I’ll try to get away with light wood furniture, tall windows, a palette of sunny colours, and a few pieces of Polish amber scattered here and there just so, catching the natural light. And thematter of cars? This has to be settled. Alicia doesn’t own a car; she thinks a car is too expensive to keep in a city like Wychwood. Roman has a car, a Honda Civic, a model from the early nineties. He looks after it beautifully. Just a week ago he replaced the rubber floor mats instead of scrubbing the old ones.
I can deconstruct Alicia’s acute feminine sensibility for an hour or more, depending on whether I can keep myself from coasting into a secondary fiction, the compacted imaginative ravellings that collect around the end of each writing hour. A fantasy of mine: Norah is sleeping downstairs in her bedroom. In my mental movie she has come home, exhausted, hitching a ride from Toronto. Every rerun is the same. She appears, suddenly within the protection of our walls. She is slightly feverish with flu, but nothing serious, nothing a few days in bed won’t fix. In a few minutes I’ll take her some lemon tea. My daughter, my sick daughter. I don’t want to wake her, though. Waking a sleeping person seems to me a particularly violent act. This is how political prisoners were tortured in China—or was it Argentina?—with an intricate and automatic alarm system cutting in five minutes after sleep commenced so that the already tormented bodies were shocked by sleep deprivation and whipped with chronic distrust.
No, let her sleep. Punch the delete key. I must get back to Roman and Alicia, my two lost children, and their separate branches of selfishness.
Tom often speaks about the oddness of trilobite evolution. No one knows a thing about the trilobite brain or even how they reproduced sexually. All the beautiful soft-tissue evidence has rotted away, leaving only the calcium shell. But it is known that most trilobites developed huge and complex eyes on the sides of their slick heads. The fossil remains are clear, right down to the smallest lens. All trilobites possessed eyes, except for one species which is blind. In this case the blindness is thought to have been a step forward in evolution, since these eyeless creatures lived in the mud at the bottom of a deep body of water. It seems that nature favours getting rid of unused apparatus. The blind trilobites were lightened of their biological load, their marvellous ophthalmic radar, and they thrived in the darkness. When I think of this uncanny adaptation, I wonder why I can’t adapt too. All I wanted was for Norah to be happy; all I wanted was everything. Instead I’ve come to rest on the lake bottom, stuck there in the thick mud, squirming, and longing to have my eyes taken away.
Two years ago, off to Washington for a book tour, I was an innocent person, a mother worried about nothing more serious than whether her oldest daughter would qualify for McGill and whether she would find a boyfriend. The radio host in Baltimore asked me—he must have been desperate—what was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. That stopped me short. I couldn’t think of the worst thing. I toldhim that whatever it was, it hadn’t happened yet. I knew, though, at that moment, what the nature of the “worst thing” would be, that it would be socketed somehow into the lives of my children.
Thus
G OODNESS IS AN abstraction,” Lynn Kelly said last Tuesday when the four of us met for coffee. “It’s an imaginative construct representing the general will of a defined group of people.” As always she speaks with authority, using her strong Welsh accent to crispen each word. “Goodness is a luxury for the fortunate.” As always we occupied the window table at the Orange Blossom Tea Room on Main Street. Only once or twice have we arrived to find someone already at “our” table, which is why, years ago, we decided to assemble at nine-thirty sharp. By ten the place is
I can deconstruct Alicia’s acute feminine sensibility for an hour or more, depending on whether I can keep myself from coasting into a secondary fiction, the compacted imaginative ravellings that collect around the end of each writing hour. A fantasy of mine: Norah is sleeping downstairs in her bedroom. In my mental movie she has come home, exhausted, hitching a ride from Toronto. Every rerun is the same. She appears, suddenly within the protection of our walls. She is slightly feverish with flu, but nothing serious, nothing a few days in bed won’t fix. In a few minutes I’ll take her some lemon tea. My daughter, my sick daughter. I don’t want to wake her, though. Waking a sleeping person seems to me a particularly violent act. This is how political prisoners were tortured in China—or was it Argentina?—with an intricate and automatic alarm system cutting in five minutes after sleep commenced so that the already tormented bodies were shocked by sleep deprivation and whipped with chronic distrust.
No, let her sleep. Punch the delete key. I must get back to Roman and Alicia, my two lost children, and their separate branches of selfishness.
Tom often speaks about the oddness of trilobite evolution. No one knows a thing about the trilobite brain or even how they reproduced sexually. All the beautiful soft-tissue evidence has rotted away, leaving only the calcium shell. But it is known that most trilobites developed huge and complex eyes on the sides of their slick heads. The fossil remains are clear, right down to the smallest lens. All trilobites possessed eyes, except for one species which is blind. In this case the blindness is thought to have been a step forward in evolution, since these eyeless creatures lived in the mud at the bottom of a deep body of water. It seems that nature favours getting rid of unused apparatus. The blind trilobites were lightened of their biological load, their marvellous ophthalmic radar, and they thrived in the darkness. When I think of this uncanny adaptation, I wonder why I can’t adapt too. All I wanted was for Norah to be happy; all I wanted was everything. Instead I’ve come to rest on the lake bottom, stuck there in the thick mud, squirming, and longing to have my eyes taken away.
Two years ago, off to Washington for a book tour, I was an innocent person, a mother worried about nothing more serious than whether her oldest daughter would qualify for McGill and whether she would find a boyfriend. The radio host in Baltimore asked me—he must have been desperate—what was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. That stopped me short. I couldn’t think of the worst thing. I toldhim that whatever it was, it hadn’t happened yet. I knew, though, at that moment, what the nature of the “worst thing” would be, that it would be socketed somehow into the lives of my children.
Thus
G OODNESS IS AN abstraction,” Lynn Kelly said last Tuesday when the four of us met for coffee. “It’s an imaginative construct representing the general will of a defined group of people.” As always she speaks with authority, using her strong Welsh accent to crispen each word. “Goodness is a luxury for the fortunate.” As always we occupied the window table at the Orange Blossom Tea Room on Main Street. Only once or twice have we arrived to find someone already at “our” table, which is why, years ago, we decided to assemble at nine-thirty sharp. By ten the place is
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