Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  He had found the little key in the grass behind the marina. He’d been lying there flat on his belly, running the palm of his hand back and forth across the dry, colorless, shaven blades, feeling the unbreatheable heat and thinking about sex—the fundamental circularity of sexual awakening, first longing, then intention and discharge, then satisfaction, and finally quiescence. What was the use of it, he wondered, this wasteful closed rhythm that presented itself again and again like an old fable that wheezes out its endless repetition. It wore away at him. He kept hoping to drive it away, but a kind of anxiety was forever regrowing around his heart, and he felt he would never be free.

  And then he saw something burning in the grass near his head, a coin or a bottle cap. But no—when he reached out he found it was a key. It lay lightly in his hand, small and almost weightless, rounded at its head and punched with a ridged hole. The other end—the business end, as some people call it—was dull-toothed, cheaply made, stamped out rather than cut; possibly it was a bicycle key or the key to a locker. Or else—and he pushed himself up on one elbow, peering at it closely, turning it over in his hand—or else it was the key to money or mystery or fame or passion. He slid the little key into his back pocket, where it remained for several weeks, long enough for its silhouette to leave an imprint on the faded denim material, a thready raised patch of white shading off into blue.

  The key was later discovered in the dryer of the Harbor Heights Laundromat by one of its regular clients, Cheryl Spence, thirty-four, who lives on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise across the street. It was a Saturday morning. She dumped in her blouses, her full cotton skirts and sundresses, her socks and underwear, her pillowcase and duvet cover. She turns all these items inside out when she launders them, giving them a hard shake as her mother had done, as her grandmother once did, and then she examines the pockets for stray tissues and paper clips. Buttons are buttoned and zippers zipped. She checks the temperature setting, measures the detergent in the little Styrofoam cup provided by the management.

  Oh, how orderly and careful I am, she says to herself, how good! In her change purse there are plenty of quarters to feed the machines, little silvery stacks of them lying on their sides, rubbing solidly together. If other people doing their laundry on a Saturday morning run short of change, Cheryl can always help them out. Whenever this happens she reflects on what a kind, generous, and altruistic person she is, and what a pity there aren’t more good-hearted people in the world like herself. She thinks this, but doesn’t say it. As a very young child, not more than six or seven years of age, she understood that she was scheduled to have a doubled existence—an open life in which her actions were plainly visible, and a hidden life where thought and intention squatted darkly. This powerful separation seems wholly natural to her, not a thing to rage against or even to question. The real world, of course, is in her own head, which she sometimes thinks of as a shut room provisioned with declaration and clarity, everything else being a form of theater.

  The little key she found at the Harbor Heights Laundromat was bent from being tossed about in the dryer’s drum. Some of its particularity had been rubbed away by heat and friction. She straightened it as best she could between her fingers, dropped it into her purse, and carried it home. Who knows when she might be confronted by a lock she can’t open?

  For several months it sat, or rather lay, in a kitchen drawer, in a cracked teacup to be precise, along with a single hairpin, a handful of thumbtacks, a stub of a candle, half an eraser, a blackened French coin, a book of matches from the Infomatic Center, a rubber band or two, and a few paper clips. Odds and ends. Flotsam and jetsam.

  In the evenings, tired out from a day at the accounts office, she likes to read long romantic novels and listen to music on her CD player. One night—it was in the middle of January, in the middle of an ice storm—she sat reading a book called The Sands of Desire and listening to a concert of soft rock when she felt herself seized by an impulse to purify her life. The way her thighs broadened out as she sat in her chair, the printed words slipping out of focus, the notes of music—their excess and persistence crowded up against her, depriving her for a frightening moment of oxygen. She opened a window and let the icy air come into her apartment, but it was not enough. She grasped a small corduroy cushion and hurled it out the window, observing with satisfaction the way it spun around in the dark air as it descended, a soft little satellite of foam and fabric. Next she threw into the driving phosphorescence a compact disc she had bought on sale only one week earlier, a medley of country ballads, wailing, weak, and jerky with tears. In a kitchen cupboard she found a family-sized package of Cheese Twists, then a brown-edged head of lettuce in the refrigerator—out they went, one after the other, sailing off the tips of her fingers. And finally, in a gesture that was a kind of suicide or ritual cleansing, she didn’t know which, she emptied out the cracked china cup with its miserable, broken, mismatched contents, its unsorted detritus of economy and mystery. It seemed to her she could hear the separate items rattling down through the frozen tree branches and landing like a shower of meteorites on the rooftops of the cars parked below—the paper clips, the thumbtacks, the little bent key. Ping. Tut. Tsk, Tick. Gone.

  This same Cheryl Spence has visited the Pioneer Museum at Steinbach and the Reptile Museum on Highway 70 and the Wax Museum in Minneapolis, but she has never even heard of the Museum of Keys in the city of Buffalo, that dark old American city of cracked alleys and beef-colored bricks. A rough place, a tough place—but underlying its rough toughness, buried there like a seam of limestone, is the hoarded and invested money of a dozen or so millionaires no one’s ever heard of, men made rich on meat, screws, plastics, textiles, optics, leather, and the like. One of them, a manufacturer of table silver, established the Museum of Keys some years ago as a showcase for his own extensive key collection.

  His interest in keys began at the age of sixty, at a time when he was recovering from a serious heart attack. It was Christmas morning. He was seated in an armchair, a blanket over his knees, ashamed of that soft-fringed covering, ashamed of his cold feet in their slippers and the weak light that drifted in from the eastward-facing window. His wife presented him with an antique porcelain music box shaped like a shepherdess. Always before she had given him practical, manly objects such as fountain pens or fishing gear. What was he to make of a figurine with flounced china skirts, revolving slowly and playing the same merry waltz tune again and again and again? He sensed some covert meaning in his wife’s offering—for there she stood, inches away from him, so rounded, pale-fleshed, and mildly luminous, so timid in her posture and so fragile (with a head that tipped sideways and one hand clasping the pleats of her skirt), though her gaze at the moment of gift-giving was oddly sharpened and sly; she held her breath in her throat as if it were something breakable like ice or glass or part of the solitude she sometimes drew around herself. He loved her, and had never thought of her as a shrewd or demanding woman, yet here she was, waiting to be thanked, that much was clear, to be awarded an explosion of gratitude he had no way of formulating. He was not schooled in such expressions. Tact or shyness had kept him ignorant.

  Her name was Anna. He knew, intimately, after thirty years of marriage, the floury cellular creases of her neck and elbows, her breasts, hips, and round, shining ankles; he knew too, or rather sensed, that real intimacy was essentially painful—to those locked in its embrace as much as those shut out. In his confusion, his embarrassment, he seized on the exquisitely fashioned silver key, which at least possessed familiar weight and form.

  How beautifully it fit his hand. How concentrated was its purpose. He had only to insert it in the shepherdess’s glazed petticoats, that slender place at the back of her waist that has no name, and the mechanism was engaged. A twist or two released a ruffling of bells in triple meter. In the moment before the music began—and this was the part he grew to love best—there could be heard a brief sliding hum of gears shifting into place, anxious to perform, wonderful
ly obedient to the key’s delicate persuasion.

  The second key he acquired belonged to the lost oak door, or so he imagines it, of a demolished Breton chapel. It is thirteen inches long, made of black iron, rough in texture but beautifully balanced. “Notice the beautiful balance,” he says when showing it off, always employing the same exclamatory phrase and allowing the key to seesaw across the back of his wrist. Some of his other keys—before long there were hundreds—are made of rare alloys; many are highly decorated and set with semiprecious stones, pieces of jade or turquoise. One of the most curious is fifteen hundred years old, Chinese, and another, dating from the days of the Roman Empire, is made so it can be worn on the finger like a little ring. There are keys from the Middle Ages with elaborate, ingenious warding devices and there is also a small, flat, unprepossessing key—entirely unornamented—which is said to be the prototype of the Yale (or pin tumbler) key invented in Middletown, Connecticut, in the year 1848.

  The Museum of Keys is located in the southwest corner of the city, admission free, closed on Mondays, and offering school tours every Tuesday. A portrait of Anna ______ , the founder’s wife, 1903-1972, hangs on the wall behind the literature display. Ten thousand visitors come through the doors each year, and often they leave the museum jingling their own keys in their pockets or regarding them with new respect, perhaps thinking how strange it is that keys, the most private and secret parts of ourselves, are nevertheless placed under doormats or flower pots for visiting friends, or hung on a nail at the back of the garage for the gas-meter man, or mailed around the world in padded envelopes, acknowledging in this bitter, guarded century our lapses of attention.

  A seven-year-old boy taken along with his class to the museum in Buffalo stares into a display case. His gaze settles on a long, oddly shaped wooden key (Babylonian), and his hand flies instantly to the key he wears around his neck, the key that will let him into his house on North Lilac Avenue after school, one hour before his mother returns from her job at the bottling plant. When first tying the key in place, she had delivered certain warnings: the key must not be lost, lent, or even shown to others, but must be kept buried under his sweater all day long, accompanying him everywhere, protecting him from danger.

  He doesn’t need protection, not that he could ever explain this to his mother, he knows how to jump and hustle and keep himself watchful. The key leads him home and into a warm hallway, the light switch waiting, a note on the refrigerator, the television set sending him a wide, waxy smile of welcome. There is no danger, none at all; his mother has been misled, her notion of the world somehow damaged. Still, he loves this key (so icy against his skin when he slips it on, but warming quickly to body temperature) and has to restrain himself, whenever he feels restless, from reaching inside his clothes and fingering its edges.

  He is a solemn child whose thoughts are full of perforations (how it would feel to bite into a red crayon or put his tongue to the rain-soaked bushes behind the schoolyard fence), or else opening onto a lively boil of fantasy that tends to be dotted with bravery and tribute. And yet, for all his imaginative powers, he cannot—at his age—begin to picture the unscrolling of a future in which he will one day possess a key ring (in the shape of the Eiffel Tower) which will hold a pair of streamlined rubber-tipped car keys, as well as a rainbow of pale tinted others—house, office, club, cottage—and a time when he will have a curly-headed wife with her own set of keys (on a thong of red leather stamped with her initials) and a fourteen-year-old daughter whose miniature brass key will open a diary in which she will write out her secret thoughts, beneath which lie a secondary drift of thought too tentative, too sacred, too rare to trust to the inexactitude of print and to the guardianship of a mere key.

  ABSENCE

  She woke up early, drank a cup of strong unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple, and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.

  Of course she had no money and no house-handy mate to prod the key free. Many a woman would have shrugged good naturedly, conceded defeat, and left the small stones of thought unclothed, but not our woman; our woman rolled up her sleeves, to use that thready old metaphor, and began afresh. She would work around the faulty letter. She would force her story, however awkwardly, toward a detour. She would be resourceful, look for other ways, and make an artefact out of absence. She would, to put the matter bluntly, make do.

  She started—slowly, ponderously—to tap out words. “Several thousand years ago there—”

  But where her hands had once danced, they now trudged. She stopped and scratched her head, her busy, normally useful head, that had begun, suddenly, to thrum and echo; where could she go from here? she asked herself sharply. Because the flabby but dependable gerund had dropped through language’s trapdoor, gone. Whole parcels of grammar, for that matter, seemed all at once out of reach, and so were those bulky doorstop words that connect and announce and allow a sentence to pause for a moment and take on fresh loads of oxygen. Vocabulary, her well-loved garden, as broad and taken-for-granted as an acre of goldenrod, had shrunk to a square yard, and she was, as never before, forced to choose her words, much as her adored great-aunt, seated at a tea table, had selected sugar lumps by means of a carefully executed set of tongs.

  She was tempted, of course, to seek out synonyms, and who could blame her? But words, she knew, held formal levels of sense and shades of deference that were untransferable one to the other, though thousands of deluded souls hunch each day over crossword puzzles and try. The glue of resonance makes austere demands. Memory barks, and context, that absolute old cow, glowers and chews up what’s less than acceptable.

  The woman grew, as the day wore on, more and more frustrated. Always the word she sought, the only word, teased and taunted from the top row of the broken keyboard, a word that spun around the center of a slender, one-legged vowel, erect but humble, whose dot of amazement had never before mattered.

  Furthermore, to have to pause and pry an obscure phrase from the dusty pages of her old thesaurus threw her off balance and altered the melody of her prose. Between stutters and starts, the sheen was somehow lost; the small watery pleasures of accent and stress were roughed up as though translated from some coarse sub-Balkan folk tale and rammed through the nozzle of a too-clever-by-half, space-larky computer.

  Her head-bone ached; her arm-bones froze; she wanted only to make, as she had done before, sentences that melted at the center and branched at the ends, that threatened to grow unruly and run away, but that clause for clause adhered to one another as though stuck down by Velcro tabs.

  She suffered too over the sounds that evaded her and was forced to settle for those other, less seemly vowels whose open mouths and unsubtle throats yawned and groaned and showed altogether too much teeth. She preferred small slanted breakable tones that scarcely made themselves known unless you pressed an ear closely to the curled end of the tongue or the spout of a kettle. The thump of heartbeat was what she wanted, but also the small urgent jumps lodged between the beats. (She was thankful, though, for the sly y that now and then leapt forward and pulled a sentence taut as a cord.)

  “Several thousand years ago a woman sat down at a table and began to—”

  Hours passed, but the work went badly. She thought to herself: to make a pot of bean soup would produce more pleasure. To vacuum the hall rug would be of more use.

  Both sense and grace eluded her, but hardest to bear was the fact that the broken key seemed to demand of her a parallel surrender, a correspondence of economy subtracted from the alphabet of her very self. But how? A story had to come from somewhere. Some hand must move the pen along or press the keys and steer, somehow, the granddaughter toward the Boston fern or place the golden app
le at the foot of the blue cradle. “A woman sat down at a table and—”

  She felt her arm fall heavy on the table and she wondered, oddly, whether or not the table objected. And was the lamp, clamped there to the table’s edge, exhausted after so long a day? Were the floorboards reasonably cheerful or the door numb with lack of movement, and was the broken letter on her keyboard appeased at last by her cast-off self?

  Because now her thoughts flowed through every object and every corner of the room, and a moment later she became the walls and also the clean roof overhead and the powerful black sky. Why, she wondered aloud, had she stayed so long enclosed by the tough, lonely pronoun of her body when the whole world beckoned?

  But the words she actually set down came from the dark eye of her eye, the stubborn self that refused at the last moment to let go. “A woman sat down—”

  Everyone knew who the woman was. Even when she put a red hat on her head or changed her name or turned the clock back a thousand years or resorted to wobbly fables about granddaughters and Boston ferns, everyone knew the woman had been there from the start, seated at a table, object and subject sternly fused. No one, not even the very young, pretends that the person who brought forth words was any other than the arabesque of the unfolded self. There was no escape and scarcely any sorrow.

  “A woman sat down and wrote,” she wrote.

  WINDOWS

  In the days when the Window Tax was first introduced M. J. used to say to me: “Stop complaining. Accept. Render unto Caesar. Et cetera.”

  I remember feeling at the time of the legislation that the two of us would continue to live moderately well as long as we had electricity to illuminate our days and nights, and failing that, kerosene or candles. But I knew that our work would suffer in the long run.