Unless
Beginning With
SO, SHE TOLD HIM, beginning with a play she saw several years ago, she couldn’t remember the name of it or even whether she enjoyed it or not. Directly in front of her in the audience sat a young couple. The woman was exceptionally slender and beautiful, with a low voice and a smiling way of inclining her head toward her young man. He could scarcely take his eyes off her. He held her hand in his throughout the play. He kneaded it hungrily. Several times, while the actors shouted and dashed around the stage, he brought her hand to his lips and held it there. Lois had never seen such tenderness between a man and a woman. She scarcely slept that night, and several times she brought her curled hand up to her own mouth and pressed her lips against it. She was about forty years old at that time, a wife, the mother of a son.
Twelve years ago she was widowed, but she never uses that word. Instead she says, “My husband died in 1988. I’ve been alone since then.” She knew exactly how pathetic that sounded.
On winter days she often found herself in her kitchen looking out the window at the largest of the old and leafless oaks. But not quite leafless. One brown leaf, only one, remained. The wind blew and blew, but that particular little leaf refused to let go its grasp. There were two ways you could think about this leaf. Either it was exceptionally healthy and strong, or else it was somehow deformed and unable to engage the mechanism that allowed it to fall to the earth where all the normal leaves lay buried in snow. The unfallen leaf was an anomaly; something ailed it. Just as Pet was almost a golden retriever but not quite, standing two inches shorter than the regulation male dog, when only a single inch was the permitted tolerance for the breed, not that Lois cared one fig about that.
She hoped Mr. Springer liked a good bread pudding. She had a list of one hundred desserts, alphabetized in a recipe box, beginning with almond apples, moving to date pudding, on to nut brittle mousse (frozen) and ending with zwieback pastry cheesecake; she rotated this list around the year. It is no longer easy to find zwieback biscuits, but graham crackers can be substituted. Needless to say, seasonal ingredients mean that the desserts themselves are not served alphabetically. She once overheard her granddaughter Christine making fun of her dessert list. She can understand this in a way, but she still thought it was rather mean.
She was twenty-four hours in labour when Tom was born. When she first started having pains she insisted that her husband drive her to the hospital straight away. “Ten minutes apart?” the receptionist said coolly. “Didn’t they tell you not to come till the pains were at five minutes?” At that point a woman could be heard screaming from another floor. “Is that woman having a baby?” Lois asked the receptionist, who rolled her eyes and said, “That’s an Italian woman having a baby.”
Her first granddaughter was named Norah Charlotte Winters, a beautiful baby. The Charlotte was after a friend of Reta’s who died very young in a car accident. Lois never met this Charlotte person. She herself was in a car accident once, a fender bender really, but a terrible shock. So much so that she gave up driving.
A woman named Crystal McGinn once lived next door with her very large family, four children at least, teenagers, boisterous youngsters. Once Crystal invited Lois over for a cup of coffee and she had asked where Lois had gone to university. Not if she’d gone to university, but where. Mrs. McGinn had gone to Queen’s and studied economics. Lois did not tell Mrs. McGinn that she herself had attended secretarial college for six months in Toronto, and then married her husband, a young doctor, and moved to Orangetown. She felt strongly that Crystal McGinn had overstepped with her question about which university. They hadn’t seen much of each other after that, nothing more than an occasional wave. She regrets this now. She realizes that Mrs. McGinn’s question was not cruelly intended, only a little tactless.
Especially considering that Lois was the doctor’s wife. There was a certain prestige in that role, at least in the early days. It became her habit to remind herself of that fact, standing in front of the hall mirror, sucking in her stomach and saying musically: I am the wife of a physician.
She won a prize at the Orangetown Fair once for her German honey cake. When she registered for the competition she was advised to call it Swiss honey cake. She complied. But what did it matter?—she won anyway. She was given a blue ribbon, which her husband accidentally threw away when he was cleaning out the attic, years later. He felt terrible about that.
She loves Oprah. She arranges her day around Oprah. She has found a new self-courage recently, as a result of watching Oprah.
Her granddaughter Norah, her favourite—an endearing sweetness at the girl’s core—has been going through a hard time. She herself understands about times of difficulty. When she was in her early fifties she stopped baking and went to bed for two weeks. Her husband wanted to take her to the Mayo Clinic; that was all he talked about, the Mayo Clinic. Then she got up one day and cleaned the bathroom as it had never before been cleaned. That plunge into hygiene seemed to set things right. She was better able to cope after that.
Except lately. She can’t talk anymore. She doesn’t trust herself. Toads will come out of her open mouth. She’ll hurt people’s feelings. She has an opinion about what happened to Norah, and she doesn’t want anyone else to know. They’d think she was crazy. Women were supposed to be strong, but they weren’t really, they weren’t allowed to be. They were hopelessly encumbered with fibres and membranes and pads of malleable tissue; women were easily injured; critical injuries, that’s what came to you if you opened your mouth.
On the other hand, she knew Norah would be all right in the end. It was a matter of time, though the pneumonia was worrying. She did wish Reta would telephone. She was so glad, though, to have good company on a winters night. Bread pudding with lemon sauce. A cup of tea. She had been bending his ear off. This was so unlike her. She didn’t know how she got started.
On the whole she believed things worked out for the best. Didn’t Mr. Springer agree?
Already
THEY’RE BURNS,” Tom said, gesturing toward Norah’s hands and wrists. Norah was asleep, with an oxygen tube connected to her nose, Snow White in her glass case, and the girls and I are gathered around the bed like curious dwarves. The skin of her face was white and puffy. Someone had brushed out her hair so that it fell cleanly on the pillowcase and on the shoulders of her blue hospital gown, tied in a bow at the back of her neck. My darling Norah. To be sitting on a moulded plastic chair so close to her like this was heaven, never mind that her lungs were still partly filled with fluid.
She has been sleeping ever since we arrived. The pneumonia was still present but under control—that was a huge relief—but I was alarmed by her reddened, scarred hands lying exposed on the white cotton blanket. I felt like a voyeur, a transgressor in this room, and that any minute my daughter would open her eyes and accuse me. Of what, though?
“A combination of severe second-degree burns,” Tom continued in a voice I distantly recognized, its ups and downs carefully modulated—and his tone carrying me back to a walk we had once taken in the woods behind our house, the shrubs in full summer leaf, the crumbling earth giving way underfoot, when he told me that my mother’s cancer had advanced, that it had metastasized to her lungs, and the remaining time would be short, just a week or so.
“You can see she has experienced infection on the backs of both hands,” he said calmly. “There’s a fair amount of scarring, and some of it might have been avoided if she’d been properly cared for.”
When did the burns occur? Why hadn’t we seen the condition of her hands before? Some of these questions came from Dr. DeVita, who was attending her, and some from Frances Quinn from the Promise Hostel, who had recognized late yesterday evening that Norah had been coughing for several days and probably needed to be looked at. Both Tom and I remembered glimpsing what we thought had been a rash or else chilblains.
“She always had gloves on,” Natalie reminded us. “Even last summer when it was boiling hot, in the middle of July even, she wo
re these old floppy gardening gloves.”
“Yes,” Chris said. “We thought it was weird.”
“That’s right,” I said. The garden gloves—she was wearing them the first day we found her last April at Bathurst and Bloor. The eleventh of April, a Tuesday, a day I would never forget. I had supposed she wore them to protect her hands from the rough pavement. What silent pain she must have suffered.
She slept in those gloves, Frances Quinn had told Tom earlier in the day. Every night at the hostel. The staff thought it was odd, but then so many of the hostel clients exhibited eccentricities.
What about when she ate in the dining hall?
She took off her gloves when she ate.
And what was the state of her hands?
Red. What looked like a rash. Well, it’s really the destruction of body tissue, a step in the healing process. Someone, one of the volunteers, remembers her hands were bandaged when she first arrived, the first couple of weeks.
And when exactly would that have been?
It’s all in her file. She came to Promise for the first time on the twelfth of April—but Tom and I already knew that. Ordinarily people were allowed to stay for just three months, that’s the rule, but Norah was so quiet, so accommodating. It just got overlooked, her long stay. No one raised an objection.
“I would say those burns are at least six months old,” said Dr. DeVita, from the burn unit.
Six months. That would take us back to early summer. Or even spring.
I wonder if Ben Abbot knows anything about a fire,” I said. I had difficulty invoking the name of Norah’s old boyfriend. It stuck in my throat. It was easier not to think of him.
“I’ve already phoned him,” Tom said. “Early this afternoon. He doesn’t have the least idea how she might have burnt herself. He was very sure of that. I had to believe him.”
“Is she still in pain? Her hands, I mean.”
“Probably not. But these burns haven’t been looked after. You can see where the granulation has taken hold.”
It was close to midnight. The room felt full of hard surfaces, shadows arching up into the corners of the ceiling, just one tiny light burning over Norah’s bed, and in another bed, behind a cloth screen, a stranger tossing and moaning between her sheets, having nightmares, muttering in some language I couldn’t identify.
It occurred to me, then, to phone my mother-in-law and tell her we would not be home tonight. Norah was doing well, but we would be staying in the hospital. A family room had been found for us at the end of the corridor, and the girls were about to go to sleep.
Lois sounded exceptionally cheerful for some reason, even though I’d wakened her from a deep sleep. “Don’t worry about Pet,” she told me, “I fed him and let him out for a run.” I promised to phone her in the morning. After I hung up I remembered I hadn’t asked about Arthur Springer. I had forgotten his existence.
“You should go to sleep too,” Tom said to me. He touched the side of my face lightly with his hand.
“No, I can’t. I’ll just sit here. In case she wakes up.”
He left me there. He had a couple of phone calls to make, and he was talking about checking something on the Internet.
A nurse arrived every hour or so to take Norah’s pulse. She came and went silently, gliding on her rubber-soled shoes. Fine, fine, she nodded at me. She’s doing fine.
I might have dozed a little in my chair, but I doubt it. Two o’clock, then three. Natalie and Chris were sound asleep in the family room, and so was Tom. I sat in my chair and kept my eyes on Norah’s face. My thoughts drifted briefly to Alicia and Roman and their doomed wedding plans in Wychwood City. I realized I didn’t care what happened to them. Their lives were ephemeral; they could be moved about like beads of mercury. I didn’t need them anymore. They were undeserving of anyone’s attention, least of all mine.
Just before three-thirty Norah opened her eyes.
I pressed my lips close to her cheek. “Norah,” I said.
She smiled faintly in my direction, then reached over and covered my wrist with her roughened hand.
“Norah,” I said again quickly. “You’re awake.”
Her mouth made the shape of a word: “Yes.”
Hitherto
February 1, 2001
Dear Russell Sandor,
I have recently read your newest short story in one of the monthly magazines we subscribe to, the story about the Czech philosophy professor who moves to Los Angeles, and how raw and thin and undigested he finds American culture, the hideous fast food, the erosion of spoken English, and especially the grotesque insult of passing by an L.A. medical supply shop and seeing in the window, among the rest of the merchandise, a mastectomy bra. There it was, undisguised. An assault to all that he valued. Dangling there, a filthy object. It was identified by a large sign, in case he didn’t know what it was: MASTECTOMY BRA. Placed there in order to outrage his fine sensibility, up front, right in his face. He felt disgust, then nausea.
Get a grip, Mr. Sandor.
A mastectomy bra is a bra like any other. It is clean and well sewn, usually in cotton. Your professor character has lived in Europe, as you repeat several times, where women’s bras hang everywhere over the street on clotheslines; a woman’s bra drying in the Mediterranean breeze is close to being the Italian national flag. The French flag. The Portuguese flag. A mastectomy bra varies only in that it has two little pockets into which one can tuck the appliance that replaces a real breast when it has been cut off, usually because of breast cancer. Some women—Emma Allen, for instance—have had a double mastectomy, and so both pockets are padded out with prostheses made of moulded jelly stuff encased in a thin plastic skin. Emma has lost a husband (lightning), a son (suicide), and now the integrity of her body. She’s earned her moral upholstery, as she calls it. I went with her when she purchased her new bras, one in black, one in ecru. The shop was a tiny place at the north edge of Toronto where you could also buy, if you were inclined, such things as fake chest hair for men.
The Czech professor in your story wonders why he gags at the straight-in-the-eye sight of a mastectomy bra. I suggest the obvious: that he hates women, and his hatred of women extends to anything that might touch the body of a woman—the chair she sits on, the clothes she wears—and particularly the matter of women’s ink, self-pitying, humourless, demanding, claustrophobic, breathless.
I am shockingly offended, and yet your professor says he fears giving offence. I’ve written several letters this year to those who have outraged me in one way or another, but I have never mailed any of them or even signed them. This is because I don’t want to be killed, as your professor almost kills his wife, holding a penknife over her sleeping body. But now I don’t mind if you kill me. I have suffered a period of estrangement from my daughter—she is now at home, safe—and the period of our separation has been very like having a cold knife lodged in my chest.
It happened that her life coincided with a traumatic event; her father suspected this was the cause of her distress, and mostly he was right. It was a case of pinning things down, pairing the incident with a missing day in our daughters life. A spring day like any other. Only it wasn’t like any other. It was a moment in history; it was reported in the newspapers, though we didn’t read closely about it for some reason; it was recorded on videotape, so that we have since seen the tragedy replayed and understand how its force usurped the life of a young woman and threw her into an ellipsis of mourning.
My own theory—before we knew of the horrifying event—was that Norah had become aware of an accretion of discouragement, that she had awakened in her twentieth year to her solitary state of non-belonging, understanding at last how little she would be allowed to say. There were signs; she was restless, turning inward, recoiling as we all do from what we know, discovering and then repudiating, but it is also probable that I was weighing her down with my own fears, my own growing perplexity concerning the world and its arrangements, that I had found myself, in the midd
le of my life, in the middle of the continent, on the side of the disfavoured, and it may be that I am partly right and partly wrong. Or that Tom is partly right and partly wrong about his theory of post-traumatic shock. Or that Danielle knew from the beginning. We’ll never know why. In any case, Norah took up the banner of goodness—goodness not greatness. Perhaps because there was no other way she could register her existence. In the obscuring distance, melting into sunsets and handsome limestone buildings and asphalt streets and traffic lights, the tiny piping voice of goodness goes almost unheard, no matter how felt and composed it is. Norah had no other place to stand after the “event” she was all perch, she and her silent tongue and burnt hands.
Goodness, that biddable creature, cannot be depended upon, not yet—I found that out. I have thrown myself into its sphere nevertheless. Goodness is respect that has been rarified and taken to a higher level. It has emptied itself of vengeance, which has no voice at all. I’m afraid I don’t put that very clearly. I’m still sorting out the details. But I am trying to be one of the faithful, and so I will sign my name to this letter not truthfully, but exactly as it appears in the local telephone book.
Reta Winters
Six Corners Road, RR 4
Orangetown
Not Yet
A LIFE IS FULL of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to cement them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet.
My old friend Gemma Walsh, who has just been appointed to a Chair in Theology (hello there, Chair) tells me that the Christian faith is balanced on the words already and not yet. Christ has already come, but he has not yet come. If you can bring the two opposing images together as you would on a stereoscopic viewer, and as traditional Christians bring together the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of the Trinity, then you will have understood something about the power and metaphysically of these unsorted yet related words.