Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  “What a good thing you were hit by the harp and not the glass,” people said. “How fortunate you were to be struck on the leg and not the head,” others offered. I cried for two days, drenching my hospital sheets with my tears, weeping from the shock and the pain and the stupidity of people’s remarks, and also because I had not been invited to the accountants’ party, never mind that I am not an accountant myself or acquainted with one.

  Was there any justice in the world? Think about it. Why should I have been shivering along on a dark slush-strewn street when I might have been standing aloft in that warm, crowded, scented room, reaching for one more pastry puff, one more glass of fragrant wine, and taking in, as though it were my right, the soft background tinkling of harp music; my name printed on the invitation list, part of the ongoing celebration of the season.

  X rays were taken, of course, and it was determined that a chip of bone had broken away from my left shin. Nothing could be done about this detached piece of tissue, I was going to have to live my life without it, just as I have learned to accommodate other subtractions. The bruising would disappear in a week or so. Painkillers were prescribed. A counselor arrived to help me deal with trauma, and the chaplain enjoined me to give thanks for having been spared even greater injury. The newspapers requested interviews, but these I resisted.

  I phoned my mother in Calgary. (“You always were clumsy,” she said.) And my father in Montana. (Did I mention that my parents have decided to separate after all these years?) He, with his hearing impairment, came away from our conversation believing I had been struck not by a harp but by a heart. “That doesn’t sound too serious to me,” he said in his fatherly way. “A heart is a relatively soft and buoyant organ.” And then he said, “You’ll get over it in no time.”

  The harpist visited me in the hospital. Her body was tense. Her face was red. She kept her coat on, buttoned up, during the whole of the visit. The harp was being examined by experts. It might be repairable or it might not, but in any case the expense was going to be exorbitant—and here was she, without insurance, and for the time being without any means of earning a living. It seemed only reasonable, she said, that I contribute to her costs.

  Only my dreams are benign. In these nightly visitations the harp is not plummeting but floating. The December air presses on its gilded strings tenderly, with the greatest tact, and I am transformed, unrehearsed, into the guest of honor, awarded the unexpected buoyancy of flight itself, as I reach out to catch the whole of my life in my arms.

  OUR MEN AND WOMEN

  Our Earthquake man is up early. He greets the soft dawn with a speculative lift of his orange juice glass. “Hello, little earth,” he hums quietly. Then, “So! You’re still here.”

  He puts in a pre-breakfast call to the E-Quake Center. “Nothing much,” he hears. “Just a few overnight rumbles.”

  Overnight what? Really?

  He resents having missed these terrestrial waves, but his resentment is so faint, so almost nonexistent, he swallows it down, along with his Vitamin C. He should be grateful. So he’d missed a tremble or two! what does it matter?—the earth is always heaving, growling, whereas last night he’d slept seven uninterrupted hours with his arms and legs wrapped around the body of his dear Patricia, his blond Patricia, graceful, lithe Patricia, fifteen years his junior, blessed replacement for Marguerite—perpetrator of sulks, rages, the hurling of hairbrushes and dinner plates. Thirty-five years he and Marguerite were together. Their four grown children are almost embarrassingly buoyant about this second marriage of his. At the time of the wedding, last Thanksgiving, two days after a 3.5 Richter scale reading, the kids chipped in together to buy their old dad and his new wife an antique sleigh bed. Actually a reproduction model, produced in a North Car olina factory. Sleek, beautiful. Closer in its configuration to being a cradle than a sleigh.

  Now, in the early morning, Patricia is grilling slices of seven-grain bread over the backyard barbecue. She has a thing about toasters, just as he has a thing about the instability of the earth. You’d think he’d be used to it after all this time, but his night dreams are of molten lava, and the crunch and grind of tectonic plates. As a graduate student he believed his subtle calibrations could predict disaster; now he knows better. Those years with Marguerite taught him that making projections is like doing push-ups in water. The world spewed and shifted. There was nothing to lean against. You had to pull yourself back from it, suck in your gut, and hold still.

  His solemn, smiling Patricia is flipping over the toast now with a long silvery fork. Sunlight decorates her whisked-back hair and the rounded cotton shoulder of her T-shirt. What a picture! She stands balanced with her bare feet slightly apart on the patio stones, defying—it would seem—the twitching earth with its sly, capricious crust. “Ready?” she calls out to him, skewering the slices of toast on her fork and tossing them straight at his head.

  But no. It’s only an optical illusion. The toast is still there, attached to the fork’s prongs. It’s a hug she’s thrown in his direction. Her two skinny arms have risen exuberantly, grabbed a broad cube of air, and pushed it forcefully toward him.

  It came at him, a tidal wave moving along a predestined line. This is what his nightmares have promised: disorder, violence.

  A man of reflexes, his first thought was to duck, to cover his face and protect himself. Then he remembered who he was, where he was—a man standing in a sunlit garden a few yards away from a woman he loved. He can’t quite, yet, believe this. “Tsunami,” he pronounced speculatively.

  “Me too,” she whispered. “Hey, me too.”

  Our Rainfall woman is also up early. She parts her dotted Swiss curtains and inspects the sky. Good, fine, okay; check. A smack of blue, like an empty billboard, fills in the spaces behind her flowering shrubs and cedar fence; she finds this reassuring, also disappointing. Her whole day will be like this, a rocking back and forth between what she wants and what she doesn’t. “I am master of all I can stand,” her father, the great explainer, used to say. She can’t remember if he meant this thought to be comforting or if he was being his usual arrogant, elliptical self.

  At eleven o’clock she conducts her seminar on drought. At four-thirty she’s scheduled to lecture on flood. Lunch will be a sandwich and a pot of tea in the staff room. They expect her to be there. Today someone asks her about the World Series, who she’s betting on. “Hmmmm,” she says, blinking, looking upward, moving her mug of tea swiftly to her lips. Then, “Hard to say, hard to say.”

  Her night dreams, her daydreams too, are about drowning, but in recent months she’s been enrolled in an evening workshop at the Y that teaches new techniques guaranteed to control nocturnal disturbances. It works like this: In the midst of sleep, the conscious mind is invited to step forward and engage briefly with the dream image, so that a threatening wave of water closing over the dreamer’s head (for example) is transformed into a shower of daisies. Or soap flakes. Or goose feathers. An alternate strategy is to bid the conscious mind to reach for the remote control (so to speak) and switch channels. Even her father’s flat elderly argumentative voice can be shut off. Right off, snap, click. Or transmuted into a trill of birdsong. Or the dappled pattern of light and shadow.

  She lives, by choice, in a part of the country where rain is moderate. There’s never too much or too little. Except—well, except during exceptional circumstances, which could occur next week or next month, anytime, in fact. Planetary systems are enormously complicated; they tend to interact erratically. She understands this, having written any number of articles on the very subject of climate variability, on the theory of chaos. Meteorologists, deservedly humbled in recent years, confess that they are working toward eighty-five percent accuracy, and that this thrust applies only to twenty-four-hour predictions. Long-term forecasting, the darling of her graduate school days, has been abandoned.

  There’s no way people can protect themselves against surprise. Her father, for instance, was one minute alive and the ne
xt minute dead. The space in between was so tightly packed that there wasn’t room to squeeze in one word.

  Our Fire fellow is relatively young, but already he’s been granted tenure. Also five thousand square feet of laboratory space, plus three research assistants, plus an unlimited travel allowance. Anything he wants he gets, and he wants a lot. He’s gassed up on his own brilliance. And with shame too. No one should need what he needs, and need it ten times a day, a hundred times a day.

  He’s a man of finely gauged increments, of flashpoints, of fevers and starbursts, of a rich unsparing cynicism. Up at five-thirty, a four-mile run, a quick flick through the latest journals, half a dozen serious articles gulped down, then coffee, scalding, out of a machine. This part of the day is a torment to him, his night dreams still not shaken off. (Has it been made clear that he lives by choice in a motel unit, and refuses even the consolation of weekly rates?)

  By seven he’s in his office, checking through his E-mail, firing off letters which become quarrels or sharp inquiries. Everywhere he sees slackers, defilers, and stumblers. His anger blazes just thinking of them. He knows he should exercise patience, but fear of anonymity, or something equally encumbering, has edged the sense of risk out of his life.

  Small talk, small courtesies—he hasn’t time. His exigent nature demands instant responses and deplores time-wasting functions. Like what? Like that wine-and-cheese reception for old What’s-His-Name and his new wife! Like staff room niceties. Blather about the World Series. And that lachrymose young Rainfall woman who keeps asking him how he’s “getting along.”

  Well, he’s getting along. And along and along. He’s going up, up. Up like a firecracker.

  Right now he’s doing fifty double-time push-ups on the beige carpet of his office in preparation for one of his popular lectures on reality. His premise, briefly, is that we can only touch reality through the sensations of the single moment, that infinitesimal spark of time which is, even now as we consider it, dying. We must—to use his metaphor—place our hand directly in the flame.

  He pursues his point, romping straight over the usual curved hills of faith, throwing forth a stupefying mixture of historical lore and its gossamer logic, presenting arguments that are bejew eled with crafty irrelevance, covering the blackboard with many-branched equations that establish and illuminate his careful, random proofs. On and on he goes, burning dangerously bright, and ever brighter.

  Notes are taken. No one interrupts, no one poses questions, they wouldn’t dare. Afterward the lecture hall empties quickly, leaving him alone on the podium, steaming with his own heat, panting, rejoicing.

  But grief steals into his nightly dreams, which commence with a vision of drenching rain, rain that goes on and on and shows no sign of ever ending, falling into the rooms of his remembered boyhood, his mother, his father—there they are, smiling, so full of parental pride—and a brother, especially a brother, who is older, stronger, more given to acts of shrugging surrender, more self-possessed, more eagerly and more offhandedly anointed. The family’s clothes and bodies are soaked through with rain, as are the green hedges, the familiar woods and fields, the roadway, the glistening roofs and chimneys, inclines and valleys, the whole world, in fact. Except for him, standing there with his hands cupped, waiting. For him there has been, so far, not a single drop.

  She’s something else, our Plague and Pestilence woman. She’s just (today) won the staff room World Series pool—a lucky guess, she admits, the first four games out of seven. No one else risked such a perfect sky-blue sweep.

  “You were an accident,” her mother told her when she was a young girl, just ten or eleven years old. “I never meant to have a kid, it just happened. There I was, pregnant.”

  Unforgivable words. But instantly forgiven. Because her mother’s voice, as she made this confession, was roughened with wonder. An accident, she said, but her intonation, her slowly shaking woman’s head, declared it to be the best accident imaginable. The most fortunate event in the history of the world, no less.

  Our Plague and Pestilence woman married young, out of love, a man who was selfish, moody, cruel, childish. But one day, several years into the marriage, he woke up and thought: “I can’t go on like this. I have to change. I have to become a different kind of person.”

  They are thankful, both of them, that their children have been spared the ravages of smallpox, typhoid, diphtheria, scarlet fever, poliomyelitis. Other diseases, worse diseases, hover about them, but the parents remain hopeful. Their histories, their natural inclinations, buoy them up. She dreams nightly of leaf mold, wheat rot, toads falling from the sky, multiplying bacteria, poisoned blood, incomprehensible delusions, but wakes up early each day with a clean sharp longing for simple tasks and agreeable weather.

  It was our Plague and Pestilence woman who, one year ago, introduced her assistant, Patricia, to the recently widowed Earthquake man, and this matchmaking success has inspired another social occasion—which occurred just last night, as a matter of fact. A platter of chicken, shrimp, saffron, and rice was prepared. A table was set in a shaded garden. The two guests—our Rainfall woman, our Fire person—were reluctant at first to come. They had to be persuaded, entreated. Once there, they were put, more or less, at their ease. Made to feel they deserved the fragrant dish before them. Invited to accept whatever it was that poured through their senses. Encouraged to see that the image they glimpsed in the steady candlelight matched almost, but not quite, the shapeless void of their private nightly dreams.

  Our P and P woman, observant as she is, doesn’t yet know how any of this will turn out. It’s far too soon to tell.

  We can’t help being proud of our men and women. They work hard to understand the topography of the real. It’s a heartbreaking struggle, yet somehow they carry on—predicting, measuring, analyzing, recording, looking over their shoulders at the presence of their accumulated labor, cocking an ear to the sounds of their alarm clocks going off and calling them to temperature-controlled rooms and the dings and dongs of their word processors, the shrill bells of approval or disapproval, the creaks of their bodies as the years pile up, and the never-ending quarrel with their smothered, creaturely, solitary selves. Limitations—always they’re crowded up against limitations. Sometimes our men and women give way to old nightmares or denial or the delusion that living in the world is effortless and full of ease. Like everyone else, they’re spooked by old injuries, and that swift plummeting fall toward what they believe must be the future. Nevertheless they continue to launch their various theories, theories so fragile, speculative, and foolish, so unanchored by proofs and possibilities, and so distorted by their own yearnings, that their professional reputations are put at risk, their whole lives, you might say. Occasionally, not often, they are called upon to commit an act of extraordinary courage.

  Which is why we stand by our men and women. In the end they may do nothing. In the meantime, they do what they can.

  KEYS

  Biff Monkhouse, the man who brought bebop to Europe, collapsed and died last week in the lobby of the George V Hotel in Paris. His was a life full of success and failure, full of love and the absence of love. The famous “teddy boy” attire he affected was a kind of self-advertisement saying: I am outside of time and nationality, beyond gender and class.

  No wallet or passport was found on his person.

  No coins, snapshots, receipts, letters, or lists were found on his person.

  No spectacles, prescriptions, pills, phone numbers, credit cards were found on his person.

  No rings, wristwatches, chains, tattoos, or distinguishing scars were found on his person.

  No alcohol, caffeine, heroin, crack, or HIV-positive cells were found in his bloodstream.

  No odor attached to his body.

  His hair had been recently cut. His nails were pared, his shoes only lightly scuffed. His right hand was closed in a tight fist.

  An ambulance attendant pried open Biff Monkhouse’s fist half an hour after the collapse
and found there, warm and somewhat oily, a plain steel key ring holding nine keys of various shapes and sizes.

  Dr. Marianne Moriarty of Agassiz University read the Biff Monkhouse news item (Reuters) and found it not at all surprising. She’s evolved her own complex theory about keys, why people cling to them, what they represent. Every time you turn a key in a lock you make a new beginning—that’s one of her beliefs. Keys are useful, portable, and highly metaphorical, suggesting as they do the two postures we most often find ourselves in—for either we are locked in . . . or locked out. In her 1987 doctoral thesis she reported the startling fact that North Americans carry, on average, 5.3 keys. (Those who are prudent have copies hidden away, occasionally in places they no longer remember.) She herself carries twelve keys—condo, office, mailbox, garage, jewelry box, and the like, also a hotel key (Hawaii) she can’t bear to send back. Using an approved statistical sample, she’s worked out the correlation between the number of keys carried and the educational or economic or age level of the key carrier. Her mother Elsie, for instance, a sixty-six-year-old housewife in the small town of Grindley, Saskatchewan, carries only three keys—back door, front door, safe-deposit box, period—while Marianne’s lover, Malcolm Loring, professor emeritus of the Sociology Department, a married man with a private income, carries sixteen keys, one of which unlocks the door of a boathouse that burned down two years ago.

  Arson was suspected, but never proven. Sixteen-year-old Christopher MacFarlane, skinny, ponytailed, bad skin, a gaping, shredded hole in the left knee of his blue jeans, and a single unattached, unidentified key in his back pocket, happened to be in the vicinity at the time of the fire. He was questioned, but later released after a somewhat rougher-than-usual body search. The young police sergeant eyed him closely and said, “We’d like you to tell us, sonny, exactly what this key is you’ve got in your pocket.” “I don’t know,” the boy replied.