Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  The indigenous folk of Strell and Upper Strell are alike in their fondness for flatties that are shaped in a circle with a small depression in the middle. Their horseshoes too reflect an inclination for circularity, the two traditional points having long since merged so that there is no visible break or separation. Boys are presented with their horseshoes at the age of twelve, girls at fourteen.

  The small Island of Spoy has not yet adopted the Lum-Bode. The people there rely instead on baking their flatties in a vertical passageway of shaped stone or brick which is said to carry smoke away from their dwellings. They nail their horseshoes over these passageways before a baking takes place, being careful that the prongs point skyward in a gesture of respect and also imprecation. Flatties are sometimes referred to by the oldenfolk of Spoy as fletcake or platter-brød, but these locutions are now in decline.

  Though flatties abound on the Island of Cailee, it is believed there are no women among the inhabitants from whom sailors may purchase a foodhoard. These brave seamen must set sail without a supply of flatties and without the womanly benedictions that protect other island folk from disorder and caprice. Caileeans wear their horseshoes suspended from a thong of leather around their necks, and before a voyage they bend forward in a deep bow, kissing the curve of iron in the ceremonial way, and in this manner preserve all that blesses and encourages them in their lives.

  On the Isle of Papa Cailee, flatties are baked communally, owing to the small number of inhabitants. By tradition, Caileean men stir the flour and water together in a great pot, after which the women gather together and add the needed fat and salt. A single horseshoe is placed at the bottom of the baking pan for the purpose of enhancing flavor and goodness. Before being eaten, the flatties of Papa Cailee are spread with beehoney and folded in quarters.

  The dwellers of Nack are partial to the savor of strong salt. Their flatties, therefore, possess a unique character, and a heat that is teasing to the tongue. Preserved fish is sometimes pressed between a pair of Nack-flatties and this skørpe, as it is called, is eaten from the hand in the open air. Nackfolk, when they are at leisure, enjoy a pursuit in which they hurl their horseshoes in the direction of a stationary wooden peg. Men, women, and children also, are known to participate in this activity.

  On the westward-lying Isle of Breen, flatties are baked but once a year. The baking takes place in the old chapelyard, and the first flatty to emerge from the bakeoven is broken over the ground where the thighbone of Saint Gårtrude is buried. There is no stone to mark this place; instead, a circle of horseshoes serves to remind folk that they are treading near holy-earth and cautions them to observe silence and to abide in a state of peace with their neighbors.

  Just half-a-daysail north lies Little Breen, where flatties are cooked on a griddle instead of an oven. They are eaten three times a day, and also at the feasts of sowing and harvesting. Those folk who fall sick are given flatties that are first soaked in sourmilk and sprinkled with the fine-ground meat of acorns. When a death occurs, the people of Little Breen throw a horseshoe into the sea so that the soul of the departed will be anchored to the earth and not lose its way.

  Here on the Isle of Lum we prefer to add one or two eggs to each baking of flatties, most especially in the summer-time when hens are clean-laying. A well-polished horseshoe is placed beneath the straw of each nest, and this greatly encourages the eggyield. It is the very young children who collect these eggs and carry them in baskets to the bakehouse. They never stumble, no egg is ever broken. Children born on islands differ from Elsewhere children in that they are knowing of each rock and fence-post of their homeplace, of every field-corner and doorway, every spit of sand and beach pebble. This knowledge imbues them with good health and strong trust, so that they are able to look out across the widewater and observe the wonder and diversity of our earthhome. May it ever be so.

  DYING FOR LOVE

  My first thought this morning is for Beth, how on earth she’ll cope now that Ted’s left her for the dancer Charlotte Brown. I ask myself, what resources does a woman like Beth have, emotional resources? Will she get through the first few days and nights? The nights will be terrible for her, I’m sure of that, long and heavy.

  For four years they’ve been together, almost five, perhaps longer. Habits accrue in that time, especially habits of the night when bodies and their routines get driven into hard rituals of washed skin, brushed teeth, programs of solemnity, then the light switch flicked off, then, then the orchestrated folding back of the almost weightless cotton blanket—for it’s spring now, late May—and the mattress buttons pushing upward. Five years gives time to study and absorb and take on the precise rhythms of another person’s breathing pattern and to accommodate their night postures, whether they sprawl or thrash or curl up tight. Beth curls, but sinuously; her backbone makes a long smiling capital C on the bedsheet, or used to, before Ted told her he was leaving her for Charlotte.

  Before bed, ever since Ted left, she drinks a cup of hot milk. This milk holds a dose of self-destruction, since she hates the taste and can only choke it down if it’s accompanied by a slice of toast spread with peanut butter, and this exacerbates her weight problem, which was one of the issues between her and Ted. He has an unreasoning fear of fat, though from a certain angle his own face looks fleshy and indulged. Charlotte Brown the dancer is so thin it breaks your heart. Even off her points, walking diagonally across a room, she has a tripping look of someone balancing on little glass stilts; also a pair of hip bones shaved down like knives, also a high thin ribbony voice.

  Beth’s met Charlotte twice, once at a pre-performance party, which is also where Ted first met her, and again, recently, when the three of them, Ted, Beth, and Charlotte, had a drink together in a bar called the Captain’s Bridge and discussed the surprisingly long list of domestic details that now needed reordering. Ted and Charlotte are planning to be married, something Ted and Beth in their five years had never considered, at least Ted had not. On this particular evening, out of embarrassment possibly, he lifted his glass and attempted a witticism so derivative—“You only get married for the first time once”—that Beth pressed her hands to the sides of her head, causing her blouse to rip under one arm.

  Ted took out a pencil and note pad. There was the lease to consider; he would pay his share through the end of June. And some stemware to split up, and two sets of oven mitts. “We won’t discuss oven mitts.” Beth said this nicely, with dignity. Then a desk chair, his. A brass umbrella stand, hers. A monkey fern that Ted claimed to have nursed through a bad spell after Beth neglected it. There was also, at the bottom of the list, a certain six-cup, hard-to-replace aluminum coffeepot.

  Beth had planned to be relaxed and offhand for this meeting; that was the reason she was wearing an old red cotton blouse with buttons fastening on the side. She worked hard to keep the toads from leaping out of her mouth. She kept her hand away from the dish of smoked pecans and held her head bravely erect as though she were sniffing a long-stemmed rose, a trick she learned from an article in a beauty magazine. Airily preoccupied, she managed to convey the impression that she was about to rush off to meet friends in a restaurant, close friends, old friends, and that she was already late and would probably have to take a cab, but that she was perfectly prepared to bear this expense, happy in fact to part with her last ten dollars, so eager was she for sympathetic companionship, to be among her own kind of people. She glanced frequently at her watch, at the same time quietly maintaining her right to the six-cup coffeepot.

  “I don’t drink coffee,” Charlotte Brown said in a dazed, injured voice.

  “All right then, keep the coffeepot,” Ted said, none too gently, causing Beth to grab her jacket, white linen, and rush out the door without saying good-bye or wishing the two of them happiness and good fortune in the years ahead.

  Later she thought of stuffing one of Ted’s stray socks in the coffeepot and mailing it to his new address. Or filling it with her birth control pills and leaving it at
his door. Or donating it to a money raiser for the victims of AIDS.

  Instead she put the coffeepot on the top shelf of a cupboard where she would hardly ever have to look at it.

  I find it difficult to imagine how Beth will cope emotionally. Nevertheless, despite her insomnia, she somehow manages to get up most mornings, get herself dressed, and go to work in the office of a very large swimwear factory. A woman named Jennifer Downs who works in the same office pressed a little packet into Beth’s hand one day. Sleeping pills, she whispered. Just a few. To get you through the next couple of weeks. You need your sleep, you need to keep yourself from falling apart.

  Beth has a bottle of gin in her cupboard and wonders what would happen if she took all twelve pills plus the gin. She doesn’t know. I don’t either. Probably nothing would happen; this is what she decides anyway—nothing. But just in case she empties the gin bottle down the kitchen sink. The pills she grinds in the disposal unit.

  Then she wanders into her bathroom, her hot milk in hand, and permits herself an admiring look in the ripply mirror, but nonchalantly, coolly, out of the corner of her eye. What she sees is the profile of someone who has considered joining that tiny company of women who have died for love. She salutes the side of her face with her thick pottery mug, across which is written the word SMILE.

  Life is a thing to be cherished, she thinks, and this thought, slender as a handrail, gets her through one more night.

  But then there’s Lizzie in Somerset; my fears for Lizzie grow day by day. Her predicament is clear and so is her fate, although I can perhaps imagine a way to assist her in the avoidance of that fate.

  It is now a fortnight since Ned quit the lodgings where the two of them have sheltered these last several months. Ever since his departure Lizzie has grieved, and repeated over and over to herself their final hour together, a long damp scene in which Ned’s confession of temptation and weakness had gone on and on, running out of his mouth so wastefully, and all for her account, when a single phrase would have done: he was sodden with love, and for a music hall performer named Carlotta. When he pronounced the word love, the little muscles around his lips strained toward a decency that surprised her.

  The first shock of silence once Lizzie found herself truly alone in the room was chilling. She dealt, finally, with her necessary calculations, adding and subtracting while pacing the length of the pink wallpapered room overlooking the filthy cobbled street.

  Small rented rooms such as this have the power to accumulate sharp clarities, particularly the relentless press of time passing, how it can never be turned backward. Lizzie’s small breasts, over which Neddie had sighed with disappointment, or so she fancied, were now engorged, swollen against her muslin bodice, their tips shivering with hurt. She was only eighteen, but of country stock, and knew the signs. An older sister, married and living in Ox fordshire, had spoken to her gently of female vulnerability, of the moon and its controlling power, but this was before Neddie made his appearance in the region.

  He was a manufacturer’s representative from Bolton. His hours were irregular. It seemed he could work when he liked, and more often he went his rounds in the early evening when, as he said, people were most easily persuaded in their buying and selling. His shirts—he possessed three—had seen better days, but his coat, which was of dark woolen stuff, and elegant, and was buttoned in the new single-breasted way, spoke of reliability. So too did his gold watch and chain and the glossy manner in which he fingered these objects. Lizzie worried about his shoes, their scraped toes and cracked uppers, wondering what, if anything, they signified.

  He teased her with foolish compliments and practiced on her a perverse magic, for, by praising her simplicity, he urged her to abandon it. By exclaiming over her devotion, he hinted that her pretty ways fell somehow short of full womanly expression. Her sincerity of affection was so forthright, so cheerful, candid, and unstinting, that he fell into a sulk and accused her of loving everyone else as well as she loved him. His restlessness, his tapping foot, his drumming fingers, the tiny working muscles around his mouth beseeched her to give up that token he most truly desired, and finally, in the cushiony orchard, under a sky of depthless black, she surrendered.

  Now she sat in a small room counting off days. A series of pictures tripped through her head, joining the pink flowers on the wall and receding finally into a continuous blur of grief. She has told Mrs. Hanna who keeps the lodging house that her husband will pay the rent as soon as he returns from a brief journey to Der byshire, a journey necessitated by a sudden illness in her mother’s family. Poor creature, said Mrs. Hanna with her munching gums, poor creature, and Lizzie has turned these words over in her mind at least a hundred times.

  Late one spring night, in the tender darkness, she flung a cloak across her shoulders, swiftly pinned a hat to her head, and strode toward the site of the New Bridge.

  The New Bridge is a wonder. Great iron spans swing between tapering stone piles in a manner so harmonious that mountains are brought to mind, and feudal strongholds and brave deeds. The graceful railings are decorated with iron Tritons and plunging sea creatures, thrusting their green painted heads boldly forward and interlacing their scaly tails. Far below the flooded river roars and sings.

  A yellowish light now forms on the bridge railing, a spumy brightness as clear as paint, but cut over and across by shapes of heavy leaves and whip-like branches, and above them a watery aisle outlined and tinted by a three-quarters-full moon. Now, Lizzie whispers. And hoists herself up among the molded mermaids. Now!

  But two thoughts quickly intervene. First, that she is a remarkably able swimmer. Her father, who drank, who told lies, who pocketed money he had no right to, who blasphemed, who could scarcely read, who was prideful and superstitious—this same man had taught each of his seven children, daughters as well as sons, to swim. He stood waist high in pond water and supported their bodies with the shelf of his broad arms, encouraging them to kick for their lives and thrash and keep their heads above the treacherous surface; over and over until they had it right, until it became second nature—which is why Lizzie knows that the moment she breaks through the white foam, a phantom courage will drive her smoothly and swiftly in the direction of the river bank.

  Her second thought is for her hat, which is yellow straw with a band of cut-felt violets around its crown, given her by the Oxford sister on her last birthday. She holds the hat in little regard, but senses at the same time the absurdity, the impossibility, of drowning in such a hat. Nor will she leave it on the bridge railing to be picked up by the first passerby.

  Suddenly, like a wave riding well above its fellows, her sorrow collapses. She smiles, licks her lips, and turns her back on the tide of river water with its glints and crescents and riding knots of gold. Down there in the swirling currents her dear Neddie’s behavior is suspended. Not only that, but she imagines possibilities of rescue. Mrs. Hanna. Her Oxford sister. Some few remaining coins in the bottom of a purse. Who can tell.

  It is to my advantage that I can discard the possibilities Lizzie can’t even imagine. All she understands is that both love and the lack of love can be supported. Loneliness might even be useful, she thinks—and clinging to this slender handrail of hope she readjusts her hat and strikes off down the road.

  Elsewhere, much nearer home, a woman named Elizabeth is lying on her bed in the middle of the afternoon with a plastic dry cleaner’s bag drawn up over her face, like a blanket in freezing weather. She is no longer young. A week ago she apprehended herself, not directly in a mirror, but by catching hold of her image, almost by chance, in the presence of its encircling flesh, and realized that this disintegrating quilted envelope would accompany her to the end, and that she had lost forever the power to stir ardor.

  Nevertheless she is surprisingly calm, breathing almost indifferently against the thin plastic covering. She inhales and exhales experimentally, playfully, observing the way the membrane puckers and clings, then withdraws at her pleasure. She has bee
n married for twenty-five years, and is still married, to a man who no longer loves her; it’s gone, it’s used up, it’s worn away, and there’s nothing to bring it back; half her despair derives from knowing that this thing that’s collapsed so suddenly in her, has been dead to him for years, and she thinks how much more bearable an abrupt abandonment of love would have been.

  How much more acceptable, like a cleanly applied knife, if he were to leave her for someone else, one of the secretaries in his office, for instance, some girl with a swaying, gliding pelvis, with carelessly bundled dark massy hair and bright coral mouth and fingernails—perhaps her name would be Coral as well, Coral of the swervy body and rhythmic hands who would bring about an honest spasm of betrayal and not this slow airless unassuageable absence.

  She tries hard to picture the two of them together, her husband and this woman Coral, and for an instant a color photo flickers on her eyelids. But she has trouble keeping it in focus. Instead she is imagining the legions of other women who have almost died for love, how they are all fetched from the same province of illusion, the same fraying story, and how they employ the same shadeless metaphors. A tragic narrative, unbearable, except that the recurrent episodes—of ecstasy, shock, loss, and lament—are similarly, cunningly, hinged to a saving capacity for digression and recovery, for the ability to be called back by clamorous objects and appointments. A woman at the end of love, after all, is not the same as a woman at the end of her tether. She has the power to create parallel stories that offer her a measure of comfort.

  Already the plastic bag has loosened its hold and slipped down below her face, a bag that only yesterday enclosed a heavy gray overcoat, her husband’s, and was carried home by Elizabeth herself from the dry cleaner’s in a nearby shopping mall and put away in a cedar closet until next winter.