Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  “All right,” she said to the proposed bargain. “All right.”

  Did she say it crossly or tenderly? With a sense of defeat or victory? The particular tone of the story has not come down to me.

  And so the long succession of summers began, the humiliation of July first when my grandmother’s favorite flowered dresses came off, her girdle, her hose, her underpants. There is a certain sharp irony to be felt when cast in a role one can’t quite occupy, and for my grandmother a jolt of anger must surely have accompanied her acquiescence, the beginning of a longer anger. She found a way to walk on the beach with reasonable dignity, but never with ease, and she learned to stand nodding and chatting with Kate Hammond and the other women, blocking out the sight of their bared, softening flesh, discussing the weather, the children, the latest movies and books. She never, apparently, became accustomed to her exposed body with its pale protrusions, its slopes and meadows and damp cavities. Her fair face lightly perspired in the fresh breeze. Always she carried herself with an air of doleful-ness, her eyes wary, her hands crossed stiffly over the region of her pubis. Stiff with love and suffering and absence.

  This went on for years. My grandparents and the other original members grew older. Some of them retired and moved to Florida, but a new and younger set of naturists joined the ranks. Archie Hammond died of a heart attack, though Kate Hammond remained a loyal summer camper, moving from a tent into one of the newer cabins. The tennis courts were upgraded. A vegetarian chef was brought from Banff.

  Then, suddenly one summer, my grandmother refused to take part. The cause of her refusal was me, her ten-year-old grandson, who was to be taken to Club Soleil for the first time. It was one thing, she felt, to take off her clothes in front of her husband and friends; she had hardened herself to the shame of it. But she would not become a naked grandmother, she would not allow herself to surrender to this ultimate indignity. This was asking too much.

  She remained in Toronto that summer, and the rupture between herself and my grandfather was never completely mended.

  It might be wondered why I was not introduced to Club Soleil until I was ten years old. I loved my grandparents, and had often wondered where they disappeared to each summer. I sensed some reticence, distaste even, on my father’s part when it came to discussing the matter. Soleil was a French word, he explained carefully, meaning sunshine. Our own vacations—my mother, father, and I, their only child—were taken at Muskoka Lodge, where the wearing of clothes was unquestioned, and indeed may have been part of the reason for going there. It was a fashionable place in those days, and a full wardrobe of “resort apparel” was de rigueur. I remember that my mother possessed a pale peach dress with a little “bolero” that floated behind her as she stood leaning on the porch rail during the evening cocktail hour. My father, of course, ended each day by exchanging his golf clothes for a white dinner jacket.

  Then one year they decided to go to Europe instead, and someone suggested that I should stay behind and join my grandparents at Club Soleil. The idea of perpetual soleil was appealing, especially since our own Muskoka Lodge summers were often cloudy or rain-soaked.

  At this point the real nature of the enterprise was explained to me, and I remember my father’s words as he struggled to fill me in. “It is a place,” he said, “where people go about in their birthday suits.”

  I knew what birthday suits meant. It was one of the jokes of the schoolyard. Birthday suits meant buck-naked, stark-naked. Starkers.

  “You mean with nothing on?” I was deeply shocked, though I later wondered if part of my shock was rehearsed and just slightly augmented for effect.

  My father coughed slightly. “It’s believed, you see, to be good for the health. Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin.”

  “Not even their swimming suits?” This came out in a theatrical squeal. It seemed important to reach a full understanding at once, to get it over with.

  “I know it’s difficult to imagine.” He patted me on the shoulder then, a rare gesture from a man who lacked any real sense of physical warmth.

  Oddly, the thought of my grandmother’s naked body lay well within my powers of imagination. I had inspected the plump nylon-encased feet and legs of my mother, so rosy, sleek, and un-scented, and I’d also seen the statues in the park and at the art gallery, the smooth marble parts of women, unblemished and still and lacking human orifices. What shocked me far more was thinking of my unclothed grandfather, a man who had always seemed to me more clothed than other men. His dark business suits were thicker of fabric and more closely woven. And there were his tight collars, black hose, serious oxfords, and the silk scarf he tucked in the neck of his woolen overcoat so that not an inch of flesh, except for his hands and face, was available for scrutiny. But this was my winter grandfather, the only one I had ever seen. Could he possibly have, tucked between his trousered legs, what my father had, what I had?

  Yes, it turned out that he did, but instead of hiding these parts behind a bath towel as I was taught to do at home, he strolled the grounds of Club Soleil, an elegant man at home in his own aging, pickled-in-brine skin, a revered ascetic and—it was clear—lord of his own domain, majestic in his entitlement, patting the heads of children and stopping to chat with Kate Hammond at the edge of the archery range. “You must not be afraid,” he said to me kindly on the day of my arrival, “to follow the rituals we observe in our summer community.”

  To be encouraged in such sanctified naughtiness was beyond any dream a ten-year-old boy might have. I learned. I learned fast, but at the same time I understood that the world was subtly spoiled. People with their limbs and creases and folds were more alike than I thought. Skin tones, hairy patches—that was all they had. Take off your clothes and you were left with your dull suit of invisibility.

  What I witnessed led me into a distress I couldn’t account for or explain, but which involved a feverish disowning of my own naked body and a frantic plummeting into willed blindness. I was launched into the long business of shame, accumulating the mingled secrets of disgust and longing, that eventually formed a kind of rattling carapace that restricted natural movement and ease.

  “I’m only sorry,” my grandfather said often that summer, “that your grandmother is not here to see how brown and strong you’ve grown.”

  When my grandfather died he was buried in a plain pine coffin, just as the instructions in his will outlined.

  And his tall and by now greatly withered body was laid out on the bare floor of the coffin without a stitch to conceal his nakedness and not even a blanket or sheet for comfort’s sake. This was not his request, but my grandmother’s, grimly decreed when the family gathered to discuss the “arrangements.” She insisted it would have been what he wanted, and since the coffin was to be closed, what difference did it make. She also insisted that Mrs. Kate Hammond be barred from the funeral.

  “It is impossible to bar anyone from a public funeral,” my father insisted.

  “Then she is not to be invited to stay for coffee afterward,” my grandmother said. “She will probably come anyway, but she is not to be explicitly invited.” She said this sternly, punitively it seemed to her family, in an attempt to outflank her dead husband, but by then all of us had learned to shrink from the anger that deformed her last years.

  Her own death, pneumonia, occurred a mere eighteen months after my grandfather’s. She too had specified in her will a plain pine box, with the additional written request that her body be put to rest unclothed and that the coffin be left open at the funeral.

  It was as though she had hungered for this lewd indiscretion, as though some large smoldering ugliness had offered itself to her in her last days and she had been unable to resist. That’s what I thought at the time.

  Now I think of that final gesture differently. (Needless to say, the family did not honor her final request, the pine coffin, yes, and yes to the naked body, but the lid was firmly closed.) It seems to me now that an offering was made on her part, heartbreaking in it
s impropriety and wish for amends. This desire perhaps had acquired a grotesque life of its own, with a vividness that could find no form of expression in the scanable universe. “The unclothed body,” she might have said, pouring into that vessel of a word a metaphorical cleansing, “is all we’re allowed to take away with us.”

  The rest must have fallen away in the same moment she wrote down the words of her will: the draperies, the coverings, the fringe and feathers, the wrappings, the linings, the stuffings and stitching. Good-bye, she must have said to what couldn’t be helped. Good-bye to the circular life of shame and its infinite regress.

  She must have thought she could get everything back by a single act of acquiescence. In the next world, just a breath away, the two of them would greet each other rapturously. Their revealed limbs would flash among the bright vegetation, at home in the green-clothed world, and embracing each other without restraint.

  She would have forgotten that nature’s substance is gnarled and knotted in its grain, so that no absolutely straight thing can come of it. They should have understood that all along, those two. It might have become one of their perishable secrets, part of the bliss they would one day gladly surrender.