Carol Shields - Collected Stories

“The locked door of the room,” is what one of them, a daughter, heard.

“The wok cringes in the womb,” is the enigmatic phrase another swears she heard.

The bereaved husband, a blundering old fool in shirt sleeves, heard, incredibly, “The sock is out of tune.”

All three witnesses turn to their listener, as lawyers to a judge. Not one of them is superstitious enough to place great importance on final words. Illness, they know, brings a rainbow of distortion, but they long, nevertheless, for interpretation.

The listening judge is an awkward but compassionate woman who would like nothing better than to bring these three fragments into unity. Inside her head she holds a pencil straight up. Her eyes are fixed on the purpling clouds.

Then it arrives. Through some unsecured back door in her imagination she comes up with “The mock orange is in bloom.”

“Of course, of course,” they chime, nodding and smiling at each other, and at that moment their grief shifts subtly, the first of many such shiftings they are about to undergo.

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON MILLY STOPPED at Ernie’s Cards ‘n’ Things to buy a mea culpa card for her father-in-law, whom she had apparently insulted.

“Sorry,” Ernie’s wife said in her testy way. “We’re all out.”

Milly found this hard to believe. The card rack was full. You could buy a happiness-in-your-new-home card or a mind-your-own-beeswax card, even a spectacular three-dollar pop-up card announcing to the world that you were feeling underappreciated. Surely there was such a thing as an I’m-sorry card.

“You can believe what you want,” Ernie’s wife said. “But we’re sold right out. At the start of the week I had at least a dozen sorry cards in stock. We had a real nice selection, all the way from ‘I boobed’ to ‘Forgive me, Dear Heart.’ They went like hotcakes, the whole lot. That’s more than I sell in an average year.”

“How strange,” Milly said. “What on earth’s everyone being sorry about all of a sudden?”

Ernie’s wife made a gesture of impatience. She wasn’t there to stand around jawing with the customers, she snapped. There was the inventory to do and the ordering and so on.

Milly at once apologized for taking up her time; she had only been speaking rhetorically when she asked what everyone was being sorry about.

At this, Ernie’s wife had the grace to blush and make amends. She’d been under strain, she said, what with people in and out of the shop all week grousing about her stock of sorry cards. There was one poor soul who came in weeping her eyes out. She’d had a set-to with her husband and told him he was getting so fat he was no longer attractive to her. It turned out he wasn’t really getting fat at all. She was just in a miffy mood because she didn’t like the new statue of Louis Riel in the park. She didn’t object to Louis in the buff, not that—it was more a question of where her tax dollars were going.

Milly, who was an intimate friend of the sculptor, said, “I’m really sorry to hear this.”

“And then,” Ernie’s wife went on, “a gentleman came in here saying he’d had an out-and-out row with his next-door neighbor who’d been a true-blue friend for twenty years.”

“These things happen,” Milly said. “Just this week my own father-in-law—”

“Seems the man and his neighbor got on to the subject of politics—in my opinion not a subject for friends to be discussing. The neighbor called my customer a stuffed-shirt fascist right to his face.”

“That seems a little extreme,” Milly said. “But why should he be the one to send a sorry card when his friend was the one who—?”

“Exactly!” Ernie’s wife held up a finger, and her eyes filled with fire. “My thoughts exactly. But later that same day who should come in but a sweet old white-haired gent who said his next-door neighbor had called him a pinko bleeding heart and he—”

“Do you mean to tell me he was the very—”

“You’re interrupting,” Ernie’s wife cried.

Milly said she was terribly sorry. She explained that she was feeling unstrung because now she would have to go all the way downtown to buy a card for her father-in-law.

“Well, if you’re going downtown,” Ernie’s wife said, “would you mind returning a pair of pajamas for me? I bought them in the sales last week and, lo and behold, I got them home and found a flaw in the left sleeve.”

Milly disliked going all the way downtown. She disliked waiting for the bus, and when she got on the bus she disliked the way a man sitting next to her let his umbrella drip on her ankle.

“I’m most awfully sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize. I didn’t even notice. In a hundred years I would never have let—”

Milly managed a smile and made a gesture with her hand that said: It’s all right, I accept your apology. She was glad the umbrella hadn’t dripped on the pajamas Ernie’s wife had given her to return. Returning merchandise can be tricky, especially when it’s wet and when the receipt’s been mislaid. More often than not you meet with suspicion, scorn, arrogance, rebuff.

But today the gentleman in the complaint department was wearing a yellow rose in his lapel, and his eyes twinkled.

“We take full responsibility for flaws,” he said. “Head office will be sending your friend a letter begging her pardon, and I personally apologize in the name of our branch and in the name of the manufacturer.”

Milly, triumphant, took the bus home. The driver apologized, as well he should, for splashing her as she stood at the bus stop.

“It’s not your fault, it’s all this blessed rain,” Milly said.

The bus driver shook his head. “A regular deluge. But I should have been more careful.”

The instant the words left his mouth, the rain began to fall more heavily. The sky turned an ugly black, and soon rain was pelting down, loud and musical, slamming on the roof of the bus and streaming in thick sheets down its sides. The windshield wipers did their best to beat back the water, but clearly they hadn’t been designed for a storm of this magnitude and, after a few minutes, the driver pulled over to the curb.

“I’m awfully sorry, folks,” he announced, “but we’re going to have to wait this one out.”

Nobody really minded. It was rather pleasant, almost like a party, to be sitting snug inside a parked bus whose windows had turned to silver, swapping stories about storms of other years. Several passengers remembered the flood of 1958 and the famous spring downpour of 1972, but most of them agreed that today’s storm was the most violent they had ever seen. They would be going home to flooded basements and worried spouses, yet they remained cheerful. Some of the younger people at the back of the bus struck up an impromptu singsong, and the older folks traded their newspapers back and forth. The headline on one paper said TRUDEAU APOLOGIZES TO REAGAN, and another said REAGAN APOLOGIZES TO SUMMIT. By the time the sun burst through, many of the passengers had exchanged names and phone numbers and announced to each other how cleansing a good storm can be, how it sweeps away unspoken hostilities and long-held grudges.

Milly, walking home from her bus stop, breathed in the shining air. Her feet were drenched, and she was forced to step over several fallen tree branches, but she noted with pleasure the blue clarity of the sky. It was going to be a splendid evening. A single cloud, a fluffy width of cumulus, floated high in the air over her house. It was shaped like a pair of wings, thought Milly, who was in a fanciful mood. No, not like wings, but like two outstretched hands, wonderfully white and beseeching, which seemed to beckon to her and say: Sorry about all this fuss and bother.