The Stone Diaries: Pulitzer Prize Winner By Carol Shields - 9

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sorrow, 1965

1965 was the year Mrs. Flett fell into a profound depression.

It happened overnight, more or less. Her family and friends stood by helplessly and watched while her usual self-composed nature collapsed into bewilderment, then withdrawal, and then a splattery anger that seemed to feed on injury. She was unattractive during this period. Despair did not suit her looks. Goodness cannot cope with badness—it’s too good, you see, too stupidly good. A person unable to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time and whose eating patterns are disordered—this type of person soon dwindles into bodily dejection—you’ve seen such people, and so has Mrs. Flett, shambling along the edges of public parks or seated under hairdryers. Their facial skin drags downward. Their clothes hang on them unevenly and look always in need of a good sprucing up. You want to rush up to these lost souls and offer comfort, but there’s an off-putting aura of failure about them, almost a smell.

The spring and summer of 1965—those were terrible months for Mrs. Flett, as she slid day by day along a trajectory that began in resignation, then hardened into silence, then leapt to a bitter and blaming estrangement from those around her, her children and grandchildren, her many good friends and acquaintances.

What was it that changed Mrs. Flett so utterly?

The phenomenon of menopause will probably leap to mind, but no. Daisy Flett is fifty-nine years old in 1965, almost sixty, and her hormonal structure, never particularly volatile—according to some—has been steady as a clock—according to others—since her forty-ninth birthday. Nor does she appear to be suffering from “delayed mourning,” as some of her family would have it. She remembers her dear sweet Barker fondly, of course she does, she honors his memory, whatever that means; and she thinks of him, smilingly, every single time she rubs a dab of Jergens Lotion into the palms of her hands, floating herself back to the moment—a very private moment, she will not discuss it with anyone, though she records it here—in which he had extolled her smooth-jointed fingers, comparing them to wonderful flexible silken fish.

Fish? A startling idea; it took her by surprise; at the time she hadn’t completely warmed to the likeness, yet she apprehended, at least, her husband’s courageous lurching toward poetry. But does she actually pine for this dead partner of hers? For the calmness offered up by the simple weariness of their love? How much of her available time bends backward into the knot of their joined lives, those twenty connubial years?

To be honest, very little. There, I’ve said it.

Her present sinking of spirit, the manic misrule of her heart and head, the foundering of her reason, the decline of her physical health—all these stem from some mysterious suffering core which those around her can only register and weigh and speculate about.

Alice’s Theory

Something happened to me. At age nineteen I was on the verge of becoming a certain kind of person, and then I changed, and went in another direction.

The self is not a thing carved on entablature. Not long ago I read—probably in the Sunday papers—about an American woman who got up one morning and started practicing a new kind of handwriting, sloping all her letters backwards instead of forwards, concentrating on smaller and denser loops. It was almost like drawing. She wrote her name a dozen times in this variant way. She wrote out the preamble to the Constitution and then the Gettysburg Address, and by noon she had become someone else.

The change that happened to me went deeper than penmanship and far, far beyond such superficialities as a new hairstyle or dietary regime—although I did at age nineteen decide to let my hair grow long, which was not a popular style in the mid-fifties, and I did give up meat and white sugar and the smoking of cigarettes.

It was summertime. I had just returned after my first year away at college. It was the first morning back, in fact, and I woke up early in our family’s large, quiet, shabby Ottawa house and looked straight up at the ceiling where there was a long circular crack shaped like the hunch in an old crone’s back, high and rounded at the top, then tapering down. That selfsame crack had been there ever since I could remember, since earliest childhood. It was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing at night, this menacing inscription in plaster that roofed me over with dread.

Not that I feared the witchlike configuration, good Christ no—I knew perfectly well that such anthropomorphizing is fanciful and solipsistic; I also knew that other people, happier people, might see a river instead of a diseased spine, or a map of a buried subcontinent or, with a little imagination, a mountain topped by a Chinese pagoda, in turn topped by a knob of whipped cream. We see what we want to see. Our perceptions fly straight out of our deepest needs, this much you learn in Introductory Psych, a required course at my college. No, what I dreaded about the ceiling crack was its persistence. That it was always there. Determined to accompany me. To be a part of me.

I dragged the stepladder up from the basement, hoping it would reach. (The ceilings in that old house of ours were ridiculously high.) On a shelf in the garden shed I found a box of plasterer’s putty and mixed myself up a large sticky batch which I spread the length of the ceiling crack, using a spatula from the kitchen drawer, and moving the ladder forward foot by foot. I’d never done this kind of work before, but I read the directions on the box carefully and made a neat job of it. I’ve always been exceptionally neat.

“Very neat presentation” was what my professors wrote on the bottoms of my term papers, also “well focused” and “full of verve.”

In half an hour the plaster was dry, and I sanded it smooth, letting the fine grains drift down on top of my head and into my face, breathing in the chalky dust, tasting it on my tongue. I did not find the sensation disagreeable, quite the contrary. By four o’clock that afternoon I had painted the entire ceiling, using a roller attached to an extension handle, and just before going to bed that night I gave the whole thing a second coat.

Then I lay down in the dark, possibly a little drunk from the heavy latex fumes that swirled downward and converged in midair with a mad proleptic wafting up of happiness. Sleep came quickly; I welcomed it; I was eager for morning; I wanted to wake up to the early light and observe, freshly, the transformation I had brought about.

This really happened. This event, this revelation! Not one of the various members of my family raised the least objection to my determination to repair and paint my bedroom ceiling. No one even challenged me as to why I needed the ladder, why I was scrounging around in the shed for a paint roller, whether this act of mine was a momentary whim or a charged metaphoric gesture. This surprised me, the general air of permission. My mother, of course, was preoccupied with the weekly gardening column she was writing for the local newspaper (Mrs. Green Thumb was the byline she used). My younger brother and sister looked on with interest, perhaps even a tincture of envy—why hadn’t they thought of improving their ceilings!—and Cousin Beverly, who had moved in with us a year earlier, gave me a hand spreading newspapers on the carpet and some useful advice about how to reach into the difficult corner angles. As for my father, had he still been alive, he might have discouraged me from assigning myself a dull and messy task, particularly on my first day home, though I can’t help thinking he would have understood the impulse driving me forward.

In one day I had altered my life: my life, therefore, was alterable.

This simple axiom did not cry out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin; I could feel its pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination, and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own will. My eyes would open in the morning to a smooth white field of possibility. The ceiling that had taunted me was shrunk now to a memory of a memory. It wasn’t just that I had covered it over. I had erased it. It was as though it had never existed.

I next made up my mind to grow kind. I was not a kind person, but I believed I could learn.

First I burned my old diaries in the fireplace and also the letters I had written home during my year away at college, letters full of gush and artifice. My mother caught me at this, and expressed concern. You may regret it, she said, you may want to look back and see what you were like at ten or twelve or sixteen years of age.

But I knew I wouldn’t need the diaries or letters to prod my remembrance. I had grown up a mean, bossy little kid. I was selfish.

I liked to hurt people’s feelings. I addressed my sister, Joan, as Miss Sneakypants and my brother, Warren, as Pimplenose. I ordered Cousin Beverly around as though she were an indentured servant and complained about the way her little girl cried in her early months; it was only colic, but I managed to suggest she was being mishandled or maybe there was brain damage or something.

I was forever clipping out dieting articles for my mother and reading them aloud to her in a cool disingenuous voice, and invariably I referred to the newspaper she wrote for as “that parochial rag.” I remember the way I was. People like to think of memory as a lowlying estuary, but my memories of myself are more like a ruffed-up lake, battering against the person I became. A nice person. A thoughtful person.

I paid attention; I listened hard to the motor clicking on and off in my head; it was like doing beads, it was very intricate work. I entered the summer of 1956 a girl and came out a woman. Women, I learned, needed to be bloody, but they didn’t need to be mean.

The reverberations in my family were surprisingly minor, like the offhand ringing of distant chimes—as though all these years I’d been given the benefit of the doubt: Alice’s gained in maturity, they said. Alice’s a real young lady now. Alice’s come into her own.

Alice’s calmed down. Alice’s got rid of that chip on her shoulder, come down off her high horse, lost her rough edges. But then Alice always was a lump of butter underneath, wasn’t she? Why, she’s turned out to be a regular darling. Oh, you can count on Alice, you always could.

Well!

Here is a diagram of our family structure before and after my father’s death.

Before he departed (brain tumor, malignant) we were such a sweet little family: two loving parents and three healthy children.

Our father was Director of the Agricultural Institute where his work on hybrid grains was universally recognized (honorary degrees from Guelph and the University of Iowa), and after his retirement, never one to be idle, he wrote a weekly horticultural column for the Ottawa Recorder. My mother was a full twenty-three years younger than my father; that age-gap became her hobby and profession, being a young wife to an older husband—it kept her girlish, made her a kind of tenant in the tower of girlhood.

There she remained, safe, looked after. She stayed home and looked after her children and sewed and cleaned the house—even though she could have afforded help—and did the garden. That garden of hers, it functioned like a kind of trope in her daily life, and in ours too. She made suppers—roasted meat, boiled vegetables, pies and puddings or molded Jello things for dessert. These meals were planned, they didn’t just happen. Our family sat down at a table that was set. My mother was always concocting new centerpieces, she was part of that mid-century squadron of women who believed in centerpieces. We children had agreeable table manners. We kept our voices low. Always, after the dishes, Joanie and Warren and I got down to our homework without reminding.

We took piano lessons on Wednesday evening from a woman named Myrna Rassmussen, the Royal Raspberry we called her behind her back—and the mildness of this epithet says a lot about who we were and what we were capable of. On Saturdays we went for family walks—no one else we knew went for family walks—and were taught by our parents, but unobtrusively, how to identify the various shrubs, trees, plants, and flowers that grew in our neighborhood or in the woods of the Experimental Farm.

After my father died—and even during the months following his diagnosis—things changed fast. Supper was late, or else early.

Sometimes it was served in the kitchen instead of the dining room, and we had things like corned beef hash out of a can or toasted cheese sandwiches. My mother never seemed to take her apron off, we had to remind her or she would have dashed out of the house like that. She got way behind on the vacuuming. Everything.

Even her beloved African violets dried up, even her ferns. Part of this household neglect can be explained by grief or disorientation, that would be only natural, but something else occurred to create all this change. A mere two months after my father’s funeral, our mother took over the horticultural column at the Recorder, becoming Mrs. Green Thumb. She was, suddenly, a different person, a person who worked. Who worked “outside the home,” as people said in those quaint days, though, in fact, she did her writing under our own roof, and mailed her column into the paper, walking down to the corner of Torrington Crescent on Wednesday afternoon to pop it into the mail box in time for the Saturday paper. Whether the editor of the Recorder invited her to take on the column or whether she volunteered I have never known, but all of a sudden there she was, sitting at a desk in a corner of the living room, our father’s old desk, laboring over her articles, scratching away with her ballpoint pen, looking up occasionally and rubbing her forehead like someone scouring her senses for an answer that would please her readers’ sensibility but remain faithful to botanical truth. Sometimes she would rise, drift over to the window for a moment, then return to the desk, settling her widening hips comfortably in her chair, ready to begin again. It appeared she had a knack for this kind of writing. It surprised everyone. It was as though she had veered, accidentally, into her own life.

Then Cousin Beverly from Saskatchewan arrived on the train, six months pregnant, big as a barn, and moved into the storeroom on the third floor. The plan was that Beverly was going to put the baby up for adoption, but this never happened. The subject was not raised. Victoria was born, a beautiful full-term baby, and she just stayed on with the family. She slept in a basket in my room at first, but then Beverly turned the downstairs sunroom into a nursery, papering over the old ivy pattern with lambs and milkmaids.

All this happened fast. In 1954 we were a nice ordinary family, Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett and their three tractable children.

Then—it seemed like a lightning flash had hit our house—there was just one parent (distracted, preoccupied) and an unwed mother and a baby with colic and three teenagers: devious Joan, sullen Warren, and mean-hearted Alice.

You’d have thought my mother would be wildly unsettled by all this, but you would be wrong. She let the chaos that hit our household in 1955 roll right over her like a big friendly engulfing wave.

She came bobbing to the surface, her round face turned upward to the sunlight, happy.

Not that we didn’t grieve for my father.

He was a tall, hunched, good-looking man who, right into his seventies, kept his thick head of hair. This hair he combed straight back from his forehead in an oddly continental manner. His brow was smoothly polished, white, stony, and clean. He had a breadth of neck that took well to a collar and tie, but his long arms and legs and his rather lumbering rectitude reminded you that he had once been a country boy, raised in rural Manitoba, born in another century. Despite his gentleness, his patience, I had found him an embarrassing father, too polite, too given to clearing his throat, too uncomfortable in his body, too old, much too old, but when he died I missed him.

My mother missed him too. In the days immediately following his funeral she went slack and heavy as though she were gasping for air through an impermeable membrane, her history, her marriage, everything gone down the chute. But then, presto, she became Mrs. Green Thumb. Her old self slipped off her like an oversized jacket.

For years now she has sat down at her desk every morning, still wearing her robe and slippers, writing out her column in longhand, a first draft, then a second, then a third, and then checking over Cousin Beverly’s typed copy. Her rusty-gray frizz fluffs out over her forehead and ears—sometimes she brushes her hair before settling down to work and sometimes she doesn’t. She gets lost in what she’s doing and doesn’t even hear the phone ringing; none of us ever guessed she had this power of absorption. She’ll do, say, the propagation of lobelia one week and how to air-layer your rubber plant the next. When she isn’t actually writing, she’s answering mail from her readers—she averages at least twenty letters a week—or else she’s thinking up ideas or filing away gardening information in my father’s old filing cabinet. She’s done this for nine whole years, but now, suddenly, it’s over.

She’s lost her job. A man named Pinky Fulham has taken over the column, and my mother, fifty-nine years old, has been given the heave-ho. She got her walking papers. She’s been fired—and thrown into a despair deeper and sharper and wider than she ever suffered over her husband’s death or her children’s misbehavior.

A year ago she was sitting at that desk with her hair buzzing around her head like something alive and her pen scrambling across the paper. She was Mrs. Green Thumb, that well-known local personage, and now she’s back to being Mrs. Flett again. She knew, for a brief while, what it was like to do a job of work. The shaping satisfaction. The feel of a typescript folded into an envelope. And then the paycheck arriving in the mail. Now she’s like some great department store of sadness with its displays of rejection and inattention and wide silent reflecting windows, out of business, the padlock on the door.

I live thousands of miles away in England—Hampstead to be precise—but I’ve left my darling husband Ben for three whole weeks, also our two little sprogs, Benje and Judy, and I’ve come all the way home to see how matters stand. I find my mother seated in the garden, gripping the arms of a wicker chair, her chin oddly dented and old, her mouth round, helpless, saying, “I can’t get used to this. I can’t get over this.”

Fraidy Hoyt’s Theory

You don’t expect Alice Flett Downing to believe in her mother’s real existence, do you?

It’s true she loves her mother, and true she’s a good daughter—didn’t she come all this way across the drink to try to jolly her out of her current state of the blues? The trouble is, Alice doesn’t know where to begin. In a curious, ironic way, she hasn’t known her mother long enough, hasn’t known her the way I’ve known her, since childhood in Bloomington, Indiana, when we were two eleven-year-old brats in pigtails—well, in point of fact, I was the one in pigtails and Daze had the naturally curly hair. Which she hated—Lord!—an ambulatory fuzzball, she called herself. Later, when the poodle-cut came into fashion, she was grateful, but by that time, the late forties, she was living up in Canada, married to a man named Barker Flett and the mother of three children, the oldest being Alice.

Alice can’t help herself, she’s got this fixation on work. She’s not like young girls were in our era, wavering between convention and fits of rebellion; she has serious interests of her own about which she is sometimes a little sententious. She’s twenty-eight years old, you’d think she’d be out there with the flower children, wouldn’t you, mooning about peace and love, and lolling around in public places, strumming a guitar and smoking grass and letting her life go sweetly to hell. But no, she’s got herself properly married to a teeny-weenie professor of economics, she lives in a little fairytale English house, she’s produced two perfect babes, and she’s published a moderately successful book called Chekhov’s Imagination and is working on another that explores Chekhov’s feminine side—this new project she’s outlined for me in a letter tucked into her Christmas card. That’s another thing about Alice:

she sends Christmas cards; she has a compulsion to hold her farflung family and friends in a tight embrace, and her charity extends to her mother’s old girlhood pals, chiefly myself and Labina Greene Dukes, who has recently moved down to Florida and who once described Alice to me as Her Holy Miss Righteousness.

Alice addresses me in her little notes and cards as “Aunt” Fraidy, and in that aunt-ish salutation I read proprietorial claims.

Also benevolent respect. Also love. The last time I saw her was at little Judy’s christening in Ottawa—that’s one more odd bump on Alice’s psyche: she’s an agnostic who nevertheless christens her children; she actually brings them across the Atlantic Ocean to be anointed by pure and holy Canadian water in the presence of pure and impure family and friends. Ceremony, she says, is society’s cement; ceremony paints large our sketchiest impulses; ceremony forms the seal between the cerebrum and cerebellum. Alice has a theory about every bush and button and human gesture, sometimes several theories.

After Judy’s ecclesiastical sprinkling in that wonderful Ottawa garden, Alice and I stood with our glasses of bubbly and had a good jabber about The Feminine Mystique. I could tell she was surprised I’d read it. Like many young people she believes we elderly types have long since shut down our valves and given way to flat acquiescence about the future. Her eyes widened when I began taking issue with Betty Friedan’s exaltation of work as salvation. “We are our work!” Alice cried. “Work and self cannot be separated.”

Oh, dear. I opened my mouth to protest.

“Look at my mother,” Alice interrupted, lowering her voice, but not quite low enough, and gesturing toward the blooming lilac where Daze was standing in a circle of friends, her body widened out now to a powerful size eighteen, little Judy nestled in the crook of her arm. “Before my mother became a newspaper columnist she had no sense of self-worth whatsoever. Whatsoever! Really, when you think about it, she functioned like a kind of slave in our society. She was unpaid. Undervalued. She was nobody. Now look at her. She’s become”—here Alice groped for words, waving her hand toward the nodding lilacs—”she’s become, you know, like a real person.”

Work is work, I wanted to tell Alice, and don’t I know it. Work’s not just sitting in the corners of shadowy libraries and producing beautiful little monographs every couple of years. It’s the alarm clock going off on winter mornings when it’s dark and cold and you’ve forgotten to iron the green blouse that goes with the gray suit and the car’s not working right and you can’t afford to get it fixed this month because it’s been four years since the Official Board of the Monroe County Art Gallery thought of increasing your salary or even dropping you a word of praise, and on top of that there are whole mornings when no one comes into the gallery at all or if they do they stand around griping about the exhibitions and giggle and smirk at the abstracts, letting you know their kindergarten darlings could do just as well with a pot of fingerpaint, and furthermore (hem, hem) it’s taxpayers who support this kind of thing when what people really like, only they’re too damned intimidated to say so, is a nice landscape, fields and sky and a horizon line that looks like a horizon line for God’s sake. And what else?

Well, there are meetings with the board and the books to balance and the publicity that somehow always misfires and the fund drives that peter out and the misplaced grant applications and the catalogues coming back late from the printers, and the crazies who phone at all hours and beg you to take just one little peek at their portfolio, you owe it, you owe them, who the hell are you anyway but a glorified clerk.

And then—lately anyway, since Mel left—it’s home to a glass of bourbon and a scrambled egg, or maybe stopping by at the library to see what new they’ve got in, and going to bed early because you’ve got a splitting headache and sometimes just before closing your eyes you think about your old pal Daze up there in Canada with her kids and her days to herself, how she bustles along at her own speed, spreading the gospel of Good Housekeeping far and wide and getting her rewards through the accomplishments of others who will certainly crown her with laurels and tell her how grateful they are, in retrospect, that she was a real mother, that she wasn’t out working her tail off for the holy dollar like her old pal, Fraidy Hoyt of Bloomington, Indiana.

Well, once in a while a family has to surrender itself to an outsider’s account. A family can get buried in its own fairy dust, and this leads straight, in my opinion, to the unpacking of lies and fictions from its piddly shared scraps of inbred history. With the Fletts, for instance, the work ethic has always been writ large.

Barker and his hybrid grains. Alice and her Russians. Warren and his music. Joanie and her—whatever the hell it is she does down there in New Mexico—and so it’s only natural that they should attribute Daze’s breakdown to the loss of her newspaper column. I thought as much myself for the first month or so, but gradually I’ve come to believe that the forfeiting of her “job” was only a trigger that released a terrible yearning she’s been suppressing all her life.

Sex is what I’m referring to, what else?

Not that Daze and I ever discuss sex. Well, not for a long time anyway, not since we were young girls trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the copulative act: how long did it last? How much did it hurt? Were you supposed to talk at the same time you were doing it, whisper little endearments and so on? What did a “climax” feel like and how could you be sure you had it or not, and why did it matter anyway, and was it cheating to pretend you did even if you didn’t? That kind of thing.

Then suddenly it became lèse-majesté to discuss our sexual lives.

I think we both wanted to; each of us, when we got together, made a few clumsy gestures in that direction, but we never managed to find any common footing. There’s too much space between us, too much disproportion, you might say. Our awful imbalance.

Daze with her plodding Barker, that epicene presence—and perhaps, or perhaps not, a brief flutter with an editor at her paper, Jay Dudley his name was, who ended up a regular shit, handing her job over to someone else like a king anointing a new lord—well, that sums up Daze’s erotic experience, about one and a half bean sprouts by my count. And on the other side of the fence, here I sit with my fifty-three lovers, possibly fifty-four. I’ve been on the side of noise, nerve, movement, and thanking my lucky stars too, and raising a toast to my army of fifty-four—that’s how I see them, a small, smartly marching army with the sun shining on their beautiful heads and shoulders.

I’ve kept track. This is possibly a perverse admission, that I possess a little pocket diary in which I’ve made note of dates, initials, geographical reference points and coded particulars, going back to 1927, such as duration, position, repetition, degree of response, and the like.

My “phantom” fifty-fourth lover was encountered just weeks ago on a train to Ottawa, no names exchanged, only a pair of ragged weepy histories. We had both drunk too much bourbon in the club car, the hour was late, and we may or may not have made love before we passed out, the two of us drearily naked on the coarse blanket of my lower berth. I have an impression of a rosy, pleated male belly pushing against me. I have a recollection, like a black-and-white movie, that we were noisy, that we made a spectacle of ourselves. He was gone—thank God—when I opened my eyes in the morning. And my body, my sixty-year-old body (Christ!), was unwilling to report what had happened, other than a soreness “down there” that could have been anything, a dryness that puzzled. A question mark went into the diary instead of the usual data. In that question mark I read the possible end of my erotic life. Something to do with shame, though I won’t yet admit it.

What do women want, Freud asked. The old fool, the charlatan.

He knew what women wanted. They wanted nothing. Nothing was good enough. Everyone knew that. Everyone but me.

The reason I was on my way to Ottawa was to offer consolation to an old friend in distress. She had written to me telling me not to come, that she had her niece Beverly to look after her, that she was not fit company at the moment, but of course I went anyway. I thought, wrongly, that I could carry her back to sunnier times, dredging up old stories, foolish or sentimental or touching on some spring of affection between us. And I believed we might, after a few days, open up this forbidden topic of sex, letting our thoughts out loose and fresh.

There comes a time, I’ve seen it happen, when women offer to decode themselves. All of Alice’s shrewd sympathy would be nothing compared to a moment’s shared revelation between old pals.

The self is curved like space, I tried to say to my girlhood friend, and human beings can come around again and again to the sharpness of early excitations. The sexual spasm, despite its hideous embarrassments and inconvenience, is the way we enter the realm of the ecstatic. The only way. It’s a far darker and more powerful force than we dreamed back when we were girls chattering on about “climaxes” and saline douches. I wanted to tell her about Professor Popkov who was my first seducer, about Georgio with his endless sportive variations (The Royal Gonad, I called him), about poor Mel who lasted only four years before drifting off in his wispy way. I intended to hold nothing back, not even my pitiable little encounter on the train. I persuaded myself that an open confrontation would dislodge whatever it is that has shut off Daze’s happiness and made her into a crazy woman.

But the week was a disaster. She would not be coaxed out of her dark bedroom; she lay flat on her back, her neck and shoulder muscles in painful contraction and her queenly pounds dropping away one after the other. “Don’t make me pretend to be lively,” she said to me once when I brought her a lunch tray. “It takes too much effort.”

I went home to Bloomington and wrote her a note of monstrous good cheer. About the future. The sun breaking through. The joy of future generations. On and on.

A week later an envelope came addressed in her writing. No note, only my little pocket diary with its cryptic entries. I must have dropped it on the carpet when I was closing my suitcase.

Cousin Beverly’s Theory

Ten years ago back in Saskatchewan I got myself into hot water. It wasn’t enough that I was a divorced woman, and, boy oh boy, that was a real crime back then, let me tell you, but worse was to come.

Two short years after I kicked my husband Jerry out (a drinker from Day One), I got boinked by Leonard Mazurkiewich who worked in the pickling plant (married, natch) whose idea of lovemaking was—well, I get the willies just thinking about it—but anyway it wasn’t worth it, three minutes of grunt and bad breath, and, bingo, there I was in the family way.

I would have gone to Calgary but I was too scared. Imagine, me scared, me who served with the WRENS during the war, way over there in Britain. Bombs and everything. I lived through that. I was full of courage when I was young. And then I came home to Saskatchewan at the end of the war and the puff just went out of me.

There was Jerry, hounding me to get married. And my parents.

And my sisters. Everyone. Somehow they tore me apart, it happened fast. The funny thing about being married to Jerry was not being able to get pregnant no matter what kind of stunts we got up to. Ha!—and after one midnight roll with Leonard Mazurkiewich, just one, I was up a stump. Some girls will turn to suicide when they get themselves in a fix like that, but I never thought of it for one minute, the reason being I could still shut my eyes when I wanted and remember what I was like over there in Britain, how brave and full of pep I could be—this picture would light up for me like something on a calendar or in a movie, the way I was, and I thought maybe I could get it back, only I couldn’t, not if I committed suicide, that’s for sure.

Aunt Daisy in Ottawa took me in. I was one of the family. She let me paint the storeroom in the attic pink and white and put up curtains—my own private bedroom, no one to muck things up, and later, after Victoria was born, she said, “Why don’t you fix up the downstairs sunroom for the baby?” and I did.

Victoria Louise weighed eight and a half pounds at birth which is amazing when you think I only weigh ninety-eight myself, being skinny like the Flett side of the family and also short like my mom’s side. She was a real good baby after she got through the colicky period. She was born with this gorgeous soft yellow hair. Now she’s nine years old and what a doll! Thank God, I didn’t put her out for adoption the way I planned. I look after her, make her clothes myself, go to the school meetings and talk to her teacher, all that stuff, and make her pipe down at home so she won’t get on Aunt Daisy’s nerves. I also take care of the housework here, do most of the family cooking, and earn a little extra on the side typing insurance policies. And lately I’ve been nursing Aunt Daisy who’s suffering from nervous prostration.

Myself, I don’t think it’s her change of life that’s done it, or her allergies either. I think it’s the kids who’ve got her down. Being a widow she feels extra responsible, I can understand that, and then again some people are just natural worriers. She used to worry about her daughter Alice who has this way of coming on strong—whew, does she ever! Then she worried for a time about Warren, who was a nice kid but sort of a drip. He had this real bad acne growing up and that made him kind of shy and drippy, but the thing is, after a certain age, no one’s really a drip any more, they’re just kind of sweet or else “individualistic.” That’s something I’ve noticed. Nowadays Warren’s a regular young man—his skin’s a whole lot improved too—and he’s down there in Rochester, New York, getting his master’s degree in music theory, first in his class, the Gold Medal. Aunt Daisy was planning to go down for the graduation, she even bought herself a darling little pillbox hat, kelly green, but now that’s out. She can hardly lug herself out of bed, she just lays there in the dark and cries a whole lot and scrunches up the sheet in her hands, just wrings those sheets like she’s wringing someone’s neck. I think it’s Joan she’s worried about now, little Joanie, the family princess, spoiled rotten, but smart as a whip, only now she’s smoking dope and doing I don’t know what, whatever hippies get up to. She says she’s selling jewelry down there in New Mexico, but I bet my bottom dollar she’s selling more than that. Well, it’s breaking her mother’s heart. It kills me to see it.

Aunt Daisy saved my life, that’s no exaggeration, giving Victoria and me a home, and now I want to save hers, only she’s the only one who can do that. A person can make herself sick and that same person has to will herself to get well again, that’s my personal theory.

Warren’s Theory

My mother’s an educated woman but you’d never know it. She has a degree in Liberal Arts from Long College for Women, class of 1926, but ask her where her diploma is and she’ll just give a shrug.

Once I came across a cardboard box up in the storeroom—this was when we were cleaning up so Cousin Beverly could move in—and in the box was a thick pile of essays my mother wrote back when she was a student. One of the essays was titled: “Camillo Cavour:

Statesman and Visionary.” I couldn’t believe that my mother had ever heard of Camillo Cavour (I certainly hadn’t) or that she could write earnestly, even passionately, about an obscure period of nineteenth-century Italian history. The ink after all these years was still clear and bright—those were her loops and dashes, her paragraphs and soaring conclusion. Italians everywhere owe a huge debt to this monolithic hero who battled for the rights of his countrymen and …

Where did it go, my mother’s intellectual ease and energy? She has never once, that any of us can remember, mentioned the subject of Italian independence to her family. Or the nineteenth century. Or her theory about Mediterranean city-states that’s so clearly set out on the pages of her 1926 essay. It never occurred to me that she would care about the plight of the Italian peasant. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her reading a book except maybe a love novel from the library or some pamphlet about how to breed better dahlias. When I think about my mother’s essay on Camillo Cavour, I can’t help feeling cheated, as if there’s some wily subversion going on, a glittering joke locked in a box and buried underground. And then I think: if I feel cheated, how much more cheated she must feel. She must be in mourning for the squandering of herself. Something, someone, cut off her head, yanked out her tongue. My mother is a middle-aged woman, a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck, so that you would expect her to land somewhere near the middle of the world. Instead she’s over there at the edge. The least vibration could knock her off.

Joan’s Theory

My mother’s been sick this year, a nervous breakdown everyone’s calling it, and my sister Alice sent me money so I could go home and visit. She wrote me a long, long letter saying she had thought it over and come to the conclusion I was the best person to cheer our mother up, that my presence would be like a “glassful of medicine.” Which is just like Alice; she’s someone who always goes around appointing people.

I expected to find my mother in a state of torpor and instead found her in a rage. It seems a man called Pinky Fulham has snatched away her newspaper column. All those hours she once put into writing about flower borders and seedlings, she now funnels into her hatred for Pinky Fulham. She can’t talk or think of anything else. She’s narrowed herself down to just this one little squint of injustice, and she beats her fists together and rehearses and rehearses her final scene with him, the unforgivable things he did and said, especially his concluding remark which was, apparently: “I hope this won’t affect our friendship.” He said it blithely, unfeelingly, the way people say such things, never even noticing how pierced to the heart my mother was, how crushed she was by such casual presumption and disregard.

Now she can’t let it go. She lies in her bed and goes over and over that final exchange, how she’d gone to his office at the Recorder and pleaded with him, and how he turned to her and pronounced that impossible thing: “I hope this won’t affect our friendship.” My mother recounts the scene for me, again and again, speaking harshly, weeping, shaking her head back and forth in a frenzy, and begging me to join in her drama of suffering.

I’d only been home a few days when I realized she was relishing all this, the pure and beautiful force of her hatred for Pinky Fulham, the ecstasy of being wronged. There’s a certain majesty in it.

Nothing in her life has delivered her to such a pitch of intensity—why wouldn’t she love it, this exquisite wounding, the salt of perfect pain?

I held her hand and let her rage on.

Jay Dudley’s Theory

Of course I feel guilty about what’s happened, how could I not, though I never actually led her on, as the saying goes. (One marriage was, I confess, enough for me.) I was very, very fond of her though. We had our moments, one in particular on that funny oldfashioned bed of hers with the padded headboard, like something out of a thirties movie. Well, that was fine, more than fine, but I could see she had a more permanent arrangement in mind, not that she ever said anything, not in a direct way. Anyway, it seemed best to put a little distance between us. I had no idea she’d take it so hard, that our “friendship”—and that’s all it was—meant something else to her.

Labina Anthony Greene Dukes’ Theory

When I married Dick Greene back in 1927 I thought I was getting a strong husband. He was straight-backed, his shirts tucked neatly into his slacks, his shoes glossy. The man played tennis. He swam for Indiana Varsity. His face was tanned and finely shaped, and I used to adore watching the way his mouth sometimes sagged open when he was listening to someone speak. That slackness of jaw held me for years in a rich, alert, concentrating innocence. He had a fastidious almost humble way of shifting his broad shoulders, as though he had them on loan, as though they were breakable.

I was the breakable one. Women always are. It’s not so much a question of one big disappointment, though. It’s more like a thousand little disappointments raining down on top of each other.

After a while it gets to seem like a flood, and the first thing you know you’re drowning.

Cora-Mae Milltown’s Theory

The poor motherless thing. Oh my, I remember to this day the first time I laid eyes on her. Eleven years old, her and her father driving up to the Vinegar Hill place in a taxi cab, and myself still up to my elbows in soap and water, not half ready for the two of them, I hadn’t even started on the kitchen. Where’s your missus?—that’s what I was about to say, but thank the Lord I buttoned my lip, because there wasn’t any missus, she’d gone and passed away years before, the life went out of her giving birth to this washrag of a girl.

It was Mr. Goodwill himself who told me the story. A tragedy. That was after I got to know him better.

Coming from Canada like he did, he wasn’t used to coloreds, and he talked to me straight out about this and that and everything else too. “Cora-Mae,” he said, “my girl needs a woman in the house, she needs to learn things, she’ll be wanting a bit of company when I’m not here. First her mamma died, you see, and then an old auntie who took care of her up in Canada, and now she’s got no one in the world, only me.”

That’s how I came to be working for Mr. Goodwill by the week instead of just Wednesdays the way the company said. That’s the Indiana Limestone Company, I’m talking about, they’d hired on Mr. Goodwill and brought him all the way down to Bloomington. A widow-man and his little girl. Now this would be round about 1916, when Orren was overseas, his leg all shot to pieces, only I didn’t know it then. That very fall our own Lucile was six years old and starting school, and so I said yes, to Mr. Goodwill, I’d come by early and get breakfast cooking and see that the child was dressed nice and clean for school, and look to the house and the wash and all. Two dollars a day he paid me, three dollars after they moved into the big house, and that was good pay for colored help then.

They treated me nice. Mr. Goodwill had a jokey way about him.

Sometimes he’d go and leave a sack of fresh doughnuts on the kitchen table. “What’s this?” I’d say, and he’d say, “Why, someone must’ve left those there for you, Cora-Mae, a little treat to go along with your coffee.”

I’d start in on the dusting and the beds and I’d wax the furniture if it needed doing and after that I’d sit myself down with a cup of coffee and a doughnut, taking my ease. If the girl was home from school for some reason she’d sit next to me and have herself a doughnut too and a big glass of milk. Once she turned and said to me, “How come you eat your doughnut with a fork, Cora-Mae?” “I don’t know,” I said back, and I didn’t. “I never saw anyone eat a doughnut like that,” she said, all puzzled-like, and I couldn’t guess her meaning, if she thought I was ignorant, if she was being fresh or just curious the way my Lucile always was. I held my tongue and tried not to scold or fret too much over the things she’d do. I’d say to myself, remember this poor child is motherless, and there’s not one thing worse in this world than being motherless.

I still think that way in my mind. My Lucile lives way out there in California now and has her own family and a beautiful home of her own, ranch style, and I haven’t seen her for, oh, six or seven years. She hardly ever sits herself down and writes a letter home, what with all she has to do looking after her family, and I don’t hold her to blame one bit about that. Her mama’s no more than a little bitty story in her life now, something from way, way back when, and that’s the way my mama is for me. You can tell that story in five minutes flat. You can blink and miss it. But you can’t make it go away. Your mama’s inside you. You can feel her moving and breathing and sometimes you can hear her talking to you, saying the same things over and over, like watch out now, be careful, be good, now don’t get yourself hurt.

Well, that’s why I took to Mr. Goodwill’s little girl the way I did.

I’d be ironing one of her dresses or brushing her hair and I’d think: I’m all she’s got. I’m not even half a mama, but I’m all the mama she’s ever going to get. How’s she going to find her way?

How’s she going to be happy in her life? I’d stare and stare into the future and all I could see was this dark place in front of her that was black as the blackest night.

Skoot Skutari’s Theory

My grandfather was born in a northern Albanian village, the son of poor country Jews. When he was eighteen he left home, telling his parents he was going to walk to Jerusalem. Instead he traveled westward to the city of Skutari (and tacked that name on to his own), and caught a boat bound for Malta. From there he traveled to Lisbon, then boarded ship for Montreal. By the year 1897 he was living in rural Manitoba, traveling from township to township and earning his living as a peddler of household sundries. Abram Gozhdë Skutari was his full name, a self-made man, a millionaire, founder and owner of a nationwide chain of retail outlets.

In the early days, though, he was heartbreakingly poor, and the life of a backwoods peddler was painful to him. He was reviled by the very farmers and townspeople who depended on him to bring them necessities. The old Jew he was called. No one had the decency to ask him his name or where he lived or whether he was married and had a family. The men in the region refused to shake his hand, as though he carried lice on his body. That hurt him terribly, he never got over the insult of that.

And then along came Eaton’s Mail Order, and suddenly people didn’t have to deal with traveling peddlers any longer. It was cheaper and easier to send in an order to the Winnipeg store for their shoe polish and hair ribbons. But how was Abram Skutari to support his wife Elena (my grandmother Lena) and their little boy (my Uncle Jacob)?

It occurred to him to apply for a bank loan and start up his own business, selling work clothes, safety equipment, fire-fighting outfits, drilling supplies, everything, in fact, that Eaton’s left out of their catalogue back in 1905. And bicycles. My grandfather had the idea that bicycles were the future. The automobile was coming in, yes, but he was looking around and seeing that every young person in Winnipeg would soon be lusting for one of the new, massproduced bicycles that had come on the market.

He was fearful, though, about applying for a loan, having never set foot in a bank, especially not the Royal Bank, an imposing stone and marble temple situated in the middle of Winnipeg at the corner of Portage and Main. He was a man who didn’t own a necktie.

He spoke brokenly. It’s possible he really did have lice—many people did during that era—but something happened that gave my grandfather courage. It was something he witnessed, an incident that changed his life.

This event took place in the summer of 1905 when he was in the midst of his peddling rounds, he and his horse and his wagon piled with merchandise. It was mid-afternoon. He pulled into a little town in Manitoba, a place as bleak as any eastern European shtetl, at that time a company town, stone quarrying, a particularly fine grade of limestone. On this day my grandfather happened to be driving past one of the worker’s houses when he heard the sound of someone moaning, as though in great pain. He didn’t stop to think or knock, but entered directly through the back door.

There he found a woman lying, unattended, in the kitchen with her legs apart, about to give birth to a baby. He could see the baby’s head starting to come. He had no idea what to do. Birth was women’s business—that was the way people thought in those days, especially a Jewish male raised in the old country, as my grandfather was.

Next door a neighbor was hanging out her clothes, and he hurriedly sought her help. Then he ran to the other end of the village where the doctor lived. It was a hot day. He remembered the heat and dust for the rest of his life. By the time they got back to the house the woman was dying. And it was my grandfather, Abram Skutari, the old Jew, who received her final glance—a roomful of people had gathered, but he was the one she fixed her eye upon. He swore afterwards that he watched her face fill up with his own fright; she drank it in, and then she died.

The child was still alive and breathing. It took my grandfather a minute to understand this. There was much noise and confusion in the room, and it was hot, and everyone was hovering around the dead woman. But there on the kitchen table was a baby wrapped in a sheet. Its lips were moving, trembling, which was how he knew it was alive. No one was paying any attention to it. It was as though it wasn’t there. As though it was a lump of dough left by mistake.

He reached out and touched its cheek, and felt a deep, sudden longing to give it something, a blessing of some kind. He could never understand where that longing came from, but he once confessed to my father, who was fond of retelling the story, that he felt perfectly the infant’s loneliness; it was loneliness of an extreme and incurable variety, the sort of loneliness he himself had suffered since leaving home at eighteen.

In his pocket was an ancient coin from the old country. He placed that coin on the baby’s forehead and held it there, watching as the breath rose and fell under the sheeting. “Be happy,” he said in Albanian or Turkish or Yiddish, or possibly English. Then he said it again, be happy, but he felt as though he were blessing a stone, that nothing good could come out of his mouth. He felt weak, he felt like a man made of paper and straw, he felt as though he wasn’t a man at all, that he might as well be dead.

He didn’t realize he was weeping until he felt the weight of an arm on his shoulder. It was the doctor, who was also weeping. They stood together like that. Their tears mingled.

Mingled—that’s the word my grandfather used when he told this story, our tears mingled. The other man’s arm on his shoulder felt like a brother’s arm and the touch of it made him wail even louder.

After that they all signed the death certificate and then the birth certificate, even my grandfather. Everyone was astonished he could write his name. He set it down: Abram Gozhdë Skutari, and as he wrote he felt a surge of strength come into his body. He felt the strumming of his own heart. He felt he would be able to do anything, even walk into the Royal Bank at the corner of Portage and Main and ask for a loan.

But that child’s sadness never left him. He swore he’d never seen a creature so alone in the world. He lived a long life and made a million dollars and loved his wife and was a decent father to his sons. But he grieved about that baby all his days, the curse that hung over it, its terrible anguish.

Mrs. Flett’s Theory

Surely no one would expect Mrs. Flett to come up with a theory about her own suffering—the poor thing’s so emptied out and lost in her mind she can’t summon sufficient energy to brush her hair, let alone organize a theory. Theorizing is done inside a neat calm head, and Mrs. Flett’s head is crammed with rage and disappointment. She’s given way. She’s a mess, a nut case. In the morning light her hurt seems temporary and manageable, but at night she hears voices, which may just be the sound of her own soul thrashing. It sings along the seams of other hurts, especially the old unmediated terror of abandonment. Somewhere along the line she made the decision to live outside of events; or else that decision was made for her. Write a gardening book, her daughter Alice advises. Go on a round-the-world trip, says Fraidy Hoyt. Take some courses at the university. Teach yourself macrame. Look into allergy shots or vitamin B complex. Listen to soothing music, keep a diary like Virginia Woolf, go for long walks, indulge in hot baths.

Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, pray, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, just let go, just be.

All this advice comes flying in Mrs. Flett’s direction, but she’s too distracted to hear.

You’d think she’d be scared to death by the state she’s in, but she’s not. Her hair’s matted, her fingernails broken, her houseplants withered, her day-to-day life smashed, but sleeping inside her like a small burrowing creature is the certainty that she’ll recover. For one thing, she distrusts the sincerity of her own salt tears, and, another thing, she remembers how, years ago, she and Fraidy loved to quote poor old William Blake: “Weep, weep, in notes of woe” and how the word woe made them fall over laughing, such a blind little bug of a word.

Now, at the age of fifty-nine, sadness flows through every cell of her body, yet leaves her curiously untouched. She knows how memory gets smoothed down with time, everything flattened by the iron of acceptance and rejection—it comes to the same thing, she thinks. This sorrowing of hers has limits, just as there’s a limit to how tangled she’ll let her hair get or how much dust she’ll allow to pile up on her dressing table. That’s Daisy for you. Daisy’s resignation belongs to the phylum of exhaustion, the problem of how to get through a thousand ordinary days. Or, to be more accurate, ten thousand such days. In a sense I see her as one of life’s fortunates, a woman born with a voice that lacks a tragic register. Someone who’s learned to dig a hole in her own life story.

But she’s tired of being sad, and tired of not even minding being sad, of not even in a sense knowing. And in the thin bony box of her head she understands, and accepts, the fact that her immense unhappiness is doomed to irrelevance anyway. Already, right this minute, I feel a part of her wanting to go back to the things she used to like, the feel of a new toothbrush against her gums, for instance. Such a little thing. She’d like to tie a crisp clean apron around her waist once again, peel a pound of potatoes in three minutes flat and put them soaking in cold water. Polish a jelly jar and set it on the top shelf with its mates. Lick an envelope, stick a stamp in its corner, drop it in the mail box. She’d like to clean her body out with a hoot of laughter and give way to the pull of gravity. It’s going to happen. All this suffering will be washed away. Any day now.