UNLESS
CAROL SHIELDS

Dedication

For Ezra and Jay

Epigraph

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

GEORGE ELIOT

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Here’s

Nearly

Once

Wherein

Nevertheless

So

Otherwise

Instead

Thus

Yet

Insofar As

Thereof

Every

Regarding

Hence

Next

Notwithstanding

Thereupon

Despite

Throughout

Following

Hardly

Since

Only

Unless

Toward

Whatever

Any

Whether

Ever

Whence

Forthwith

As

Beginning With

Already

Hitherto

Not Yet

Acknowledgements

About the Author

The Work of Carol Shields

Copyright

About the Publisher

Here’s

IT HAPPENS THAT I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I’ve heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I’ve never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

In my new life—the summer of the year 2000—I am attempting to “count my blessings.” Everyone I know advises me to take up this repellent strategy, as though they really believe a dramatic loss can be replaced by the renewed appreciation of all one has been given. I have a husband, Tom, who loves me and is faithful to me and is very decent looking as well, tallish, thin, and losing his hair nicely. We live in a house with a paid-up mortgage, and our house is set in the prosperous rolling hills of Ontario, only an hour’s drive north of Toronto. Two of our three daughters, Natalie, fifteen, and Christine, sixteen, live at home. They are intelligent and lively and attractive and loving, though they too have shared in the loss, as has Tom.

And I have my writing.

“You have your writing!” friends say. A murmuring chorus: But you have your writing, Reta. No one is crude enough to suggest that my sorrow will eventually become material for my writing, but probably they think it.

And it’s true. There is a curious and faintly distasteful comfort, at the age of forty-three, forty-four in September, in contemplating what I have managed to write and publish during those impossibly childish and sunlit days before I understood the meaning of grief. “My Writing”: this is a very small poultice to hold up against my damaged self, but better, I have been persuaded, than no comfort at all.

It’s June, the first year of the new century, and here’s what I’ve written so far in my life. I’m not including my old schoolgirl sonnets from the seventies—Satin-slippered April, you glide through time / And lubricate spring days, de dum, de dum—and my dozen or so fawning book reviews from the early eighties. I am posting this list not on the screen but on my consciousness, a far safer computer tool and easier to access:

I. A translation and introduction to Danielle Westerman’s book of poetry, Isolation, April 1981, one month before our daughter Norah was born, a home birth naturally; a midwife; you could almost hear the guitars plinking in the background, except we did not feast on the placenta as some of our friends were doing at the time. My French came from my Québécoise mother, and my acquaintance with Danielle from the University of Toronto, where she taught French civilization in my student days. She was a poor teacher, hesitant and in awe, I think, of the tanned, healthy students sitting in her classroom, taking notes worshipfully and stretching their small suburban notion of what the word civilization might mean. She was already a recognized writer of kinetic, tough-corded prose, both beguiling and dangerous. Her manner was to take the reader by surprise. In the middle of a flattened rambling paragraph, deceived by warm stretches of reflection, you came upon hard cartilage.

I am a little uneasy about claiming Isolation as my own writing, but Dr. Westerman, doing one of her hurrying, over-the-head gestures, insisted that translation, especially of poetry, is a creative act. Writing and translating are convivial, she said, not oppositional, and not at all hierarchical. Of course, she would say that. My introduction to Isolation was certainly creative, though, since I had no idea what I was talking about.

I hauled it out recently and, while I read it, experienced the Burrowing of the Palpable Worm of Shame, as my friend Lynn Kelly calls it. Pretension is what I see now. The part about art transmuting the despair of life to the “merely frangible,” and poetry’s attempt to “repair the gap between ought and naught”—what on earth did I mean? Too much Derrida might be the problem. I was into all that pretty heavily in the early eighties.

2. After that came “The Brightness of a Star,” a short story that appeared in An Anthology of Young Ontario Voices (Pink Onion Press, 1985). It’s hard to believe that I qualified as “a young voice” in 1985, but, in fact, I was only twenty-nine, mother of Norah, aged four, her sister Christine, aged two, and about to give birth to Natalie—in a hospital this time. Three daughters, and not even thirty. “How did you find the time?” people used to chorus, and in that query I often registered a hint of blame: was I neglecting my darling sprogs for my writing career? Well, no. I never thought in terms of career. I dabbled in writing. It was my macramé, my knitting. Not long after, however, I did start to get serious and joined a local “writers’ workshop” for women, which met every second week, for two hours, where we drank coffee and had a good time and deeply appreciated each other’s company, and that led to:

3. “Icon,” a short story, rather Jamesian, 1986. Gwen Reidman, the only published author in the workshop group, was our leader. The Glenmar Collective (an acronym of our first names—not very original) was what we called ourselves. One day Gwen said, moving a muffin to her mouth, that she was touched by the “austerity” of my short story—which was based, but only roughly, on my response to the Russian icon show at the Art Gallery of Ontario. My fictional piece was a case of art “embracing/repudiating art,” as Gwen put it, and then she reminded us of the famous “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” and the whole aesthetic of art begetting art, art worshipping art, which I no longer believe in, by the way. Either you do or you don’t. The seven of us, Gwen, Lorna, Emma Allen, Nan, Marcella, Annette, and I (my name is Reta Winters—pronounced Ree-tah) self-published our pieces in a volume titled Incursions and Interruptions, throwing in fifty dollars each for the printing bill. The five hundred copies sold quickly in the local bookstores, mostly to our friends and families. Publishing was cheap, we discovered. What a surprise. We called ourselves the Stepping Stone Press, and in that name we expressed our mild embarrassment at the idea of self-publishing, but also the hope that we would step along to authentic publishing in the very near future. Except Gwen, of course, who was already there. And Emma, who was beginning to publish op-ed pieces in the Globe and Mail.

4. Alive (Random House, 1987), a translation of Pour Vivre, volume one of Danielle Westerman’s memoirs. I may appear to be claiming translation as an act of originality, but, as I have already said, it was Danielle, in her benign way, wrinkling her disorderly forehead, who had urged me to believe that the act of shuffling elegant French into readable and stable English is an aesthetic performance. The book was well received by the critics and even sold moderately well, a dense but popular book, offered without shame and nary a footnote. The translation itself was slammed in the Toronto Star (“clumsy”) by one Stanley Harold Howard, but Danielle Westerman said never mind, the man was un maquereau, which translates, crudely, as something between a pimp and a prick.

5. I then wrote a commissioned pamphlet for a series put out by a press calling itself Encyclopédie de l’art. The press produced tiny, hold-in-the-hand booklets, each devoted to a single art subject, covering everything from Braque to Calder to Klee to Mondrian to Villon. The editor in New York, operating out of a phone booth it seemed to me, and knowing nothing of my ignorance, had stumbled on my short story “Icon” and believed me to be an expert on the subject. He asked for three thousand words for a volume (volumette, really) to be called Russian Icons, published finally in 1989. It took me a whole year to do, what with Tom and the three girls, and the house and garden and meals and laundry and too much inwardness. They published my “text,” such a cold, jellied word, along with a series of coloured plates, in both English and French (I did the French as well) and paid me four hundred dollars. I learned all about the schools of Suzdal and Vladimir and what went on in Novgorod (a lot) and how images of saints made medieval people quake with fear. To my knowledge, the book was never reviewed, but I can read it today without shame. It is almost impossible to be pseudo when writing about innocent paintings that obey no rules of perspective and that are done on slabs of ordinary wood.

6. I lost a year after this, which I don’t understand, since all three girls had started school, though Natalie was only in morning kindergarten. I think I was too busy thinking about the business of being a writer, about being writerly and fretting over whether Tom’s ego was threatened and being in Danielle’s shadow, never mind Derrida, and needing my own writing space and turning thirty-five and feeling older than I’ve ever felt since. My age—thirty-five—shouted at me all the time, standing tall and wide in my head, and blocking access to what my life afforded. Thirty-five never sat down with its hands folded. Thirty-five had no composure. It was always humming mean, terse tunes on a piece of folded cellophane. (“I am composed,” said John Quincy Adams on his deathbed. How admirable and enviable and beyond belief; I loved him for this.)

This anguish of mine was unnecessary; Tom’s ego was unchallenged by my slender publications. He turned out not to be one of those men we were worried about in the seventies and eighties, who might shrivel in acknowledgment of his own insignificance. Ordinary was what he wanted, to be an ordinary man embedded in a family he loved. We put a skylight in the box room, bought a used office desk, installed a fax and a computer, and I sat down on my straight-from-a-catalogue Freedom Chair and translated Danielle Westerman’s immense Les femmes et le pouvoir, the English version published in 1992, volume two of her memoirs. In English the title was changed to Women Waiting, which only makes sense if you’ve read the book. (Women possess power, but it is power that has yet to be seized, ignited, and released, and so forth.) This time no one grumped about my translation. “Sparkling and full of ease,” the Globe said, and the New York Times went one better and called it “an achievement.”

“You are my true sister,” said Danielle Westerman at the time of publication. Ma vraie soeur. I hugged her back. Her craving for physical touch has not slackened even in her eighties, though nowadays it is mostly her doctor who touches her, or me with my weekly embrace, or the manicurist. Dr. Danielle Westerman is the only person I know who has her nails done twice a week, Tuesday and Saturday (just a touch-up), beautiful long nail beds, matching her long quizzing eyes.

7. I was giddy. All at once translation offers were arriving in the mail, but I kept thinking I could maybe write short stories, even though our Glenmar group was dwindling, what with Emma taking a job in Newfoundland, Annette getting her divorce, and Gwen moving to the States. The trouble was, I hated my short stories. I wanted to write about the overheard and the glimpsed, but this kind of evanescence sent me into whimsy mode, and although I believed whimsicality to be a strand of the human personality, I was embarrassed at what I was pumping into my new Apple computer, sitting there under the clean brightness of the skylight. Pernicious, precious, my moments of recognition. Ahah!—and then she realized; I was so fetching with my “Ellen was setting the table and she knew tonight would be different.” A little bug sat in my ear and buzzed: Who cares about Ellen and her woven place-mats and her hopes for the future?

I certainly didn’t care.

Because I had three kids, everyone said I should be writing kiddy lit, but I couldn’t find the voice. Kiddy lit screeched in my brain. Talking ducks and chuckling frogs. I wanted something sterner and more contained as a task, which is how I came to write Shakespeare and Flowers (San Francisco: Cyclone Press, 1994). The contract was negotiated before I wrote one word. Along came a little bundle of cash to start me off, with the rest promised on publication. I thought it was going to be a scholarly endeavour, but I ended up producing a wee “giftie” book. You could send this book to anyone on your list who was maidenly or semi-academic or whom you didn’t know very well. Shakespeare and Flowers was sold in the kind of outlets that stock greeting cards and stuffed bears. I simply scanned the canon and picked up references to, say, the eglantine (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) or the blackberry (Troilus and Cressida) and then I puffed out a little description of the flower, and conferenced on the phone (twice) with the illustrator in Berkeley, and threw in lots of Shakespearean quotes. A sweet little book, excellent slick paper, US$12.95. At sixty-eight pages it fits in a small mailer. Two hundred thousand copies, and still selling, though the royalty rate is scandalous. They’d like me to do something on Shakespeare and animals, and I just might.

8. Eros: Essays, by Danielle Westerman, translation by Reta Winters, hastily translated—everything was hasty in those days, everything still is—and published in 1995. Hugely successful, after a tiny advance. We put the dog in a kennel, and Tom and I and the girls took the first translation payment and went to France for a month, southern Burgundy, a village called La Roche-Vineuse, where Danielle had grown up, halfway between Cluny and Mâcon, red-tiled roofs set in the midst of rolling vineyards, incandescent air. Our rental house was built around a cobbled courtyard full of ancient roses and hydrangeas. “How old is this house?” we asked the neighbours, who invited us in for an aperitif. “Very old” was all we got. The stone walls were two feet thick. The three girls took tennis lessons at l’école d’été. Tom went hacking for trilobites, happy under the French sun, and I sat in a wicker chair in the flower-filled courtyard, shorts and halter and bare feet, a floppy straw hat on my head, reading novels day after day, and thinking: I want to write a novel. About something happening. About characters moving against a “there.” That was what I really wanted to do.

Looking back, I can scarcely believe in such innocence. I didn’t think about our girls growing older and leaving home and falling away from us. Norah had been a good, docile baby and then she became a good, obedient little girl. Now, at nineteen, she’s so brimming with goodness that she sits on a Toronto street corner, which has its own textual archaeology, though Norah probably doesn’t know about that. She sits beneath the lamppost where the poet Ed Lewinski hanged himself in 1955 and where Margherita Tolles burst out of the subway exit into the sunshine of her adopted country and decided to write a great play. Norah sits cross-legged with a begging bowl in her lap and asks nothing of the world. Nine-tenths of what she gathers she distributes at the end of the day to other street people. She wears a cardboard sign on her chest: a single word printed in black marker—GOODNESS.

I don’t know what that word really means, though words are my business. The Old English word wearth, I discovered the other day on the Internet, means outcast; the other English word, its twin, its cancellation, is worth—we know what that means and know to distrust it. It is the word wearth that Norah has swallowed. This is the place she’s claimed, a whole world constructed on stillness. An easy stance, says the condemning, grieving mother, easy to find and maintain, given enough practice. A sharper focus could be achieved by tossing in an astringent fluid, a peppery sauce, irony, rebellion, tattoos and pierced tongue and spiked purple hair, but no. Norah embodies invisibility and goodness, or at least she is on the path–so she said in our last conversation, which was eight weeks ago, the eleventh of April. She wore torn jeans that day and a rough plaid shawl that was almost certainly a car blanket. Her long pale hair was matted. She refused to look us in the eye, but she did blink in acknowledgement–I’m sure of it–when I handed her a sack of cheese sandwiches and Tom dropped a roll of twenty-dollar bills in her lap. Then she spoke, in her own voice, but emptied of connection. She could not come home. She was on the path to goodness. At that moment I, her mother, was more absent from myself than she; I felt that. She was steadfast. She could not be diverted. She could not “be” with us.

How did this part of the narrative happen? We know it didn’t rise out of the ordinary plot lines of a life story. An intelligent and beautiful girl from a loving family grows up in Orangetown, Ontario, her mother’s a writer, her father’s a doctor, and then she goes off the track. There’s nothing natural about her efflorescence of goodness. It’s abrupt and brutal. It’s killing us. What will really kill us, though, is the day we don’t find her sitting on her chosen square of pavement.

But I didn’t know any of this when I sat in that Burgundy garden dreaming about writing a novel. I thought I understood something of a novel’s architecture, the lovely slope of predicament, the tendrils of surface detail, the calculated curving upward into inevitability, yet allowing spells of incorrigibility, and then the ending, a corruption of cause and effect and the gathering together of all the characters into a framed operatic circle of consolation and ecstasy, backlit with fibre-optic gold, just for a moment on the second-to-last page, just for an atomic particle of time.

I had an idea for my novel, a seed, and nothing more. Two appealing characters had suggested themselves, a woman and a man, Alicia and Roman, who live in Wychwood, which is a city the size of Toronto, who clamour and romp and cling to the island that is their life’s predicament—they long for love, but selfishly strive for self-preservation. Roman is proud to be choleric in temperament. Alicia thinks of herself as being reflective, but her job as assistant editor on a fashion magazine keeps her too occupied to reflect.

9. And I had a title, My Thyme Is Up. It was a pun, of course, from an old family joke, and I meant to write a jokey novel. A light novel. A novel for summertime, a book to read while seated in an Ikea wicker chair with the sun falling on the pages as faintly and evenly as human breath. Naturally the novel would have a happy ending. I never doubted but that I could write this novel, and I did, in 1997—in a swoop, alone, during three dark winter months when the girls were away all day at school.

10. The Middle Years, the translation of volume three of Westerman’s memoirs, is coming out this fall. Volume three explores Westerman’s numerous love affairs with both men and women, and none of this will be shocking or even surprising to her readers. What is new is the suppleness and strength of her sentences. Always an artist of concision and selflessness, she has arrived in her old age at a gorgeous fluidity and expansion of phrase. My translation doesn’t begin to express what she has accomplished. The book is stark; it’s also sentimental; one balances and rescues the other, strangely enough. I can only imagine that those endless calcium pills Danielle chokes down every morning and the vitamin E and the emu oil capsules have fed directly into her vein of language so that what lands on the page is larger, more rapturous, more self- forgetful than anything she’s written before, and all of it sprouting short, swift digressions that pretend to be just careless asides, little swoons of surrender to her own experience, inviting us, her readers, to believe in the totality of her abandonment.

Either that or she’s gone senile to good effect, a grand loosening of language in her old age. The thought has more than once occurred to me.

Another thought has drifted by, silken as a breeze against a lattice. There’s something missing in these memoirs, or so I think in my solipsistic view. Danielle Westerman suffers, she feels the pangs of existential loneliness, the absence of sexual love, the treason of her own woman’s body. She has no partner, no one for whom she is the first person in the world order, no one to depend on as I do on Tom. She does not have a child, or any surviving blood connection for that matter, and perhaps it’s this that makes the memoirs themselves childlike. They go down like good milk, foaming, swirling in the glass.

II. I shouldn’t mention Book Number Eleven since it is not a fait accompli, but I will. I’m going to write a second novel, a sequel to My Thyme Is Up. Today is the day I intend to begin. The first sentence is already tapped into my computer: “Alicia was not as happy as she deserved to be.”

I have no idea what will happen in this book. It is a mere abstraction at the moment, something that’s popped out of the ground like the rounded snout of a crocus on a cold lawn. I’ve stumbled up against this idea in my clumsy manner, and now the urge to write it won’t go away. This will be a book about lost children, about goodness, and going home and being happy and trying to keep the poison of the printed page in perspective. I’m desperate to know how the story will turn out.

Nearly

WE ARE MORE THAN halfway through the year 2000. Toward the beginning of August, Tom’s old friend Colin Glass came to dinner one night, driving out from Toronto. Over coffee he attempted to explain the theory of relativity to me.

I was the one who invited him to launch into the subject. Relativity is a piece of knowledge I’ve always longed to understand, a big piece, but the explainers tend to go too fast or else they skip over a step they assume their audience has already absorbed. Apparently, there was once a time when only one person in the world understood relativity (Einstein), then two people, then three or four, and now most of the high-school kids who take physics have at least an inkling, or so I’m told. How hard can it be? And it’s passed, according to Colin, from crazy speculation to confirmed fact, which makes it even more important to understand. I’ve tried, but my grasp feels tenuous. So, the speed of light is constant. Is that all?

Ordinarily, I love these long August evenings, the splash of amber light that falls on the white dining-room walls just before the separate shades of twilight take over. The medallion leaves that flutter their round ghost shadows. All day I’d listened to the white-throated sparrows in the woods behind our house; their song resembles the Canadian national anthem, at least the opening bars. Summer was dying, but in pieces. We’d be eating outside if it weren’t for the wasps. Good food, the company of a good friend, what more could anyone desire? But I kept thinking of Norah sitting on her square of pavement and holding up the piece of cardboard with the word GOODNESS, and then I lost track of what Colin was saying.

E=mc². Energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared. The tidiness of the equation raised my immediate suspicion. How can mass—this solid oak dining table, for instance—have any connection with how fast light travels? They’re two different things. Colin, who is a physicist, was patient with my objections. He took the linen napkin from his lap and stretched it taut across the top of his coffee cup. Then he took a cherry from the fruit bowl and placed it on the napkin, creating a small dimple. He tipped the cup slightly so that the cherry rotated around the surface of the napkin. He spoke of energy and mass, but already I had lost a critical filament of the argument. I worried slightly about his coffee sloshing up onto the napkin and staining it, and thought how seldom in the last few years I had bothered with cloth napkins. Nobody, except maybe Danielle Westerman, does real napkins anymore; it was understood that modern professional women had better things to do with their time than launder linen.

By now I had forgotten completely what the cherry (more than four dollars a pound) represented and what the little dimple was supposed to be. Colin talked on and on, and Tom, who is a family physician and has a broad scientific background, seemed to be following; at least he was nodding his head appropriately. My mother-in-law, Lois, had politely excused herself and returned to her house next door; she would never miss the ten-o’clock news; her watching of the ten-o’clock news helps the country of Canada to go forward. Christine and Natalie had long since drifted from the table, and I could hear the buzz and burst of TV noises in the den.

Pet, our golden retriever, parked his shaggy self under the table, his whole dog body humming away against my foot. Sometimes, in his dreams, he groans and sometimes he chortles with happiness. I found myself thinking about Marietta, Colin’s wife, who had packed her bags a few months ago and moved to Calgary to be with another man. She claimed Colin was too wrapped up in his research and teaching to be a true partner. A beautiful woman with a neck like a plant stem, she hinted that there had been a collapse of passion in their marriage. She had left suddenly, coldly; he had been shocked; he had had no idea, he told us in the early days, that she had been unhappy all these years, but he found her diaries in a desk drawer and read them, sick with realization that a gulf of misunderstanding separated them.

Why would a woman leave such personal diaries behind? To punish, to hurt, of course. Colin, for the most part a decent, kind-hearted man, used to address her in a dry, admonitory way, as though she were a graduate student instead of his wife. “Don’t tell me this is processed cheese,” he asked her once when we were having dinner at their house. Another time: “This coffee is undrinkable.” He loved pleasure—he was that kind of man—and took it for granted and couldn’t help his little yelps of outrage when pleasure failed. You could call him an innocent in his expectations, almost naive on this particular August evening. It was as though he were alone in a vaulted chamber echoing with immensities, while Tom and I stood attendance just outside the door, catching the overflow, the odd glimpse of his skewed but calm brilliance. Even the little pockets under his eyes were phlegmatic. He was not a shallow person, but perhaps he suspected that we were. I had to stop myself interrupting with a joke. I often do this, I’m afraid: ask for an explanation and then drift off into my own thoughts.

How could he now be sitting at our table so calmly, toying with cherries and coffee cups and rolling the edge of his straw placemat, and pressing this heft of information on us? It was close to midnight; he had an hour’s drive ahead of him. What did the theory of relativity really matter to his ongoing life? Colin, with his small specs and trim moustache, was at ease with big ideas like relativity. As a theory, relativity worked, it held all sorts of important “concepts” together with its precision and elegance. Think of glue lavishly applied, he said helpfully about relativity; think of the power of the shrewd guess. Such a sweeping perspective had been visionary at the beginning, but had been assessed and reinforced, and it was, moreover, Colin was now insisting, useful. In the face of life’s uncertainties, relativity’s weight could be assumed and then set aside, part of the package of consciousness.

He finished awkwardly, sat back in his chair with his two long arms extended. “So!” That’s it, he seemed to say, or that’s as much as I can do to simplify and explain so brilliant an idea. He glanced at his watch, then sat back again, exhausted, pleased with himself. He wore a well-pressed cotton shirt with blue and yellow stripes, neatly tucked into his black jeans. He has no interest in clothes. This shirt must go back to his married days, chosen for him, ironed for him by Marietta herself and put on a hanger, perhaps a summer ago.

The theory of relativity would not bring Colin’s wife hurrying back to the old stone house on Oriole Parkway. It would not bring my daughter Norah home from the corner of Bathurst and Bloor, or the Promise Hostel where she beds at night. Tom and I followed her one day; we had to know how she managed, whether she was safe. The weather would be turning cold soon. How does she bear it? Cold concrete. Dirt. Uncombed hair.

“Would you say,” I asked Colin—I had not spoken for several minutes—“that the theory of relativity has reduced the weight of goodness and depravity in the world?”

He stared at me.“Relativity has no moral position. None whatever.” (“This coffee is undrinkable.”)

I looked to Tom for support, but he was gazing with his mild eyes at the ceiling, smiling. I knew that smile.

“But isn’t it possible,” I said to Colin, “to think that goodness, or virtue if you like, could be a wave or particle of energy?”

“No,” he said. “No, it is not possible.”

I made an abrupt move to clear the table. I was suddenly exhausted.

Still, I am thankful for the friendship and intellectual ardour of such an unpretentious man as Colin Glass, who despite his suffering and shame really wanted me to understand a key concept of the twentieth century. Or was he simply diverting himself for an hour? This is what I must learn: the art of diversion. He said not one word about Marietta all evening long. Tom and I understand that he is reconstructing his life without her. But a daughter is something different. A daughter of nineteen cannot be erased.

Once

IT WAS UNDERSTOOD that I would do the publicity, such as it was, for Danielle Westerman’s third volume of memoirs. At eighty-five she was too old, and too distinguished, to handle a day of interviews in Toronto, even though she lives there. I, as the translator, could easily field questions from the press. A very light schedule was organized by the publisher, since Dr. Westerman already possesses a long twilight of faithful readership.

In early September, I drove into Orangetown, down its calm, old-fashioned main street and into the countryside again. The city of Toronto, monumental and lonely, glowed in front of me. Its outskirts are ragged, though its numbered exits pretend at a kind of order. Traffic was light. I drove slowly by the corner of Bloor and Bathurst for a glimpse of Norah. There she was, as always, on the northeast corner, seated on the ground near the subway entrance with her bowl and cardboard sign, even though it was not yet nine o’clock. Had she had breakfast? Did she have nits in her hair? What is she thinking, or is her mind a great blank?

I parked the car and walked over to where she was. “Hello, darling Norah,” I said, setting down a plastic bag of food: bread and cheese, fruit and raw vegetables. And, in an envelope, a recent photo of Pet with his straight, proud muzzle and furry ruff. Norah, of all the girls, doted on Pet, and now I was bribing her shamelessly. It was a chilly day, and it iced my heart to see her unreadable immobility, but I was glad to notice that she was wearing warm mittens. Glad? Me glad? The least little signal will gladden my heart these days. Today she looked not quite at me, and nodded. Another wave of gladness struck. I allow myself only one such glimpse a week, since she’s made it clear she doesn’t want to see us.

It is like watching her through plate glass. All week I will draw expensively on this brief moment of voyeurism, at the same time trying to blot it out with images of Norah on her bicycle; Norah sitting at the kitchen table studying for exams; Norah reaching for her green raincoat; Norah trying on new school shoes; Norah sleeping, safe.

After a while I went to have my eyebrows arched and tinted at Sylvia’s, which calls itself a “spirit spa,” meaning, it seemed, that while Madame Sylvia swiped at my brow with a little paintbrush, she murmured and sang into my ear. It was now nine-thirty in the morning and I lay on a narrow table in a tiny white room. “You are at the age when you must protect the fine skin around the eyes,” she warned. “A woman’s face falls, it is inevitable, but the eyes go on and on, giving light. You will be eighty, ninety, and your eyes will still charm.”

She knows nothing about my life. I’ve never been here before and have never thought of having an eyebrow tint. I have perfectly decent eyebrows, nicely shaped and regular, but I did look into a mirror a week or so ago and noticed that the small hairs at the outside corners were coming in grey. There was a little grey at the temples too, but nothing to be surprised about, not for a woman whose forty-fourth birthday is approaching, not for a woman who has never even thought of herself as possessing “temples,” such august body parts.

“Are you by any chance a Gemini?” Madame Sylvia asked intimately. Swish went the paintbrush. She stopped, peered at me closely, then swished again, a deft little stroke.

“No,” I said, ashamed to acknowledge the astrological universe. “My birthday’s in September. Next week, in fact.”

“I can tell, yes.” She had a touch of the harridan in her voice. “I can always tell.”

What could she tell?

“Twenty-four dollars,” she said. “Let me give you my card. For next time.”

Presumptuous, but yes, there will be a next time. I calculated quickly. My face would make it through the next few weeks, but by November I will probably be back in Madame Sylvia’s hushed white cell. I may well become a regular. Eyebrows, lashes, full facials, neck massage. I have led a reflective life, a life of thought, a writer, a translator, but all this is about to change. The delicate skin around my eyes was demanding attention. Has Tom noticed? I don’t think so. Christine and Natalie don’t really look at me in that way; they just see this watercolour blob that means mother, which is rather how I see myself.

“A woman’s charm is with her for life,” Madame Sylvia said, “but you must pay attention.”

No, I thought an hour later, no. I’m sorry, but I have no plans to be charming on a regular basis. Anyone can be charming. It’s really a cheap trick, mere charm, so astonishingly easy to perform, screwing up your face into sunbeams, and spewing them forth. The calculated lift of the wrist, chin up, thumb and forefinger brought together to form a little feminine loop, that trick of pretending to sit on a little glass chair, that concentration of radiance, l’esprit; little sprinkles of it everywhere, misting the air like bargain scent. Ingenue spritz, Emma Allen calls it.

I know that cheapness so intimately—the grainy, sugary, persevering way charm enters a fresh mouth and rubs against the molars, sticking there in soft wads, promoting mouth ulcers or whatever it is that’s the metaphoric projection of self-hatred. Of all the social virtues, charm is, in the end, the most unrewarding. And compared to goodness, real goodness, or the unmovable self-abnegation my daughter Norah practises, charm is nothing but crumpled tissue paper, soiled from previous use.

Sincerity? No. Sincerity’s over. Sincerity’s lost whatever edge it had. It’s fine, fine matter but wasted on the press, who all grew up post-Holocaust, devoted readers of Mad Magazine, and wouldn’t recognize a bar of willed innocence if it came wrapped in foil.

Nor will I ever again be pointlessly, endlessly polite. I got over that two years ago when I did my author tour. It seems I’ve lost, like a stream of pebbles leaving my hand, the kind of endurance that professional courtesy demands: suck in your breath, let your face go numb, listen to the interviewer’s questions, register optimally, let your breath out, evaluate the feelings of those who depend on you (agent, publisher, editor, that nice Sheila person who does publicity, and of course Danielle Westerman), and perform again and again like the tuned-up athlete you are, the fit physical specimen that each new book demands, then move on to the next task.

Mrs. Winters, who has just translated The Middle Years, the unfolding memoir of Holocaust survivor Danielle Westerman, is a woman of grace and charm, whose thick brown hair is arranged into a bun. Putting down her coffee cup, she shrugs off her beige raincoat and…

I’ve entered early middle age now and I have a nineteen-year-old daughter who lives on the street. I no longer require a reputation for charm, those saving lilac shadows and contours. Maybe I never did. I won’t—not now—tuck the ends of my sentences into little licks of favour, and the next time a journalist pins me down with a personal question, trolling for information—Tell me, Mrs. Winters, how are you able to balance your family and professional life?—I will stare back hard with my newly practised stare. How do I balance my life? Tinted eyebrows up. Just what kind of inquiry is this? Wouldn’t you prefer, Mrs. Winters, to pursue you own writing rather than translate Dr. Westerman’s work? Please, not that again. How did you and your husband meet? What does he think of your writing?

I will in the future address my interviewer directly, and say with firmness: “This interview is over.” There is nothing to lose. Rude and difficult people are more likely to be taken seriously. Curmudgeons are positively adored. I’ve noticed this. Even the fascinatingly unknowable earn respect.

And when I read in the paper tomorrow that “Mrs. Winters looked all of her forty-three years” and that “Mrs. Winters with her familiar overbite was reluctant to talk about her work schedule,” I will want to phone the editor and complain bitterly. This from the pen of a small, unattractive man, almost entirely lipless beneath a bony, domineering nose, sweating with minor ambition, head tilted like something carved out of yellow wax.

He interviewed me in a cappuccino bar in mid-Toronto. A chilly, stooped, round-headed man in his thirties or forties—it was hard to tell—slow to smile, pathetically in need of human attention, thinking his superior thoughts. Fluff on his shoulders begged to be picked off. I, on the other hand, was wearing a soft jade jacket of cashmere lined with silk, which represented a rare splurge on my part, but I could be sure this man would overlook this garment with its crystal buttons and mandarin collar and concentrate instead on my drab raincoat, beige, and not quite pristine at the cuffs. In print he will be certain to refer to my chignon as a bun. It’s taken me years to learn to do a glossy little chignon—I can get my hair brushed back and securely pinned up each morning in a mere two and a half minutes and I consider my coiffure one of my major life accomplishments. I really mean this.

Sheila from publicity had filled me in before the interview, and I felt the information packet hovering; what to do with it? This young/youngish man was the newly appointed books columnist at Booktimes. He was well known for holding pious opinions about the literature of the Great North, about his own role as advocate of a diverse new outpouring of Canadian voices, the post-colonial cry of blaming anguish. The stream of current fiction about middle-class people living in cities was diluting the authentic national voice that rose from the landscape itself and—

Oh, shut up, shut up.

Cappuccino foam dotted the corners of his undistinguished mouth. And just one more question, Mrs. Winters—

Of course he didn’t call me Reta, even though there might be only a year or two between us. The “Mrs.” gave him power over me: that vexing r rucking things up in the middle and making one think of such distractions as clotheslines and baking tins. He was the barking terrier, going at Mrs. Winters’s ankles, shaking out his fur and asking me to justify myself, wanting me to explain the spluttering, dying, whimpering bonfire of my life, which I would not dream of sharing. He seemed to forget he was interviewing me about Danielle Westerman’s new book.

I understand you’re working on a second novel, said he.

Well, yes.

Takes nerve.

Uh-huh.

Actually—actually, well, he had a novel on the go himself.

Really! What a surprise!

At the end of the hour he did not ask for the bill. I asked for the bill. “I’ll just put it on my Visa,” I said, breaking a tenuous breadth of silence. I announced this with all the majesty I could muster over a vinyl table, like a grande dame, adding twenty years to my age, and feeling the vowels shifting in my beautifully moulded throat. Such dignity; I surprised myself with my own resonance, and I may have managed a pained smile, displaying, no doubt, that famous overbite. He turned off the tape recorder at the word “Visa.”

He had two young children at home, he said. Christ, what a responsibility, although he loved the little bastards. One of them was quite, quite gifted; well, they both were in their separate ways. But the work of raising kids! Never enough time to read the books he had to review, books all over the house with little markers in them, books he would never finish. So much was expected, and of course, like all journalists, he was underpaid.

Oh, shut up.

They also expected him to do a feature on the weekend.

Uh-huh?

And last week he’d actually broken the MacBunna story.

Really? Macumba? Marimba?

Congratulations, said Mrs. Reta Winters from Orangetown.

Thanks.

I should be getting on my way, I said. My parking meter. A lunch date. A long drive home.

I understand you and your family live in a lovely old house near Orangetown…

And then, slyly: I understand one of your daughters now lives in Toronto and…

I’ve been here before. There is something about having an established family, a long-lasting spousal arrangement, three daughters in their teens, a house in the country, a suggestion of impermeability, that draws the curiosity of others so that they can, as Tom says, probe with probity.

But no, this man across the table will not be feeding on my flesh, nor will his colleagues—though one can tell that he has no colleagues; there is no possibility of colleagues. He has no context for friends or co-workers, though there are the kids and there’s the wife; he’s referred to her three times now. Nicola. She has her professional life, too, he tells me, as though the matter were in dispute.

I can’t resist. “Does Nicola—is she a journalist too?”

“Journalist?”

“Like you, I mean.”

His hand jumps, and for a moment I think he’s going to turn the tape recorder on again. But no, he’s reaching into his pocket and now he’s releasing two coins onto the table. The tip. They lie there, moist from his hand. Two dimes. I focus on them with what I hope is a cool, censorious gaze.

But he’s not looking at me. He’s looking across the room where a silver-haired man is seating himself gracefully at a table.“I’m not sure, but I think that’s Gore Vidal,” my interviewer whispers in a hungry voice. “He’s here for the writers’ festival, you know.”

I rise and exit, as though led by a brass quintet.

The charming Mrs. Winters slips on her comfortable beige raincoat…

Wherein

IT IS LATE AFTERNOON, early October, the sky darkening, and the lights in the old Orangetown Library already on. The smell of waxed floors is particularly sharp at this hour; it must be the heating system that triggers it.

Today, as always, the librarians, Tessa Sands and Cheryl Patterson, are helpful. I’ve dropped by to pick up Dennis Ford-Helpern’s The Goodness Gap. I’m not, by the way, unaware of the absurdity of believing one can learn goodness through the medium of print. Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it’s been shaped into acceptable expository prose.

I could easily have bought the Ford-Helpern book last week when I was in Toronto. But no, if I am sincere about achieving genuine goodness in my life and thereby finding a way to reconnect with Norah, this means dealing with issues large and small, or else shifting my finite dispersal of goodness to goodish places such as the public library. At the moment I am attempting to be a good citizen who supports her local library, which is dramatically underused by the community and in danger of closing.

Aside from a part-time custodian, these two librarians, Tessa and Cheryl, are the only full-time employees of the Orangetown Library; everyone else got the boot a year ago when the town council announced the library cutbacks.

Tessa and Cheryl have known our family for years. I’ve been a member of the Library Board forever, and Tessa remembers Norah from when she was four years old, attending Saturday-morning story hour, able to sit cross-legged and absolutely still, wearing only a nametag, not a sign saying GOODNESS. She was capable at that age of an exquisite shiver when listening to the adventures of Bluebeard and ready to shed tears over the fate of the twelve dancing princesses, a story that Tessa always reshapes for her young audiences. Happy endings are her specialty.

Tessa, in her fifties—married to a classical guitarist, mother to one adolescent child—is big, starchy, and pedagogic and getting more so every year. She possesses several lolloping chins, which shift as she talks, each one a millisecond out of sync with the movement of her surprisingly small mouth. She was a biologist before she decided to get her librarian’s qualifications. Her voice is clear and elocutionary.

Cheryl, divorced, in her late thirties, leans toward me today with both elbows on the desk, her chin cupped in her hands; her look is hunched and quizzical and surprisingly chic. Today she has a stick-on bindi in the middle of her forehead; I find it hard to avoid staring at this little colourful spot, which is in honour, I can only suppose, of the man she is currently seeing, a dentist trained in Bombay who has hung up his shingle at the Orangetown Mall, a shy young bespectacled man whose Indian wife couldn’t deal with small-town Ontario and went back to her parents after six months.

They are great friends, Tessa and Cheryl—colleagues—and they have the good sense to be proud of the generation-stretching bond they’ve devised. Snobbishness of a particular kind attends them, a case of old-style womanhood kissing up with the new—they’ve actually done it. It’s almost like love. They’re each so proud of the other, and like to express this reciprocal pride aloud. She knows exactly where to find things. Well, she’s the best there is when it comes to following up on the Internet. What they share is their dominion over this granite building, whose brown stones hint at the colour of the earth beneath, that good rich agricultural land so wisely set aside for the public good. Another serious budget cut, though, and this place will be a tea room-slash-gifte shoppe.

Tessa and Cheryl are united in their passion for books, books like Ford-Helpern’s, which they are happy enough to provide, but especially novels, novels that describe the unwrittenness of unremarkable men and women. Their instinct is to keep these books flowing toward those who have lost touch with the “real world.” I’m their number-one project these days. “Here’s the new Atwood,” Tessa tells me today, patting the book’s cover. “It came in yesterday, and I moved your name to the top of the waiting list.”

“It’s been nominated for the Booker, you know.”

“Thanks,” I say in an immaculate tone, “both of you.”

They beam. And wait for more.

“How’s Norah? Any news? Is she coming home soon?”

No, she will not be home soon. That is perfectly clear. “I’m not sure when she’ll be home. Nothing much has happened.”

The fact is, Tom and I don’t use the library nearly as much as we used to. Tom orders his books—mostly about trilobites—through Amazon.com, and I tend to pick up what I need in Toronto.

“How’s she doing?” From Cheryl.

“Reasonably well. As far as we know.”

Ah! They exchange glances. Tessa, who has some of the rough, shaggy manners of our own Pet, reaches awkwardly over the counter and embraces me. “She’ll get through this nonsense.” She fixes me with a snagging look of determination and strength, that “carry on” look that brings tears to my throat.

It was Tessa who alerted us to Norah’s whereabouts last April. We hadn’t heard from her for over a week. Tom thought Norah had quarrelled with her boyfriend, but I knew better. When we tried to phone we could never get through. Her last visit home at the end of March had been deeply disturbing. I thought several times of getting in touch with the university, but the idea seemed ridiculous, parents checking up on a grown daughter. We were worried, worried sick. Springtime depression. The thought of suicide. Only recently a Muslim woman had set herself on fire in Toronto. I read something about it in the paper. Then Tessa happened to go into the city to visit her elderly mother, and there she caught a glimpse of Norah when she came up out of the subway. Norah, sitting on the sidewalk, begging.

“Norah?” Tessa said.

Norah looked up. Of course she recognized Tessa at once, but she said nothing. She firmed her grip on the little square of cardboard and thrust it at Tessa. It must have been a cool day, Tessa remembers, because Norah was wearing a pair of old gardening gloves, far too big for her small hands.

“Norah,” softly, “do your parents know you’re here?”

Norah shook her head.

Around the corner, Tessa opened her bag, fished out her cell phone, and reached me in Orangetown. Luckily, Tom was home. We got straight into the car and drove to Toronto. All the way, my chest was convulsed with pain. The air we breathed was shaking like a great sail.

I’m supposed to be Reta Winters, that sunny woman, but something happened when her back was turned. Reta’s dropped a ball in the schoolyard, she’s lost that curved, clean shell she was carrying home from the beach. And these two women—Tessa and Cheryl—know what I am, standing here juggling my cascading images of before and after, all my living perfume washed off because my oldest daughter has gone off to live a life of virtue. Her self-renunciation has even made her choose a corner of Toronto where the pickings are slim. I had to explain the situation to my other daughters, how their sister Norah was in pursuit of goodness. I remember that I sketched in the picture fast, using the simplest and shortest words I could find, as though a summary would take the sting and strangeness away. Yes, a life of goodness, that’s what she’s chosen.

They’ve been expecting me at the library; I always phone ahead. They have six books stacked on the counter, The Goodness Gap on top, then the Atwood, then a biography and a couple of slender new mysteries for my mother-in-law, Lois, and a copy of The Waves for Christine, who has just discovered Virginia Woolf. These books have been carefully chosen. Just the right degree of narrative packing for me, nothing too dark or New Agey; literary novels, but not postmodernly so; no “poetic” novels, please; no insulting trash. An exotic setting is always nice. But nothing about rich people or people who go to lunch—that is, people who know “where” to go to lunch, those smart-edged professionals who “want a life,” as if they weren’t getting one. Nothing hip. No family sagas, no male bonding with nature stuff. No horses. No poetry or short stories, not for the moment; they don’t work.

Cheryl slides the little tower of books toward me slowly, as though they were gathered treasure aboard the deck of a schooner. Their bright new covers gleam in plastic library coats, catching warm bars of light from overhead. I dig into my bag for my library card, grateful.

The reading room today is, as usual, lightly scattered with housewives and seniors, a few students, several of whom I recognize, and one or two strangers. These people move through the stacks or sit quietly at the old oak tables, turning the pages of reference books, poring over newspapers, glancing up when the door opens or closes, looking around and observing the quiet activity, and then retreating to print. This might be a private club, with everyone so relaxed and polite and obeying the rules.

No one actually stares, but they know who I am. I’m Reta Winters, the doctor’s wife (that fine man!), the mother of three daughters, the writer. I live five miles out of town, in what used to be the countryside but is now becoming more and more a part of Orangetown, almost a suburb, if a town of five thousand can have a suburb. In our big old house, it could be said, we live the life we long ago chose: abundant, bustling, but with peaceful intervals, islands of furniture, books, music, soft cushions to lean into, food in the fridge, more in the freezer. I work as a writer and translator (French into English). And I am the mother of Norah Winters, such a sad case. They remember seeing her around town, a striking girl with fine features, tall like Tom, sometimes riding her bike up Main Street or sitting with her friends in front of the high school, that long straight blonde hair of hers, those strong slender legs testifying to the loose agility of the young. She had a smile that cut like a crescent through her whole body. She went away to university in Toronto, where she had a boyfriend, then she went missing for a few days last spring, then she turned up on a Toronto street corner. The word’s got around.

They nod in my direction or else they utter greetings under their breath. “Afternoon.” Blessings that I return with a congenial dip of my head as though I were sniffing a nosegay. I’m braced by people’s steady repeatable gifts of acknowledgement, and am reminded of what I seem to be waiting for, what all of us wait for: that moment of grace or surprise that has left us but will certainly return. It always does. I believe this, more or less.

In half an hour—I will be gone by then—Cheryl will ring a little bell and move from table to table, announcing in her tender girl’s voice that the library will be closed in five minutes. She will say this with a plunge of apology; she is genuinely sorry to break through the thread of her clients’ thoughts and regretful about disturbing the concentration of perception and silence that the library has promised each of its visitors and that has accumulated during the long sleepy afternoon. There is no longer enough money to keep the library open on weekday evenings. This is not Cheryl’s fault, but she feels sorry about the situation and hopes that they will understand.

I glance around at my fellow citizens as I deposit the books in my sack, and I feel a surge of love for the arbitrariness of our arrangements, that we should be assembled here together in this particular compartment of time, sharing public space, at one with each other in our need for retreat and for the printed word. There’s Mrs. Greenaway, with her impossibly narrow nose bridge, smiling perpetually, an intelligent woman with no place to stow her brand of originality. Mr. Atkinson, retired teacher, his tie sunk into the fat of his neck, the Britannica opened on the table before him, to a map of some sort. There’s a bearded man whose name I don’t know but who seems to be scribbling a novel or a memoir into a series of spiral notebooks. There’s Hal (Swiftfoot) Scott, who pumps gas and plays hockey, or at least he did before he got caught in a drug bust last year. He’s reading Maclean’s, probably the sports section.

This is a familiar yet unique scene. The precise pattern will occur only once—us, here, this moment engraved in a layer of memory—a thought that stirs me to wonderment.

Such feelings come easily to me these days, and I know enough to distrust myself with these little ironic turnings, these fake jewels. The string section comes on somewhere behind my eyes. There is a sense of buoyancy, as though I’m being carried along on a tidal wave of sensation, borne forward. Precious and precarious, a bending, subtle wand of desire making itself known. Followed by a tightening of the throat, moistening of the eyes, awe for the beauty of ongoing life. Et cetera. Oh, God. This is insane, these errands, these visions, my stepping into cantilevered space and allowing myself to be tipped from skepticism to belief. Twin babies in snowsuits. People hugging at the airport. Pet with his golden fur and brown-socketed eyes sniffing endearingly into the corners of the house, knowing something is wrong, something is missing. Boo hoo.

“She is such a lachrymose woman.” I once heard a man say that disdainfully about his sister; he might have been talking about me in my present state. But it’s just me, Reta Winters, pushing against what has become an observant loyalty to my habit of sadness. Stupid or shrewd; one or the other. It’s only temporary, a warped sense of rejoicing, une déformation—so says Danielle Westerman—but it’s somehow true, too. For here we are, together in this room at the public library with its old, worn wooden floors, held inside a little tick-tock of time.

And each of us has a life we’ll soon be going back to. Dinners will be waiting for us; what an odd and consoling thought. Elaborate full-course affairs or plates of Kraft Dinner or Greek salad from a Safeway tub. I’ve got two chickens roasting in the oven right now, enough for leftovers tomorrow; a potato casserole that just needs heating up, and the makings of a salad. My, my, such a good woman, so organized, too.

Enough of that!

Yes, I must get home. A long day, yes. Rain, rain. The weather forecast. Goodbye. My umbrella, good heavens, I almost forgot. Yes, busy, busy. Parked just outside. Don’t really need. Still have the dog to walk. Yes, I will, of course I will. Thank you again, thank you both. You must be glad to see the end of a long day.

I want, I want, I want.

I don’t actually say these last words; I just bump along on their short, stubbed feet, their little dead declarative syllables—while buttoning up my coat and making my way home.

Nevertheless

WE LIVE ON A STEEP HILL. This is rolling country on the whole, so our rocky perch is a geological anomaly, chosen no doubt because it offered a firm foundation as well as a view. The house is a hundred years old, a simple brick Ontario farmhouse that has been much added on to by its several previous inhabitants, and by us. It has weathered into durable authenticity, withstanding the scorchings and freezings of the Ontario climate.

People often ask me—I don’t know why—how many rooms we have, and each time this happens I go blank. This is something I should know, but don’t. It depends on what you call a room. Is a vestibule a room? Ours has a bright Indian rug, a bench, an engraving on the wall, a number of hooks for coats. The large square entrance hall has a Swedish wood-burning stove on the left-hand side, which we installed during the bitter winter of 1986 and which provides the kind of good, dry radiant heat required in our climate. And there’s space in this “hall” for several easy chairs, a telephone table, the oak floor laid with a soft, faded kilim, and in the corner a big blocky desk that Tom uses for personal correspondence—and yet this is not really a room. A hall is not a room; any real estate agent will tell you that. The dining room, off to the right, has a tiny sunroom adjoining it, which is more a cupboard than a room, a wicker settee, a tiny table, some hanging plants, a large squashy ottoman, a sense of opalescence and purity. The living room to the left has a deep bay window, almost a room in itself. Everything’s green and white or shades of teal, clear and, at least to my eye, luminous. There’s a screened porch off the den, and above it another screened porch, what used to be called a sleeping porch. The room where I work is the old box room in the attic, also not officially a room, though the new skylight and cunningly suspended bookshelves make it feel like one. My office is what I call this space, or else my cubby—or, most often, the box room. My life as a writer and translator is my back story, as they say in the movie business; my front story is that I live in this house on a hill with Tom and our girls and our seven-year-old golden retriever, Pet.

Each of our three daughters has a room of her own, Natalie in the south room and Christine in what we call the raspberry room, not because of the colour of the walls but because her window overlooks our flourishing raspberry patch. Norah, the eldest, has her bedroom at the end of the hall (she is not home at the moment, hasn’t been for months, in fact). The sweetest smell hovers in this room, wafting from the tulip-printed duvet or the warm white linen curtains at the windows. Tom and I have the north bedroom, which could really be called two rooms because of the little L-shaped anteroom off the end where Tom keeps his precious trilobite collection in a locked glass case. When the girls were babies they slept here in a crib, to be close to us at night. That crib is now in the basement, occupying a corner of another non-room, a half-finished space with rather sooty knotty-pine walls and painted cement floor, built probably in the late fifties by the McGinn family.

The McGinn House; that’s what our place is still called locally, though three or four tenants intervened between them and us, short-term renters who left scarcely any impression of themselves and, in fact, let the house go halfway to ruin.

The McGinns were the first non-farming family to live here. Mr. McGinn ran a second-hand furniture store in town, not very successfully by all accounts. It was during his tenure that the farm acreage was sold off, leaving just four acres for us, woods mostly, maple, sycamore, and a few ancient oaks, and a small apple orchard. I read recently that an English oak takes three hundred years to grow, then lives for three hundred years, then spends three hundred years dying. This thought gave me pause, or at least a lash of sentimental static that was not quite elaborated into a thought: the wonder that living oaken tissue could be so patient and obedient to its built-in triadic rhythm, responding to the tiny distortions of its oversized cells. Did it matter at which moment an oak heart decided to wither and call it a day?

I often think about the McGinn family. I never met them, but they linger nevertheless. They left traces. I’ve asked Lois about the family, but she had little to do with them, not being one for neighbourliness. She is a great believer in “not imposing,” and at that time Tom was a very small boy, too young to play with the McGinn children. The two houses were well separated in those days by ghostly old lilacs and springy untrained stands of spirea.

When we moved in, the half-finished basement room had a freestanding bar at one end with a dark slate top, and we can only think they left it behind because it was too heavy for them to move, not worth the effort. In the deep drawer behind the bar we found a single large cocoa bean, waxed and beautiful and smelling exotically of oily dust. We kept it for years, though now it seems to have vanished. There was also an ancient cardboard box of Dance Dust. If you sprinkled a little on the floor, it made it slippery, just right for a sliding foxtrot. The McGinns, mum and dad, must have had parties, we think—other couples over to dance to records on the wind-up Victrola, something else they left behind. People have probably been happy in this house.

The family had several children—teenagers—and I sometimes wonder if these children were affected by the political tumult of the early sixties, if they got themselves into trouble and worried their parents. They would be approaching late middle age now, these children, keeping an eye on their eroding health and their aging marriages and the doings of their grandchildren, and it seems entirely likely to me that their thoughts must turn occasionally to the house where they grew up. Probably they recall the immense built-in gun cupboard (tongue-and-groove) in the upstairs hall, for which we have never had any use. They may, when they get together for family reunions, reminisce about the tiny crawl space under the porch, which is entered by a concealed door on the wall and which, for my children, became a secret clubhouse.

Someone in the McGinn family left a sealed envelope behind a bathroom radiator, one of those old-fashioned, many-ribbed hot water affairs with ornamental spines. I discovered the envelope when I was painting the room. Reaching down behind the radiator with my paintbrush, I encountered something papery. I had to be careful to dislodge it in one piece. I put down my brush and looked around for a wire coat hanger that I could poke through the grooves of the radiator. The envelope, intact and still sealed after all this time and only lightly smudged with dirt, had the name “Mrs. Lyle McGinn” written across it. Blue ink, faded. It felt crisp in my hands, even after lying hidden all those dateless winters with the furnace clanking off and on and sending heat through the pipes and baking and rebaking it. Should I open it? I wondered. Yes, of course I would open it. I only pretend to have moral scruples about such things. Just touching the envelope brought on a rush of sweet religious melancholy. Yes, I most certainly would open it.

The thought came to me that it might be a suicide note. Or a child’s admonishing report card. Or a confession of some sort. I am so sorry to tell you that I have fallen in love with… The neighbours in back of us, when we first moved in, had hinted at tragedy in the McGinn family, an event of some kind that precipitated the move, years of happiness overcome by sorrow. (My mother-in-law, who hadn’t liked Mrs. McGinn, had nothing to contribute in the way of information.) I hadn’t paid attention to these rumours, but I also reasoned that any family who surrendered such a house must have had serious cause.

What I found inside the ancient envelope was a simple, rather cheap invitation. A baby shower to be held March 13, 1961. (I would have been four years old.) Pink and blue flowers dangled on their short stems from a rustic cradle suspended from a tree branch. “Please bring a small toy or article of clothing,” the invitation read in svelte, arched handwriting, the same handwriting as on the envelope, “not exceeding $3. Please also bring a ‘mother’s hint’ for Georgia.”

What happened to the pregnant Georgia who was to be honoured at the party? What happened to her baby when it was born, and was the shower a happy success? These questions opened up for me like rooms along a dim corridor, and these rooms possess doorways to other rooms. I remembered Danielle Westerman asking me once what a shower was; as a transplanted Frenchwoman, a woman in her mid-eighties, she had trouble understanding the concept. But I’ve been to dozens of such events and find it not at all difficult to imagine an early-sixties living room ringing with high-pitched women’s laughter that never seems to let up, though always, beneath it, there is the deeper sound of one particular woman hooting. This person would be famous among her acquaintances for her much-praised, infectious laugh. She, with her boldly printed home-sewn shift dress—I imagine a geometric design, black against red—would be the sort of person who enlivened any gathering and who was always welcome. Mrs. McGinn, on the other hand, would have a tiny, whispery laugh, and would often draw her hand up against her mouth. Was it Mr. McGinn who owned the rifle collection housed in the specially built cupboard, and did one of those guns go off accidentally? Was it he who attempted to insulate the attic and made a terrible botch of it? How did Mrs. McGinn—I’ve never discovered her first name, and Lois was no help here, but I speculate it might be Lillian or Dorothy or Ruth, something like that—occupy herself, and was it she who decided to install the green steel kitchen sink with its green enamel basin? Today the sink has reached a kind of antique status, too much a curiosity to part with, and, in any case, it still functions perfectly. I can imagine Lillian/ Dorothy/Ruth standing at this sink, cutting wax beans into one-inch pieces and covering them with water, sighing and looking at the clock. Almost suppertime. The clock—postwar plastic—would have been shaped like a teapot or a frog. She is a woman of about my size and age, a medium frame, still slim, but widening at the hips. Middle forties with a lipsticked pout. Some essence has deserted her. A bodily evaporation has left her with nothing but hard, direct questions aimed in the region of her chest, and no one would ever suspect that she might be capable of rising to the upper ether of desire, wanting, wishing.

I love this house. Tom and I—we’ve been together for twenty-six years, which is the same as being married—moved here in 1980, next door to the red-shingled house he grew up in and where his mother still lives, a seventy-year-old widow, rather gaunt these days, and increasingly silent. Tom, like his father before him, has a family practice in Orangetown, a quick ten minutes away, but he spends at least a third of his time working on trilobite research, his hobby, his avocation, he would tell you in a kind of winking way so that you understand trilobites are his real work.

What’s confusing to people is that I’ve taken his name. I grew up as Reta Summers and when I was eighteen with long straight brown hair down to my waist and enrolled in French studies, I met a medical student named Tom Winters, and so we had on our hands a “situation.” We could become a standing joke or else one of us could change seasons. At the time this name business seemed an enormous problem, and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to reel off a fast and funny account of the dilemma and how we solved it. I went to court and signed some papers; that was it, but you would have thought at the time that I’d sacrificed body parts. (I grew up, after all, listening to Helen Reddy singing “I Am Woman.”) We are, both of us, soixante-huitards in spirit, and I suppose we will remain so all our lives. In truth, I was only twelve years old in 1968, but the potential of rebellion had spiked me even then, what it could be used for or stored against and how we have to live inside the history we’re given, but must resist, like radicals, being made into mere creatures of a mere era.

Our house is full of rough corners that seem to me just about to come into their full beauty. I often think of how Vicente Verdú, the Spanish writer, spoke of houses as existing between reality and desire, what we want and what we already have. Probably this old house is not as lovely as I believe. My eyes are curtained over. I used to be able to see the separate rooms with their colours and spaces, but now I can’t. I’ve overvalued its woody, whorled coves and harbours, convincing myself of an architectural spaciousness and, at the same time, coziness, when I really, long ago, should have pursued some professional decorating advice. The word cozy cannot be translated into French; I’ve often had this discussion with Danielle Westerman, not that cozy is a word that crops up frequently in her stern essays. There is no French word for reckless, either, which is curious when you think that the French are, stereotypically at least, a reckless people.

It’s highly unlikely that Mrs. McGinn went to that 1961 baby shower for her friend Georgia. The envelope was still sealed, after all, when I discovered it. No one in the family would have deliberately hidden the note from her. It simply went astray as small bits tend to do in a busy house, getting separated from the rest of the mail, carried into this unlikely room where it became lost and, curiously, preserved.

It mattered so little, this 1961 women-only social evening. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was president of the United States. The country was exploding with consciousness and guilt. There were marches in the streets; intelligent, responsible people were willing to spend months in jail. Around the world the political forces eclipsed an event as neutral and trivial and minuscule as a baby shower in a small Canadian town; a lost invitation weighed nothing at all on the scale of human concerns.

But maybe, if Mrs. McGinn happened to be a certain kind of woman, then maybe she had a good, affectionate friend who phoned to remind her of the event. March is a dreary month in our part of the world, with its blackened snow and random melts. The faint feminism of the early sixties had not yet ignited for women like Lillian (?) McGinn. Feminism was in its chrysalis stage, and Lillian was adrift between generations and between seasons. Probably she still wore a girdle and used a diaphragm to prevent further pregnancies. The house was drafty and the children were churlish. An evening social occasion would be welcome. Mrs. McGinn, standing at the green sink and slicing her beans, might be thrilled to be invited out for a shower and to know that an invitation had been sent, even though it had been mislaid somehow. She would be grateful for the telephone reminder and feel relief from the thoughts that preyed on her. She would rush her family through dinner and make a stab at the supper dishes, getting them soaking in Ivory Liquid at the very least. Or maybe, just this once, a teenaged daughter, overburdened with her own unhappiness and her concern about tomorrow’s biology test, would pitch in and offer to help. “Let me,” she would say to her featureless (to her) mother. “You go to your thingamajig.” The daughter who in my mind rather resembles Natalie, would feign disinterest but be moved at the same time by her own curiosity about the communal lives of adult women. And perhaps, if she were at all sensitive, she would feel the invisible wave of distress in the house; something was wrong with her mother, some element unanswered.

She would be a daughter who understood nothing about the care of a house. Her bedsheets in that upstairs bedroom—the same room Natalie has occupied all these years, going straight from a crib into a junior bed—were changed regularly, delivered crisp and fresh, but she has never considered the notion of domestic maintenance, and why should she?

“Leave the kitchen to me,” Mrs. McGinn’s daughter might have commanded her mother in March of 1961, speaking in an exasperated tone, exactly like Christine’s, wanting to prod a troubling root of kindness that she feels but can’t yet quite claim.“I’ll look after the dishes.”

A house requires care. Until recently the Merry Maids came and cleaned our house twice a month, but now I call on them less and less frequently. Their van rolling into our driveway, the women’s muscles and buoyancy and booming equipment wear me out. I mostly look after the house myself. I deal with the dust and the dog hairs, wearing my oldest jeans and a cotton sweater coming unknit at the cuffs. Cleaning gives me pleasure, which I’m reluctant to admit and hardly ever do, but here, in my thoughts, I will register the fact: dusting, waxing, and polishing offer rewards. Quite a lot of people would agree with this if pressed, though vacuuming is too loud and cumbersome to enjoy. I especially love the manoeuvring of my dust mop over the old oak floors. (It is illegal to shake a dust mop out of a window in New York, and probably even in Toronto; I read that somewhere.) Those Buddhist monks I saw not long ago on a TV documentary devote two hours to morning meditation, followed by one hour of serious cleaning. Saffron-robed and their shaved heads gleaming, they actually go out into the world each day with buckets and rags, and they clean things, anything that needs cleaning, a wall or an old fence, whatever presents threat or disorder. I’m beginning to understand where this might take them.

With my dampened dust cloth in hand I’m keeping myself going. I reach under the sink and polish that hard-to-get-to piece of elbow pipe. Tomorrow I’m planning to dust the basement stairs, swiftly, but getting into the corners.

I’m not so thick that I can’t put the pieces of my odd obsession together, wood and bone, plumbing and blood. To paraphrase Danielle Westerman, we don’t make metaphors in order to distract ourselves. Metaphors hold their own power over us, even without their fugitive gestures. They’re as real as the peony bushes we observe when we’re children, lying flat on the grass and looking straight up to the undersides of leaves and petals and marvelling: Oh, this is secret territory, we think, an inverted world grown-ups can’t see, its beetles, its worms, its ant colonies, its sweet-sour smell of putrefaction. But, in fact, everyone knows about this palpable world; it stands for nothing but the world itself.

I dust and polish this house of mine so that I’ll be able to seal it from damage. If I commit myself to its meticulous care, I will claim back my daughter Norah, gone to goodness. The soiling sickness that started with one wayward idea and then the spreading filaments of infection, the absurd notion—Tao?—that silence is wiser than words, inaction better than action—this is what I work against. And probably, especially lately, I clean for the shadow of Mrs. McGinn, too, wanting to drop a curtsey in her direction. Yes, it was worth it, I long to tell her, all that anxiety and confusion. I’m young enough that I still sigh out: what is the point? but old enough not to expect an answer.

I hurry with this work. I hurry through each hour. Every day I glance at the oak banister. Hands have run up and down its smoothed curves, giving it the look of a living organism. This banister has provided steady support, all the while looking graceful and giving off reflected light, and resisting with its continuity the immensity of ordinary human loneliness. Why would I not out of admiration stroke the silky surfaces now and then; every day, in fact? I won’t even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little dérisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending—these eat up a woman’s creativity, anyone’s creativity. But I’ve watched the way she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even when it is just me coming into Toronto to have lunch in her sunroom.

Her views often surprise me, though I like to think I know her well, and despite the forty years between us. Dr. Westerman: poet, essayist, feminist survivor, holder of twenty-seven honorary degrees. “It might be better,” I said once, pointing to a place in her first volume of memoirs and trying not to sound overly expository, “to use the word brain here instead of heart.”

She gave me a swift questioning look, the blue-veined eyelids sliding up. Now what? I explained that referring to the heart as the seat of feeling has been out of fashion for some time, condemned by critics as being fey, thought to be precious. She considered this for a second, then smiled at me with querulous affection, and placed her hand on her breast. “But this is where I feel pain,” she said. “And tenderness.”

I let it go. A writer’s partis pris are always—must be—accommodated by her translator. I know that much after all these years.

There are other things I could do with my time besides clean my house. There’s that book on animals in Shakespeare, the companion volume to my Shakespeare and Flowers. Or I could finish my translation of the fourth and final volume of Westerman’s memoirs, which would take me about six months. Instead I’m writing a second novel, which is going slowly because I wake up in the morning anxious, instead, to clean my house. I’d like to go at it with Q-tips, with toothpicks, every crack and corner scoured. Mention a new cleaning product and I yearn to hold it in my hand; I can’t stop. Each day I open my eyes and comfort myself with the tasks that I will accomplish. It’s necessary, I’m finding, to learn devious means of consoling oneself and also necessary to forgive one’s own eccentricities. In the afternoon, after a standing-up lunch of cheese and crackers, I get to my novel and produce, on a good day, two pages, sometimes three or four. I perch on my Freedom Chair and think: Here I am. A woman seated. A woman thinking. But I’m always rushed, always distracted. Tuesdays I meet my friends for coffee in Orangetown, Wednesdays I go to Toronto, every second Thursday afternoon is the Library Board meeting.

Last Friday, after days spent at home waiting for a phone call from Mrs. Quinn at the Promise Hostel—which yielded nothing but the fact that nothing had changed—I went into Toronto with Tom to a one-day trilobite conference at the museum, and even attended a session, thinking it might provide distraction. A paleontologist, a woman called Margaret Henriksen, from Minneapolis, lectured in a darkened room, and illustrated her talk with a digital representation of a trilobite folding itself into a little ball. No one has ever seen a trilobite, since they exist only in the fossil record, but the sections of its bony thorax recorded in stone were so perfectly made that, when threatened, these creatures were able to curl up, each segment nesting into the next and protecting the soft animal underbodies. This act is called enrolment, a rather common behaviour for arthropods, and it seems to me that this is what Tom has been doing these past weeks. I clean my house and he “enrols” into a silence that carries him further away from me than the fleeting figure of Mrs. McGinn, who rests like a dust mote in the corner of my eye, wondering why she was not invited to her friend’s baby shower on that March evening back in 1961. It nags at her. She is disappointed in herself. Her life has been burning up one day at a time—she understands this for the first time—and she’s swallowed the flames without blinking. Now, suddenly, this emptiness. Nothing has prepared her for the wide, grey simplicity of sadness and for the knowledge that this is what the rest of her life will be like, living in a falling-apart house that wishes she weren’t there.

After the conference in Toronto, some trilobite friends from England wanted to go for a meal at a place called the Frontier Bar on Bloor Street West, where the theme is Wild West. They’d read about it in a tour guide and thought it might be amusing.

Everything’s in your face at the Frontier Bar—from the cowhides nailed to the walls to the swizzle sticks topped with little plastic cowboy hats. The drinks have names like Rodeo Rumba and Crazy Heehaw, and we felt just a little effete ordering our bottle of good white wine. Before we said goodnight at the end of the evening, I excused myself to go to the women’s washroom (the Cowgals’ Corral), and there I found, on the back of each cubicle door, a tiny blackboard supplied with chalk, a ploy by the management to avoid the defacing of property.

I’ve often talked to Tom about the graffiti found in public bathrooms; we’ve compared notes. The words women write on walls are so touchingly sweet, so innocent. Tom can hardly believe it. “Tomorrow is cancelled,” I saw once. And another time, “Saskatchewan Libre!” Once, a little poem. “If you sprinkle / when you tinkle / Please be a sweetie / and wipe the seatie.” I love especially the slightly off witticisms, the thoughts that seemed unable to complete themselves except in their whittled-down elliptical, impermanent forms.

I’d never before felt an urge to add to the literature of washroom walls, but that night, at the Frontier Bar, I picked up the piece of chalk without a moment’s hesitation, my head a ringing vessel of pain, and my words ready.

First, though, I wiped the little slate clean with a dampened paper towel, obliterating “Hi, Mom” and “Lori farts” and leaving myself a clear space. “My heart is broken,” I wrote in block letters, moved by an impulse I would later recognize as dramatic, childish, indulgent, grandiose and powerful. Then, a whimsical afterthought: I drew a little heart in the corner and put a jagged line through it, acutely aware of the facile quality of the draftsmanship.

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

So-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.

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