Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  Two months later Thomas Tallis is still on the fridge door. No one in the family has quite the courage to take him down, but the manuscript, all 612 pages, has been mailed to the publisher. This is a reasonably distinguished publishing house—though certainly not the best—and the editor is delighted to have the Tallis book on his fall list. He would much rather the author had written about William Byrd, of course, that goes without saying. There would have been great interest in a book about William Byrd, whereas there is only considerable interest in Thomas Tallis. Tallis, if the truth be known, must always be identified along with his famous student who, according to tradition, overshadowed him. Part of Tallis’s essence, in fact, is that he is stuck in an inevitable frame of reference. He also ran. Ran a good race, but . . .

  Imagine what a woman does who has suddenly, after four long years, completed an arduous task. She cleans her house, for one thing, not perfectly, but competently. She remains in bed an hour longer in the morning, and for this her husband is ecstatically grateful. They wake together, his lips trace the pearled curve of her spinal column. He is a man who stumbles about all day dealing with the exigencies of gravel production, gravel deliveries, gravel prices per cubic meter, but thinking every other minute of his wife’s soft limbs, her bodily clefts and swellings.

  For her clever daughter she buys tickets to the ballet, and they return from the performance drunk with pleasure, and enact mock, foolish pirouettes on the hall carpet, bumping into the walls and giggling like a pair of teenagers.

  For her younger son, a boy of exceptional beauty, she spends a whole day sorting through the debris of his bedroom. She does this tactfully, tidily, thoroughly, and the child is conscious of an immense sense of relief. All those buried socks, books, pencil ends, wads of paper, coins, dust—he was unable to deal with it, but now all is order and ease.

  Her middle child is neither clever nor exceptional in appearance, but she loves him best; she can’t help it; he touches a spot of tenderness in her that only music has been able to reach. She kisses the top of his head while he eats his cereal. She straightens the collar of his coat before he leaves for school. She has gone back to listening to Tallis in the afternoons, a remarkable recording by the Tallis Scholars, and as she listens something like a kite string reaches down and pulls at her thoughts, which are not quite ready to be thoughts. It might be that she’s putting her own heart beside itself, making comparisons. What does it mean to be better or best?

  One of the new, young music gurus, writing in the weekend papers, believes Tallis is actually a better composer than Byrd. What had been considered simple in his work is now thought of as subtle. What struck earlier critics as primitive is really a form of understated sophistication. Perhaps these judgments boil down to mere fashion. Or perhaps the recent Tallis biography has upped his reputation.

  Imagine a girl just twenty-one years old—I’m aware that I probably should say “young woman,” but there is so much girlishness in her face and in the way she sets off from home each morning, running a quarter of a mile to the Tube station, swinging her leather satchel at her side. She is probably in love or at least drawn to the possibility of love. Undoubtedly she thinks about the new clenched knot of ardor in her chest, thinks of it all day long, coming and going to her classes, while seated at the piano and also at the harpsichord, which she has recently taken up. Her head may be swarming with Latin, with choral efforts, with the rising and falling and patterning of sound, but her body presses against this new, rapturous apparition.

  Then one day, late in May, she meets a young man. They collide on the Tube, not the most romantic of venues. This man is awkward, he has holes in his pockets, he is ungainly in his appearance. He is really rather ordinary, as a matter of fact, immersed as he is in the drainage capability of compacted gravel, and so lacking in perception that he will never understand why she agreed to have a coffee with him instead of attending her class. He’s a lad, that’s all, just another face, though he flatters himself that she sees something in him. Why, otherwise, does she go to the cinema with him on that first afternoon, and then out for fish and chips, and later, only a week later, does she end up in his flat, in his bed?

  Why does she marry him, him of all people? Why do they buy a house in a semi-respectable area of London, produce three quite nice children, take holidays in Scotland or else in Yorkshire where her mother lives? And why—another question altogether—when her book on Tallis is launched at a large cocktail buffet, and her publisher suggests that she write about William Byrd, does she shake her head “no”?

  Let someone else do Byrd, her look said on that occasion.

  But now, one year later she’s rethinking the matter. Yes. Byrd. Why not?

  The system of temperament in the family shifts once again, and so does the onward allotment of time. As before, this woman rises early each day, but this time to put together her notes on William Byrd, the divine William Byrd, who seems suddenly in danger of being eclipsed by his renowned teacher and mentor.

  She allows the house to fill up with dust and clutter. When her husband drops a kiss on the back of her neck, she shakes her hair impatiently. Her word processor sends out blinding windows of authority. She’s busy, she’s preoccupied, she’s committing an act of redemption. A choir of ten thousand voices sings inside her head. No wonder she’s been looking at her husband lately with an odd, assessing, measuring clarity.

  More and more he tries to stay out of her way, and more and more he refers to himself in the third person. He’s an ordinary man, no one to make a fuss over. He insists on that. Nevertheless he finds himself opening his ears to the new music that’s overtaken the house.

  SOUP DU JOUR

  Everyone is coming out these days for the pleasures of ordinary existence. Sunsets. Dandelions. Fencing in the backyard and staying home. “The quotidian is where it’s at,” Herb Rhinelander wrote last week in his nationwide syndicated column. “People are getting their highs on the level roller coaster of everydayness, dipping their daily bread in the soup of common delight and simple sensation.”

  A ten-year-old child is sent to the corner store to buy a bunch of celery, and this small isolated event with its sounds, smells, and visual texture yields enough footage for a feature film. A woman bending over her embroidery pauses to admire the hitherto unremarked beauty of her thimble, its cozy steel blue utility, its dimpled perfection. A walker stumbles over a fallen log and apprehends with piercing suddenness the crumbling racy aroma of rotted wood, how the smell of history rises from such natural decay, entropy’s persistent perfume, more potent than the strongest hallucinogen and free for the taking. Nowadays people ill in their beds draw courage from the shapeliness of their bed-posts, the plangent software of cut flowers, Hallmark cards, or knitted covers for their boiled eggs, and such eggs! Such yellowness of yolk! Such complementary wrap and gloss of white.

  Everywhere adolescent girls stare into ditches where rainwater collects and mirrors the colors of passion; their young men study the labels of soup cans, finding therein a settled, unbreakable belief in their own self-sufficiency. The ordinary has become extraordinary. All at once—it seems to have happened in the last hour, the last ten minutes—there is no stone, shrub, chair, or door that does not offer arrows of implicit meaning or promises of epiphany.

  Only think of Ronald Graham-Sutcliffe in his Dorset garden among his damasks and gallicas. Modern roses do not interest Mr. Graham-Sutcliffe. They remind him of powder puffs, and of periods of his life that now strike him as being unnecessarily complicated. He still feels a stern duty to weigh the suffering in every hour, but this duty is closely followed by the wish to obliterate it. He pulls on his Wellingtons in the morning, every morning now that he’s retired, and does a quick stiff-legged patrol among his fertile borders. He locks his hands behind his body, the better to keep his balance as he moves forward with his old man’s dangerous toppling assurance. Times have changed; he no longer counts the numbers of new buds or judges the quali
ty of color. He’s gone beyond all that. Now, standing at the middle tide of old age, it’s quite enough to take in a single flower’s slow, filmic unfolding. One rose, he sees, stands for all roses, one petal drifting to the soft ground matches the inevitable erosion of his own essential un-importance. This is natural harmony, this is the greatest possible happiness, he says to himself, then draws back as though the thought has come from someone more vulgar than himself.

  He savors too his morning tea with its twirl of white milk. And his bedtime whiskey; now that he’s allowed only one a day, he’s learned to divide the measure into an infinite number of sips, each sip marking off a minute on his tongue and a tingle of heat in his folded gut. At the end of the day, hot soapy bathwater laps against the thinness of ectomorphic legs, surely not his legs, these jointed shanks with their gleam of Staffordshire pearl, though he acknowledges distant cousinage. Afloat on the surface are his pinkish testicles, clustered like the roe of a largish lake fish, yes, his, definitely his, undeniably his, but nothing to make a fuss over. Not anymore. He is a man for whom ambition has been more vital than achievement, fleshly volume more imperative than mastery. He sees this clearly, and has no further expectations, none that count in the real world. His army years, his time in the colonial service, his difficulty with women (one in particular), his throat full of unconfessed longings—all have come to rest in a large white porcelain tub and a warm towel waiting, folded beautifully, over a chromium rail.

  Mrs. Graham-Sutcliffe, Molly to her friends, is seated on a small green sofa in a Dorset sitting room, a book open on her lap. Lamplight throws a spume of whiteness around her which is more flattering than she can possibly know. She is memorizing French verbs in an attempt to give meaning to her life. Naturally she favors those regular, self-engrossed verbs—manger, penser, refléchir, dormir—that attach to the small unalarming segments of her daily existence. She loves her daily existence, which includes, although she hasn’t thought to acknowledge it, the pale arc of lamplight and the hooting of owls reaching her through the open window. Entering the various doorways of present, imperfect, future anterior, and subjunctive, she perceives and cherishes the overlapping of one moment with the next, the old unstoppable, unfoolable nature of time itself.

  Exuberant and healthy, except for the usual grindings and twinges, she has a hearty respect for those paragraphs in a full life that need reworking. As a young child she was attacked by a madwoman on a London omnibus. The woman, who was later arrested and sent to an asylum, pulled a package of lamb chops from a leather bag and hurled them with all her strength at young Molly’s straw boater. Something about the child, the yellowness of her hair, the eager wet shine of her eyes, had excited the woman’s rage. Molly’s hat was knocked askew. She was struck on the left cheek and ear, and the precise shape and weight of the blow has been stamped on her memory.

  For a year or two she woke from sleep trembling and pressing her hands up against her face and emitting little muffled yelps of terror. In another epoch, in another sort of family, she might have been sent to an analyst in an attempt to erase the wound. Instead she learned to nurse the incident along, to touch it up with a blush of comedy. She has by now related the story to hundreds of friends and acquaintances, smoothing out its strangeness in the telling, assigning herself a cameo role of amused passivity. The story ripples with light. There is something, after all, more intrinsically droll about a packet of lamb chops than, say, a brick. Lamb chops ascend more readily to myth, as witness the greaseproof paper that has long since slipped away and the butcher’s twine. Bone, flesh, and gristle, and a border of hard yellow fat, are caught in midflight aboard a rather charming period conveyance, and there the image rests, shivering amid the most minor of vibrations and eliciting throttled laughter from Molly Graham-Sutcliffe’s many good-natured friends.

  In the same gregarious, self-mocking manner, she has transformed other, similarly seismic nightmares into the currency of the mundane and mild—her dozens of inconvenient household moves over the years, an agonizing childbirth that yielded a still-born lump with a cord around its neck, the spreading, capricious arthritis in her elbows and knees, and Mr. Graham-Sutcliffe’s occasional indiscretions, one in particular. There is a verb, she’s found, to match every unpardonable act, and every last verb can be broken down until it becomes as faultless and ordinary and innocently inquisitive as that little sleepy English infinitive: to be.

  And now, with Mr. Graham-Sutcliffe still in his bathwater and his wife Molly on her green sofa, nodding a little over her French grammar and feeling a slight chill from the open window, it seems as good a time as any to leave Dorset behind, thousands of miles behind, and move on to the other side of the world.

  But there is a chill too in the city of Montreal where, with the five-hour time difference, it is late afternoon on a breezy spring day. A woman by the name of Heather Hotchkiss, age forty, is standing in the kitchen of a suburban bungalow, stirring a pot of homemade soup. She is the owner/manager of a Laundromat in nearby Les Ormes de Bois and finds after the long working day, Mondays in particular, that there is nothing so soothing, so cheering, as the chopping, stirring, seasoning, and tasting that are part of the art of soup making. In her right hand she grasps a wooden spoon. Its handle, worn smooth by many washings, provides a frisson of added pleasure, as does the rising steam with its uplifting fragrance of onion, carrot, garlic, and cabbage. She stirs and sniffs like the practically minded ordinary woman she feels herself to be. The diced potato and celery will be added only during the last half hour of cooking in order to preserve their more fragile flavor and texture.

  This much she learned from her mother, who undoubtedly learned it from her mother and so forth ad infinitum. The mysteries of soup making are ancient. You would have to go back a thousand years, perhaps further, to discover its intricacies and logic, whereas you would have to go back only ten or twelve years to uncover the portion of Heather Hotchkiss’s life that she dissolves so expediently, so unconsciously, in her steaming, wholesome vegetable brews.

  Ten years ago people in the movies still smoked and laughed deep within their throats. The world was extravagant and feckless. Nevertheless churches, at least in the larger English market towns, were locked up for the first time against vandals. Heads were shaved or dyed blue. Lovers gave each other flashy gifts such as diamond cuff links or microwave ovens, bought on the never-never. Ten years ago the pleasures of everyday existence were known only to a handful. Everyone else, Heather Hotchkiss included, wanted more.

  More of everything, more risk, more moments of excited intimacy, more pain, more heightened eroticism, more self-destruction, more high-kicking desire, more altered states of consciousness, more sensual fulfillment, more forgiveness, more capitulation, more lingering surrender, more rapturous loss of breath, more unhealed grief, more hours pressed into the service of ecstasy, more air, more weather, more surfaces to touch, more damage, more glimpses of heaven. Ten or twelve years ago Heather Hotchkiss, in love with Ronald Graham-Sutcliffe, a married man old enough to be her father, would have hooted at the simple delight of soup making, but this is where time has delivered her, across an ocean, to the suburb of a large North American city where she is the proprietor of a well-run business with a reasonable profit margin, in good health but with graying hair, bent over a stainless steel cauldron of bubbling soup. She also knits, swims at the Y, reads books on gardening, practices meditation, and takes her son Simon for weekend walks on Mount Royal.

  Simon, aged ten, is in love this spring with the cracks of sidewalks, their furrowed darkness and decay and their puzzling microcosmic promise. The earth opens, the earth closes; the scars are straight, uniform, and accessible—or are they? Sometimes he sees the spreading stain of a burgeoning ant colony, sometimes surprise tufts of coarse grass or weeds. He never steps on a crack, never. Over the winter his legs have grown to such an extent that he can dodge the tricky cracks while pretending indifference, looking skyward, whistling, humming, daydreaming
, and, more than anything else, counting. He is a ritual counter. There are ten provinces in his country. There are 34 children in his class at school, 107 iron spikes in the schoolyard fence, and 322 squares of pavement between his house and the corner store where his mother often sends him on errands. He is firmly under the spell of these sidewalk sections, these islands, compelled to count them again and again, ever watchful for variation or trickery. Sometimes, not often, he is inattentive and finds himself one or two numbers out. Then he feels a temporary diminishment of his powers and an attack of gooseflesh on his neck and arms. He knows his life depends on the memorizing of the immediate, proximate world.

  But today he concentrates so hard on the task of counting squares that he arrives in front of the grocery forgetting what has brought him here. His mother sent him, true. She gave him a five-dollar bill. A single item is required, but what? He is ready to die with the shame of it. He cannot return home empty-handed and he cannot enter the store and engage the pity of Mr. Singh, the owner, who would immediately telephone his mother and ask what it is she requires.

  He freezes, hugs the points of his elbows, thinking hard, bringing the whole of his ten years into play. Today is Monday. The day when his mother is most inclined toward soup making. He pictures the two bowls of soup, one for her, one for him, side by side on the smooth pine table. He sees clearly the red woven placemats and the gleaming spoons with their running banners of light, and then the various colored vegetables floating in a peppery broth.

  He takes a breath, pokes a stick between the squares of concrete, and begins the process of elimination. Not carrots, not onions, not potatoes. As he strikes these items from the familiar list, he experiences the same ponderable satisfaction he finds in naming such other absences as father or brother or uncle, always imagining these gaps to be filled with a leather-fresh air of possibility, just around the corner, just five minutes out of reach.