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Authors: Carol Shields

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BOOK: Unless
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At once I felt a release of pressure around my ribs. Something not unlike jubilation rubbed against me, just for a moment, half a moment, as though under some enchantment I was allowed to be receptor and transmitter both, not a dead thing but a live link in the storage of what would
become an unendurable grief. I believed at that instant in my own gusto, that I’d set down words of revealing truth, inscribing the most private and alarming of visions instead of the whining melodramatic scrawl it really was, and that this unscrolling of sorrow in a toilet cubicle had all along been my most deeply held ambition.

I went to join the others gathered on the pavement outside the bar. They hadn’t noticed I’d been away so long, and perhaps it really had been only a moment or two. Everyone was topped up with good wine and bad food and they were chattering about Toronto and how strange that such campy curiosities as the Frontier Bar continued to exist. Tom slid an arm around my waist, oh so sweetly that I half believed I’d left my poison behind. The night air was bitingly cold, close to freezing, but for the first time in weeks I was able to take a deep breath.
My Heart Is Broken
. My mouth closed on the words, and then I swallowed.

So

S
O-OO-OO
?” my daughter Norah once asked me—she was about nine years old. “Why exactly is it that you and Daddy aren’t married?”

I had been waiting for the question for some years, and was prepared. “We really are married,” I told her. “In the real sense of the word, we are married.” She and I were in Orangetown on a Saturday morning, in the only shoe store in town not counting the ones out at the mall, and Norah was trying on new school shoes. “We’re married in that we’re together forever.”

“But,” she said, “you didn’t have a wedding.”

“We had a reception,” I told her cheerily. This diversion from wedding to reception had always been part of my plan. “We had a dinner for friends and family at your father’s apartment.”

“What kind of reception?”

How easily I managed to lead her sideways. “We had pizza and beer,” I said. “And champagne for toasts.”

“Was Grandma Winters there?”

“Well, no. She and Grandpa Winters had another reception for us later. Sort of a tea party.”

“What did you wear?”

“You mean at the pizza party?”

“Yes.”

“I had a caftan that Emma Allen made out of some African cotton. A blue and black block print. You’ve seen the picture. Only she was Emma McIntosh then.”

“Was she your bridesmaid?”

“Sort of. We didn’t use that word in those days.”

“Why not?”

“This was back in the seventies. Weddings were out of style back then. People didn’t think they were important, not if two people really loved each other.”

“I hate these shoes.” She wiggled in the chair.

“Well, we won’t buy them, then.”

“What kind of shoes did you have?”

“When?”

“At the pizza thing.”

“I’m not sure I remember. Oh, yes I do. We didn’t have shoes. We were barefoot.”

“Barefoot? You and Daddy?”

“It was summertime. A very hot summer day.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “I wish I’d been there.”

This was much too easy. “I wish you’d been there too,” I said, meaning it. “That would have made the day perfect.”

 

“So, is there anything new?” It was Emma Allen phoning a week ago from Newfoundland. She has been a friend since high-school days in Toronto. There is no need for reference points between Emma and me. Our brains tick over in the same way. She is a writer, a medical journalist, a redhead, tall and lanky, who once lived, briefly, in Orangetown with her husband and kids and was part of the same writers’ workshop. We speak at least once a week on the phone. When she asks if there’s anything new, she is talking about Norah, about Norah living on the street.

“She’s still there. Every day.”

“That has to be some comfort,” she said in her measured way. “Though it’s not bloody much.”

“I worry about the cold.”

It was October, and we were having a frost almost every night. We’d even had a fall of snow, which had since melted.

“Thermal underwear?” Emma asked.

“Good idea.”

“On the other hand—”

“Yes?”

“The cold may bring her home. You know how a good cold snap makes people wake up and look after themselves.”

“I’ve thought of that.”

“I thought probably you had.”

 

Tom’s father was a family physician in Orangetown, so Tom became a family physician in Orangetown. It’s not really as simple as that, but the fallout is the same. When he was a student he was in rebellion against the established order, way over to the edge of the left. He didn’t attend his own university graduation, because the ceremony involved wearing academic dress. For ten years the only trousers he wore were jeans. He doesn’t own a necktie and doesn’t intend to, not ever—the usual liberal tokens. His instincts are bourgeois, but he fights his instincts. That is, he lives the life of a married man but balks at the idea of a marriage ceremony. Mostly, he is a different kind of doctor than his crusty, sentimental father. Tom is a saint, some people in Orangetown think, so patient, so humane, so quietly authoritative. He works at the Orangetown Clinic with three other doctors, one of whom is an obstetrician who looks after most of the births in the region. Tom misses that, attending births. He sees a lot of sick people and a lot of lonely people. It’s through Tom that I’ve found out about the ubiquity of loneliness. I wouldn’t have believed it otherwise.

It’s my belief that he thinks about trilobites all the time. While he’s checking out a prostate gland or writing a prescription for asthma drugs, a piece of his mind holds steady to the idea of 500 million years ago—unfathomable to me—and the extinct, unlovely arthropods drat occupied every sea and ocean
in the world. They hung around for a long time, something like a hundred million years. Some were half the size of a thumb-nail and some were a foot long. Recently, a giant trilobite was found near the shores of Hudson Bay, a monster measuring 70 centimetres—that’s two feet, four inches. Ugly but adaptable creatures, trilobites, and obliging with their remains. A head with bulging eyes, a thorax, a tail of sorts; a little three-part life that once was. Tom loves them, and so we all love them.

 

“So what!” says Christine when I confront her with a bent cigarette that I found in the pocket of her winter parka. “So why were you going through my parka anyway?”

“I was putting it in the washer and so I checked the pockets.”

“I’m not addicted, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That is what I’m worried about, yes.”

“Well, I’m not. I’ve just had a few. With friends.”

“When I was pregnant with you, Chris, I never had a drop of wine for nine months. I never took so much as an aspirin. I drank three glasses of milk, every day, and you know I hate milk.”

“Wow! You were a real martyr to the cause of motherhood.”

“I wanted you to be healthy.”

“So you could lay a guilt trip on me when I got older.”

“I just hoped—”

“No wonder Norah—” She stopped herself.

No wonder Norah left home. I looked into her stricken face and could read the words she had come so close to engraving on the air.

“It’s all right,” I said, gathering her in my arms.

“I hate smoking anyway,” she whispered. “It was just something to do.”

 

“Sooo-ooo-oo!”

That’s what people say when they are about to introduce a narrative into the conversation or when they are clearing a little space so that you can begin a story yourself. It can be sung to different tunes, depending on the circumstances.

“So!”

That’s usually the first word uttered when I sit down to have coffee with Sally Bachelli and Annette Harris and Lynn Kelly. So! Meaning, here we are again at the Orange Blossom Tea Room. We’re the Orangetown coffee “lie-dies” getting together on a Tuesday morning. What’s new? So! So is like the oboe, signalling the A pitch to the strings. So, where do we go from here?

Aside from Emma Allen, and Gwen Reidman, with whom I’m rather out of touch, these three—Sally, Annette, Lynn—are my closest friends. We are all about the same age but are wildly different in size. Sally is a large woman, queenly. She has a round mouth in a round face and wears
thick, round, plastic-rimmed eyeglasses. A former actress who now runs an after-school drama group, she’s brilliant with accents: Scottish, German, East Indian; she can do anything. Even her shoulders are theatrical, even her elbows and wrists. Her clothes, which she designs and makes herself, are extraordinary in their roomy, fluttering, brightly coloured and gathered shapes.

“So,” says Lynn Kelly, who wears matched pantsuits in muted tones with department store jewellery and flat shoes. She is the shortest of us, under five foot and very wiry. How she produced two children from those tiny hips is a mystery. She has large hair, though, to make up for lack of body size, thick, dark, luxurious hair all in a tangle. Every sentence she utters seems to have a full stop attached. She was born and educated in North Wales.

Annette Harris came to Orangetown from Toronto, and before that from Jamaica. When she says the word
so
, she makes a circle of it. Of all of us, she has the best figure, a model’s figure, slim-waisted, deep-breasted, wonderful legs, and beautiful hands. She dresses with austerity except for her collection of handmade silver bracelets and earrings. I met Annette in the writers’ group I once belonged to. She was writing poetry in those days, and still is. Her book
Lost Things
was published a year ago and has done very well. She gave a reading in Toronto, and people were fighting to get in.

So, what do the four of us talk about as we gather at the Orange Blossom Tea Room? We never think about the aboutness of talk; we just talk.

Today Lynn was talking about trust. She is an avid cyclist, and her bike was leaning against a lamppost just out of view of the window. “How do I know it won’t be stolen?” she asked us. “Why is it I’m absolutely sure it’s safe?”

“Because this is Orangetown,” Sally said.

“Because school’s in session,” I suggested.

“Because it’s a twenty-year-old bike.” From Annette. “Not that it isn’t a terrific model.”

“And why is it,” Lynn went on, “that I’m not afraid of riding my bike down Borden Road and turning on to Main Street? I’ve got my helmet on and I’m trying to keep way over on the margin of the road, but what if a driver suddenly decides to go into road rage and ram straight into me?”

“I don’t think there’s that much road rage in Orangetown at this hour,” I said, remembering that I had left my own house unlocked.

“Don’t believe it,” Annette said. “There’s rage everywhere.”

“Someone could walk into this cafe right this minute brandishing a sword. I read about a man who went into a church in England and started slicing up people.”

“He was insane.”

“It could never have been predicted.”

“Like being struck by lightning. You can’t go around worrying about lightning.”

“Or planes crashing into your house.”

“If someone came in here with a sword,” Lynn said coolly, “we wouldn’t have a chance.”

“We’d be helpless.”

“We could duck under the table.”

“No, we’d be helpless.”

“Trust. We’ve had it drilled into us at birth. Or rather, we emerge from the womb already trusting. Trusting the hand that’s about to hold us.”

“So?” Lynn said. “When are we disabused of this notion?”

“When does doubt cut in, you mean?”

“Immediately,” I said. “One second after birth. I’m sure of it.”

 

So, the days go by, early fall, middle fall. Natalie and Chris both got small parts in
The Pajama Game
that the high school is putting on, and at home they’re always bursting into
Pajama Game
songs, which, after all these years, are still good songs. “Hernando’s Hideaway,” “Seven and a Half Cents.”
I’ve got ssss-steam heat
. That’s Natalie’s favourite; she belts it out, descending the stairs as she sings, going from one side to another, leaning over the banister, stretching her arms wide; Chris, just behind her on the stairs, chants a subtle boom-de-boom in accompaniment. Tom is writing a paper
for the trilobite conference next year in Estonia. “Wouldn’t you like to go to Estonia?” he asks me. I don’t know. It depends on Norah, what happens to Norah. I’m trying to work on my new novel but am often derailed. Danielle’s new book is selling well even without an author tour, even with minimal promotion. So it goes.

Otherwise

T
WO YEARS AGO
I inhabited another kind of life in which I scarcely registered my notion of heartbreak. Hurt feelings, minor slights, minimal losses, small treacheries, even bad reviews—that’s what I thought sadness was made of: tragedy was someone not liking my book.

I wrote a novel for no particular reason other than feeling it was the right time in my life to write a novel. My publisher sent me on a four-city book tour: Toronto, New York, Washington, and Baltimore. A very modest bit of promotion, you might say, but Scribano & Lawrence scarcely knew what to do with me. I had never written a novel before. I was a woman in her forties, not at all remarkable looking and certainly not media-smart. If I had any reputation at all it was for being an editor and scholar, and not for producing, to everyone’s amazement, a “fresh, bright, springtime piece of fiction,” or so it was described in
Publishers Weekly
.

My Thyme Is Up
baffled everyone with its sparky sales. We had no idea who was walking into bookstores and buying it. I didn’t know and Mr. Scribano didn’t know. “Probably
young working girls,” he ventured, “gnawed by loneliness and insecurity.”

These words hurt my feelings slightly, but then the reviews, good as they were, had subtly injured me too. The reviewers seemed taken aback that my slim novel (200 pages exactly) possessed any weight at all. “Oddly appealing,” the
New York Times Book Review
said. “Mrs. Winters’s book is very much for the moment, though certainly not for the ages,”
The New Yorker
opined. Tom advised me to take this as praise, his position being that all worthy novels pay close attention to the time in which they are suspended, and sometimes, years later, despite themselves, acquire a permanent lustre. I wasn’t so sure. As a long-time editor of Danielle Westerman’s work, I had acquired a near-crippling degree of critical appreciation for the severity of her moral stance, and I understood perfectly well that there was something just a little bit
darling
about my own book.

BOOK: Unless
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