Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  It won the Offenden Prize, which, though the money was nice, shackled the book to minor status. Clarence and Dorothy Offenden had established the prize back in the seventies out of a shared exasperation with the opaqueness of the contemporary novel. “The Offenden Prize recognizes literary quality and honors accessibility.” These are their criteria. Dorothy and Clarence are a good-hearted couple, and rich, but a little jolly and simple in their judgments, and Dorothy in particular is fond of repeating her recipe for enduring fiction. “A beginning, a middle, and an ending,” she likes to say. “Is that too much to ask?”

  At the award ceremony in New York she embraced Tom and the girls, and told them how I shone among my peers, those dabblers in convolution and pretension who wrote without holding the reader in the mind, who played games for their own selfish amusement, and who threw a mask of noir over every event, whether it was appropriate or not. “It’s heaven,” she sang into Tom’s ear, “to find that sunniness still exists in the world.”

  I don’t consider myself a sunny person. In fact, if I prayed, I would ask every day to be spared from the shame of dumb sunniness. Danielle Westerman has taught me that much, her life, her reflection on that life. Don’t hide your dark side from yourself, she always said, it’s what keeps us going forward, that pushing away from the unspeakable brilliance. She wrote, of course, amid the shadows of the Holocaust, and no one expected her to struggle free to merriment.

  After the New York event, I said good-bye to the family and got on a train and traveled to Washington, staying in a Georgetown hotel which had on its top floor, reserved for me by my publisher, something called the Writer’s Suite. A brass plaque on the door announced this astonishing fact. I, the writer in a beige raincoat, Mrs. Reta Winters from Lancaster, entered this doorway with small suitcase in tow and looked around, not daring to imagine what I might find. There was a salon as well as a bedroom, two full baths, a very wide bed, more sofas than I would have time to sit on in my short stay, and a coffee table consisting of a sheet of glass posed on three immense faux books lying on their sides, stacked one on the other. A large bookshelf held the tomes of the authors who had stayed in the suite. “We like to ask our guests to contribute a copy of their work,” the desk clerk had told me, and I was obliged to explain that I had only a single reading copy with me, but that I would attempt to find a copy in a local store. “That would be most appreciated,” she almost whistled into the sleeve of my raincoat.

  The books left behind by previous authors were disappointing, inspiration manifestos or self-help manuals, with a few thrillers thrown in. I’m certainly not a snob—I read the Jackie Onassis biography, for example—but my close association with writers such as Danielle Westerman has conditioned me to hope for a degree of ambiguity or nuance and there was none here.

  In that great, wide bed I had a disturbing but not unfamiliar dream—it is the dream I always have when I am away from Lancaster, away from the family. I am standing in the kitchen at home, producing a complicated meal for guests, but there is not enough food to work with. In the fridge sits a single egg and maybe a tomato. How am I going to feed all these hungry mouths?

  I’m quite aware of how this dream might be analyzed by a dream expert, that the scarcity of food stands for a scarcity of love, that no matter how I stretch that egg and tomato, there will never be enough of Reta Winters for everyone who needs her. This is how my friend Gwen, whom I am looking forward to seeing in Baltimore, would be sure to interpret the dream if I were so foolish as to tell her. Gwen is an obsessive keeper of a dream journal—as are quite a number of my friends—and she also records the dreams of others if they are offered and found worthy.

  I resist the theory of insufficient love. My dream, I like to think, points only to the abrupt cessation, or interruption, of daily obligation. For twenty years I’ve been responsible for producing three meals a day for the several individuals I live with. I may not be conscious of this obligation, but surely I must always, at some level, be calculating the amount of food in the house and the number of bodies to be fed: Tom and the girls, the girls’ friends, my mother-in-law next door, passing acquaintances. Away from home, liberated from my responsibility for meals, my unexecuted calculations steal into my dreams and leave me blithering with this diminished store of nourishment and the fact of my unpreparedness. Such a small dream crisis, but I always wake with a sense of terror.

  Since My Thyme Is Up is a first novel and since mine is an unknown name, there was very little for me to do in Washington. Mr. Scribano had been afraid this would happen. The television stations weren’t interested, and the radio stations avoided novels unless they had a “topic” like cancer or child abuse.

  I managed to fulfill all my obligations in a mere two hours the morning after my arrival, taking a cab to a bookstore called Politics & Prose, where I signed books for three rather baffled-looking customers and then a few more stock copies which the staff was kind enough to produce. I handled the whole thing badly, was overly ebullient with the book buyers, too chatty, wanting them to love me as much as they said they loved my book, wanting them for best friends, you would think. (“Please just call me Reta, everyone does.”) My impulse was to apologize for not being younger and more fetching like Alicia in my novel and for not having her bright ingenue voice and manner. I was ashamed of my red pantsuit, catalogue-issue, and wondered if I’d remembered, waking up in the Writer’s Suite, to apply deodorant.

  From Politics & Prose I took a cab to a store called Pages, where there were no buying customers at all, but where the two young proprietors took me for a splendid lunch at an Italian bistro and also insisted on giving me a free copy of my book to leave in the Writer’s Suite. Then it was afternoon, a whole afternoon, and I had nothing to do until the next morning when I was to take my train to Baltimore. Mr. Scribano had warned me I might find touring lonely.

  I returned to the hotel, freshened up, and placed my book on the bookshelf. But why had I returned to the hotel? What homing instinct had brought me here when I might be out visiting museums or perhaps taking a tour through the Senate chambers? There was a wide springtime afternoon to fill, and an evening too, since no one had suggested taking me to dinner.

  I decided to go shopping in the Georgetown area, having spotted from the taxi a number of tiny boutiques. My daughter Norah’s birthday was coming up in a week’s time, and she longed to have a beautiful and serious scarf. She had never had a scarf in all her seventeen years, not unless you count the woolen mufflers she wears on the school bus, but since her senior class trip to Paris, she had been talking about the scarves that every chic Frenchwoman wears as part of her wardrobe. These scarves, so artfully draped, were silk, nothing else would do, and their colors shocked and awakened the dreariest of clothes, the wilted navy blazers that Frenchwomen wear or those cheap black cardigans they try to get away with.

  I never have time to shop in Lancaster, and, in fact, there would be little available there. But today I had time, plenty of time, and so I put on my low-heeled walking shoes and started out.

  Georgetown’s boutiques are set amid tiny fronted houses, impeccably gentrified with shuttered bay windows and framed by minuscule gardens, enchanting to the eye. My own sprawling untidy house outside Lancaster, if dropped into this landscape, would destroy half a dozen or more of these meticulous brick facades. The placement of flower pots was so ardently pursued here, so caring, so solemn, and the clay pots themselves had been rubbed, I could tell, with sandpaper, to give them a country look.

  These boutiques held such a minimum of stock that I wondered how they were able to compete with one another. There might be six or seven blouses on a rod, a few cashmere pullovers, a table casually strewn with shells or stones or Art Nouveau picture frames or racks of antique postcards. A squadron of very slender saleswomen presided over this spare merchandise, which they fingered in such a loving way that I suddenly wanted to buy everything in sight. The scarves—every shop had a good half dozen—were knotted o
n dowels, and there was not one that was not pure silk with hand-rolled edges.

  I took my time. I realized I would be able, given enough shopping time, to buy Norah the perfect scarf, not the near-perfect and certainly not the impulse purchase we usually settled for at home. She had mentioned wanting something in a bright blue with perhaps some yellow dashes. I would find that very scarf in one of these many boutiques. The thought of myself as a careful and deliberate shopper brought me a bolt of happiness. I took a deep breath and smiled genuinely at the anorexic saleswomen, who seemed to sense and respond to my new consumer eagerness. “That’s not quite her,” I quickly learned to say, and they nodded with sympathy. Most of them wore scarves themselves around their angular necks, and I admired, to myself, the intricate knotting and colors of these scarves. I admired, too, the women’s forthcoming involvement in my mission. “Oh, the scarf absolutely must be suited to the person,” they said, or words to that effect—as though they knew Norah personally and understood that she was a young woman of highly defined tastes and requirements which they were anxious to satisfy.

  She wasn’t really. She is, Tom and I always think, too easily satisfied and someone who too seldom considers herself deserving. When she was a very small child, two or three, eating lunch in her high chair, she heard an airplane go overhead and looked up at me and said, “The pilot doesn’t know I’m eating an egg.” She seemed shocked at this perception, but willing to register the shock calmly so as not to alarm me. She would be grateful for any scarf I brought her, pleased I had taken the time, but for once I wanted, and had an opportunity to procure, a scarf that would gladden her heart.

  As I moved from one boutique to the next I began to form a very definite notion of the scarf I wanted for Norah, and began, too, to see how impossible it might be to accomplish this task. The scarf became an idea; it must be brilliant and subdued at the same time, finely made, but with a secure sense of its own shape. A wisp was not what I wanted, not for Norah. Solidity, presence, was what I wanted, but in sinuous, ephemeral form. This was what Norah at seventeen, almost eighteen, was owed. She had always been a bravely undemanding child. Once, when she was four or five, she told me how she controlled her bad dreams at night. “I just turn my head around on the pillow,” she said matter-of-factly, “and that changes the channel.” She performed this act instead of calling out to us or crying; she solved her own nightmares and candidly exposed her original solution—which Tom and I took some comfort in but also, I confess, some amusement. I remember, with shame now, telling this story to friends, over coffee, over dinner, my brave little soldier daughter, shaping her soldierly life.

  I seldom wear scarves myself, I can’t be bothered, and besides, whatever I put around my neck takes on the configuration of a Girl Scout kerchief, the knot working its way straight to the throat, and the points sticking out rather than draping gracefully downward. I was not clever with accessories, I knew that about myself, and I was most definitely not a shopper. I had never understood, in fact, what it is that drives other women to feats of shopping perfection, but now I had a suspicion. It was the desire to please someone fully, even one’s self. It seemed to me that my daughter Norah’s future happiness now balanced not on acceptance at Smith or the acquisition of a handsome new boyfriend, but on the simple ownership of a particular article of apparel, which only I could supply. I had no power over Smith or the boyfriend or, in fact, any real part of her happiness, but I could provide something temporary and necessary: this dream of transformation, this scrap of silk.

  And there it was, relaxed over a fat silver hook in what must have been the twentieth shop I entered. The little bell rang; the updraft of potpourri rose to my nostrils, and the sight of Norah’s scarf flowed into view. It was patterned from end to end with rectangles, each subtly out of alignment: blue, yellow, green, a kind of pleasing violet. And each of these shapes was outlined by a band of black, colored in roughly as though with an artist’s brush. I found its shimmer dazzling and its touch icy and sensuous. Sixty dollars. Was that all? I whipped out my Visa card without a thought. My day had been well spent. I felt full of intoxicating power.

  In the morning I took the train to Baltimore. I couldn’t read on the train because of the jolting between one urban landscape and the next. Two men seated in front of me were talking loudly about Christianity, its sad decline, and they ran the words Jesus Christ together as though they were some person’s first and second names—Mr. Christ, Jesus to the in-group.

  In Baltimore, once again, there was little for me to do, but since I was going to see Gwen at lunch, I didn’t mind. A young male radio host wearing a black T-shirt and gold chains around his neck asked me how I was going to spend the Offenden prize money. He also asked what my husband thought of the fact that I’d written a novel. (This is a question I’ve been asked before and for which I really must find an answer.) Then I visited the Book Plate (combination café and bookstore) and signed six books, and then, at not quite eleven in the morning, there was nothing more for me to do until it was time to meet Gwen.

  Gwen and I had been in the same women’s writing group back in Lancaster. In fact, she had been the informal but acknowledged leader for those of us who met weekly to share and “workshop” our writing. Poetry, memoirs, fiction; we brought photocopies of our work to these morning sessions, where over coffee and muffins—this was the age of muffins, the last days of the seventies— we kindly encouraged each other and offered tentative suggestions, such as “I think you’re one draft from being finished” or “Doesn’t character X enter the scene a little too late?” These critical crumbs were taken for what they were, the fumblings of amateurs. But when Gwen spoke we listened. Once she thrilled me by saying of something I’d written, “That’s a fantastic image, that thing about the whalebone. I wish I’d thought of it myself.” Her short fiction had actually been published in a number of literary quarterlies and there had even been one near-mythical sale, years earlier, to Harper’s. When she moved to Baltimore five years ago to become writer-in-residence for a small women’s college, our writers’ group fell first into irregularity, and then slowly died away.

  We’d kept in touch, though, the two of us. I wrote ecstatically when I happened to come across a piece of hers in Three Spoons which was advertised as being part of a novel-in-progress. She’d used my whalebone metaphor; I couldn’t help noticing and, in fact, felt flattered. I knew about that novel of Gwen’s—she’d been working on it for years—trying to bring a feminist structure to what was really a straightforward account of an early failed marriage. Gwen had made sacrifices for her young student husband, and he had betrayed her with his infidelities. In the early seventies, in the throes of love and anxious to satisfy his every demand, she had had her navel closed by a plastic surgeon because her husband complained that it smelled “off.” The complaint, apparently, had been made only once, a sour, momentary whim, but out of some need to please or punish she became a woman without a navel, left with a flattish indentation in the middle of her belly, and this navel-less state, more than anything, became her symbol of regret and anger. She spoke of erasure, how her relationship to her mother—with whom she was on bad terms anyway—had been erased along with the primal mark of connection. She was looking into a navel reconstruction, she’d said in her last letter, but the cost was criminal. In the meantime, she’d retaken her unmarried name, Reidman, and had gone back to her full name, Gwendolyn.

  She’d changed her style of dress too. I noticed that right away when I saw her seated at the Café Pierre. Her jeans and sweater had been traded in for what looked like large folds of unstitched, unstructured cloth, skirts and overskirts and capes and shawls; it was hard to tell precisely what they were. This cloth wrapping, in a salmon color, extended to her head, completely covering her hair, and I wondered for an awful moment if she’d been ill, undergoing chemotherapy and suffering hair loss. But no, there was a fresh, healthy, rich face. Instead of a purse she had only a lumpy plastic bag with a superma
rket logo; that did worry me, especially because she put it on the table instead of setting it on the floor as I would have expected. It bounced slightly on the sticky wooden surface, and I remembered that she always carried an apple with her, a paperback or two, and her small bottle of cold-sore medication.

  Of course I’d written to her when My Thyme Is Up was accepted for publication, and she’d sent back a postcard saying, “Well done, it sounds like a hoot.”

  I was a little surprised that she hadn’t brought a copy for me to sign, and wondered at some point, halfway through my oyster soup, if she’d even read it. The college pays her shamefully, of course, and I know she doesn’t have money for new books. Why hadn’t I had Mr. Scribano send her a complimentary copy?

  It wasn’t until we’d finished our salads and ordered our coffee that I noticed she hadn’t mentioned the book at all, nor had she congratulated me on the Offenden Prize. But perhaps she didn’t know. The notice in the New York Times had been tiny. Anyone could have missed it.