Other times I feel I’m just another anxious mother who quarrelled with her daughter, a daughter who was merely depressed, fed up at the end of a long winter and probably worried about her first love affair going stale. I’ve overreacted, that’s all. And projected my own fears and panics onto Norah. What evidence do I have? None. She will be fine in a few days, home again, feeling a little foolish and apologetic.
I go back and forth between complacency and worry. No one gets through this rime of life unruffled. It’s impossible. On the other hand, I remember the look in her eyes as she sat at the kitchen table, and my thoughts become more and more reckless. It sometimes occurs to me that there is for Norah not too much but too little; a gaping absence, a near-starvation. There is a bounteous feast going on, with music and richness and arabesques of language, but she has not been invited. She is seeing it for the first time, but now she will never be able to shake it from view. A deterioration has occurred to the fabric of the world, the world that does not belong to her as she has been told. Again and again and again. She is prohibited from entering. From now on life will seem less and less like life.
No, I am not ready yet to believe this.
Insofar As
October 8, 2000
Dear Sirs:
I was feeling more than usually depressed last night over personal matters and I happened to be sitting in a big armchair skimming through the latest issue of your magazine, which my spouse thoughtfully picked up for me at the local Mags & Fags. (We don’t subscribe, because we already feel there is too much paper flowing into our house, and we do try to be good citizens and only take the occasional nick off the planet.)
I couldn’t help noticing that you have sold one of your very expensive advertising pages to what appears to be a faux institution of some kind. The density of the typography and its brown uncurling script are attempting to avoid the usual four-colour commercial blast, but without success. There’s actually a lot of hustle on this page. The product, in any case, is Great Minds of the Western Intellectual World: Galileo, Kant, Hegel, Bacon, Newton, Plato, Locke, and Descartes. Small but very authentic-looking engravings of these gentlemen’s heads form a right (let us say impregnable) band across the top of the page, and what is suggested is a continuum of learning, a ceaseless conveyor belt of noble thought, extracts of which are recorded, as you explain further down on the page, in eighty-four (84) half-hour lecture tapes, which one may listen to as he [assumed pronoun] walks or jogs or commutes or does the CHORES [my emphasis].
That’s a great number of half-hours given over to learning, you will agree, but at least a subscriber will be saved, according to the advertising copy, “years of intense reading and study” and, even worse, “complete withdrawal from active life.” You can awaken your mind “without having to quit your job or become a hermit.” A hermit! The scholar will be guided in his study by the Faculty; that’s Darren (skipping last names), Alan, Dennis, Phillip, Jeremy, Robert, another Robert, Kathleen (Kathleen?), Louis, Mark, and Douglas. My question is: How did Kathleen make it to this race?
I might as well admit that I am troubled these days (and nights) by such questions. I have a nineteen-year-old daughter who is going through a sort of soak of depression—actually her condition has not yet been diagnosed—which a friend of mine suspects is brought about by such offerings as your Great Minds of the WIW, not just your particular October ad, of course, but a long accumulation of shaded brown print and noble brows, reproduced year after year, all of it pressing down insidiously and expressing a callous lack of curiosity about great women’s minds, a complete unawareness, in fact.
You will respond to my comments with a long list of rights women have won and you will insist that the playing field is level, but you must see that it is not. I can’t be the only one who sees this.
I realize I cannot influence your advertising policy. My only hope is that my daughter, her name is Norah, will not pick up a copy of this magazine, read this page, and understand, as I have for the first time, how casually and completely she is shut out of the universe. I have two other daughters too—Christine, Natalie—and I worry about them both. All the time.
Yours,
Reta Winters
The Hermitage,
Orangetown, Canada
Thereof
THERE IS A PROBLEM all fiction writers must face if they want to create unique and substantial characters. Characters, at least those personages who are going to be important to the developing narrative, require context They can’t simply be flung onto the page as though they had metamorphosed from warm mud. Darwin put an end to that. Freud too. Parthenogenesis doesn’t work for human beings, not yet and probably never, unless being human becomes something other than what we know. Characters in books need to be supplied with a childhood of some sort, with parents at the very least, sometimes even grandparents. These genealogical antecedents may be dead or lost, in which case they need not be introduced into the ongoing narrative but simply alluded to. Ancient Granddad Barney with his war medals. Grandma Foster and her fixation on bodily functions. The old genetic mutterings press directly or subtly on the contemporary character and how he/she responds to life’s vicissitudes. The distinctions may be shaded in with a rub of graphite: WASP or Jewish, old money or new; a novelist must recognize that the gene pool is part of the plot, and that even my spacey, romantic Alicia is a bundle of chromosomes, precisely engineered. Parents influence children, stiffening or weakening their resolve, and no credible novelist is going to reverse that assumption. Even in the most Kafkaesque dreamscape there are certain elements that cannot be subtracted from substance, geography, family, blood. Everyone is someone’s child, and a novel, in the crudest of terms, is a story about the destiny of a child. There is always a bank of DNA pressing its claim. The question is: How far back does a novelist have to go in order to stabilize a character and achieve solidity?
In my view, it’s not necessary to provide a complete genealogical chart; hardly any contemporary readers have the patience for that heft of information. Only a few vital family traces are required, the sense that the character isn’t self-invented or arbitrary. Jane Austen, even though she is pre-Darwinian, always goes back at least one generation, and sometimes two. She knew the importance of grounding.
I am working on my sequel to My Thyme Is Up (which I am titling Thyme in Bloom, reserving Autumn Thyme in the event I decide to go for a trilogy) and am struggling with how much hereditary infill I need to secure Alicia and Roman in time. I’ve gone for simplicity—and symmetry: each of them is the only child of loving parents. Alicia’s family is medium wealthy; Roman’s is second-generation Albanian working class but on the way up (all the men have heads of thickly woven hair; the women are sharp-voiced, sexy). At first I was going to have their parents all dead, but now I want them involved in the wedding preparations, and also taking part in a farcical restaurant scene when they come together for the first time. Alicia’s father (lawyer? No, I’ve already got him down in My Thyme Is Up as a mechanical engineer, too bad) cannot believe there is a single man anywhere on earth worthy of his darling daughter. Just hearing of possible suitors, he offers an angry, offended face and some highly specialized grunts of disapproval. Meanwhile, Romans mother (a futurist, a top-drawer futurist, working for a think-tank in the middle of Wychwood) announces that no living woman is capable of appreciating her sweet boy. She smiles, but slyly, lips pressed tight. Her sturdy cheerfulness repudiates any real feeling. Secretly she believes that the pursuit of happiness is a selfish act, something only children can take seriously. Children, in her opinion, are untamed savages waiting to be shaped by civilizing hands.
I didn’t know Tom as a child, and this has always seemed an incalculable loss. As an adult he is patient and preoccupied, a somewhat melancholy hedonist, also on occasion barbed, twitchy, and dishevelled; as a medical student in the seventies he was outrageous and was twice arrested for political demonstrations and, in partnership with his classmates, jailed f
or bandaging up the statues of esteemed Canadian heroes around Queen’s Park, putting splints on former prime ministers and blood-coloured paint on their muscular bronze chests. But what was he really like, that skinny kid running out into the yard after dinner with a football tucked under his arm, the screen door banging after him, the grass growing green and long-shadowed and in autumn dotted with wet yellow leaves? This imagined scene speaks of security and wood smoke and encrusted sunlight, and oh, I think, those swarming, uncaptured moments were stolen from me, snatched away by a mismatch of the primal timeline.
But it’s not just Tom; my own childhood is missing the same kind of specific content. “The trouble with children,” Danielle Westerman once said, “is that they aren’t interested in childhood” (“Autoreflections,” private interview, 1977). Yes, and when they do finally develop sufficient curiosity, it’s too late. (She rejects entirely her childhood at La Roche-Vineuse, her father, her mother. Both of them neglected their only child, she confesses. But there must be more to it than that, I suspect, something sharper and more hurtful and sudden.)
Most of what I remember from the early years is my own appalling ignorance. A partial view of the world was handed to me, a row of houses in the Kingsway area of Toronto, and the rest I had to pretend to know. Like all children, I was obliged to stagger from one faulty recognition to the next, always about to stumble into shame. It isn’t what we know but what we don’t know that does us in. Blushing and flushing, shuffling and stuttering—these are surface expressions of a deeper pain. The shame of ignorance is killing. “I nearly died,” grown-ups say of their early dumb misunderstandings, and they mean that the revealing of their ignorance feels like a stoppage of the heart.
At least this is how I, Reta Winters (née Summers), felt as a child, rummaging through an even younger child’s mind and seeing nothing but a swirl of images before words and grammar arrived, a sort of fingerpainting, wet and vivid smears of colour that signalled, mostly, danger. I recognized from the beginning that I was unhinged from what I assumed everyone else in the world knew. I was obliged to regulate the world, but in secret. Why was the sky blue if you looked up but not when you looked at it sideways? What if the moon fell down into our garden or, worse, onto the roof? These questions, more like miracles in their phenomenological shapes, gathered around me and formed the oxygen I breathed, and what they whispered to me was: You will very possibly be killed because of your ignorance. It could happen at any moment.
Someone entered our garden, when I was a child, and carried away every blossom from my mother’s three hydrangea bushes. My mother took this assault with remarkable good humour, as though she didn’t know the real danger we were in. I knew, though. I knew our family had been chosen and that the missing flowers signified a greater evil and a part of a larger design, which might ultimately lead to death, but I was unable to turn my fears into words, since I knew at a completely other level that I was being ridiculous.
Such gaps of comprehension, such incompletions, had to be lived with silently—that seemed the natural law. A child is suspended in a locked closet of unknowing, within the body’s borders, that dark place. To name a perplexity is to magnify it. At the same time—I recognized the calumny for what it is—children’s natural observations are often thought to be whimsical, even adorable, and their sayings, their mild queries, much quoted and smiled over, but there is no guarantee of an answer. Why do children risk disclosure at all? It must be out of desperation or unsupportable fear. It’s a wonder they don’t throw themselves out of windows in fits of confusion.
Our sunny daughter Norah teased us with curious notions. Voices talking in her head, she said. All the time. But we understood at once that this meant nothing, only that she had become conscious of the lifelong dialogue that goes on in a person’s head, the longest conversation any of us has. Oh hello, it’s me again. And again. The most interesting conversation we’ll ever know, and the most circular and repetitive and insane. Please, not that woman again! Doesn’t she ever shut up? (This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.)
I suspect that little Reta Summers was slower than most in accepting the unknotting of earthly matter and manifestation, or else she was more afraid of ridicule. I tried to puzzle things out for myself. There was a war, for instance, and everyone talked about it, how awful it was with people getting killed, even babies, who were horribly burned. But what was a war exactly? What was napalm? How far away was Vietnam? No one told me, but I figured out it must be in the lane behind the Bloor Street delicatessen because I’d once heard loud noises coming from the store’s back wall. I cried when I was taken to this place, even though my mother and father were holding my hand. They didn’t ask me why I was crying. Probably they thought I was scared of Mr. Hopkins, who had a moustache and cut meat with a black blade as long as his arm.
I understood that people had two names or sometimes three. I was really Reta Ruth Summers. Before I went to school I’d learned to recite my address, 555 Strath Avenue, and my telephone number, and everyone thought this was amazing for a child of my age. Once in a while I was allowed to hold the phone up to my ear and talk to Grandma or Aunt Judy. “But Aunt Judy isn’t a real aunt,” my mother told me carefully. I knew what real meant. You could touch it or see it, it wasn’t made up like the stories I invented.
The angels are moving their furniture, they said when the thunder roared on a summer night; Le tonnerre, my mother whispered dramatically, making her eyes big and letting me know this was a splendid thing, nothing to be frightened of. But the angel part was nonsense. Even they knew it was nonsense, the way their lips came together as they said the words, confessing that they loved their own piece of whimsy dearly, but I must have loved it too when I think of the way I swallowed down its easy comfort.
My mother always spoke to me in French and my father in English, and I was allowed to reply in either language. This was part of a pact the two of them had made before my birth, that any child of theirs would grow up in two languages, and that they would share responsibility for this plan. My mother, a pure laine Marteau from Montreal, spoke a musical French, and my father a crisp Edinburghian English, only slightly eroded by his years in Canada.
Oddly, the epic confusion of my early years was not caused but rather mitigated by immersion in two languages; doubleness clarified the world; la chaise, chair; le rideau, curtain; être, to be; le chien, dog. Every object, every action, had an echo, an explanation. Meaning had two feet, two dependable etymological stems. I swam in English, a relaxed backstroke, but stood up to my hips in French. The French-English dictionary with its thready blue cover was our family bible, since we were a family unattached to formal religious practice.
Nevertheless, they taught me to say a prayer at bedtime. “Dear Jesus, bless Mummy and Daddy and Grandma and the two grandpas and Aunt Judy and make me a good girl.” What I knew of Jesus I plucked from the air. Jesus was invisible, but he could hear everything I thought or said. He could see me even when I sat on the toilet, which was humiliating. He was like God but not as old as God. He didn’t stop loving me when I was bad, not that I believed this for a moment. He wore a brown gown and liked to have kids climbing on his lap. He wasn’t invisible then. Nails were driven through his hands and feet; I couldn’t bear to think of that, the tearing of flesh.
I learned to say the prayer perfectly. “The way she enunciates!” my father, the lapsed Presbyterian, said, his voice full of warm minerals. This was a mere trick, and I’d learned how to do it, and in so doing I had made them love me even more. “Isn’t she the clever one,” they said, and every time they said it, it was as if they handed me a flower. Bien douée, said my mother, who had not been inside a Catholic church since her marriage. I remember how she shook her head with wonder, the proud young mother, the way she stood so buoyantly on the front porch in her lime-coloured pedal-pushers and squeaky Mexican sandals—there is a word for those woven leather shoes: huaraches. She loved her early married
life, her little mock-Elizabethan Toronto house and rectangular patch of garden, and that period of time before she became discouraged.
From my mother I developed my love of flowers. Their shapes came folded inside tiny seeds, so small that fifty of them filled the bottom of a flat seed packet. They were miraculously encoded from the beginning, little specks of dark matter that we shook into our hands, then sowed into flower beds. They sprouted, then opened out in a studied and careful program of increments. Now, that was astonishing, all those compressed unfoldings and burstings, but no one said so. No one made a fuss when the seeds actually performed: sprouts, leaves, the long rivery stems, and finally the intricacy of blossoms. I liked to tear the silk of the petals between my fingers, rubbing the pollen into my hands. “But that isn’t nice, Reta,” my mother said. “Why would you want to hurt a beautiful flower?” I didn’t believe this, that flowers hurt, but nevertheless I didn’t do it again. I was the inept child searching for those moments of calm when I would find adult validation or at least respite from my endless uncertainty.
I once scratched the banister with a spoon. My mother rubbed it with butter, and the scratch went away. She had no idea I had done it, her little girl wouldn’t do a thing like that. With great good nature they laughed when I said eggshells were made of plastic, and also when I asked my father if we could buy some icicles to hang from our roof. Our neighbours, the McAndrews, had icicles, long sculptured fingers of silvery ice that lasted all winter. “Our little Reta,” they said, laughing. “Our little one.” I was afraid of drowning in their approbation. There was nothing hard to hang on to. Any minute I would lose my balance and then I wouldn’t be little Reta anymore. Like Norah, I wouldn’t be anything.