We So Seldom Look on Love

by Barbara Gowdy

  —Steven Heighton

  Steven Heighton: The Latin dramatist Terence wrote that because he was human, nothing human was alien to him. I realize this credo has become something of a chestnut, but after reading your books in sequence, I kept wanting to quote it.

  Barbara Gowdy: Well … a whole lot of what is human is alien to me, but it’s hardly my job to decide whether or not it should exist or be explored. I can be as repelled as anyone else. I struggle against my reactions, though, when I feel that they’re getting in the way of my finding out something interesting or important. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as “too much information.”

  SH: Okay, here’s another quote for you. A reviewer in Saturday Night once remarked—about the stories in We So Seldom Look on Love—that “Gowdy stares down the things she finds repulsive.” I quote this one partly because I think the reviewer has it wrong. To me, the evidence of your writing doesn’t suggest any revulsion, any recoiling from the “abnormal,” but instead, the natural fascination of a child.

  BG: No, I’m not revolted by the abnormal, not as a matter of course. When I say I can be repelled, I mean by bodily functions, certain ones. What the necrophile does in “We So Seldom Look on Love” repels me, for instance. It’s nothing I could have concocted. I lifted it from an interview in which a real necrophile, a woman named Karen Greenlea, describes how she expresses her love for dead men. In fact, every one of the stories in that collection is based on something I heard or read about, however outlandish.

  SH: Well, any repulsion or revulsion you felt seems to have become invisible, or was transformed, in the process of writing the story “We So Seldom Look on Love.” I don’t read it and think, “The author is really struggling with the material here.” It feels totally natural. You’ve got right into the character’s mind, her body and voice, and she’s obviously not repulsed.

  BG: There’s no point in exploring anything if you’re not going to try to get right inside it and be empathetic. What fascinated me about the real necrophile’s story was that she was embracing death, quite literally. Whereas most of the rest of us don’t even touch death. We rarely have open-casket funerals these days. You know, the only kind of aberrant behaviour that disgusts me is the kind that knowingly or indifferently does harm. I get more upset about corporate environmental behaviour than about someone having sex with a dog. As long as the dog’s enjoying it. Not that I’ve written about that.

  SH: In the opening paragraph of the story, you write: “There is always energy given off when a thing turns into its opposite…. There are always sparks at those extreme points.” I wonder if those lines could be reread as a kind of aesthetic credo, since your fiction is so often situated at the intersection point of morbidity and vitality—the place where mortality and life, especially in its basic sexual guise, interpenetrate and even become indistinguishable.

  BG: Most writers seem to write to temperament, and my temperament often has me describing things in an extreme way simply because I’m not happy with euphemisms or half-truths. I sometimes go overboard for the sake of cutting the bullshit, and then I try to pull back to a place of truth.

  “There’s no point in exploring anything if you’re not going to try to get right inside it and be empathetic.”

  SH: Susan Swan … described you to me as a romantic—she said it’s something that people might not think initially. I can see how that could happen. Someone encountering We So Seldom Look on Love … might think, “She’s no romantic.” There’s a sort of surgical exactitude to the prose that’s at odds with what we think of as romantic prose.

  BG: Well, I feel that I am, and that the “exactitude” comes from wanting to honour the romantic in myself. I couldn’t bear to write careless prose and then put icing on it. As I keep saying, I want to get to the truth—all writers do—and I think that the finer, altered light is the true light, and that you can only get anywhere near it through discipline.

  SH: And Romanticism is so misunderstood. When people think of romantic prose, at least nowadays, they think of what you’ve described to me elsewhere as “quiveringly beautiful prose”—self-consciously beautiful writing—which you’ve conscientiously avoided, I think.

  BG: I can write that stuff, but it never makes it into the final drafts. Not that I despise beautiful prose when it works—I envy it when it works—it just doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s as if I were a country-and-western singer trying to sing opera. If writers can make it work, it’s probably because it suits their temperament. It’s at odds with mine, and with the things I’m describing.

  SH: But I suppose you could have done the necrophile story in a tone of … deliberate Gothic excess.

  “I couldn’t bear to write careless prose and then put icing on it…. I want to get to the truth.”

  BG: But then it would have come across as Gothic! What I was trying to do with that story, with all the stories in the collection, was to be as calmly objective as I could about what people do to survive. If I was also trying to shock, I wasn’t aware of it. I know that sounds disingenuous. Maybe it is.

  SH: Not really.

  BG: That I don’t always react the way other people do can be pretty estranging.

  SH: Maybe it’s necessary for writers to feel somewhat estranged. I know a few writers who were popular when they were kids, part of the gang, but they’re the minority. Most of us felt like freaks. Most of us fulfilled Byron’s prerequisite for a writer—”an uneasy mind in an uneasy body.” Come to think of it, that also describes most of the characters in We So Seldom Look on Love.

  BG: Well, I felt very odd as a child. I was a late developer, physically. I didn’t get my period until I was fifteen, and I was small and thin for my age. For a couple of years there in my teens I wore about three pairs of underwear and two pairs of jeans and padded bras. I was trying to look like Sandra Dee and came across looking like—I don’t know—Olive Oyl on steroids. So I really had a sense of how the body does not describe the soul.

  SH: One thing reviewers hardly ever talk about when they talk about fiction is the actual writing, word by word and sentence by sentence. This always amazes me. It’s true “What I was trying to do with all the stories in the collection, was to be as calmly objective as I could about what people do to survive.” that much of the poetry of your own work comes from the attentively rendered detail and characterization, but those details are built out of words, and yours are chosen with the ear of a poet and the economy of someone dispatching an urgent telegram…. There’s plenty of gorgeous assonance everywhere, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant. Then there are the striking similes and metaphors, as when Sylvie, the Siamese twin in We So Seldom Look on Love, sees “ovations of fireflies” along the road. Which is not only a nice metaphor, it’s also synesthetic—a staple technique of poetry, especially in the surrealist mode. So, I have to ask you—do you read a lot of poetry, and, more to the point, have you written any, or do you think you might?

  BG: I read poetry just like I listen to jazz sometimes, to loosen up my ear. I tried to write poetry—once. I was asked to write a poem for an American magazine, about ten years ago, and I worked and worked on this poem. And I honed it down to two words…. It’s like Siddhartha, who yearns to hear music as a single note. Working on that poem, I started out with something like twenty stanzas and ended up with two words. I tend to trim a lot when I am writing anyway, and the permission to trim a poem was probably too strong. You expect poetry to be about tone, about the musicality of the line. Every word rings more glaringly than it does, or needs to do, in fiction…. In fiction, if you write, “Oh, go to hell,” there’s nothing to polish…. Regarding how I think of language in fiction, there’s a kind of effect I want, which is memorable but unselfconscious. Not too cool, though, not too emotionless, and it has to sound true. “Ovations of fireflies”—I’d forgotten that line. But now that you remind me, I remember holding the pen above the paper for a long time.

  SH: You mean you wor
ried it was too pretty?

  BG: Or untrue. I don’t mind prettiness when it’s true.

  —Reprinted by permission of the author

  An Excerpt from Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels

  Chapter One

  All three girls are in the front seat. The fat girl with the glasses is driving. In the back seat their father is asleep sitting up.

  They pull into the parking lot, and two men who are leaning against a blue Volkswagen van turn to look at them. One of the men has a camera round his neck. “Fuck,” the thin girl says.

  Their father jerks awake. Before the car has come to a full stop, he has his door open. “Scram!” he yells at the men. He falls out the door, onto one knee. The three girls quickly get out of the car. Their father stands up and heads for the men, thrashing his arms. “Vamoose!” he yells. “Bugger off!” The men don’t move.

  “Dad,” the fat girl pleads. Their father staggers away from everyone and slaps his pockets for cigarettes.

  “Just leave him,” the thin girl mutters. She starts walking, giving their father a wide berth. Her sisters follow. The fat girl with the glasses can’t squeeze between the fenders of the two hearses, and she reddens, conscious of the men approaching. “Climb over,” the thin girl orders. Glancing at the photographer, she reaches into her purse and gets out the pack of cigarettes that their father is searching for. If she has to have her picture taken, she wants to be smoking.

  The photographer starts clicking. But not at the thin girl. He aims at the third girl, the pretty blonde one, who is waiting while the fat sister climbs over the fenders. “Figures,” the thin girls thinks. The pretty girl gazes at the scorched white sky as if wondering whether their mother is up there yet.

  “Excuse me,” the second man says, sauntering up. The pretty girl smiles politely. The thin girl narrows her eyes. The eyes of the man are rabid with fake pity. He says it’s a real drag about their mother and he hates like hell to hassle them, but the pictures aren’t going to have captions unless he gets their names straight.

  Both the fat girl and the pretty one look at the thin girl. “Lou,” the thin girl says. The man flips open a pad and starts writing. Lou nods at the fat girl, “Norma,” nods at the pretty girl, “Sandy.” This is the first reporter that Lou’s let anywhere near her. It’s because he has long hair and a beard and is wearing blue jeans.

  “Still in high school?” the reporter asks conversationally.

  “For another few weeks, yeah.” Lou blows a smoke ring. The photographer goes on clicking at Sandy.

  “When did you get the cat?” the reporter asks.

  “What?”

  “The cat. Your mother went up on the roof to rescue a cat, didn’t she?”

  “We better get inside,” Norma murmurs.

  Sweat starts dripping down the reporter’s forehead. “I understand that one of you was there when it happened,” he says, earnest now.

  “We were all there,” Lou says. Her hand shakes bringing her cigarette up to her mouth. “Okay, we’ve got to go,” she says, moving around the reporter, feeling herself on a dangerous verge.

  Inside the funeral parlour, Sandy asks where the washroom is. She has decided to put her false eyelashes back on.

  It’s not vanity, like Lou thinks. This morning Lou said, “You’ve got too much makeup on. Nobody’ll believe you’re broken up.” So Sandy took her eyelashes off, but now she wishes she hadn’t, and not only because of the photographer. She can’t understand why someone as smart as Lou hasn’t figured out that the better you look, the better people treat you.

  She bats her lashes to see if they’re stuck on. “Beauty is only skin deep,” she tells herself defensively. She has always taken this expression to mean that only what is skin deep is beautiful.

  Her throat tightens. She has had an awful thought. In an autopsy they remove all your organs, don’t they? She isn’t sure. But just the idea of strange men rummaging around inside their mother … She thinks of their mother’s organs sloshing in whisky. She thinks of their mother’s womb, and she starts crying and fishes in her purse for Kleenex. Even before their mother died, the depressing image of her womb crossed Sandy’s mind a couple of times. She pictured an empty drawstring purse.

  Norma and Lou go into the room where their mother is. Nobody else has arrived yet. They’re an hour early because yesterday their aunt phoned and told them to be. The casket is against the far wall, between big green plants that you can tell from the door are plastic.

  Norma walks over. “Is she all here?” she whispers. Only the upper part of the casket is open, and the lower part doesn’t seem long enough.

  “Who gives a shit,” Lou says in a steady voice. “She’s dead.” Last night Lou cried her heart out. Their sweet little mother who tap-danced … have they cut off her legs? No way is Lou going to look in the casket.

  She walks to the window and parts the heavy velvet drapes. Their father is yelling at the newspapermen again. They are about ten yards away from him, standing their ground. Lou can’t hear their father, but the newspapermen are nodding as if whatever he’s yelling makes a lot of sense.

  Norma touches the tip of their mother’s small nose. “It’s me,” she whispers. Their mother’s nose is like a pebble, cool. Her face is white and smooth as a sink, and Norma realizes it’s because the blood has been drained from her. “What do they do with the blood?” she asks Lou.

  “Christ,” Lou says, lighting another Export A. “Do you mind?” She wonders if Sandy went to the washroom to cry. In a couple of weeks Sandy plans to marry a guy who has the stupidest face Lou has ever seen on a person not mongoloid retarded. Lou suddenly has a panicky feeling that she has to put a stop to the wedding. As soon as possible. Today.

  She closes her eyes. What the hell is going on? she asks herself. What does she care who Sandy marries? Maybe their mother is seeping out, and Lou has swallowed Maternal Instinct. People in Wales believe that you can swallow a dead person’s sin. But their mother had no sin, and nobody can tell Lou that she sure had one, the biggest one, because Lou has always viewed that as a sacrifice. Their mother had no instincts left either, now that Lou thinks about it. Drowning pain Lou doesn’t count.

  When Lou opens her eyes, Sandy is entering the room on the arm of an undertaker. He gestures toward the casket, disengages himself and backs away, and pressing her hands at her mouth, Sandy walks over and stands beside Norma.

  “She’s got lipstick on,” Sandy says.

  “They always do that,” Norma says.

  “But she never wore pink lipstick,” Sandy says, her voice breaking. She slowly brings her hand down and touches her fingers to their mother’s lips. “Are her insides in her?” she asks.

  “I think so.”

  “They’re pickled in formaldehyde,” Lou says. Lou is still looking out the window. Their father has just accepted a flask from the reporter, and now he’s shaking the reporter’s hand. “What a prick,” Lou says.

  Norma sighs. She walks over to a chair and drops into it and removes her glasses, which have felt too tight ever since they fell into the eavestrough. She knows that the prick Lou is referring to isn’t one of the newspapermen, it’s their father. Lou says she hates their father. Norma’s never been able to hate him and especially couldn’t now, when he’s so pathetic. Even Lou has to admit that he loved their mother. What drove their mother to drink and probably to the roof, and what drove him, part way at least, to every bad, crazy thing he did, never really drove the two of them apart. Yesterday, in their mother’s bedside table, Norma found the kidney stone that he gave their mother—for luck and instead of an engagement ring—on the night they met. Lou wouldn’t look at it. Lou blames him.

  Lou turns from the window. Norma is staring at her without glasses. Sandy is crying quietly, leaning into the casket. She seems to be stroking their mother’s face.

  “What are you doing?” Lou asks her.

  “Changing her lipstick,” Sandy sobs.

  Lou feels nau
seated. “I need some air,” she says and leaves the room.

  Going around a corner in the hall, she bumps into their father.

  “Oh, hi!” he says, astonished.

  His whisky breath makes her stomach heave. “The last room on the left,” she says, shoving by him.

  She opens an Exit door and is in the parking lot. The heat slams into her. The photographer is gone, but the reporter is still there, resting against a car that’s in the shade. He gets up and wanders over.

  “What are you hanging around for?” she asks.

  “Waiting for you.” He lights her cigarette. The back of his hands and forearms have a rug of black hair on them. “So,” he says, “was it an accident or what?”

  “Didn’t the whisky loosen my father’s tongue?” she asks sarcastically.

  “What is she crying about? … She isn’t crying for these deaths on either side of her.”

  “I’d like to hear what you’ve got to say.”

  She wonders why she doesn’t tell him. It’s none of his business, but that’s not the reason.

  “Off the record,” he says. “Strictly between you and I.”

  “Between you and me,” she corrects him.

  He dips his head to look in her face. He has whisky breath, too.

  “I’ve got to go back in,” she says, tossing away most of her cigarette.

  “Hey, come on.” He grabs her arm.

  “Let go.”

  “One minute, okay?”

  “FUCK OFF, OKAY?”

  They stare at each other. He drops his hand.

  In the washroom she looks for feet under the cubicle doors. Sees none. She shuts herself in a cubicle and starts crying. She can’t believe it, it makes her mad, because last night she imagined she experienced the final evolution of her heart.

  What is she crying about? Not about their mother or about the baby that she cried at the thought of having and still wouldn’t keep. She isn’t crying for these deaths on either side of her.