Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  At that moment the word celery arrives, fully shaped, extracted cleanly from the black crack in the pavement, the final crack (as luck would have it) before the three smooth cement steps that lead up to the sill of the corner store. The boy’s gratitude is thunderous. He almost stumbles under the punishment of it, thinking how he will remember it all his life, even when he is old and forgetful and has given up his obsession with counting. He says it out loud, celery, transforming the word into a brilliantly colored balloon that swims and rises and overcomes the tiny confines of the ordinary everyday world to which, until this moment, he has been condemned.

  INVENTION

  My grandmother, as everyone knows, was the inventor of the steering wheel muff.

  It was born of love. She was a woman who adored her young husband, she doted on him, and her invention was a tribute to that love. Never a driver herself, she worried about the way my grandfather’s gloved hands slipped on the steering wheel in the winter—ours is a country with a long and bitter winter season, icy roads, danger at every turn. When Grandfather was forced to remove his gloves in order to secure a firmer grip on the wheel, his knuckles quickly turned white with cold. She was pained by the sight of that whiteness, and moved to do what she could.

  It took her a single afternoon to crochet her first model, her prototype you might say. It proved less than satisfactory, however, since it offered little purchase on the smooth surface of their Buick’s steering wheel. What to do? She looked around and discovered another kind of wool with improved adhesive properties, wool that was imported from a region on the coast of west Ireland where the sheep graze on certain regional sedges and beach grass, there being an absence of ordinary turf. She also experimented with an elastic edging, then lined the “glove,” as she called it in the early days, with a strip of gathered chamois.

  My grandfather, a lover of gadgets, was delighted. He called it his steering wheel “chapeau,” and demonstrated its usefulness to his colleagues. Soon my grandmother was busy making her little hand-wrought coverings for their many friends. She tried flannel, corduroy, fur, velvet, suede, burlap, all with greater or lesser success, and gave away her various models as hospitality gifts or stocking stuffers. One of these friends wrote her a thank-you note saying: “My steering wheel is now snug in its beautiful winter muff,” and the official term—muff—was born, just weeks before she hired four helpers, women recruited from the Alice House for Unwed Mothers, and set up a workshop in the attic of her home on Russell Road.

  Money began to trickle in, then became rivers of money, especially when she introduced her famous faux-leopard muff which became the signature for all that was chic, young, adventurous, and daring.

  People were surprised at how she threw herself into the muff enterprise. A small factory was built north of the city, which she launched by breaking a ginger ale bottle across the workers’ gate, and this moment was immortalized in a Pathé newsreel. (You can if you look carefully make out the blurred image of my grandfather, smiling proudly from the sidelines.) Other factories were put into operation, Cincinnati, Manchester, Hong Kong. To this day production has never quite managed to keep up with demand, which is more than you can say about other products. The market had been waiting, it seemed, for just such a utilitarian accessory. She in her housedress and apron, she who had been timid about speaking into her own telephone, was interviewed more than once on the radio about the benefits of the muff, which not only warmed a cold surface but brought coolness—in Arizona, New Mexico, California—to the problem of a hot steering wheel. Who would have thought it—that an object this simple could bring consumer satisfaction to so many.

  Except to my grandfather, of course, whose spirits withered as the wheel muff empire grew.

  In his later years he went back to the cold, rigid bone of an undressed steering wheel. A serious driver, he maintained, cherished the direct touch of the hand on the steering apparatus, the control, the feeling of resonating with the working engine, of being part of the mechanism itself and not separated from it by a piece of superfluous “fluff.” Almost every day he could be seen driving erratically up and down Russell Road, grasping his naked steering wheel in his hard old hands, his flesh sealed against comfort. This went on for years, not that my grandmother paid the least attention. By that time they were living apart.

  Invention is a curious gift, and may well be overcredited. Invention is not so much about creation as “finding out”; the word’s Latin origin says it clearly, invenire, meaning to come upon. My grandmother would have defined it, initially anyway, as making do, improving, stumbling across—but then success made her dizzy, then arrogant, and then she became “an inventor.”

  Just think of how many times that woman went to court to protect her patents! Think of how sternly she dealt with the Cincinnati strike. Where did she find the strength to confront public attention? And all the while her temperament grew discolored, so that she forgot utterly that long-ago moment when she was a young woman, passionately, tenderly in love with her handsome new husband, glancing across the width of the car at his gloved hands slipping on the wheel and thinking: what can I do to show my ardor?

  It was quite otherwise for Fulham-Cooper, my famed precursor through my mother’s side of the family, a late sixteenth-century grammarian whose blood I am happy to claim. Fulham-Cooper did not, of course, start out as a grammarian, but was, as his name announces, a cooper, one who earned his living by making and repairing barrels in a sleepy corner of rural England. He was greatly gifted in his trade, however, and had a head for business. And he was literate, something of an anomaly in that era. In time he was able to employ two or three assistants, later as many as twenty. A regional map of the period shows that his village eventually bore his name: Fulhamton. It might be thought that such a man would direct his inventive energy toward improving the traditional barrel or cask, but instead my ancestor invented the hyphen.

  As you know, much medieval writing came down to us en jambed on the page, one word running smack into the next. Those monks, sweating over their manuscripts and devoted to the preservation of sacred texts, gave only minimal thought to how difficult they made the act of reading. What good fortune, then, that Simon the Wise (no relation, I’m sorry to say) invented the word-space. He was widely celebrated for this device, and justly so, in my opinion, though a space, like a zero, may seem at first a negative triumph, mere air masquerading as substance.

  Well, we know differently today. Emptiness has weight; absence gestures at meaning. A doorway is privileged over an actual door in its usefulness and even its beauty—to give a homely example. A caesura locks a poem into a grid of understanding; a silence distinguishes speech from speech and thought from thought.

  After the discovery of the word-space came that spirited novelty the period, or full stop, a collaborative invention by a pair of unmarried Jutland sisters, both skilled embroiderers, in need of a stitch (they used a French knot) to conclude or accent a line of scripture running along the length of a linen altar cloth, a treasure which is now preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum, its precious threads disintegrating between sheets of glass, but available to public view if one applies to the curator in writing.

  The cryptic comma was, I like to think, devised by one Brother Alphonse, a very distant cousin on my paternal grandfather’s side, who was also known for his fine woodcuts and his habit of near-continuous prayer. One day, as he was lost in meditation, the nib of his pen slipped downward and sideways, and instead of depositing a fine, precise dot on his sheet of precious parchment, he left a curled worm of ambiguity, which he recognized at once as a sacred pause, a resting place during which time he might breathe out his thanks to God for the richness of his blessings, and prepare his next imprecation. Let me be free in my thoughts, let me be clean in my acts, let me never lose connection with the holy bonds between me and Thee, and the everlasting earth, amen, amen, amen, ad infinitum . . .

  My own ancestor’s invention of the hyphen deri
ves directly from his barrel-making skills. Consider the barrel, which is nothing more, after all, than a circle of bent staves held together by an iron hoop. The simple hoop connects what is otherwise uncon nectable, since the barrel-maker’s wooden strips long to spring apart.

  A hyphen takes on the same function. A diacritical mark of great simplicity, it joins what is similar and also what is disjunctive. Two words may be read as one, a case of compounding meaning and doubling force, but this horizontal bar, requiring only a sweet, single stroke of the pen, divides as well as marries. How clever of my kinsman to know that successful inventions are both functional and elegant. Aesthetically, the hyphen is superior to the slash, you will agree, and it makes a set of parentheses look like crude homemade fencing.

  Fulham-Cooper, later Sir Fulham-Cooper, may have been a genius, or he may simply have “fallen upon” his useful contribution. I am proud to come from a long line of inventors, but I recognize, at the same time, that invention is random and accidental. For instance: someone discovered one idle afternoon that a loop of plastic tubing will defy gravity if gyrated rapidly around the human body. Someone else, in another slot of time, noticed that a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur will create a new substance which is highly explosive. Some unsung hero invented the somersault, not to mention the cartwheel. Other people—through carelessness or luck or distraction or necessity—invented keys, chairs, wheels, thermometers, and the theory of evolution.

  As I say, the spirit of invention seems rooted in my own family history. The proof is there. I have tracked this genetic facility carefully, and friends of mine have even been kind enough to suggest that I might qualify as a professional genealogist, especially since I have managed, finally, to document my family tree all the way back to Titus the Shepherd—one of my Greek-speaking forebears. His invention, though he himself was a lazy young man, and naturally was thought by his parents to be a wastrel, altered the entire nature of human consciousness.

  It happened late on a summer afternoon. Titus, a shepherd like his father and grandfather, was bored. The sheep were stupid with heat that day, slow in their movements, and abjectly obedient. None strayed. Instead they huddled miserably in the shade of a small fig tree, unmoving. There was no breeze, no cloud overhead, nothing to break through the emptiness in Titus’s head.

  He waved his staff in the direction of another shepherd on another hill, a greeting of sorts, anything to interrupt his ennui, but met with no response. It would be hours yet before he might return home, eat his mother’s soup of onions and fennel, and endure his father’s bitter complaints, and another hour or two before he would be able to take refuge in his bed.

  All day long he yearned for his bed. There he at once fell asleep and dreamed, and his dreams made him happy.

  When he was a very small boy he asked his father what this thing was that happened at night. How did the night stories enter the house and find their way behind his eyes with their colors and shapes and drama? Such richness. “These are dreams,” he was told. “Everyone is given dreams.”

  Sometimes his dreams frightened him. He was chased by a bear and eaten. His mother fell ill. He was naked, shamed. He felt a terrible hunger, a thirst. But even these visions of tragedy brought their gifts, their excitement. They carried movement, possibility, a raising of the blood. Furthermore their shadow would soon shift sideways, he knew this, and make space for the good dreams he had come to depend upon; even their decaying presence offered the promise of the next night and the next dream story. The world could be made and unmade in this way. It could go on forever.

  The most skilled genealogist—and I am only an amateur, as I have said—cannot give an account of another’s dreams. Titus has left no records himself, but it is established that he was healthy and able. And one can easily guess what a young man’s dreams might consist of. Feats of courage, no doubt. Saving one of his father’s lambs, for instance, and earning extravagant public tribute. And surely he would dream of women, young women, old women, their clean skins and secret clefts. Their songs and offerings and quick, dark-eyed glances. And the heaving of a sudden rhythmic rapture that quickly emptied itself and began again, again, and again, played out in the darkness, a story unfolded and made brilliant.

  But for now there are no dreams to distract and amuse. The sun, he notices, is still almost straight overhead. The sheep make their soft, useless noises of appetite and suffering in their hotly lit circle. It will be hours before Titus will be in his cool bed, dreaming. The thought is unbearable, unbearable.

  To offer himself a measure of solace, and to pass the time, he begins to dream about dreaming. It is as though he has opened a small, previously unknown door in his head. He does not dare shut his eyes, of course, for his father’s small flock is his responsibility; he mustn’t let even one sheep out of sight. He breathes in and out, and at that moment feels a dividing of consciousness. He exists in two places at once, stubbornly rooted to this dull hillside, solitary, dimly aware, but at the same time he feels himself carried into a story of splendor and bravery. There is music, vi brancy. His spine stretches. The grip on consciousness is firm, yet a woman is walking toward him, a beautiful woman with a thin band of gold around her left wrist. She is reaching out her slender arms. What can she be saying? He can scarcely believe what he hears: she is chanting his name. Titus. I’ve found you.

  A distortion of time occurs, though he isn’t sure whether it is elongated or shortened. A dozen strands and subplots creep into the dream story. Opportunities for bold deeds multiply, and he hears himself named on a role of honor: Brave Titus, Noble Titus. Circling the crowded scenes of action are softer lights, alternate arrangements, where a vague beauty presses and offers ease. Its glaze covers the hillside, even the flanks of the standing sheep and the pathetic little fig tree bent against the air.

  For a moment it seems the vision is about to collapse, but he manages to draw it back to life. Onward. A new, freshly furnished story rumbles into view with its defining line of phosphorescence. And next . . . and then . . . and finally . . .

  The rest of Titus’s day passes in what seems a moment. In no time he is ducking through the doorway of his parents’ house, where the smell of soup greets him. He can’t wait to tell them what he has discovered. He makes them sit down and listen carefully. He can dream in the daytime as well as at night, he says. He can dream with his eyes wide open, never for a minute losing his concentration on the silly sheep.

  “A day-dream,” his father says, full of wonder. “I must try this out for myself.”

  “You have chanced upon something of great value,” his mother says, and she touches his shoulder with respect, understanding at once that this new form of consciousness will bring creativity and salvation and grace where before nothing but dullness had been.

  No wonder I feel fortunate to be a humble leaf on my family tree. This tree thrives, its energy flows into the world making its offerings and inventions. The fact that I myself lack inventive fervor is not a cause for sadness, you must believe me; I know perfectly well that if the spirit of invention were too widely distributed, the world would implode.

  Some of us are needed who merely keep the historical record. We count, we describe, we make our small forays into the archives. We keep track of our findings.

  We interpret, we analyze, we speculate. And sometimes we risk our small emendations. Perhaps this too is part of invention.

  DEATH OF AN ARTIST

  The old man is dead.

  At least he appears to be dead, lying there, nested there in oaky repose, relaxed under a demi-coverlet, the coffin lid tufted and ribboned and stuck with flowers. People shuffle by and stare down at him, remarking how like himself he looks. His last disguise.

  In fact, his face is fleshier, angrier, than it appeared on the screen, knobbed and prehistoric with its thug’s nose, long bony white-tipped ears, thickish lips, and a tongue that now and then deceived him on the tube, wagging and twitching while he thrust abo
ut for one of those Anglo-Gallic witticisms of his, Oscar Wilde with a dash of maple syrup, always playing the role, the wimpled satyr. Now you see him, now you don’t.

  No one knew him, really knew him. The history of his choleric, odd, furiously unproductive, and thoroughly unsatisfying life is most clearly set out in his diaries, eight plump volumes, but difficult to decipher because of the red crayon he affected, and the cheap lined schoolboy paper. These “undiaries,” as he himself once called them, are best read in reverse, that is, you should begin with the final entry and work your way backward.

  Never mind the smiting, toxic scrawl. Begin. Observe him, then, at age eighty-eight, the infant’s tongue lolling and speaking his need. His weepy red script holds the glare of old regrets and fresh insights. “This has been the most remarkable day of my life,” he writes after making his desperate and theatrical journey, actually hoisting himself onto a train one June morning and going back to that country crossroads where he was born.

  As a pilgrimage it was heroic, he with his tick-tocky heart and plugged lungs, playing the hoary sage, the native son. He required two canes, if you remember, to move himself along, wheezing and wiping the tears from his eyes. That was a side of him that perhaps only Emily knew: his sentimentality, his foundering in the folds of memory, those long sighs and leaky snuffles, just barely audible in his broadcasts.

  The two canes, of course, were part of his getup, his self relishment. In his left hand he grasped the aluminum rod, spare and modern, government-issue; in his right, the burnished sycamore wand owned by his putative grandfather, former choir member and townsman. Between these two symbolic props he balanced himself, blinking at the camera, a tottery old paradox, eliciting sympathy while projecting scorn, disdainful of the particular but committed to the whole. Wink, blink. “Well, yes,” he barked into the microphone. The sun shone down. His beard was handsomely stiff and speckled. It was said that before his public appearances he shampooed it with the yolk of an egg, and that he considered it a mark of virility, though probably only Emily was entirely privy to this remark.