A Celibate Season. Carol Shields
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open, they said—Creative Connections—so I decided I might as well give it a whirl. First session, so gotta run.
With love,
Chas
P.S. It’s all right about the tea trolley. The white shoe polish did the trick.
P.P.S. If Vance says it’s okay to ask questions, can’t see why you shouldn’t,
4 Old Town Lane
Ottawa, Ont.
Sept. 30
Dear Chas,
Yes, Vance does collect rare burgundies—I’ve actually been treated to a sip! He invited us back to his office after today’s hearings, dusted off the bottle, opened it with a bit of joking ceremony, and handed around the wine in delicate long-stemmed crystal glasses that he just happens to have in his desk. It was so dry it took all my sang-froid not to make a face. But Dr. Grey—Austin—held up his glass to the light, squinted, and said admiringly, “Formidable!”
Vance preened a bit and allowed as how it was a nice little burgundy, and when Jessica and I said nothing (my lips puckered), Vance couldn’t resist a dig. “No praise from either of the fairer sex? Not up to B.C. standards, Jock? Could I offer Baby Duck?”
He was trying to get a rise out of me, of course. I think I’ve been less than a barrel of fun lately, because, to tell the truth, I am feeling somewhat down, and besides we’d just heard a brief from a single mother whose home consists of two roach-infested rooms, and whose baby suffers from malnutrition!
“Ignore him, Jock,” Dr. Grey—Austin (can’t get used to it)—said. “Just because he’s a senator doesn’t mean he knows anything.” He then remarked that it had certainly been a wrenching brief.
“Nobody ever said poverty would be fun,”Vance said. “On the other hand, you have to remember that it is, to some extent, a state of mind.”
I snapped at him. “Meaning those poor women should pull up their socks and snap out of it?”
Austin, who seems to be a bit of a peacemaker, said Vance was partly right, although poverty isn’t a curable state of mind. “A state of mind that you, Jock, for instance, don’t share.”
“She isn’t poor,” Vance said. “How could she?”
“I’ve been poor,” I said.
God, remember that first year I went to law school? When we just had the one car, and it took me an hour and a half on the bus to UBC? And how we’d count our pennies to come up with bus fare, and sometimes I’d have to skip lunch?
Vance sneered that I didn’t know the meaning of the word, at which point Jessica, who had been remarkably silent, drawled, “Tell me, Jock, what would you do if What’s-his-name—your husband—”
“Chas.”
“Chas! What kind of a name is that?”
“A nickname,” I said, a bit huffily. “For Charles.”
“Oh. Where I come from he’d be called Chuck. So like I said, what would you do if Chuck—”
“Chas.”
Jessica blew out cigarette smoke and looked sideways at me through the thick glasses and grinned very slightly. “Okay, Chas—if he walked out—or…No. What if he had walked out when the kids were little? Before you got your law degree, say?”
Funny, I suddenly felt as though heavy cold air had wafted in from the Gatineau and was flowing over my body, the way they say you feel if a ghost enters the room. I hadn’t known I harboured such phantoms.
I told her I probably would have taken my capital, and—
“Capital?” she said (sneered).
“Savings,” I amended. “I would have taken my savings and done exactly what I did—go to law school.”
“Poor people don’t have savings.” Still glaring.
“Chas and I weren’t exactly in clover,” I pointed out, feeling somewhat defensive by then. (She has that effect on me.) I explained about how we made do on a lot of beans and tuna casseroles and the occasional chuck roast and powdered skim milk, and how during the eighties recession when you were laid off we got along on as little as some people do on welfare.
“You weren’t poor,” Jessica said, maddeningly.
“We damn well were!”
I’m learning to stand up to Jessica. If you don’t she bullies you; but if you do she treats you with grudging respect.
“We once figured out that we were ten per cent below the poverty line,” I told her, and I went on about how we shivered through one winter with the thermostat set at sixty, and how I used to get my clothes at the Thrift Shop when I went to university.
“My dear,”Vance said, “hand-woven jute would look good on you—or, even better, no hand-woven jute.”
I groaned I was so frustrated, and Austin said there was a difference between being cash poor and poverty. “You knew you were smart enough to study law, and even though it used to be a man’s prerogative you didn’t sit still for that.”
“And,”Vance said, rather smugly, “no doubt you were able to make arrangements for your children.”
I started to say that their grandmothers had helped, but Vance interrupted before I could get the words out.
“Ha! Now picture Granny—”
“She goes ape if you call her Granny.”
“Whatever. But I want you to picture her in a welfare line-up.”
My mother? In a welfare line-up? I had to laugh. “I can’t get her mink jacket off,” I said.
They all laughed and I cheered up a bit, and then Jessica bawled, “Here’s to the poor!” and swilled down the rare burgundy in one gulp. She smacked her lips and pronounced, “Excellent appearance, not too faithful, maybe just a mite pretentious—no wonder you find it appealing, Vance. Well, thank God there’s money in poverty so we can drink world-class.”
With that she wheeled around, wound up like a big-league pitcher, and hurled the glass against the wall where it shattered and left splats of red dribbling down the white.
“You never could hold your booze, could you Jess?” Vance said in a steely voice.
The two of them squared off as though they were about to dive for their six-guns. Austin and I looked at the floor—a mistake; glass and dribbles of wine were scattered all over the pale-blue carpet—and in weird unison we shifted our gazes to the ceiling and started an inane conversation about the Third World that was interrupted by a loud belch from Jessica. She then swooped down on me and grabbed my arm—in a moment of madness I’d accepted an invitation to supper at her place—and as we left I turned and saw Vance and Austin looking thoughtfully at the second bottle of vintage burgundy. I’d have killed to join them.
“I get the feeling you didn’t approve of my toast,” Jessica yelled as she wheeled her rusted-out Volkswagen (beetle, formerly yellow) at breakneck speed down Rideau Street.
“I think you go out of your way to antagonize Vance,” I answered, sounding hideously prim. (I have scary glimpses of myself turning into Mother.) “He’s loaded, but that’s not exactly a crime.”Then I mumbled something about compassion not being a function of money, or a prerogative of the less-rich, either. I do believe all this, dearest Chas, but it sounds incredibly self-righteous written down, especially when, what with one thing and another, I haven’t given an awful lot of drought to “women and poverty” in recent years.
Now, suddenly, it’s all I’m thinking about. I think of it all day and half the night, and I’m grateful that something seems to be getting addressed. I told Jess that I’d been