Jude started scribbling the first lie she could think of.
There's the phone, better go answer it.
Till next time, Jude.
P.S. I like your line about flying free like a kite—except that if you've ever flown a kite you may have noticed they have to be anchored firmly by the string or else they flop out of the sky?
Well, the length of that P.S. blew her story about the phone ringing, but never mind. Jude would have liked to enclose something, a flower maybe, but there was nothing growing out there in the frozen mud. Instead, she searched the sideboard, and ended up dropping into the envelope a tiny inch-long feather from a Canada goose.
Virtually Nothing
Ah, but when the post knocks and
the letter comes
always the miracle seems repeated—
speech attempted.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF
Jacob's Room
Re: Technology etc
Hey Jude (as the Beatles put it), thanks for your astonishing ginger pumpkin loaf, I take back any aspersions I've ever cast on pumpkins. I love the old Hudson's Bay Company tin you sent it in, I'm going to store my bangles in it. To make this a mutually beneficial arrangement (forgot to tell you, that's what MBA means) I'm posting you some Irish truffles, since North American chocolate doesn't deserve the name.
"Rug muncher" is a new one on me, but after several minutes of reflection I believe I've worked it out! I still maintain that small towns are creepy, but mercifully you don't come across like a smalltown girl; all those childhood years browsing in the adult section of the library must explain it, I suppose.
Got your last e-mail in my hotel in Boston--I'm deeply flattered that I've caused this quantum shift from post to e-mail, can I tempt you to move on to Instant Messaging next?--or texting if you'd only get a mobile...
Yes, Kathleen = girlfriend as in partner not as in female friend, sorry. (I mean sorry for the confusion.) Our two Englishes only pretend to be the same language! The one that always confuses me is "mad,"--when an American tells me he's mad I visualize a straitjacket.
Right now I'm in the crew lounge at Dublin Airport. No, my movements are not like "the random firing of electrons," since you ask, they're as highly structured as a monk's. Four days on, three off, and we bid for our schedules in strict order of seniority. Luckily few are as senior as me because so many have switched to jobs on the ground, and a third of my unlucky colleagues have been given the heave in recent years. Our airline used to be classy, but always on the brink of bankruptcy, so after 9/11 it had to reinvent itself as lean and mean, a.k.a. cheap and nasty.
Still: flying's in my blood, because I was born at 30,000 feet. My Amma--who'd been an air hostess herself--insisted Da take her for a last-minute visit to her parents in Cochin. (High-caste communists, a funny combo.) She was more than eight months on, but the rules weren't as strict in the sixties, and on the way home to Dublin she suddenly had me in the aisle!
You ask how I "stay so charming all the time" during flights--well, I fake it. I've never quite expoded and screamed "Yiz are all a shower of bitches and bastards" (as folklore has it a former colleague once did) but I've come close. Ah no, the truth is a flight attendant has to basically like people or the job would start draining her like a vampire on day one. Speaking of which, time to go through security...
Re: slurs on "Frozen North"
Síle, I just checked an atlas and I'll have you know that Ireland, Ont., is ten degrees further SOUTH than Dublin. I admit the snowbanks are still hip-high but the sun's dazzling.
So, a partner as well as a house; you sound pretty settled to me, for all your talk of freedom...
Re: the museum, it's a lovely 1862 schoolhouse; when the town tried to flog it to a sinister Heritage Village, a bunch of us formed a protest committee. Persuaded an old farmer called Jim McVaddy to donate his priceless Canadiana on condition the town handed over the schoolhouse for a museum--and then managed to beg start-up money from a private foundation. Since I was just about the only one under retirement age (and I'd been interning at a Children's Pioneer Museum half an hour away while doing my BA in the evenings), I wangled the one paid job. In year five, Backroads and Byways magazine has hailed us as "one of the more charmingly maverick little museums in Ontario"(!).
I just had a turkey sub with Rizla. The garage/ café is run by the Leungs: see, this area is not entirely populated by the "Waspy pioneers" of your imagination. Gong Leung goes into Cantonese whenever she's bitching about the customers. Their daughter Diana looks totally Canadian and it occurs to me it's because she wears braces. My friend Gwen always says you can tell a Brit (meaning, from your islands) by the bad teeth, but I've assured her that yours are extremely white and even.
Re: Quakers
I keep picturing you in a gray Victorian bonnet, Jude, it's unnerving. But the Quaker thing does help explain your purist oddities. I love the way you say "We built our Meetinghouse at Coldstream in 1859" as if you were there--time traveler! My Amma was Hindu, but the Church insisted she convert to marry Da (already pretty much lapsed, ironically), and he claims it was "simpler for her to change everything" (country, job, primary language, religion, marital status) all at once. Huh, rather her than me!
I chose my house in Stoneybatter because it's handy for the airport, but I love it now. (I'm a Southsider by birth but the rougher charms of Dublin's Northside have grown on me, whereas Kathleen, having grown up with five siblings in a gray housing estate well north of the Liffey, calls my street "grotty" and prefers me to spend my days off in her flat in sedate Ballsbridge.) Basically Stoneybatter's a rare example of an inner-city village: small 1870s artisan's dwellings, plus nasty council flats, but so overrun by artsy professionals these days that it's nicknamed Luvviebatter. The contrast between the indigenous population (fish fingers and stew) and the "jumped-up trendy hoors" as we're known in the vernacular (who buy goat's cheese and cilantro) keeps things lively.
Re: when will you be fully "together" again, ah come on, it's only been six weeks. My ex Ger, when her mother died she went into a year-long slump. Whoops, possibly not the most helpful thing to say, but my point is, go easy on yourself, Jude, will you?
Re: Web site
Nah, I'm not insulted that you call the museum's site "desperately in need of a revamp," Síle. It was set up many summers ago by the Petersons' granddaughter, but then she went to South Korea to teach ESL. Yeah, that would be fantastic if you could fix it so it no longer says "School Workshops coming soon in 2003!"
I thought of you yesterday at Paddyfest in Listowel (about forty k to the northwest of Ireland, Ontario), there was a great ceilidh going on. I had to stay in my stall and hand out leaflets about historic attractions till Cassie and Anneka took a shift so I could go dance. They live nearby in Stratford--C. does box office for the theatre festival, A. wigs--and they've just managed to complete adoption procedures for Lia, who's obsessed with wheels. They've invited me over for Oscar night despite the fact that I haven't seen any of the nominees. (I hate to admit this to a "cinema slut," but it's a rare movie that holds my interest enough to make me sit still for two hours.) Since Mom died all my friends keep wanting to hook up with me, I guess they're afraid I'll turn into Norman Bates if left alone. (Note cunningly inserted reference to classic film.)
Re: Canadians, mock all you like but our inventions include basketball, insulin, the gas mask, ketchup, and international time zones.
Re: vegging on velvet sofa
Well hello there, Jude the Obscure. I should be meeting Trish (yes, before you ask, she's another ex, the first in fact) at the Balkan film festival's opening gala but it's pissing rain so instead I'm curled up on my purple sofa with my cat Petrushka (named for the girl in Ballet Shoes, which was my favourite novel till I hit puberty and discovered Gone with the Wind), who keeps scratching her head on the corner of my laptop, which accounts for any typos. I can hear footsteps going down the street and a boy and girl having an argument in Dub accents so s
trong you'd need subtitles.
Re: time zones, politics has made such a pig's ear of the map. I just checked online and Russia's got eleven zones, whereas China insists on keeping all its citizens to the same time, which means the sun comes up at 5am or 9am depending on which province you live in. And just think, you could be sipping tea at 4pm in Argentina, when due north of you in Venezuela it's only 2pm!
Beside me is the remains of a vast carton of pad thai--ordered in from one of the six restaurants round the corner. For a tomboy, Jude, you're turning out to have weirdly housewifely traits such as the cooking everything from scratch. I bet you grow rutabagas, don't you? (I have no real idea what a rutabaga is, it came up in the Guardian crossword my colleague Fintan was doing in the crew lounge in L.A.) But then you also chop firewood and all that sturdy pioneer stuff. Whereas I'm just a lazy, nail-painting consumer, sigh. (Wretched trampoline currently gathering dust under my four-poster.)
Re: Rizla, I think I'd like him. Since you came out, have you and he ever wound up competing for the limited supply of local talent?
Re: what crimes I've ever committed
Here goes. Vandalism. Defacement of currency (at fourteen when I stamped NO NUKES on banknotes). Driving without a license, driving without insurance, reckless driving under the influence of alcohol and marijuana. Grievous bodily harm: in grade eleven I broke the nose of a bitch called Tiffany-Lou. See, I'm not a Victorian bonneted kind of gal at all.
I have a scar around the base of my ear from playing tabletop. That's amazing that most of you Irish don't learn to drive till your twenties, because all kids in Ontario do is drive around looking for trouble to get into, like mailbox baseball. (Can you figure that one out?) Anyway, tabletop is when a bunch of you go on the back roads and climb onto the car roof with your drinks (cheap wine--Moody Blue, Black Knight, or Lonesome Charlie). So, this particular white-knuckle ride, Rizla was driving (fifteen years older than the rest of us but NOT a sobering influence), hit a pothole and I nearly tore my ear off.
Re: competing, nah, my tastes and his rarely overlap.
Re: as to when I "came out"--hm, I'm not sure I was ever in. I wasn't too concerned about being "normal," maybe because Quakers aren't keen on dogma or fitting in. I brought home some boys and some girls, and Mom never expressed a view (though I'm sure she had her preference). I guess my policy's been to make no grand statements and tell no lies. Unless you count my haircut as a statement? But I've had that since I was four.
Re: virtual coffee
I love it! Gals roaring round on skidoos. Jude, your English is much stranger than mine, I'll have you know. Gazumping is just a real-estate technicality, by the way, not as exciting as it sounds. Many thanks for the tiny zipped bag of water labeled "Genuine Ontario Icicle Tip." I put it in my freezer but it's come out as flat as a credit card. (A parable about globalization?)
I agree, it's very peculiar getting to know each other at electronic arm's length. (We'll have to actually meet in the flesh again one of these years.) So today I've brought you to my favourite Dublin Italian café to teach you what real coffee tastes like. I've also ordered you an impeccable torta limone. We're gazing out at the boardwalk erected along the Liffey to give it the look of the Seine, but the tourists slip-sliding along in the rain with plastic bags over their heads do slightly spoil the impression...
Re: Coming Out (which we aged crones of thirty-nine definitely used to pronounce in capital letters), in my case it was a dramatic and somewhat traumatic result of joining a feminist group at college and falling for Trish, but had a happy ending as Da is a die-hard liberal.
Re: being "undomestic partners," Kathleen and I both prefer having our own spaces, and after all, with my schedule I'd be gone more than half the time anyway. I cohabited with Ger for nine months while she drove me slowly insane with her sloppiness. I was three years, on and off, with a pilot called Vanessa, who was memorable in several ways to do with moodiness, alcohol, and (unproven but likely) cheating with a girl in personnel. Vanessa would never have moved in with me, because she was shitscared of the airline finding out. The irony being that she had a Garbo-in-pants air about her and everybody knew already.
Re: International Date Line, flying east across it so you slip from today to yesterday is indeed unsettling. When the captain makes the announcement, I always get this inane impulse to glance out the window, as if there'll be a visible seam down the Pacific.
Re: what I do all day
Right now I'm writing 300 words on forerunners (precognition of things not invented yet) for a newsletter called Pathways of the Past. In our archive we have an article from 1867 about a young Mitchell man, coming home late from a dance in a neighbour's parlour, when this roaring black machine with white lights going "faster than a bull could run" nearly knocked him into the ditch. Now, I know you call me "riddled with superstition" just for not liking to open an umbrella indoors or have thirteen at table, but doesn't that sound like a car? Maybe time occasionally curves back on itself, like when you're hemming something and the thread gets knotted into a loop.
Except you probably don't sew either, do you, Síle?
I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Leung let me pay for the strawberry rhubarb pie you and I were telepathically sharing at the Garage yesterday--which I take to mean the community now considers me officially out of mourning. Though I'm hardly fixed yet: Last night when I came home from a great slide show on Ojibway arrowheads, I happened across Mom's reading glasses in the back of a drawer and cried for about half an hour.
Not that she was always fun to live with. We did a lot of speculating about our neighbours, but often she'd just watch her little TV and knit all evening, and she'd snap at me if I forgot to keep the stove stoked up. But nowadays I keep talking to her in my head. Which is much like a long-distance friendship, I guess...(Good if occasionally frustrating.)
Re: dead mothers
I know what you mean. Mine will always be thirty-five and radiant, stirring a pot of chai, blowing me a kiss. As a rather misogynist Bengali proverb puts it, "Only when a woman is dead can we sing her praise."
I can't believe you're still up to your knees in snow, in March; I almost wish I was there to wade around in it.
I remember this book about kids who make a girl out of snow; she dances round the garden in a sparkly dress of icicles. But the parents say "Bring your little barefoot friend in before she catches her death." The children try and explain, but the father says "What nonsense," chases her and drags her in, and while they're having tea she melts away on the hearthrug.
Re: snow girl
Síle, I'm due in the schoolhouse five minutes ago to help some volunteers take down the Fearful Epidemics exhibition, but I just have to tell you I know that story, it's by Hawthorne. And the worst thing is that when the kids burst out crying, the father goes into denial, and tells the maid to sweep up that pile of dirty snow the kids have tracked in...
Family Feeling
The sole cause of man's unhappiness
is that he does not know how to stay
quietly in his room.
—PASCAL
Pensées
Sunday morning in Kathleen's flat. Síle lay six inches away, watching her tinted eyelashes against the pillow. Even in sleep, the woman's pale bob looked freshly brushed. Síle fiddled with the thin gold chain around her own waist, and waited for Kathleen to wake up.
Everybody thought it marvelous that the two of them never had fights. What nobody knew—at least, Síle had never mentioned it to anyone, and she didn't imagine Kathleen had—was that they hadn't had sex in three and a half years.
Put so baldly, this sounded like a disaster. But sex, it seemed, was one of these things that could slip away while your back was turned. For her and Kathleen it had never really been a case of fireworks in bed, and what there was had fizzled out over the first two years they were together. Síle always used to think of herself as someone with a lively libido, but perhaps these things could change, like hair goi
ng gray. (Not that hers was, not yet.)
Oddly enough, she rarely thought about it. Her life was crammed with work and play, friends and films, weekends in Brighton or Bilbao. And so much of a couple wasn't about the physical anyway. Or rather, there was an affection that was deeply physical; it just didn't lead to orgasms. Perhaps it was all the stronger because it didn't rely on the chanciness of sex, it occurred to'Síle now. Kathleen tall and warm-skinned at her back, as they waved guests off at the end of a dinner party; a hard hug after a week apart; Kathleen's long hands massaging her neck, feeding her guacamole, pulling off her tightest boots.
Perhaps all that was enough. It should really be enough, if the point of the mating drive was to select a good mate. Why shouldn't it be enough?
These were tormenting questions, and'Síle had no answers. (Their friends never probed; worn-down parents of small children were often assumed to have stopped having sex, but not a lively pair like Kathleen and'Síle.) She really shouldn't dwell on the thing, she reminded herself; fed with attention, it swelled and loomed.
Of course'Síle had minded, when she'd first realized what was happening, or rather, not happening anymore. She'd made some subtle overtures, but they'd come to nothing and she hadn't wanted to force it. You couldn't fake the spark: If you stroked a woman's back and nothing happened, what could you do but sit up and suggest a cup of tea? An article she'd come across had recommended sex toys, but the idea of suddenly brandishing handcuffs and strapons at Kathleen made'Síle cringe. Lust might have given her the courage to push harder, but that was the whole problem; by the time you noticed that lust had gone AWOL, all you had left was a vague unease. Like a forgotten phone number, a lost key.