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 pot 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 dean my house. I’d like to go at it with Q-rips, 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 friends 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 c
owhides 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.
It’s my belief that he thinks about trilobites all the time. While he’s checking out a prostate gland or writing a prescription for asthma drugs, a piece of his mind holds steady to the idea of 500 million years ago—unfathomable to me—and the extinct, unlovely arthropods drat occupied every sea and ocean in the world. They hung around for a long time, something like a hundred million years. Some were half the size of a thumb-nail and some were a foot long. Recently, a giant trilobite was found near the shores of Hudson Bay, a monster measuring 70 centimetres—that’s two feet, four inches. Ugly but adaptable creatures, trilobites, and obliging with their remains. A head with bulging eyes, a thorax, a tail of sorts; a little thre
e-part life that once was. Tom loves them, and so we all love them.
“So what!” says Christine when I confront her with a bent cigarette that I found in the pocket of her winter parka. “So why were you going through my parka anyway?”
“I was putting it in the washer and so I checked the pockets.”
“I’m not addicted, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“That is what I’m worried about, yes.”
“Well, I’m not. I’ve just had a few. With friends.”
“When I was pregnant with you, Chris, I never had a drop of wine for nine months. I never took so much as an aspirin. I drank three glasses of milk, every day, and you know I hate milk.”
“Wow! You were a real martyr to the cause of motherhood.”
“I wanted you to be healthy.”
“So you could lay a guilt trip on me when I got older.”
“I just hoped—”
“No wonder Norah—” She stopped herself.
No wonder Norah left home. I looked into her stricken face and could read the words she had come so close to engraving on the air.
“It’s all right,” I said, gathering her in my arms.
“I hate smoking anyway,” she whispered. “It was just something to do.”
“Sooo-ooo-oo!”
That’s what people say when they are about to introduce a narrative into the conversation or when they are clearing a little space so that you can begin a story yourself. It can be sung to different tunes, depending on the circumstances.
“So!”
That’s usually the first word uttered when I sit down to have coffee with Sally Bachelli and Annette Harris and Lynn Kelly. So! Meaning, here we are again at the Orange Blossom Tea Room. We’re the Orangetown coffee “lie-dies” getting together on a Tuesday morning. What’s new? So! So is like the oboe, signalling the A pitch to the strings. So, where do we go from here?