Unless

  “A lot of people did write, they got quite excited about it—for Canadians, I mean—but she was flogged anyway.”

  “God, this is a brutal world.”

  Annette, born and brought up in Jamaica, is a poet and economist, divorced from her husband, who turned violent after his bankruptcy. She lives alone in a tiny cottage-like house in Orangetown, working part-time for a dot-corn, shuffling statistics on her screen.

  Lynn lives with her mensch of a husband, Herb, and their two children in a sparkling new house on the edge of town. She has a busy law practice, but she still takes off two hours every Tuesday morning to come to coffee.

  And Sally is at home for a year with a baby son, born on her fortieth birthday, a miracle baby, a sperm bank success. She used to bring Giles in a backpack thing, but now he’s weaned and she gets a Tuesday-morning sitter. She’s thought about suing her obstetrician—Lynn advises against it—because he wouldn’t let her wear her glasses during the delivery, and so she missed most of what happened. The doctor said it wasn’t safe to wear glasses, but she’s convinced herself it was a matter of aesthetics, that she and her “eyewear” disturbed his painterly vision of what the Birth of a Child should look like.

  The four of us have been meeting like this for ten years now. We order cappuccinos; three out of four of us ask for decaf. Once in a while we order a scone or a croissant.

  We don’t have a name; we’re not a club; there’s no agenda. We prefer not to think of ourselves as holders of opinions, that is, we do not “hold forth” on our opinions, because such opinions are arbitrary and manufactured in an unreal world with only fifty per cent participation. We know almost everything there is to know about each other. We talk about all kinds of topics, although we don’t talk about our sex lives—I think we avoid this subject out of a very old taboo, the need to protect others. Nor do we do much cooing over children because of Annette, who doesn’t have any. If Annette happens to be travelling, as she sometimes does, Sally, Lynn, and I get in our kid stuff then. Sometimes we drop in gender discoveries: the fact that men like wind but women don’t very much, they find it worrying. The observation that men won’t, if they can help it, sit in the middle seat of a sofa, but women don’t seem to care. In France it’s thought that menstruating women are incapable of making a good mayonnaise. No! Surely, not anymore. We discuss the public library crisis, since both Annette and I sit on the board. Has our old friend Gwen, now Gwendolyn Reidman, always been a lesbian or is this a discovery of her middle age? And will Cheryl Patterson, the librarian, marry Sam Sondhi, the dentist out at the mall? Art is a courtship device, Annette says, at least poetry is. We wonder if the innocence we are born with is real, and try to imagine a case in which it isn’t destined to be obliterated. What then?

  Tom has asked me once or twice what it is we talk about on Tuesday mornings, but I just shake my head. It’s too rich to describe, and too uneven. Chit-chat, some people call it. We talk about our bodies, our vanities, our dearest desires. Of course the three of them know all about Norah being on the street; they comfort me and offer concern. A phase, Annette believes. A breakdown, thinks Sally. Lynn is certain the cause is physiological, glandular, hormonal. They all tell me that I must not take Norah’s dereliction as a sign of my own failure as a mother, and this, though I haven’t acknowledged it before, is a profound and always lurking fear. More than a fear—I believe it. They tell me it’s all right to be angry with Norah for giving up, but I can’t seem to find the energy for anger.

  We know what we look like: four women in early middle age, hunched over a table in a small-town coffee shop, leaning forward, all of us, the way women do when they want to catch every word. Two years ago when I went to New York to receive the Offenden Prize, the three of them gave me a send-off gift of purple underpants in real silk. I wore these to the ceremony under my white wool suit, and all evening, every time I took a step this way or that, shaking hands and saying “Thank you for coming” and “Isn’t this astonishing,” I felt the rub of silk between my legs, and thought how fortunate I was to have such fine, loving friends. Lynn, coming from Wales, calls underpants knickers, and now we all do. We love the sound of it.

  I have been careful to give Alicia a few friends. It’s curious how friends get left out of novels, but I can see how it happens. Blame it on Hemingway, blame it on Conrad, blame even Edith Wharton, but the modernist tradition has set the individual, the conflicted self, up against the world. Parents (loving or negligent) are admitted to fiction, and siblings (weak, envious, self-destructive) have a role. But the non-presence of friends is almost a convention—there seems no room for friends in a narrative already cluttered with event and the tortuous vibrations of the inner person. Nevertheless, I like to sketch in a few friends, in the hope they will provide a release from a profound novelistic isolation that might otherwise ring hollow and smell suspicious.

  Alicia’s best friend is Linda McBeth. Linda, an art consultant who toils at the same magazine where Alicia works, had a role in My Thyme Is Up, and so she also appears in the sequel. The two women have side-by-side cubicles at work, and they go together to a yoga class every Thursday night, and then out for a drink. They talk and talk and sometimes get a little drunk. Linda has a weight problem. She has a man problem too, a lack-of-man problem, that is. She requires Alicia to reinforce her self-confidence. But she’s funny, gifted at her work, and highly perceptive when it comes to other people. “I don’t know about Roman,” she says to Alicia at one point. “He’s such a great guy, but sometimes he comes on just the tiniest bit kingly.”

  “You mean sitting-on-a-throne kind of kingly?” Alicia asked.

  “Yes,” Linda said. “He always seems to be sort of surveying his vast domain, if you know what I mean. And looking over the heads of his subjects, who are bowing down before him.”

  “Hmm,” said Alicia. “Yes.”

  Roman has a good friend too, I’ve seen to that. Michael Hammish will be best man at Roman and Alicia’s wedding, which is coming up soon, unless I do something quickly to prevent it. He was Roman’s roommate at Princeton, a slightly menacing stockbroker and weekend soccer player, married to the demure blonde Gretchen, who does publicity for the Wychwood Dance Company. Michael Hammish, who has hamlike thighs and big square mannish knees, has taken Roman aside and warned him about this marriage he’s about to enter. “If there’s anything you want to do, do it now, Roman, because once you’re married you haven’t a hope in hell, even married to a great woman like Alicia. Things get in the way, couple-type things. You’ll see. It happens all the time, it’s even happened to Gretch and me to a certain extent. But you’ve got a chance to think this over. You’ve been wanting for months to find out where your family comes from. I’ve noticed, I’ve taken note of it. Albania, Albania, that’s all you talk about. Take my advice, pal, and do it now. You won’t be getting another chance.”

  Yet

  NORAH WAS ACCEPTED at McGill back in 1998. Of course she was, with her marks. There had never been any doubt about it. Our foolish worries were only a test of our certainty. The letter of acceptance glowed with welcome. But by then “the boyfriend” had come along, a twenty-two-year-old named Ben Abbot who was a second-year philosophy student at the University of Toronto. Of course that changed everything. She cancelled McGill, enrolled at Toronto, moved into a basement apartment off Bathurst with Ben, and opted for a major in modern languages. Good girl. After her mother’s heart.

  But I worried: because she wasn’t under our roof any longer, like Natalie and Christine, and because I didn’t know if she was having a decent breakfast in the mornings and because she was having sex all the time with a person who had been a stranger a short while ago and who now was intimate with every portion of her body; just thinking of this brought on a siege of panic. First they were together a month, then six months, then a year, then a year and a half. I was beginning to get used to it. But not really, not completely. I recognized that I was one of those mothers who has difficul
ty with her child’s becoming a woman.

  Almost through her second year, the first day of April, she was home for a weekend, drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table while I, snug in my warmest robe, stirred up some eggs for breakfast. The kitchen in this ancient house is exceptionally airy and bright, and I was reminded of all the mornings of Norah’s childhood when she sat here at the window overlooking the bare brown winter woods, eating her buttered toast and chattering about the day ahead. She had been wakened in those days with a buzz from her own small wind-up alarm clock, a gift for her tenth birthday, something she had particularly asked for. Being woken by an alarm clock one has set for oneself was a sign of maturity, she believed, and she was anxious, perhaps, as the oldest child in the family, the big sister of Natalie and Christine, about maturity—what it meant and how she could get there fast. More important than being good and pleasing and adorable was the wish, early in her life, to be mature. That little plastic clock became a part of her perpetualism, a doctrine, as in the Church, of everlastingness. She took it with her to camp as a child, and then she carried it back and forth in her backpack to the basement apartment in Toronto where she and her boyfriend lived. Had she set the alarm last night?

  Yes, probably she had, even just coming home to Orangetown for the weekend—and here she was, awake—while Tom and the other girls were barely stirring upstairs. No one asked her to be this intense; no such demands were ever made on her by anyone other than herself.

  I enjoyed having company in the kitchen in the early morning. I loved her sleepy, yawning, mussed look, merging with what I thought of as the careless use of herself in the world—the untidy Bathurst apartment, Ben, the passion for Flaubert—all of which I would never understand completely because it was unhinged from my own frame of time, the sixties child, the nineties child. For the moment, though, she was home; I had her to myself. She was wearing one of my cast-off robes that zipped up the front, that awful burgundy colour, her body lending grace to the awkward lines. But I was suddenly alerted to something about her presence: the fact that her face looked oddly fallen. Her eyes were swollen, filled, though not with tears. What I glimpsed there was something hard, fixed, chitinous. What was it? “We are real only in our moments of recognition”—who said that? I was recognizing something now. I put on my reading glasses and looked at my daughter again, closely. I made her turn toward the window so that the light fell across her eyes and on her hard little upper lip. She blinked at last, then closed her eyes against the light and against me.

  “Is it Ben?”

  “Partly.”

  “You don’t love him the way you did.”

  “I do. And I don’t. Don’t enough.”

  “What do you mean, not enough?”

  She shrugged and made a grab for my waistline, just hooked her thumb over the belt of my robe and hung on, with her forehead pressed into my stomach. I would give anything to have that moment back.

  “Try to explain,” I said.

  “I can’t love anyone enough.”

  “Why not?”

  “I love the world more.” She was sobbing now.

  “What do you mean, the world?”

  “All of it. Existence.”

  “You mean,” I said, knowing this would sound stupid, “like mountains and oceans and trees and things?”

  “All those things. But the other things too.”

  I had eased myself into a chair and was massaging the tender place between her shoulder blades. My thumb fit there perfectly, doing its little circular motion. I had no way of knowing this would be her last visit home, that she was about to disappear. “Go on.”

  “There’s literature,” she said. “And language. Well, you know. And branches of languages and dead languages and forgotten dead languages. And Matisse. And Hamlet. It’s all so big, and I love all of it.”

  “But what—?”

  “And whole continents. India. Especially those places like India that I’ve never seen. Every little trail running off every hidden dirt road branching off from every major trade route. The shrubbery, the footpaths. The little town squares. There must be millions of town squares. I’ll never see them all, so what is the point?”

  “You could spend a year travelling, you know, Norah.” I could hear Natalie and Christine moving about upstairs, shouting from bedroom to bedroom, tuning a radio to the local rock station.

  “And the tides,” Norah said. “Think of the tides. They never forget to come and go. The earth tipping in space. Hardly anyone understands them.”

  “Has Ben moved out?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are you living?”

  “I’m still there. For the time being. But I’m thinking about going on my own.”

  “Your classes. Your spring courses. What about them?”

  “What about them?”

  “You’ve dropped out of university.” I couldn’t believe this thought that popped into my head so suddenly and had to say it again. “You’ve dropped out of university.”

  “I’m thinking about it. About not taking my exams.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just—you know—sort of pointless.”

  “What about your scholarship?”

  “I don’t need any money. That’s what’s so astonishing. I can give up my scholarship—”

  “Does Ben know what you’re thinking of?”

  “Moving out or not taking exams?”

  “Both.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t intend to tell him.”

  “No.”

  “Will you talk to your father?”

  “God, no.”

  “Please, Norah. He went through some—some phases—when he was younger. Way back. Please talk to him.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Please, Norah.”

  “All right.”

  Injury, when it comes, arrives from so many different directions that I don’t even attempt to track it. News from Indonesia or Jerusalem, Bush heating up for the election, breakthrough advances in cancer research—none of this had anything to do with this beautiful first daughter of mine with her light, fine hair, who was good, who was clever, who spoke in a low musical voice unusual for her age, who was living obediently and reading Flaubert and provoking no one who might do her damage.

  I felt the kitchen walls swell outward, everything curved as in a TV cartoon, and then shrink inward, pressing against the two of us. “You do realize this is serious,” I said to her. “You are in a serious psychological state and you need help. It is very likely that you are depressed. It may be you have some mineral or vitamin deficiency, something as simple as that.”

  “It’s not one big thing. I know that much. It’s a lot of little things. I’m trying to get past the little things, but I can’t.”

  “Norah,” I tried. “The world often seems to be withholding something from us. We all feel that way at rimes, but especially at your age. You have to face up to it—”

  “But that’s exactly what I want to do. I’m trying to face up to it. But it’s too big.”

  “Has something happened, something you haven’t told us about?”

  “No. It’s just—everything.”

  I heard myself shouting into her face, making a rough knot-hole in the centre of the world, rude and out of control. “You have to talk to your father today,” I told her. “Today.”

  “I said all right.”

  “But you must talk to someone else as well. Someone in the counselling area. Today.”

  Did I really say that: “in the counselling area”? No wonder she stared at me.

  “It’s Sunday” she said.

  “Well go to the hospital. Emergency will be open.”

  “It’s not an emergency.”

  “Norah, you need help.”

  “I’m trying to find where I fit in.”

  She held on to me desperately then. I
was thinking quickly. Drugs. Some awful mix-up with drugs. Or a cult, I tried to picture cult members I’d seen hanging around the university, grey robes, sandals. Or those awful born-again Christians who won’t let women wear makeup and cut off their hair if they talk back. I stared at Norah’s mouth: no lipstick. But, no, it was breakfast time; no one would be wearing makeup at this hour. Still, mere had to be some perfectly logical explanation if I could just think my way through to it. Something had scrolled backward in her consciousness, giving her a naked naïveté about life, that it can be brought to a state of perfection, though we know this can never happen. Or maybe it was a temporary imbalance of the inner ear. I’d read about that recently. Mononucleosis, the old bugaboo, the particular enemy of students; people used to think it was passed around by kissing. Or maybe a brain tumour, massive but not inoperable. A misalignment in the spine, which would require the merest adjustment by an expert in Boston—we could fly down there in less than two hours, a breeze.

  These were sensible ideas, examples of the kind of sideways thinking I’ve learned from Tom. My heartbeat, though, kept drilling straight through my calm speculations. I knew. Right away I knew this was the beginning of sorrow. In fact, it must have been less than an hour later that Norah left the house, just slipped out the front door with her orange backpack, hitching a ride, probably, into Toronto. I couldn’t believe she left without saying goodbye. I looked all over the house for her and for her things. No one. Nothing. Then I knew how wildly out of control she was, how she’d become dangerous to her own being. She was lost.

  Lost. A part of my consciousness opened like the separation of a cloud onto scenes of abrupt absence. Sunlight fell with a thud on streets that Norah would never walk down, the stupid, dumb, dead sun. Her birthdays would go on without her, the first of May, ten years from now, or twenty. Somehow she had encountered a surfeit of what the world offered, and had taken an overdose she is not going to be able to survive.

  Or else not a surfeit, but its opposite, as Danielle Westerman seems to understand. A trick of perception may have fooled Norah into believing that life is too full to be embraced and too beautiful to bear. But the truth is something very different, and I am trying to figure out what that truth might be. Sometimes I am close to knowing.