Carol Shields - Larry’s Party

Even today, August 17th, her son’s thirtieth birthday, she’s remembering. Larry knows the signs. It’s five-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, and there she is, high-rumped and perspiring in her creased cotton sundress, busying herself in the kitchen, setting the dinner plates on top of the stove to warm, as if they weren’t already hot from being in a hot kitchen. She’s peering into the oven at the bubbling casserole, and she’s floating back and forth, fridge to counter, counter to sink. Her large airy gestures seem to have sprung not from her life as wife and mother, but from a sunny, creamy, abundant girlhood, which Larry doubts she ever had. She smiles and she chats and she even flirts a little with her thirty-year-old son, who looks on, a bottle of cold beer in his hand, but he knows the old warnings. Her jittery detachment gives her away. She picks up a jar of pickles and bangs it hard on the breadboard to loosen the lid. She’s thinking and fretting and knowing and feeling sick with the poison of memory.

This my mother, Larry thinks, my sad soft mother. Most of her life has involved the absorbing of her grievous history, of trying to go forward when all this heaviness lies inside. One ancient mistake, one hour gone wrong, and now she pays and pays.

She’s a housewife, Larry’s mother, a maker of custard sauce, a knitter of scarves, a fervent keeper of baby pictures and family scrapbooks, but this is her real work: sorrowing, remembering. The loose shuttle of her pain flies back and forth so that sometimes she seems just fine, just like anyone else’s mother. Today she’s made Larry a lemon meringue pie for his birthday instead of a cake; she could have made it yesterday and kept it on the top shelf of the fridge just under the freezer section, but with her history she wouldn’t dream of taking a chance like that, and who could blame her? Her anxieties about food are built into the Weller family chronicle – as is Larry’s passion for lemon meringue pie. Dot makes her son a big one every year on his birthday, with a circle of birthday candles poking up through the golden-tipped meringue. A sight to behold.

There’ll be Lancashire hotpot too, that’s what’s bubbling away in the oven right now. It’s a simple oldtime recipe that Dot’s mother used to make on Saturday nights back in England: chunks of stewing lamb arranged across the bottom of a Pyrex casserole, then a layer of sliced potatoes, another of carrots, then more lamb, and all this topped with a handful of finely diced onions. Next you add plenty of salt, pepper, and parsley flakes, and a cup of Oxo, and bake covered for an hour and a half. Larry’s crazy about Lancashire hotpot, or at least he pretends he is, for the sake of his sad and perpetually grieving and remembering mother. Mum, he calls her; he always has. Americans say Mom or Ma. People in movies and books say Mother.

She’s set the dropleaf table in the living room for six, her best damask cloth and the good cutlery and china. There’ll be just the family, her loved ones, as she likes to call them, as though they were characters out of an obituary – her husband Stu, Larry, Dorrie, and little Ryan in his booster seat. Her daughter Midge is coming too, but here it is, almost time to sit down at the table, and she hasn’t turned up yet. Three years ago Midge kicked her husband out after receiving an anonymous note saying that Paul frequented a certain gay bar, and now she swears she’s never going to get married again. She says, with her eyes rolling upward, that she knew something was funny-bunny about him from day one.

Larry worries about his mum. She’s not getting out enough lately, hardly at all in fact, unless you call a trip to Sears’ mattress sale “getting out.” It also worries Larry that his mother frets so much about other people. She worries about Midge, that at the age of thirty-two she’s starting to get bitter, always sounding off like a regular women’s libber, and going on marches and so forth. She also worries about Larry and Dorrie, the way they’re half the time bickering, and Dorrie working full-time for Manitoba Motors instead of staying home with Ryan, who’s still in diapers at twenty-three months, and she worries about her husband who right this minute is in the bedroom putting on a clean sports shirt because she nagged him into it, and is in a bad mood. As a matter of fact, he’s done nothing but grumble all day, the heat, the mosquitoes, his lower back pain, not enough sugar in his afternoon coffee, the mess in the backyard because of the compost pile Larry’s talked him into, and now having to eat at the dropleaf table in the living room instead of the kitchen nook. So far he hasn’t even said happy birthday to Larry, to his own son.

She checks the oven, looks at the clock, glances out the kitchen window to see if Midge’s car is coming down the back lane. Where is that girl? Next she pours boiling water over the silver pie server in case of lurking germs, then sets it on a paper towel to dry. Immaculate. So’s the speckled linoleum. So is Dot’s cutlery drawer. In this house you would never see a tea-bag tossed wet and leaking into the sink, or a pile of coffee grounds. People who let a skin of mold accumulate on the hem of their shower curtain are not her kind of people. This is a woman who carries her meat home from the butcher’s and washes it at the sink. Larry is watching her rinse her hands under the tap, and at the same time he’s kicking his foot against the table leg the way he used to do when he was little. The upholstered breakfast nook where he sits has the wiped hygienic smell of on old marriage. He’s blowing a little tune into his empty beer bottle.

Is there room in the tilting, rotating world for a thirty-year-old man who sits blowing into a bottle? He thinks this, and so does his mother, who reaches over and takes it from him, not so much with an air of rebuke as with resolution, and places it under the counter. What deprivation, her expression asks, what injury has stalled her son at the age of thirty? Something’s been subtracted too soon, but what? And is it her fault?

Of course it’s her fault.

Worry, worry, a circle of worry. And these are her loved ones, these five. Her grumbling husband, her errant daughter, her baffling son, and in the living room her daughter-in-law Dorrie, whose neatness of body, whose sharpness of eye and chin and shoulder, is bent over the weekend paper, scouting the ads and cutting out dollars-off coupons, while little Ryan sits on the floor and plays with the paper scraps, tearing them into tiny flakes. This small and insufficient family. This is all Larry’s mother’s got to cushion her against the damage of her own life.

The history of Dot Weller, and how she killed her mother-in-law, came to Larry in small pieces, by installments as it were. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t know at least part of the story, and he’s not sure, in fact, if he’s ever been presented with a full account, start to finish, all at once.

In one of his mother’s albums there’s an old photograph of Larry himself taken at nine months. Little Larry wearing a white smocked nightgown is wedged into an old-fashioned wooden highchair which for some reason has been carried out of doors. Blurred trees and a suggestion of lawn fill in a background lit with a glare of ominous light that falls across the infant’s fine frizz of hair and on to the glossy wood of the chair. Can a head think when it’s that size? Can a baby’s face be this wise and unfoolable? His hands, which look like nothing so much as a pair of crimped shells, grip the edge of the highchair’s tray, and his expression is pulled into a knit of absorbed anguish. He can’t possibly know at this age, or can he, that a calamity has occurred in his mother’s life? And yet, the comprehending orbits of his soft eyes, the small roundness of his mouth, already hold a full level of bruising knowledge. He has a mother who cries in her sleep. A mother who’s missing the kind of cold, saving curiosity that would hold her steady after a tragic event and whose contagion of grief has spread to him. Through her milk, through her skin and fingertips.