Collected Stories. Carol Shields
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sentimentality, saying, “Why not?—it’s part of the human personality.” Occasionally, she said the unexpected thing, as when she described her husband’s novella, Fiend at the Water Fountain, as being, “cool and straight up and down as a tulip.”
What she actually told the journalist from Encounter was that she never laughed when reading her husband’s books. For this Meershank has always respected her, valued her, adored her. She was his Canadian rose, his furry imbiber of scented tea, his smiling plum, his bread and jam, his little squirrel, his girlie-girl, his Dear Heart who promised in the garden by the river beside the limestone house in 1949 to stay at his side forever and ever. What a joke she has played on him in the end.
She has, Meershank said to Maybelle, taken a turn for the worse. He phoned the doctor, who said he would come at once. Then he handed Maybelle a piece of paper on which two telephone numbers were written. “Please,” he said. “Phone the children.”
Maybelle was unprepared for this. And she had never met the children. “What should I tell them?” she asked.
“Tell them,” Meershank said, and paused. “Tell them it could be sooner than we thought.”
One of the daughters, Sonya, lived in London, Ontario, where she was the new director of the program for women’s studies. (For those who trouble to look, her mirror image can be found in Ira Chauvin, post-doc researcher in male studies, in Meershank’s academic farce, Ten Minutes to Tenure.) Sonya did not say to Maybelle, “Who is this calling?” or “How long does she have?” She said, “I’ll be there in three hours flat.”
The other daughter, Angelica, ran a health-food restaurant and delicatessen with her husband, Rusty, in Montreal. They were just closing up for the night when Maybelle phoned. “I can get a plane at midnight,” Angelica said in a high, sweet, shaky voice. “Tell her to wait for me.”
After that Maybelle sat on a kitchen chair in the dark. She could have switched on the light, but she preferred to sit as she was and puzzle over what level of probability had landed her on the twenty-fourth of May as a visitor—she was not such a fool as to mistake a single embrace for anything other than a mutation of grief.
The tiles of the kitchen wall, after a moment, took on a greenish glow, and she began to float out of her body, a trick she had perfected during her long years of commuting between Cookston Corners and downtown Toronto. First she became Sonya, flying down an eastbound highway, her hands suddenly younger and supple-jointed on the slippery wheel. She took the long cloverleafs effortlessly, the tires of her tough little car zinging over ramps and bridges, and the sleepy nighttime radio voices holding her steady in the middle lane.
Then, blinking once and shutting out the piny air, she was transformed into Angelica, candid, fearful, sitting tense in an aisle seat at the rear of a plane—she had her mother’s smooth cheeks, her father’s square chin and her own slow sliding tears. On her lap she clutched a straw bag, and every five minutes she pushed back the sleeve of her blouse and checked her wristwatch, trying to freeze its hands with her will.
Next she was the doctor—springing onto the veranda, tapping at the screen door and taking the stairs two at a time. She drifted then into the amorphous body of Louise, where it was hot and damp and difficult to breathe, but where shadows reached out and curved around her head. Her hands lay surprisingly calm on the sheet—until one of them was lifted and held to Meershank’s beating heart.
She felt his bewilderment and heard with his ears a long popping chain of firecrackers going off. A window in the bedroom had been opened—at last—and the scent of the mock orange blossoms reached him with a rushing blow. Everything was converging. All the warm fluids of life came sliding behind Maybelle’s eyes, and she had to hold on to the sides of the kitchen chair to keep herself from disappearing.
In each of Meershank’s fictions there is what the literary tribe calls a “set piece,” a jewel, as it were, set in a spun-out text, or a chunk of narrative that is somehow more intense, more cohesive, more self-contained than the rest. Generally theatrical and vivid, it can be read and comprehended, even when severed from the wider story, or it can be “performed” by those writers—Meershank is not one—who like to gad about the country giving “readings.”
In Meershank’s recently published book, Malaprop in Disneyfield, the set piece has four characters sitting at dusk on a veranda discussing the final words of the recently deceased family matriarch. The sky they gaze into is a rainy mauve, and the mood is one of tenderness—but there is also a tone of urgency. Three of the four had been present when the last words were uttered, and some irrational prompting makes them want to share with the fourth what they heard—or what they thought they heard. Because each heard something different, and there is a descending order of coherence.
“The locked door of the room,” is what one of them, a daughter, heard.
“The wok cringes in the womb,” is the enigmatic phrase another swears she heard.
The bereaved husband, a blundering old fool in shirt sleeves, heard, incredibly, “The sock is out of tune.”
All three witnesses turn to their listener, as lawyers to a judge. Not one of them is superstitious enough to place great importance on final words. Illness, they know, brings a rainbow of distortion, but they long, nevertheless, for interpretation.
The listening judge is an awkward but compassionate woman who would like nothing better than to bring these three fragments into unity. Inside her head she holds a pencil straight up. Her eyes are fixed on the purpling clouds.
Then it arrives. Through some unsecured back door in her imagination she comes up with “The mock orange is in bloom.”
“Of course, of course,” they chime, nodding and smiling at each other, and at that moment their grief shifts subtly, the first of many such shiftings they are about to undergo.
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON MILLY STOPPED at Ernie’s Cards ‘n’ Things to buy a mea culpa card for her father-in-law, whom she had apparently insulted.
“Sorry,” Ernie’s wife said in her testy way. “We’re all out.”
Milly found this hard to believe. The card rack was full. You could buy a happiness-in-your-new-home card or a mind-your-own-beeswax card, even a spectacular three-dollar pop-up card announcing to the world that you were feeling underappreciated. Surely there was such a thing as an I’m-sorry card.
“You can believe what you want,” Ernie’s wife said. “But we’re sold right out. At the start of the week I had at least a dozen sorry cards in stock. We had a real nice selection, all the way from ‘I boobed’ to ‘Forgive me, Dear Heart.’ They went like hotcakes, the whole lot. That’s more than I sell in an average year.”
“How strange,” Milly said. “What on earth’s everyone being sorry about all of a sudden?”
Ernie’s wife made a gesture of impatience. She wasn’t there to stand around jawing with the customers, she snapped. There was the inventory to do and the ordering and so on.
Milly at once apologized for taking up her time; she had only been speaking rhetorically when she asked what everyone was being sorry about.
At this, Ernie’s wife had the grace to blush and make amends. She’d been under strain, she said, what with people in and out of the shop all week grousing about her stock of sorry cards. There was one poor soul who came in weeping her eyes out. She’d had a set-to with her husband and told him he was getting so fat he was no longer attractive to her. It turned out he wasn’t really getting fat at all. She was just in a miffy mood because she didn’t like the new statue of Louis Riel in the park. She didn’t object to Louis in the buff, not that—it was more a question of where her tax dollars were going.
Milly, who was an intimate friend of the sculptor, said, “I’m