Carol Shields - Unless

The observation that men won’t, if they can help it, sit in the middle seat of a sofa, but women don’t seem to care. In France it’s thought that menstruating women are incapable of making a good mayonnaise. No! Surely, not anymore. We discuss the public library crisis, since both Annette and I sit on the board. Has our old friend Gwen, now Gwendolyn Reidman, always been a lesbian or is this a discovery of her middle age? And will Cheryl Patterson, the librarian, marry Sam Sondhi, the dentist out at the mall? Art is a courtship device, Annette says, at least poetry is. We wonder if the innocence we are born with is real, and try to imagine a case in which it isn’t destined to be obliterated. What then?

Tom has asked me once or twice what it is we talk about on Tuesday mornings, but I just shake my head. It’s too rich to describe, and too uneven. Chit-chat, some people call it. We talk about our bodies, our vanities, our dearest desires. Of course the three of them know all about Norah being on the street; they comfort me and offer concern. A phase, Annette believes. A breakdown, thinks Sally. Lynn is certain the cause is physiological, glandular, hormonal. They all tell me that I must not take Norah’s dereliction as a sign of my own failure as a mother, and this, though I haven’t acknowledged it before, is a profound and always lurking fear. More than a fear — I believe it. They tell me it’s all right to be angry with Norah for giving up, but I can’t seem to find the energy for anger.

We know what we look like: four women in early middle age, hunched over a table in a small-town coffee shop, leaning forward, all of us, the way women do when they want to catch every word. Two years ago when I went to New York to receive the Offenden Prize, the three of them gave me a send-off gift of purple underpants in real silk. I wore these to the ceremony under my white wool suit, and all evening, every time I took a step this way or that, shaking hands and saying “Thank you for coming” and “Isn’t this astonishing,” I felt the rub of silk between my legs, and thought how fortunate I was to have such fine, loving friends.

Lynn, coming from Wales, calls underpants knickers, and now we all do. We love the sound of it. have been careful to give Alicia a few friends. It’s curious how friends get left out of novels, but I can see how it happens. Blame it on Hemingway, blame it on Conrad, blame even Edith Wharton, but the modernist tradition has set the individual, the con-flicted self, up against the world. Parents (loving or negligent) are admitted to fiction, and siblings (weak, envious, self-destructive) have a role. But the non-presence of friends is almost a convention — there seems no room for friends in a narrative already cluttered with event and the tortuous vibrations of the inner person. Nevertheless, I like to sketch in a few friends, in the hope they will provide a release from a profound novelistic isolation that might otherwise ring hollow and smell suspicious.

Alicia’s best friend is Linda McBeth. Linda, an art consultant who toils at the same magazine where Alicia works, had a role in My Thyme Is Up, and so she also appears in the sequel. The two women have side-by-side cubicles at work, and they go together to a yoga class every Thursday night, and then out for a drink. They talk and talk and sometimes get a little drunk. Linda has a weight problem. She has a man problem too, a lack-of-man problem, that is. She requires Alicia to reinforce her self-confidence. But she’s funny, gifted at her work, and highly perceptive when it comes to other people. “I don’t know about Roman,” she says to Alicia at one point. “He’s such a great guy, but sometimes he comes on just the tiniest bit kingly.”

“You mean sitting-on-a-throne kind of kingly?” Alicia asked.

“Yes,” Linda said. “He always seems to be sort of surveying his vast domain, if you know what I mean. And looking over the heads of his subjects, who are bowing down before him.”

“Hmm,” said Alicia. “Yes.”

Roman has a good friend too, I’ve seen to that. Michael Hammish will be best man at Roman and Alicia’s wedding, which is coming up soon, unless I do something quickly to prevent it. He was Roman’s roommate at Princeton, a slightly menacing stockbroker and weekend soccer player, married to the demure blonde Gretchen, who does publicity for the Wychwood Dance Company. Michael Hammish, who has hamlike thighs and big square mannish knees, has taken Roman aside and warned him about this marriage he’s about to enter. “If there’s anything you want to do, do it now, Roman, because once you’re married you haven’t a hope in hell, even married to a great woman like Alicia. Things get in the way, couple-type things. You’ll see. It happens all the time, it’s even happened to Gretch and me to a certain extent. But you’ve got a chance to think this over. You’ve been wanting for months to find out where your family comes from. I’ve noticed, I’ve taken note of it. Albania, Albania, that’s all you talk about. Take my advice, pal, and do it now. You won’t be getting another chance.”

Yet

Norah was accepted at McGill back in 1998. Of course she was, with her marks. There had never been any doubt about it. Our foolish worries were only a test of our certainty. The letter of acceptance glowed with welcome. But by then “the boyfriend” had come along, a twenty-two-year-old named Ben Abbot who was a second-year philosophy student at the University of Toronto. Of course that changed everything. She cancelled McGill, enrolled at Toronto, moved into a basement apartment off Bathurst with Ben, and opted for a major in modern languages. Good girl. After her mother’s heart.

But I worried: because she wasn’t under our roof any longer, like Natalie and Christine, and because I didn’t know if she was having a decent breakfast in the mornings and because she was having sex all the time with a person who had been a stranger a short while ago and who now was intimate with every portion of her body; just thinking of this brought on a siege of panic. First they were together a month, then six months, then a year, then a year and a half. I was beginning to get used to it. But not really, not completely. I recognized that I was one of those mothers who has difficulty with her child’s becoming a woman.

Almost through her second year, the first day of April, she was home for a weekend, drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table while I, snug in my warmest robe, stirred up some eggs for breakfast. The kitchen in this ancient house is exceptionally airy and bright, and I was reminded of all the mornings of Norah’s childhood when she sat here at the window overlooking the bare brown winter woods, eating her buttered toast and chattering about the day ahead. She had been wakened in those days with a buzz from her own small wind-up alarm clock, a gift for her tenth birthday, something she had particularly asked for. Being woken by an alarm clock one has set for oneself was a sign of maturity, she believed, and she was anxious, perhaps, as the oldest child in the family, the big sister of Natalie and Christine, about maturity — what it meant and how she could get there fast. More important than being good and pleasing and adorable was the wish, early in her life, to be mature. That little plastic clock became a part of her perpetualism, a doctrine, as in the Church, of everlastingness. She took it with her to camp as a child, and then she carried it back and forth in her backpack to the basement apartment in Toronto where she and her boyfriend lived. Had she set the alarm last night?

Yes, probably she had, even just coming home to Orangetown for the weekend — and here she was, awake — while Tom and the other girls were barely stirring upstairs. No one asked her to be this intense; no such demands were ever made on her by anyone other than herself.