Aside from Emma Allen, and Gwen Reidman, with whom I’m rather out of touch, these three—Sally, Annette, Lynn—are my closest friends. We are all about the same age but are wildly different in size. Sally is a large woman, queenly. She has a round mouth in a round face and wears thick, round, plastic-rimmed eyeglasses. A former actress who now runs an after-school drama group, she’s brilliant with accents: Scottish, German, East Indian; she can do anything. Even her shoulders are theatrical, even her elbows and wrists. Her clothes, which she designs and makes herself, are extraordinary in their roomy, fluttering, brightly coloured and gathered shapes.
“So,” says Lynn Kelly, who wears matched pantsuits in muted tones with department store jewellery and flat shoes. She is the shortest of us, under five foot and very wiry. How she produced two children from those tiny hips is a mystery. She has large hair, though, to make up for lack of body size, thick, dark, luxurious hair all in a tangle. Every sentence she utters seems to have a full stop attached. She was born and educated in North Wales.
Annette Harris came to Orangetown from Toronto, and before that from Jamaica. When she says the word so, she makes a circle of it. Of all of us, she has the best figure, a model’s figure, slim-waisted, deep-breasted, wonderful legs, and beautiful hands. She dresses with austerity except for her collection of handmade silver bracelets and earrings. I met Annette in the writers’ group I once belonged to. She was writing poetry in those days, and still is. Her book Lost Things was published a year ago and has done very well. She gave a reading in Toronto, and people were fighting to get in.
So, what do the four of us talk about as we gather at the Orange Blossom Tea Room? We never think about the aboutness of talk; we just talk.
Today Lynn was talking about trust. She is an avid cyclist, and her bike was leaning against a lamppost just out of view of the window. “How do I know it won’t be stolen?” she asked us. “Why is it I’m absolutely sure it’s safe?”
“Because this is Orangetown,” Sally said.
“Because school’s in session,” I suggested.
“Because it’s a twenty-year-old bike.” From Annette. “Not that it isn’t a terrific model.”
“And why is it,” Lynn went on, “that I’m not afraid of riding my bike down Borden Road and turning on to Main Street? I’ve got my helmet on and I’m trying to keep way over on the margin of the road, but what if a driver suddenly decides to go into road rage and ram straight into me?”
“I don’t think there’s that much road rage in Orangetown at this hour,” I said, remembering that I had left my own house unlocked.
“Don’t believe it,” Annette said. “There’s rage everywhere.”
“Someone could walk into this cafe right this minute brandishing a sword. I read about a man who went into a church in England and started slicing up people.”
“He was insane.”
“It could never have been predicted.”
“Like being struck by lightning. You can’t go around worrying about lightning.”
“Or planes crashing into your house.”
“If someone came in here with a sword,” Lynn said coolly, “we wouldn’t have a chance.”
“We’d be helpless.”
“We could duck under the table.”
“No, we’d be helpless.”
“Trust. We’ve had it drilled into us at birth. Or rather, we emerge from the womb already trusting. Trusting the hand that’s about to hold us.”
“So?” Lynn said. “When are we disabused of this notion?”
“When does doubt cut in, you mean?”
“Immediately,” I said. “One second after birth. I’m sure of it.”
So, the days go by, early fall, middle fall. Natalie and Chris both got small parts in The Pajama Game that the high school is putting on, and at home they’re always bursting into Pajama Game songs, which, after all these years, are still good songs. “Hernando’s Hideaway,” “Seven and a Half Cents.” I’ve got ssss-steam heat. That’s Natalie’s favourite; she belts it out, descending the stairs as she sings, going from one side to another, leaning over the banister, stretching her arms wide; Chris, just behind her on the stairs, chants a subtle boom-de-boom in accompaniment. Tom is writing a paper for the trilobite conference next year in Estonia. “Wouldn’t you like to go to Estonia?” he asks me. I don’t know. It depends on Norah, what happens to Norah. I’m trying to work on my new novel but am often derailed. Danielle’s new book is selling well even without an author tour, even with minimal promotion. So it goes.
Otherwise
TWO YEARS AGO I inhabited another kind of life in which I scarcely registered my notion of heartbreak. Hurt feelings, minor slights, minimal losses, small treacheries, even bad reviews—that’s what I thought sadness was made of: tragedy was someone not liking my book.
I wrote a novel for no particular reason other than feeling it was the right time in my life to write a novel. My publisher sent me on a four-city book tour: Toronto, New York, Washington, and Baltimore. A very modest bit of promotion, you might say, but Scribano & Lawrence scarcely knew what to do with me. I had never written a novel before. I was a woman in her forties, not at all remarkable looking and certainly not media-smart. If I had any reputation at all it was for being an editor and scholar, and not for producing, to everyone’s amazement, a “fresh, bright, springtime piece of fiction,” or so it was described in Publishers Weekly.
My Thyme Is Up baffled everyone with its sparky sales. We had no idea who was walking into bookstores and buying it. I didn’t know and Mr. Scribano didn’t know. “Probably young working girls,” he ventured, “gnawed by loneliness and insecurity.”
These words hurt my feelings slightly, but then the reviews, good as they were, had subtly injured me too. The reviewers seemed taken aback that my slim novel (200 pages exactly) possessed any weight at all. “Oddly appealing,” the New York Times Book Review said. “Mrs. Winters’s book is very much for the moment, though certainly not for the ages,” The New Yorker opined. Tom advised me to take this as praise, his position being that all worthy novels pay close attention to the time in which they are suspended, and sometimes, years later, despite themselves, acquire a permanent lustre. I wasn’t so sure. As a long-time editor of Danielle Westerman’s work, I had acquired a near-crippling degree of critical appreciation for the severity of her moral stance, and I understood perfectly well that there was something just a little bit darling about my own book.
My three daughters were happy about the book because they were mentioned by name in a People Magazine interview. (“Mrs. Winters lives on a farm outside Orangetown, Ontario, is married to a family physician, and is the mother of three handsome daughters, Natalie, Christine, and Norah.”) That was enough for them. Handsome! Norah, the most literary, the most mercurial of the three—both Natalie and Chris are in the advanced science stream at Orangetown High School—mumbled that it might have been a better book if I’d skipped the happy ending, if Alicia had decided on going to Paris after all, and if Roman had denied her his affection. There was, my daughter postulated, maybe too much over-the-top sweetness in the thyme seeds Alicia planted in her window box, and in Alicia’s listless moods and squeaky hopes. And no one in her right mind would sing out (as Alicia had done) those words that reached Roman’s ears—he was making filtered coffee in the kitchen—and bound him to her forever: “My thyme is up.”
It won the Offenden Prize, which, though the money was nice, shackled the book to minor status. Clarence and Margot Offenden had established the prize back in the seventies out of a shared exasperation with the opaqueness of the contemporary novel. “The Offenden Prize recognizes literary quality and honours accessibility.” These are their criteria. Margot and Clarence are a good-hearted couple, and rich, but a little jolly and simple in their judgments, and Margot in particular is fond of repeating her recipe for enduring fiction. “A beginning, a middle, and an ending,” she likes to say. “Is that too much to ask?”
At the award ceremony in New York she embraced Tom and the girls and told them how I shone among my peers, those dabblers in convolution and pretension who wrote without holding the reader in mind, who played games for their own selfish amusement, and who threw a mask of noir over every event, whether it was appropriate or not, who put a doorway, say, or a chair in every chapter, just to be baffling and obscure. “It’s heaven,” Margot sang into Tom’s ear, “to find that sunniness still exists in the world.” I was interviewed for television, sitting in a Vasily chair with a cat on my lap; someone, the director or producer, had insisted on the cat. Something to do with image.
I don’t consider myself a sunny person. In fact, if I prayed, I would ask every day to be spared the shame of dumb sunniness. Danielle Westerman, her life, her reflection on that life, has taught me that much. Don’t hide your dark side from yourself, she said to me once, it’s what keeps us going forward, that pushing away from the blinding brilliance. She said that, of course, in the tough early days of feminism, and no one expected her to struggle free to merriment. I remember that I did feel, starting my mini-tour, the resident anxiety you develop when you know you’ve been too lucky; at any moment, maybe next Tuesday afternoon, I would be stricken with something unbearable.
After the New York event, I said goodbye to the family and got on a train and travelled to Washington, staying in a Georgetown hotel, which had on its top floor, reserved for me by my publisher, something called the Writer’s Suite. A brass plaque on the door announced this astonishing fact. I, the writer in a beige raincoat, Ms. Reta Winters from Orangetown, entered this doorway with small suitcase in tow and looked around, not daring to imagine what she might find. There was a salon as well as a bedroom, two full baths, a very wide bed, more sofas than I would have time to sit on in my short stay, and a coffee table consisting of a sheet of glass posed on three immense faux books stacked one on the other. A large bookshelf held the tomes of the authors who had stayed in the suite. “We like to ask our guests to contribute a copy of their work,” the desk clerk had told me, and I was obliged to explain that I had only a single reading copy with me but that I would attempt to find a copy in a local store. “That would be most appreciated,” she said with deep sincerity.
The books left behind by previous authors were disappointing, inspiration manifestos or self-help manuals, with a few thrillers thrown in. I am not a snob—I read the Jackie Onassis biography, for example—but my close association with writers such as Danielle Westerman has conditioned me to hope for a degree of ambiguity or nuance, and there was none here.
In the great, wide bed I had a disturbing but not unfamiliar dream—it is the dream I always have when I am away from Orangetown, away from the family. I am standing in the kitchen at home, producing a complicated meal for guests, but there is not enough food to work with. In the fridge sits a single egg and maybe a tomato. How am I going to feed all those hungry mouths?
I’m aware of how this dream might be analyzed by a dream expert, that the scarcity of food stands for a scarcity of love, that no matter how I stretch that egg and tomato, there will never be enough of Reta Winters for everyone who needs her. This is how my old friend Gwen, whom I was looking forward to seeing in Baltimore, would be sure to interpret the dream, if I were so foolish as to tell her. Gwen is an obsessive keeper of a dream journal—as are quite a number of my friends—and she also records the dreams of others if they are offered and found worthy. She is, she claimed in a recent letter, an oneirocritic, having completed an extension course in dream interpretation.
I resist the theory of insufficient love. I understand dreams to be an alternative language and one we don’t necessarily need to learn. My empty-fridge dream, I like to think, points only to the abrupt cessation, or interruption, of daily obligation. For more than twenty years I’ve been responsible for producing three meals a day for the several individuals I live with. I may not be conscious of this obligation, but surely I must always, at some level, be calculating and apportioning the amount of food in the house and the number of bodies to be fed: Tom and the girls, the girls’ friends, my mother-in-law, and various passing acquaintances. And then there’s the dog to feed, and water for his bowl by the back door. Away from home, liberated from my responsibility for meals, my unexecuted calculations steal into my dreams like engine run-on and leave me blithering with this diminished store of nurture and the fact of my unpreparedness. Such a small dream crisis, but I always wake with a sense of terror.
Since My Thyme Is Up was a first novel and since mine was an unknown name, there was very little for me to do in Washington. Mr. Scribano had been afraid this would happen. The television stations weren’t interested, and the radio stations avoided novels, my publicist told me, unless they had a “topic” like cancer or child abuse.
I managed to fulfill all my obligations in a mere two hours the morning after my arrival, taking a cab to a bookstore called Politics & Prose, where I signed books for three rather baffled-looking customers and then a few more stock copies, which the staff was kind enough to produce. I handled the whole thing badly, was overly ebullient with the book buyers, too chatty, wanting them to love me as much as they said they loved my book, wanting them for best friends, you would think. (“Please just call me Reta, everyone does”) My hair had come unpinned—this happens only rarely—and was dangling in my hot face. My impulse was to apologize for not being younger and more adorable, like Alicia in my novel, and for not having her bright ingenue voice and manner. I was ashamed of my red pantsuit, catalogue-issue, and wondered if I’d remembered, waking up in the Writer’s Suite, to apply deodorant.
From Politics & Prose I took a cab to a store called Pages, where there were no buying customers at all but where the two young proprietors took me for a splendid lunch at an Italian bistro and also insisted on giving me a free copy of my book to leave in the Writer’s Suite. I had the afternoon free, a whole afternoon, and nothing to do until the next morning when I was to take my train to Baltimore. Mr. Scribano had warned me I might find touring lonely.
I returned to the hotel, freshened up, and placed my book on the bookshelf. But why had I returned to the hotel? What homing instinct had brought me here when I might be out visiting museums or perhaps taking a tour through the Senate chambers? There was a wide springtime afternoon to fill, and an evening too, since no one had suggested taking me to dinner.
I decided to go shopping in the Georgetown area, having spotted from the taxi a number of tiny boutiques. My daughter Norah’s birthday, the first of May, was coming up in a week’s time, and she longed to have a beautiful and serious scarf. She had never had a scarf in all her seventeen years, not unless you count the woollen mufflers she wore on the school bus, but since her grade-twelve class trip to Paris, she had been talking about the scarves that every chic Frenchwoman wears as part of her wardrobe. These scarves, so artfully draped, were silk, nothing else would do, and their colours shocked and awakened the dreariest of clothes, the wilted navy blazers that Frenchwomen wear or those cheap black cardigans they try to get away with.
I never have time to shop in Orangetown, and, in fact, there would be little available there. But today I had time, plenty of time, and so I put on my low-heeled walking shoes and started out.
Georgetown’s boutiques are set amid tiny-fronted houses, impeccably gentrified with shuttered bay windows and framed by minuscule gardens, enchanting to the eye. My own sprawling, untidy house outside Orangetown, if dropped into this landscape, would destroy half a dozen or more of these impeccable brick facades. The placement of flowerpots was ardently pursued here, so caring, so solemn, and the clay pots themselves had been rubbed, I suspected, with sandpaper, to give them a country look.
These boutiques held such a minimum of stock that I wondered how they were able to compete with one another. There might be six or seven blouses on a rod, a few cashmere pullovers, a table strewn casually with shells or stones or Art Nouveau picture frames or racks of antique postca
rds. A squadron of very slender saleswomen presided over this spare merchandise, which they fingered in such a loving way that I suddenly wanted to buy everything in sight. The scarves—every shop had a good half dozen—were knotted on dowels, and there was not one that was not pure silk with hand-rolled edges.
I took my time. I realized I would be able, given enough shopping time, to buy Norah the perfect scarf, not the near-perfect and certainly not the impulse purchase we usually settled for at home. She had mentioned wanting something in a bright blue with perhaps some yellow dashes. I would find that very scarf in one of these many boutiques. The thought of myself as a careful and deliberate shopper brought me a bolt of happiness. I took a deep breath and smiled genuinely at the anorexic saleswomen, who seemed to sense and respond to my new consumer eagerness. “That’s not quite her,” I quickly learned to say, and they nodded with sympathy. Most of them wore scarves themselves around their angular necks, and I admired, to myself, the intricate knotting and colours of these scarves. I admired, too, the women’s forthcoming involvement in my mission. “Oh, the scarf absolutely must be suited to the person,” they said, or words to that effect—as though they knew Norah intimately and understood that she was a young woman of highly defined tastes and requirements and biddable spirits that they were anxious to satisfy.
She wasn’t really. She was, Tom and I always used to think, too easily satisfied and someone who too seldom considered herself deserving. When she was a very small child, three or four, eating lunch at the kitchen table, she heard an airplane go overhead and looked up at me and said, “The pilot doesn’t know I’m eating an egg.” She seemed shocked at this perception of loneliness, but was willing to register the shock calmly so as not to alarm me. She, the girl she was two years ago, would be grateful for any scarf I brought her, pleased I had taken the time, but for once I wanted, and had an opportunity to procure, a scarf that would delight her heart.