Unless. Carol Shields
Curmudgeons are positively adored. I’ve noticed this. Even the fascinatingly unknowable earn respect.
And when I read in the paper tomorrow that “Mrs. Winters looked all of her forty-three years” and that “Mrs. Winters with her familiar overbite was reluctant to talk about her work schedule,” I will want to phone the editor and complain bitterly. This from the pen of a small, unattractive man, almost entirely lipless beneath a bony, domineering nose, sweating with minor ambition, head tilted like something carved out of yellow wax.
He interviewed me in a cappuccino bar in mid-Toronto. A chilly, stooped, round-headed man in his thirties or forties—it was hard to tell—slow to smile, pathetically in need of human attention, thinking his superior thoughts. Fluff on his shoulders begged to be picked off. I, on the other hand, was wearing a soft jade jacket of cashmere lined with silk, which represented a rare splurge on my part, but I could be sure this man would overlook this garment with its crystal buttons and mandarin collar and concentrate instead on my drab raincoat, beige, and not quite pristine at the cuffs. In print he will be certain to refer to my chignon as a bun. It’s taken me years to learn to do a glossy little chignon—I can get my hair brushed back and securely pinned up each morning in a mere two and a half minutes and I consider my coiffure one of my major life accomplishments. I really mean this.
Sheila from publicity had filled me in before the interview, and I felt the information packet hovering; what to do with it? This young/youngish man was the newly appointed books columnist at Booktimes. He was well known for holding pious opinions about the literature of the Great North, about his own role as advocate of a diverse new outpouring of Canadian voices, the post-colonial cry of blaming anguish. The stream of current fiction about middle-class people living in cities was diluting the authentic national voice that rose from the landscape itself and—
Oh, shut up, shut up.
Cappuccino foam dotted the corners of his undistinguished mouth. And just one more question, Mrs. Winters—
Of course he didn’t call me Reta, even though there might be only a year or two between us. The “Mrs.” gave him power over me: that vexing r rucking things up in the middle and making one think of such distractions as clotheslines and baking tins. He was the barking terrier, going at Mrs. Winters’s ankles, shaking out his fur and asking me to justify myself, wanting me to explain the spluttering, dying, whimpering bonfire of my life, which I would not dream of sharing. He seemed to forget he was interviewing me about Danielle Westerman’s new book.
I understand you’re working on a second novel, said he.
Well, yes.
Takes nerve.
Uh-huh.
Actually—actually, well, he had a novel on the go himself.
Really! What a surprise!
At the end of the hour he did not ask for the bill. I asked for the bill. “I’ll just put it on my Visa,” I said, breaking a tenuous breadth of silence. I announced this with all the majesty I could muster over a vinyl table, like a grande dame, adding twenty years to my age, and feeling the vowels shifting in my beautifully moulded throat. Such dignity; I surprised myself with my own resonance, and I may have managed a pained smile, displaying, no doubt, that famous overbite. He turned off the tape recorder at the word “Visa.”
He had two young children at home, he said. Christ, what a responsibility, although he loved the little bastards. One of them was quite, quite gifted; well, they both were in their separate ways. But the work of raising kids! Never enough time to read the books he had to review, books all over the house with little markers in them, books he would never finish. So much was expected, and of course, like all journalists, he was underpaid.
Oh, shut up.
They also expected him to do a feature on the weekend.
Uh-huh?
And last week he’d actually broken the MacBunna story.
Really? Macumba? Marimba?
Congratulations, said Mrs. Reta Winters from Orangetown.
Thanks.
I should be getting on my way, I said. My parking meter. A lunch date. A long drive home.
I understand you and your family live in a lovely old house near Orangetown…
And then, slyly: I understand one of your daughters now lives in Toronto and…
I’ve been here before. There is something about having an established family, a long-lasting spousal arrangement, three daughters in their teens, a house in the country, a suggestion of impermeability, that draws the curiosity of others so that they can, as Tom says, probe with probity.
But no, this man across the table will not be feeding on my flesh, nor will his colleagues—though one can tell that he has no colleagues; there is no possibility of colleagues. He has no context for friends or co-workers, though there are the kids and there’s the wife; he’s referred to her three times now. Nicola. She has her professional life, too, he tells me, as though the matter were in dispute.
I can’t resist. “Does Nicola—is she a journalist too?”
“Journalist?”
“Like you, I mean.”
His hand jumps, and for a moment I think he’s going to turn the tape recorder on again. But no, he’s reaching into his pocket and now he’s releasing two coins onto the table. The tip. They lie there, moist from his hand. Two dimes. I focus on them with what I hope is a cool, censorious gaze.
But he’s not looking at me. He’s looking across the room where a silver-haired man is seating himself gracefully at a table.“I’m not sure, but I think that’s Gore Vidal,” my interviewer whispers in a hungry voice. “He’s here for the writers’ festival, you know.”
I rise and exit, as though led by a brass quintet.
The charming Mrs. Winters slips on her comfortable beige raincoat…
IT IS LATE AFTERNOON, early October, the sky darkening, and the lights in the old Orangetown Library already on. The smell of waxed floors is particularly sharp at this hour; it must be the heating system that triggers it.
Today, as always, the librarians, Tessa Sands and Cheryl Patterson, are helpful. I’ve dropped by to pick up Dennis Ford-Helpern’s The Goodness Gap. I’m not, by the way, unaware of the absurdity of believing one can learn goodness through the medium of print. Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it’s been shaped into acceptable expository prose.
I could easily have bought the Ford-Helpern book last week when I was in Toronto. But no, if I am sincere about achieving genuine goodness in my life and thereby finding a way to reconnect with Norah, this means dealing with issues large and small, or else shifting my finite dispersal of goodness to goodish places such as the public library. At the moment I am attempting to be a good citizen who supports her local library, which is dramatically underused by the community and in danger of closing.
Aside from a part-time custodian, these two librarians, Tessa and Cheryl, are the only full-time employees of the Orangetown Library; everyone else got the boot a year ago when the town council announced the library cutbacks.
Tessa and Cheryl have known our family for years. I’ve been a member of the Library Board forever, and Tessa remembers Norah from when she was four years old, attending Saturday-morning story hour, able to sit cross-legged and absolutely still, wearing only a nametag, not a sign saying GOODNESS. She was capable at that age of an exquisite shiver when listening to the adventures of Bluebeard and ready to shed tears over the fate of the twelve dancing princesses, a story that Tessa always reshapes for her young audiences.