The Republic of Love by Carol Shields Page B

married seven years ago. “There’re lots of sevens in my story.” She’s never looked back. Life is bliss, sex is good. “We’ve got his kids and my son, he plays jazz piano at the Nostalgia Club, and in a year Jim’ll retire. I give pottery lessons, I’m having a show next month. My name is Molly Beardsley.”
    “I KNOW M OLLY B EARDSLEY ,” Beverly Miles told Fay at lunch. “Jim Beardsley’s first wife was my sister’s best friend.”
    This kind of thing is always happening to Fay, circles inside circles. Last week Hannah Webb told her she’d attended an evening seminar on menopause given by a marvelous woman, a Dr. McLeod. “That’s my mother,” Fay said. “Peggy McLeod? That’s my mother.”
    The population of Winnipeg is six hundred thousand, a fairly large city, with people who tend to stay put. Families overlap with families, neighborhoods with neighborhoods. You can’t escape it. Generations interweave so that your mother’s friends (Onion Boyle, Muriel Brewmaster, and dozens more) formed a sort of squadron of secondary aunts. You were always running into someone you’d gone to school with or someone whose uncle worked with someone’s else’s father. The tentacles of connection were long, complex, and full of the bitter or amusing ironies that characterize blood families.
    At the same time, Fay has only a vague idea who the noisy quarreling couple on the floor above her are, and no idea at all who lives in the crumbling triplex next door, though she knows, slightly, two of the tenants in the building across the street. Her widowed Uncle Arthur lives one street over on Annette Avenue, but she knows no one else on that street. Some days she can wait anonymously in the bus shelter at River and Osborne and speak to no one, and the next day she’ll run into any number of acquaintances. These surprises used to drive Peter crazy, the oppressive clannishness they implied and the embarrassments, but Fay again and again is reassured and comforted to be part of a knowable network.
    When her former lover, Nelo Merino, was tranferred to Ottawa and wanted her to come with him, she had to ask herself, in the sternly analytical style she favored in those days: Do I love Nelo more than I love these hundreds, thousands of connections, faces, names, references and cross-references, biographies, scandals,coincidences, these epics, these possibilities? The answer, and it didn’t take her long to make up her mind, was no.
    Geography is destiny, says Fay’s good friend Iris Jaffe, and Fay tends to agree.
    “I FORGOT to tell you,” Fay said to her mother on the telephone, “that Hannah Webb was at that seminar you gave at the Y last week.”
    “Hannah?”
    “You know Hannah Webb. Our director.”
    “Really? Was she there? Well, there was such a huge turnout. I never did get a chance to look at the registration list.”
    “She said she found it extremely helpful.”
    “Oh good, I’m glad.”
    “And that you were a marvelous woman. How do you like that? Sympathetic, she said. But with a practical grasp.”
    “Heavens.”
    “You must have seen her there. She’s got grayish-goldish hair. Sort of piled up with combs. Lovely hair. She’s about five-foot, six. Probably wearing a white raincoat?”
    “Oh dear, there were so many there, you’d be surprised.”
    “She asked you a question during the discussion, about hot flashes. What caused them.”
    “Oh, of course! I remember now. Well, I can’t have been very helpful on that subject. I mean, we don’t know for sure about hot flashes, what brings them on.”
    “She said you had some good ideas for handling them. She was really pleased she’d gone. She’s been having a rotten time.”
    “Isn’t that amazing.”
    “What?”
    “I mean, that your director discusses her hot flashes with her staff.”
    “Well, she’s very –”
    “You’ll never guess who else was there. Marlene Fournier.”
    “Marlene Fournier? Becky Scott’s aunt?”
    “We