Carol Shields - Unless

This will explain my despondency, and why I am burbling out my feelings to you. I am a forty-four-year-old woman who was under the impression that society was moving forward and who carries the memory of a belief in wholeness. Now, suddenly, I see it from the point of view of my nineteen-year-old daughter. We are all trying to figure out what’s wrong with Norah. She won’t work at a regular job. She’s dropped out of university, given up her scholarship. She sits on a curbside and begs. Once a lover of books, she has resigned from the act of reading, and believes she is doing this in the name of goodness. She has no interest in cults, not in cultish beliefs or in that particular patronizing cultish nature of belonging. She’s too busy with her project of self-extinction. It’s happening very slowly and with much grief, but I’m finally beginning to understand the situation. My daughter Christine grinds her teeth at night, which is a sign of stress. Another daughter, Natalie, chews her nails. Women are forced into the position of complaining and then needing comfort. What Norah wants is to belong to the whole world or at least to have, just for a moment, the taste of the whole world in her mouth. But she can’t. So she won’t.

Yours, Renata Winters, The Orangery, Wychwood City

Hence

My daughter is living like a vagabond on the streets of Toronto, but even so I had to have four yards of screened bark mulch delivered to the house this morning, $141.91, including haulage. The last weeding’s done in the garden, and now we’ll spread this dark woody-smelling stuff between the shrubs and perennials, raking it as evenly as we can, inhaling the slightly unnatural scent, which is pitched halfway between rot and freshness. By spring it will have worked its way into the soil, all the splintery bits reduced to fine dust.

This thought brings on a metaphor blitz that cracks my head in two, so I get rid of it in my usual way. Think of something else, do something else. Immediately.

I wrote a cheque for the deliveryman, a boy, really, with a fine face and lovely straight teeth. I’ve been too preoccupied to pay attention to the calendar lately, and I had to ask him to remind me of the date.

“It’s my birthday,” he beamed. “I’m twenty-eight today.”

“That’s a good age,” I said, for what else really was there to say?

“Yeah, I think so,” he agreed. Mr. Amiability. “I’m hoping they’ll take me on regular.” He nodded in the direction of his truck. “Then I can quit my night job delivering the National Post and that’ll make it easier to see my girlfriend, who’s out in Lake Inlet, and then we can think about getting married and having a family, yeah.”

I could see, if I had nodded or smiled, that he would tell me everything, every little wavelet of thought that lapped between his ears and kept him alive. What power I had over him; I could turn him on and off like a radio; it shamed me somewhat. He stood, his arms crossed over his chest, bursting with his life chronicle and the importance of this particular day to him and how much he hoped for — which was really so little, so pathetically little. It wasn’t until he was walking back to the truck that I noticed something wrong with his legs; they twisted inward, kneeing together oddly, producing a bounce instead of a smooth stride.

“Have yourself a good one,” he called back to me in his outrageously happy voice.

Tom and I spread the mulch late in the afternoon. The clean look of it was pleasing, as though we’d done the earth a good deed. We stopped and observed the tussle of dark and light on the few remaining leaves, and then went together into the warm, orderly kitchen, which seemed like a rebuke of some kind. We had failed in our effort to live our happy life. Never mind our careful arrangements, we were about to be defeated. This despite the sweet burnt-tomato smell of lasagna rising from the oven. Chris was playing the piano in the living room, Mozart, absorbed for once in the music’s deepening repetitions. Natalie was sprawled on the floor in front of the TV in jeans. Tom settled down on the chair next to her, and Pet, who willingly serves as a footstool, seemed to be saying: isn’t this heaven! — why isn’t it like this all the time? They were watching the six-o’clock news, not avidly, not with eagerness, but attentively enough. They were amiable and groggy. Natalie regarded the screen with her where-have-all-the-flowers-gone? look, while Tom actually registered what was being announced. A federal election had been called at the insistence of the prime minister, and this tiny election news, not unexpected, fluttered alongside the immensity of the Gore-Bush dance in the States. “I don’t like him anymore,” Natalie said lazily from the floor. Jean Chrétien, she means. She spoke with an astringency that was almost asexual. “Pompous. A kronkhead.”

Chris in the next room launched into another round of Mozart, knowing that any minute she’d be called to set the dinner table and wanting me to know that she was more usefully employed getting prepared for her lesson tomorrow. I checked the oven and set the table.

Seven o’clock. I reached in the oven and removed the foil from the lasagna, then shut the red kitchen curtains, which is my signal to my mother-in-law next door to put on her coat and walk up the hill and across the leaf-strewn lawn for dinner. She takes her evening meals with us, and we have used the curtain signal for close to twenty years. She’ll be watching from her darkened sunroom, waiting patiently, her nose already powdered, a dash of lipstick applied, her bladder emptied, her house keys in her pocket, and it will take her exactly four minutes to travel the hundred yards uphill to our back door, which I leave unlocked. Why do I have red curtains in my kitchen? Because Simone de Beauvoir loved red curtains; because Danielle Westerman loves red curtains out of respect for Beauvoir, and I love them because of Danielle. They serve, when nothing else quite does, as the sign of home and comfort, ease, companionability, food and drink and family.

I set the steaming lasagna on the table along with a green salad in my mother’s old mahogany bowl from Brazil, that time she and my father had attended a conference in São Paulo — when was that? Back in the early seventies when I was young, left alone with Aunt Judy. “Dinner,” I called. And then, louder: “Dinner!”

They are well trained. Mozart faded at once with a spill down the keyboard. Grandma Winters came through the door bearing an apple crumble for dessert. She shed her good fall coat, sighing, and, as usual lately, gave no word of greeting. The TV died, and we all sat down together, Chris with a baseball cap on backwards as though she were intent on driving her grandmother mad.

We were in the midst of family love; I breathed it in gratefully, despite its mixture of disorder and unreckoning. On this fall evening I had lit candles in the dining room, and we were sitting down as though we were an ordinary family, as if our small planet was on course, as though the seasons would continue, autumn about to move into winter, and outdoors the new mulch, like a coat of fleece, protecting and warming the ground. Snow was forecast even though it’s only October.

Natalie, always one to take responsibility for dinnertime silences even though she’s the youngest, was chattering about her history teacher, Mr. Glaven, who announced to the class today that he was gay. “Big fat surprise,” she said, “as though we didn’t have an inkling.”

“Oh, him,” Chris said. “We knew he was gay two years ago.” Grandma Winters blinked, and then attacked her lasagna, carrying soft forkfuls of food straight into her mouth. She is proud of her appetite but would never say so. What has she eaten today? Toast and coffee for breakfast and toast and tea for lunch. No wonder she has an appetite at the end of the day.