Small Ceremonies

  His closest friend at the university is Roger Ramsay who teaches Canadian Literature. Roger has a fat man’s face, round and red, with a hedge of fat yellow curls. But his body is long and lean and muscular. He is younger than we are, young enough so he is able to live with someone without marrying her, and he and Ruthie have an apartment at the top of an old Gothic house which is cheap and charming and only a little uncomfortable. Posters instead of wallpaper, ragouts in brown pots instead of roasts, candles instead of trilights, Lightfoot records instead of children. A growing collection of Eskimo carvings and rare Canadian books.

  Ruthie St. Pierre is small, dark and brilliant; assistant to the head of the translation department in the Central Library. They both smoke the odd bit of pot or, as Roger puts it, they’re into it. We love them, but what we can’t understand is why they love us, but they do, especially Martin. In this friendship I am the extra; the clumsy big sister who is only accidentally included.

  My closest friend is a woman named Nancy Krantz. She is about my age, mother to six children and wife to a lawyer named Paul Krantz, but that is strictly by the way. Nancy is not really attached to anyone, not even to me, I admit sadly. I am an incidental here as well.

  She generally drops in unexpectedly between errands, usually in the morning. She almost, but not quite, keeps the Volkswagen engine running in the driveway while we talk. She is in a rush and she dances back and forth in my kitchen with the car keys still jingling in her fingers. I cannot, in fact, imagine her voice without the accompaniment of ringing car keys. Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.

  We talk fast, both of us, as though we accelerated each other, and there is a thrilling madness in our morning dialogues. Nancy has always just been somewhere or is on her way to somewhere – to an anti-abortionist meeting, to a consumers’ committee, to a curriculum symposium. And into these concerns, which in the abstract interest me very little, she manages to sweep me away. I stand, coffee cup in one hand, wildly gesticulating with the other, suddenly stunningly vocal. The quality of our exchanges is such that she enables me to string together miles of impressive phrases; my extemporaneous self reawakened. I pour more coffee, and still standing we talk on until, with a loud shake of her key ring, Nancy glances at her watch and flies to the door. I am left steaming with exhaustion and happiness.

  Today she has come from a committee which is fighting rate increases in the telephone service. It is her special quality to be able to observe these activities as though she were a spectator at a play. She can be wildly humorous. This morning, as a footnote to her recital, she delivers what I think to be a stunning theory of life, for she has discovered the mechanism which monitors her existence.

  Every month, she tells me, the water bill arrives in the mail. The Water and Sewerage Office informs her how much money she must pay and, in addition, how many gallons of water her household has consumed during the month. But that isn’t all. Underneath that figure is another which is even more fascinating, the number of gallons which she and her family have consumed on the previous billing.

  She has noticed something: since she and her husband Paul have been married, the number of gallons has gone up every month. There have been no exceptions over eighteen years, not one in eighteen years, twelve billing each year. By thousands and thousands of gallons she has gone steadily up the scale. It is inexorable. She and the meter are locked in combat. She would like to fool it once, to be very thrifty for a month, use her dishwater over again, make everyone conserve on baths, flush the toilet once a day, just to stop the rolling, rolling of the tide.

  It has become a sign to her, a symbol of the gathering complexity of her life. Tearing open her water bill she finds her breath stuck in her chest. Travelling from gallon to gallon she is inching toward something. Is there such a thing as infinity gallons of water, she has wondered.

  But recently it has occurred to her that she will never reach infinity. One month – the exact date already exists in the future, predestined – one month there will be a very slight decrease in number of gallons. And the next month there will be a further decrease. Very small, very gradual. It will work its way back, she says. And it will mean something important. Maybe that she is reverting to something simpler, less entangled.

  She doesn’t know whether it will be a good thing or bad, whether she is frightened or not of the day when the first decrease comes. But she sees her whole life gathered around that watershed. It may even mean the beginning of dying, she confides to the rhythm of her chromium-plated key ring.

  Winter is about to fall in on us. Early this morning when I woke up I could almost feel the snow suspended over the back yard. Outside our window there was a dense gathering of white, a blank absence of sun, and through the walls of the house the blue air pinched and gnawed.

  Downstairs in the kitchen I made coffee, and I was about to wake Martin and the children when I heard a thin waterfall of sound coming from behind the birch slab door leading to the family room. I opened it and found the television on.

  Richard and Meredith were sitting on the sofa watching. All I could see from the doorway were the backs of their heads, the two of them side by side, Richard leaning slightly forward, his hands on his knees. The sight of them, the roughed fur of their hair and the crush of pajama collars, and especially the utter attentiveness to the screen, made me weak for a moment with love.

  “What’s going on?” I asked hoarsely.

  “Shhh,” Richard rasped. “They’re getting into the Royal Coach.”

  “Who?” I asked, and then remembered. It was Princess Anne’s wedding day.

  “How long have you two been up?” I asked.

  “Five o’clock,” Meredith said shortly, never for a moment taking her eyes off the picture. “Richard woke me up.”

  “Five o’clock!” I felt my mouth go soft with disbelief.

  “It’s direct by satellite,” Richard said.

  “But it will all be rebroadcast later,” I said with sternness, feeling at the same time wondering amazement at their early rising.

  “It’s not the same though,” Meredith said.

  “They leave out half the junk,” said Richard.

  (Would Anita Spalding be watching too? In the Birmingham flat, linked through satellite with Richard? Probably.)

  While the coffee breathed and burped in the kitchen, I sat on the arm of the sofa watching the glittering coach drive through London. A camera scanned the crowds, and the announcer reminded us how they had stood all night waiting. The London sky looked tea-toned, foreign, water-thin.

  “I thought you didn’t like Princess Anne,” I challenged Meredith.

  “I don’t,” she told me, “but this is a wedding.”

  Later, when Martin was up, we ate breakfast, and I told them about Princess Margaret’s wedding. There was no satellite in those days, so we didn’t have to get up at five o’clock to watch. Instead, a film of the wedding was shot in London and rushed into a waiting transatlantic jet.

  We were at home in our first apartment; Martin was writing the final draft of his thesis. It was just after lunch, and Meredith, who was very young, had been put into her crib for a nap. Our television was old, a second-hand set with a permanent crimp in the picture.

  The camera was focused on a bit of sky off the coast of Newfoundland and, while Martin and I and millions of others stared at the blank patch, a commentator chattered on desperately about the history of royal weddings.

  Finally a tiny speck appeared on the screen. The jet. We watched, breathless, as it landed. A man leaped out with an attaché case in his hand – the precious reels of film. Fresh from London. Rushed to the colonies. I remember my throat going tight. Stupid, but this man was a genuine courier, in a league with Roman runners and, though Martin and I were indifferent even then to royalty, we recognized a hero when we saw one.

  We watched him race, satchel in hand, ac
ross the landing field and then into a flat terminal building where the projector was oiled and waiting. There was a moment’s blackout, and the next thing we saw was the Royal Coach careening around Pall Mall. Miraculous.

  While I was telling Meredith and Richard this story over cornflakes and toast, their eyes were fixed on me; they never miss a word. The genes are true; my children are like me in their lust after other people’s stories.

  Unlike Martin, whose family tree came well stocked with family tales, I am from a bleak non-storytelling family. I can remember my father, a tall, lank man who for forty years worked as inventory clerk in a screw factory, telling only one story, and this he told only two or three times. It was so extraordinary for him to tell a story at all that I remember the details perfectly.

  A single incident fetched from his childhood: a girl in his high school tried to commit suicide by leaping into the stairwell. My father happened to be coming down a corridor just as she was sailing through the air. On impact she broke both her ankles and promptly fainted. This brought my father to the point of the story, the point as he conceived it being that the act of fainting was a benefice which spontaneously blocked out pain. He didn’t explain to us why the girl was trying to take her life or whether she managed to live it afterwards. He seemed oddly incurious about such a dramatic event, and it must have been his bland acceptance of the facts which restrained us from asking him for details.

  It is one of my fantasies that I meet this suicidal girl. She would be about seventy now – my father has been dead for ten years – and I imagine myself meeting her at a friend’s. She is someone’s aunt or family friend, and I recognize her the moment she touches on her attempted school suicide. I interrupt her and ask if she remembers a young boy, my father, who rushed to her when she fell and into whose arms she fainted. Yes, she would say, it happened just that way, and we would exchange long and meaningful looks, embrace each other, perhaps cry.

  From my mother I can recall only two frail anecdotes, and the terrible thin poverty of their details may well account for my girlhood hunger for an expanded existence.

  Once – I must have been about four at the time – my mother bought a teapot at Woolworth’s, carried it home, and discovered when she opened it on the kitchen table that it was chipped. It was quite a nice brown teapot, she later explained to us, and it might have been bumped on the door coming out of Woolworth’s. Or, on the other hand, it might have been chipped when she bought it. Should she return it?

  She never slept a wink that night. After a week she had still not made up her mind what to do, and by this time she had broken out in a rash. It attacked the thin pink meat of her thighs and I can recall her, while dressing in the closet one morning, raising the hem of her housedress and showing me the mass of red welts. But I don’t remember the teapot. She kept it for a year and used it to water her plants; then somehow it got broken.

  Her other story, frequently told, concerned a friend of hers who greatly admired my mother’s decorating talents. The friend, a Mrs. Christianson, had written to Canadian Homes suggesting they come to photograph our house for a future issue. For a year my mother waited to hear from the magazine, all the while keeping the house perfect, every chair leg free from dust, every corner cheerful with potted plants. No one ever called, and she came to the conclusion in the end that they were just too hoity-toity (a favorite expression of hers) to bother about Scarborough bungalows.

  That was all we had: my father’s adventure in the stairwell, which never developed beyond the scientific rationale for fainting, my mother’s teapot and rash and her near-brush with fame. And a sort of half-story about something sinister that had happened to Aunt Liddy in Jamaica.

  My sister Charleen, who is a poet, believes that we two sisters turned to literature out of simple malnutrition. Our own lives just weren’t enough, she explains. We were underfed, undernourished; we were desperate. So we dug in. And here we are, all these years later, still digging.

  On Tuesday Martin felt a cold coming on. He dosed himself with vitamin C and orange juice and went to bed early. He turned up the electric blanket full blast and shivered. His voice dried to a sandy rasp, but he never complained. It is one of the bargains we have.

  Years ago, he claims, I put him under a curse by telling him that I loved him because he was so robust. Can I really have said such a thing? It seems impossible, but he swears it; he can even show me the particular park bench in Toronto where, in our courting days, I paid allegiance to his health. It has, he says, placed him under an obligation for the rest of his life. He is unable to enjoy poor health, he is permanently disbarred from hypochondria, he is obliged to be fit. So he went off to the university, his eyes set with fever and his pockets full of Kleenex.

  I know the power of the casual curse. I have only to look at my children to see how they become the shapes we prepare for them. When Meredith was little, for instance, she, like any other child, collected stones, and for some reason we seized on it, calling her our little rock collector, our little geologist. Years later, nearly crowded out of her room by specimens, she confessed with convulsions of guilt that she wasn’t interested in rocks any more. In fact, she never really liked them all that much. I saw in an instant that she had been trapped into a box, and I was only too happy to let her out; together we buried the rocks in the back yard. And forgot them.

  Another example: Furlong, reviewing my first book for a newspaper, described me, Judith Gill, as a wry observer of human nature. Thus, for him I am always and ever, wry. My wryness overcomes even me. I can feel it peeling off my tongue like very thick slices of imported salami, very special, the acidity measured on a meter somewhere in the back of my brain. Furlong has never once suspected that it was he who implanted this wryness in me, a tiny seedling which flourished on inception and which I am able to conceal from almost everyone else. For Furlong, though, I can be deeply, religiously, fanatically wry.

  Just as for me Martin is strong and ruddy, quintessentially robust. But by the end of the week he was ready to give in. “Go to bed,” I said. “Surrender.”

  Three days later he was still there, sipping tea, going from aspirin to aspirin.

  I brought him the morning mail to cheer him up. “Just look at this,” I said, handing him a milky-white square envelope.

  I had already read it. It was an invitation to Furlong’s lunch party in celebration of his new book. A one-thirty luncheon and a reading at three; an eccentric social arrangement, at least in our part of the world.

  I squinted at the date over Martin’s shoulder. “It’s a Sunday, I think.”

  “It is,” Martin said. “And I think –" his voice gathered in the raw bottom of his throat, “I think it’s Grey Cup Day.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I’m sure, Judith. Look at the calendar.”

  I counted on my fingers. “You’re right.”

  He muttered something inaudible from the tumble of sheets.

  “How could he do it?” I said.

  “Well he did.”

  “He can’t have done it on purpose. Do you think he just forgot when Grey Cup is?”

  “Furlong’s not your average football fan, you know.”

  “Nevertheless,” I said, breathless with disbelief, “to give a literary party on Grey Cup.”

  “For ‘one who embodies the national ethos,’” Martin was quoting from a review of Graven Images, “he is fairly casual about the folkways of his country.”

  “What’ll we do?” I said. “What can I tell him.”

  “Just that we’re terribly sorry, previous engagement, et cetera.”

  “But Martin, it’s not just us. No one will come. Absolutely no one. Even Roger, worshipper though he be, wouldn’t give up the game for Furlong. He’ll be left high and dry. And there’s his mother to consider.”

  “It’s what they deserve. My God, of all days.”

  “And he’s so vain he’ll probably expect us to come anyway.”

  ??
?Fat chance.”

  “I’d better phone him right away.”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “Right.”

  “And Judith.”

  “What?”

  “Make it a firm no.”

  “Right,” I said.

  But I didn’t have to phone Furlong. He phoned me himself late in the afternoon.

  “Judith,” he said, racing along. “I suppose you got our invitation today. From Mother and me.”

  “Yes, we did but –"

  “Say no more. I understand. It seems I’ve made a colossal bloop.”

  “Grey Cup Day.”

  “Mother says the phone’s been ringing all day. And I ran into Roger at the university. Poor lad, almost bent double with apology. Of course, the instant we realized, we decided on postponement.”

  “That really is the best thing,” I said, relieved that I would not have to admit we put football before literature in this house.

  “We’ll make it December then, I think. Early December.”

  “Maybe you should check the bowl games,” I suggested wanting to be helpful.

  “Of course. Mother and I will put our heads together and come up with another date. Now I mustn’t keep you from your work, Judith. How is it coming, by the way?”

  “Well. I think I can honestly say it’s going well.”

  “Good. Good. No more novel-writing aspirations?” he asked, and for an instant I thought I heard a jealous edge to his voice.

  “No,” I said. “You can consider me cured of that bug.”

  “That’s what it is, a wretched virus. I can’t tell you how I envy you your immunity.”

  “It was madness,” I said. “Pure madness.”

  “That was Furlong on the phone,” I told Martin when I took up his supper tray. Soup, toast, a piece of cheese. He was sitting up reading the paper and looking better.

  “And? What did he have to say for himself?”

  “All a mistake. He never thought of Grey Cup. So don’t worry, Martin. It’s been postponed. Way off in the future. Sometime in December.”