lasagna on the table along with a green salad in my mother’s old mahogany bowl from Brazil, that time she and my father had attended a conference in Sáo Paulo—when was that? Back in the early seventies when I was young, left alone with Aunt Judy. “Dinner,” I called. And then, louder: “Dinner!”
They are well trained. Mozart faded at once with a spill down the keyboard. Grandma Winters came through the door bearing an apple crumble for dessert. She shed her good fall coat, sighing, and, as usual lately, gave no word of greeting. The TV died, and we all sat down together, Chris with a
baseball cap on backwards as though she were intent on driving her grandmother mad.
We were in the midst of family love; I breathed it in gratefully, despite its mixture of disorder and unreckoning. On this fall evening I had lit candles in the dining room, and we were sitting down as though we were an ordinary family, as if our small planet was on course, as though the seasons would continue, autumn about to move into winter, and outdoors the new mulch, like a coat of fleece, protecting and warming the ground. Snow was forecast even though it’s only October.
Natalie, always one to take responsibility for dinnertime silences even though she’s the youngest, was chattering about her history teacher, Mr. Glaven, who announced to the class today that he was gay. “Big fat surprise,” she said, “as though we didn’t have an inkling.” “Oh, him,” Chris said. “We knew he was gay two years ago.” Grandma Winters blinked, and then attacked her lasagna, carrying soft forkfuls of food straight into her mouth. She is proud of her appetite but would never say so. What has she eaten today? Toast and coffee for breakfast and toast and tea for lunch. No wonder she has an appetite at the end of the day. Tom serves himself last. His hands are shaking. When did that start? Thank God for Chris, thank God for Natalie, for their inane high-school gossip, their naive willingness to lunge forward and expand on tiny particulars of the quotidian, Mr. Glaven who
was spotted in Toronto in a gay bar over the weekend, holding hands with another man, kissing him on the lips. “Oh no, not on the lips!” From Chris. They strained to compensate for Norah’s absence, keeping up the volubility quotient but without quite catching Norah’s murmuring reflectiveness or her perfectly judged pause when she is asked a question. “Don’t forget the salad,” I reminded them, and this was my only real contribution to the dinner conversation, a reflex embedded in my role as mother, the provider of nutrition, the server of balanced meals.
I was thinking about Alicia in my novel who has gone on a no-carb diet so she can fit into the size-eight wedding dress she has ordered. What a vapid woman she is. What does Roman see in her really? Such fatal vanity, such a lack of suffering—either that or the suffering hasn’t quite reached her. It’s got blocked in her marrow, it never moves from her flesh up into her brain stem.
Suddenly it was clear to me. Alicia’s marriage to Roman must be postponed. Now I understood where the novel is headed. She is not meant to be partnered. Her singleness in the world is her paradise, it has been all along, and she came close to sacrificing it, or, rather, I, as novelist, had been about to snatch it away from her. The wedding guests will have to be alerted and the gifts returned. All of them, Alicia, Roman, their families, their friends—stupid, stupid. The novel, if it is to survive, must be redrafted. Alicia will advance in her
self-understanding, and the pages will expand. I’ll start over tomorrow. This thought pulsed in my throat. Tomorrow.
The telephone rang at that moment A call from New York and the news that my editor, Mr. Scribano, had died during the afternoon.
D
EAR MR. SCRIBANO
died in hospital, after a fall down the stairs the previous day. The small private funeral will be held in three days and there is to be a special tribute in next week’s
New York Times Book Review
. Someone from the paper phoned me at home in Orangetown and asked how I had found him as an editor.
