Carol Shields - Collected Stories

Half a dozen syllables in the third line are being withheld from me, so temptingly, a few feet out of sight, suspended on the other side of the desk lamp. Or else they are unwilling to freeze themselves in the particular posture I have prepared for them. I refuse, possessing as I do a kind of preternatural sprezzatura , and this presents another hurdle, to invert the structure of ordinary spoken English, attaching adjectives to the end of a line for the sake of rhyme. Here’s an example from the literature of sonnets: “With strange new hopes and fears and fancies wild.” “Wild” to rhyme with “smil’d” (Wilmon Brewer, a ferocious old sonnet-writer, whose book, awful, was published in 1937, Sonnets and Sestinas) . If I were at the helm, Wilmot Brewer’s line would have to go “With strange new hopes and fears and wild fancies,” and where would you find a rhyme for fancies? In any case, I don’t believe fancies is a word I’ve ever used in a sonnet.

And I want, also, that short introductory beat, the primary iamb, followed by the heavier second beat, and I won’t have it any other way, though many sonnet-makers give in at this early point, as though they are inserting a trumpet into the verse and daring it to blow.

My brain stem is ready, the iambic grasp of knit/purl engaged, and is so close to matching the rhythm of my breath that I don’t even think of it. Its motor hums in the joints of my shoulders and wrists, knit/purl, knit/purl, ten items arranged on each clean glass shelf, though I don’t like to be overly prescriptive when it comes to meter.

Sometimes I look around whatever room I happen to be in as a way of steadying my thoughts. It is seven o’clock now. After our coffee ceremony I moved from the living room to the kitchen, with its fused aroma of afternoon coffee and tonight’s roasting chicken and fresh pepper. My little notepad occupies the clean edge of the corner table, and I have just heard a woman on the radio say to her interviewer, about a local celebrity murderer, “There was something about that man that made the hair on my spine stand up.”

After a minute I pick up a pencil and jot down the word spine . Then spinal . No, spinal is an anapest. I turn the radio off. Color in its array of tints moves forward in my mind, but not the words I need. Spinal fluid . Not quite.

It is my aging body I want to write about, this oiled goatskin I live inside of. The body that rises now, a little creakily, though I attempt to disguise this lack of limberness with an effort of will. I lean over from the waist as smartly as I can (as though a witness were standing next to me taking notes) and check the chicken in the oven and the pair of baking potatoes, darkening in their hides. Max is reading the newspaper. I hear him turning over the pages in the living room and think how he has deprived himself all day of this pleasure. He’s always been strict about the avoidance of the newspaper earlier in the day, he is like a puritan in that way: first he must perform his daily task, getting down onto hard disk or paper his own five hundred words, which tomorrow he may or may not delete. In ten minutes we will sit down at the dinner table, just the two of us. Are we to share the future or no? I’ve never made a fuss of things—why would I begin now?

Oh, these duo dinners! They’ve grown so hard for us. We’ll be talking about the Middle East tonight, the two of us. Or else the obscenity of CEO salaries in America. We already know each other’s views on these subjects; we speak in order to keep the silence away. It’s as though we reheat these issues in our very dear little copper saucepan—so battered and beloved—hoping by accident to stir in something new. But we are inoculated against surprise. We can no longer make each other laugh. We can’t even startle one another. We are both abashed at this imposed duty at the end of every day, even though we’ve done it for years: each of us is obliged to eat a meal in the presence of a stranger, and yet each is determined to be a self, a singular self. Music helps; this is something we’ve both noticed in the last year, and I can hear Max now, rising and shuffling among CDs on the shelf where we keep them. What’s it to be tonight? Ah, Mozart. Good!

After dinner, which includes a single glass of red wine, sipped slowly, grape-sized sips, I will phone our daughter in Oak Park to see how she got through her day, to try to gauge from her voice her level of vitality. I can hear myself being distractingly glib in order to blunt all that I resist. Is she bearing up? Will she manage another day of effort as she tries to see through her life’s obscuring clutter? I have to know before I can tuck myself into our queen-size water bed, where I will read for an hour or more, while Max in another room watches a documentary on television. I am reading a short, bleak Irish novel and he is watching something to do with elephant tusks, needless slaughter and corruption in the international market.

Sleep arrives early, and my arm lifts, as though under hypnosis, to switch off the bedside lamp. My last thought before drifting off collapses into a kind of formula of information directed to the center of my cortex, where a question awaits. What am I now? What is my position in the universe, in the fen and bog of my arrangements?

The reply comes promptly, mocking my tone of high seriousness: if it weren’t for my particular circumstances I would be happy.

SEVERAL OF THE MIRACLES THAT OCCURRED this year have gone unrecorded.

Example: On the morning of January 3, seven women stood in line at a lingerie sale in Palo Alto, California, and by chance each of these women bore the Christian name Emily.

Example: On February 16 four strangers (three men, one woman) sat quietly reading on the back seat of the number 10 bus in Cincinnati, Ohio; each of them was reading a paperback copy of Smiley’s People .

On March 30 a lathe operator in a Moroccan mountain village dreamed that a lemon fell from a tree into his open mouth, causing him to choke and die. He opened his eyes, overjoyed at being still alive, and embraced his wife, who was snoring steadily by his side. She scarcely stirred, being reluctant to let go of a dream she was dreaming, which was that a lemon tree had taken root in her stomach, sending its pliant new shoots upward into her limbs. Leaves, blossoms and finally fruit fluttered in her every vein until she began to tremble in her sleep with happiness and intoxication. Her husband got up quietly and lit an oil lamp so that he could watch her face. It seemed to him he’d never really looked at her before, and he felt how utterly ignorant he was of the spring that nourished her life. Now she lay sleeping, dreaming, her face radiant. What he saw was a mask of happiness so intense it made him fear for his life.

On May 11, in the city of Exeter in the south of England, five girls (aged fifteen to seventeen) were running across a playing field at ten o’clock in the morning as part of their physical education program. They stopped short when they saw, lying on the broad gravel path, a dead parrot. He was grassy green in color with a yellow nape and head, and was later identified by the girl’s science mistress as Amazona ochrocephala . The police were notified of the find, and it was later discovered that the parrot had escaped from the open window of a house owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, who claimed, while weeping openly, that they had owned the parrot (Miguel by name) for twenty-two years. The parrot, in fact, was twenty-five years old, one of a pair of birds sold in an open market in Marseilles in the spring of 1958. Miguel’s twin brother was sold to an Italian soprano who kept it for ten years, then gave it to her niece Francesca, a violinist who played first with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and later with the Chicago Symphony. On May 11 Francesca was wakened in her River Forest home by the sound of her parrot (Pete, or sometimes Pietro) coughing. She gave him a dish of condensed milk instead of his usual whole-oats-and-peanut mixture, and then phoned to say she would not be able to attend rehearsal that day. The coughing grew worse. She looked up the name of a vet in the Yellow Pages and was about to dial when the parrot fell over, dead in his cage. A moment earlier Francesca had heard him open his beak and pronounce what she believed were the words “Ça ne fait rien.”