Dressing Up for the Carnival Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  DRESSING UP FOR THE CARNIVAL

  A SCARF

  WEATHER

  FLATTIES: THEIR VARIOUS FORMS AND USES

  DYING FOR LOVE

  ILK

  STOP!

  MIRRORS

  THE HARP

  OUR MEN AND WOMEN

  KEYS

  ABSENCE

  WINDOWS

  REPORTAGE

  EDITH-ESTHER

  NEW MUSIC

  SOUP DU JOUR

  INVENTION

  DEATH OF AN ARTIST

  THE NEXT BEST KISS

  EROS

  DRESSING DOWN

  THE WORK OF CAROL SHIELDS

  POETRY

  Others

  Intersect

  Coming to Canada

  NOVELS

  Small Ceremonies

  The Box Garden

  Happenstance

  A Fairly Conventional Woman

  Swann

  A Celibate Season

  (written with Blanche Howard)

  The Republic of Love

  The Stone Diaries

  Larry’s Party

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  Various Miracles

  The Orange Fish

  PLAYS

  Departures and Arrivals

  Thirteen Hands

  Fashion, Power, Guilt

  (with Catherine Shields)

  Anniversary

  (with David Williamson)

  CRITICISM

  Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Copyright © Carol Shields, 2000

  All rights reserved

  “Dressing Up for the Carnival” appeared in Malahat Review; “Weather,” “The

  Harp,” and “Keys” in Story; “Dying for Love” and “Soup du Jour” in West Coast

  Review; “Ilk,” “Mirrors,” and “Reportage” in Prairie Fire; “Our Men and Women” in

  North Dakota Quarterly; “Absence” and “Death of an Artist” in Event; “New Music”

  in BBC Music Magazine; “The Next Best Kiss” in Atlantic Monthly; “A Scarf ” in

  The Financial Post Magazine; and “Dressing Down” in Saturday Night. “Flatties:

  Their Various Forms and Uses” was published in a chapbook for the Harborfront

  International Writers Festival; “Stop!” in a chapbook, Drop Out; and “Eros” in an

  anthology, Feeling the Heat (Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver).

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and

  any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Shields, Carol.

  Dressing up for the carnival / Carol Shields.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-16185-2

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this

  publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or

  transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

  recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright

  owner and the above publisher of this book.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Evan, Eli, and Rebecca

  DRESSING UP FOR THE CARNIVAL

  All over town people are putting on their costumes.

  Tamara has flung open her closet door; just to see her standing there is to feel a squeeze of the heart. She loves her clothes. She knows her clothes. Her favorite moment of the day is this moment, standing at the closet door, still a little dizzy from her long night of tumbled sleep, biting her lip, thinking hard, moving the busy hangers along the rod, about to make up her mind.

  Yes! The yellow cotton skirt with the big patch pockets and the hand detail around the hem. How fortunate to own such a skirt. And the white blouse. What a blouse! Those sleeves, that neckline with its buttoned flap, the fullness in the yoke that reminds her of the morris dancers she and her boyfriend Bruce saw at the Exhibition last year.

  Next she adds her new straw belt; perfect. A string of yellow beads. Earrings of course. Her bone sandals. And bare legs, why not?

  She never checks the weather before she dresses; her clothes are the weather, as powerful in their sunniness as the strong, muzzy early morning light pouring into the narrow street by the bus stop, warming the combed crown of her hair and fueling her with imagination. She taps a sandaled foot lightly on the pavement, waiting for the number 4 bus, no longer just Tamara, clerk-receptionist for the Youth Employment Bureau, but a woman in a yellow skirt. A passionate woman dressed in yellow. A Passionate, Vibrant Woman About To Begin Her Day. Her Life.

  Roger, aged thirty, employed by the Gas Board, is coming out of a corner grocer’s carrying a mango in his left hand. He went in to buy an apple and came out with this. At the cash register he refused a bag, preferring to carry this thing, this object, in his bare hand. The price was $1.29. He’s a little surprised at how heavy it is, a tight seamless leather skin enclosing soft pulp, or so he imagines. He has never bought a mango before, never eaten one, doesn’t know what a mango tastes like or how it’s prepared. Cooked like a squash? Sliced and sugared like a peach? He has no intention of eating it, not now anyway, maybe never. Its weight reminds him of a first-class league ball, but larger, longer, smooth skinned, and ripely green. Mango, mango. An elliptical purse, juice-filled, curved for the palm of the human hand, his hand.

  He is a man of medium height, burly, divorced, wearing an open-necked shirt, hurrying back to work after his coffee break. But at this moment he freezes and sees himself freshly: a man carrying a mango in his left hand. Already he’s accustomed to it; in fact, it’s starting to feel lighter and drier, like a set of castanets which has somehow attached itself to his left arm. Any minute now he’ll break out into a cha-cha-cha right here in front of the Gas Board. The shriveled fate he sometimes sees for himself can be postponed if only he puts his mind to it. Who would have thought it of him? Not his ex-wife Lucile, not his co-workers, not his boss, not even himself.

  And the Borden sisters are back from their ski week in Happy Valley. They’ve been back for a month now, in fact, so why are they still wearing those little plastic ski passes on the zipper tabs of their jackets? A good question. I SKIED HAPPY MOUNTAIN these passes say. The Bordens wear them all over town, at the shopping center, in the parking lot. It’s spring, the leaves are unfolding on the hedges in front of the post office, but the Borden girls, Karen and Sue, still carry on their bodies, and in their faces too, the fresh wintry cold of the slopes, the thrill of powder snow and stinging sky. (The air up there chimes with echoes, a bromide of blue.) It would be an exaggeration to say the Borden sisters
swagger; it would be going too far. They move like young ponies, quivery and thoughtful, with the memory of expended effort and banked curves. They speak to each other in voices that are loud and musical, and their skin, so clear, pink, bright, and healthy, traps the sunshine beneath its surface. With one hand, walking along, they stroke the feathering-out tops of hedges in front of the post office, and with the other they pull and tug on those little plasticized tags—I SKIED HAPPY MOUNTAIN. You might say it’s a kind of compulsion, as though they can’t help themselves.

  And then there’s Wanda from the bank who has been sent on the strangest of errands. It happened in this way: Mr. Wishcourt, the bank manager where Wanda works, has just bought a new baby carriage for his wife, or rather, for their new baby son, Samuel James. The baby carriage was an impulsive lunch-hour purchase, he explains to Wanda, looking shamefaced but exuberant: an English pram, high-wheeled, majestically hooded, tires like a Rolls-Royce, a beauty, but the fool thing, even when folded up, refuses to fit in the back of his Volvo. Would she object? It would take perhaps three-quarters of an hour. It’s a fine day. He’ll draw her a plan on a sheet of paper, put an X where his house is. He knows how she loves walking, that she gets restless in the afternoon sometimes, sitting in her little airless cage. He would appreciate it so much. And so would his wife and little Sam. Would she mind? He’s never before asked her to make coffee or do personal errands. It’s against his policy, treating his employees like that. But just this once?

  Wanda sets off awkwardly. She is, after all, an awkward woman, who was formerly an awkward girl with big girlish teeth and clumsy shoulders. The pram’s swaying body seems to steer her at first, instead of her steering it. Such a chunky rolling oblong, black and British with its wambling, bossy, outsized keel. “Excuse me,” she says, and “Sorry.” Without meaning to, she forces people over to the edge of the sidewalks, crowds them at the street corners, even rubs up against them with the big soft tires.

  All she gets back are smiles. Or kindly little nods that say: “It’s not your fault” or “How marvelous” or “What a picture!” After a bit she gets the hang of steering. This is a technical marvel she’s pushing along, the way it takes the curbs, soundlessly, with scarcely any effort at all. Engineering at its most refined and comical. Her hands rest lightly on the wide white handlebar. It might be made of ivory or alabaster or something equally precious, it’s so smooth and cool to the touch.

  By the time Wanda reaches Pine Street she feels herself fully in charge. Beneath the leafy poplars, she and the carriage have become a single entity. Gliding, melding, a silvery hum of wheels and a faint, pleasing adhesive resistance as the tires roll along suburban asphalt. The weight of her fingertips is enough to keep it in motion, in control, and she takes the final corners with grace. Little Sam is going to love his new rolling home, so roomy and rhythmic, like a dark boat sailing forward in tune with his infant breathing and the bump-dee-bump of his baby heart.

  She stops, leans over, and reaches inside. There’s no one about; no one sees her, only the eyes inside her head that have rehearsed this small gesture in dreams. She straightens the blanket, pulling it smooth, pats it into place. “Shhh,” she murmurs, smiling. “There, there, now.”

  Mr. Gilman is smiling too. His daughter-in-law, who considers him a prehistoric bore, has invited him to dinner. This happens perhaps once a month; the telephone rings early in the morning. “We’d love to have you over tonight,” she says. “Just family fare, I’m afraid, leftovers.”

  “I’d be delighted,” he always says, even though the word leftovers gives him, every time she says it, a little ping of injury.

  At age eighty he can be observed in his obverse infancy, meta phorically sucking and tonguing the missing tooth of his life. He knows what he looks like: the mirror tells all—eyes like water sacks, crimson arcs around the ears, a chin that betrays him, the way it mooches and wobbles while he thrashes around in his head for one of those rumpled anecdotes that seem only to madden his daughter-in-law. Better to keep still and chew. “Scrumptious,” he always says, hoping to win her inhospitable heart, but knowing he can’t.

  Today he decides to buy her flowers. Why-oh-why has he never thought of this before! Daffodils are selling for $1.99 a half dozen. A bargain. It must be spring, he thinks, looking around. Why not buy two bunches, or three? Why not indeed? Or four?

  They form a blaze of yellow in his arms, a sweet propitiating little fire. He knows he should take them home immediately and put them in water for tonight, but he’s reluctant to remove the green paper wrapping which lends a certain legitimacy; these aren’t flowers randomly snatched from the garden; these are florist’s flowers, purchased as an offering, an oblation.

  There seems nothing to do but carry them about with him all day. He takes them along to the bank, the drugstore, to his appointment with the foot specialist, his afternoon card club at the Sunset Lodge. Never has he received more courteous attention, such quick service. The eyes of strangers appear friendlier than usual. “I am no worse off than the average person,” he announces to himself. He loses, gracefully, at canasta, then gets a seat on the bus, a seat by the window. The pale flowers in his arms spell evanescence, gaiety. “Hello there,” a number of people call out to him. He is clearly a man who is expected somewhere, anticipated. A charming gent, elegant and dapper, propounding serious questions, bearing gifts, flowers. A man in disguise.

  Ralph Eliot, seventeen years old, six feet tall, killingly handsome, and the best halfback the school team has seen in years, has carelessly left his football helmet hanging on a hook on the back of his bedroom door. An emergency of the first order; his ten-year-old sister Mandy is summoned to bring it to the playing field.

  She runs all the way up Second Avenue; at the traffic light she strikes a pose, panting, then pounds furiously the whole length of Sargent Street, making it in four minutes flat. She carries the helmet by its tough plastic chin strap and as she runs along, it bangs against her bare leg. She feels her breath blazing into a spray of heroic pain, and as her foot rounds on the pavement, a filament of recognition is touched. The exactitude of the gesture doubles and divides inside her head, and for the first time she comprehends who her brother is, that deep-voiced stranger whose bedroom is next to her own. Today, for a minute, she is her brother. She is Ralph Eliot, age seventeen, six feet tall, who later this afternoon will make a dazzling, lazy touchdown, bringing reward and honor to his name, and hers.

  Susan Gourley, first-year arts student, has been assigned Beck ett’s Waiting for Godot. She carries it under her arm so that the title is plainly visible. She is a girl with a look of lusterless inattention and a reputation for drowsiness, but she’s always known this to be a false assessment. She’s biding her time, waiting; today she strides along, strides, her book flashing under her arm. She is a young woman who is reading a great classic. Vistas of possibility unfold like money.

  Molly Beale’s briny old body has been propelled downtown by her cheerful new pacemaker, and there she bumps into Bert Less ing, the city councillor, whose navy blue beret, complete with military insignia, rides pertly over his left ear. They converse like lovers. They bristle with wit. They chitter like birds.

  Jeanette Foster is sporting a smart chignon. Who does she think she is! Who does she think she is?

  A young woman, recently arrived in town and rather lonely, carries her sandwiches to work in an old violin case. This is only temporary. Tomorrow she may use an ordinary paper bag or eat in the cafeteria.

  We cannot live without our illusions, thinks X, an anonymous middle-aged citizen who, sometimes, in the privacy of his own bedroom, in the embrace of happiness, waltzes about in his wife’s lace-trimmed nightgown. His wife is at bingo, not expected home for an hour. He lifts the blind an inch and sees the sun setting boldly behind his pear tree, its mingled coarseness and refinement giving an air of confusion. Everywhere he looks he observes cycles of consolation and enhancement, and now it seems as though the evening itself
is about to alter its dimensions, becoming more (and also less) than what it really is.

  A SCARF

  Two years ago I wrote a novel, and my publisher sent me on a three-city book tour: New York, Washington, and Baltimore. A very modest bit of promotion, you might say, but Scribano & Lawrence scarcely knew what to do with me. I had never written a novel before. I am a middle-aged woman, not at all remarkable-looking and certainly not media-smart. If I have any reputation at all it is for being an editor and scholar, and not for producing, to everyone’s amazement, a “fresh, bright, springtime piece of fiction,” or so it was described in Publishers Weekly.

  My Thyme Is Up baffled everyone with its sparky sales. We had no idea who was buying it; I didn’t know and Mr. Scribano didn’t know. “Probably young working girls,” he ventured, “gnawed by loneliness and insecurity.”

  These words hurt my feelings slightly, but then the reviews, good as they were, had subtly injured me too. The reviewers seemed taken aback that my slim novel (200 pages exactly) possessed any weight at all. “Oddly appealing,” the New York Times Book Review said. “Mrs. Winters’ book is very much for the moment, though certainly not for the ages,” the New Yorker said. My husband Tom advised me to take this as praise, his position being that all worthy novels pay close attention to the time in which they are suspended, and sometimes, years later, despite themselves, acquire a permanent luster. I wasn’t so sure. As a longtime editor of Danielle Westerman’s work, I had acquired a near-crippling degree of critical appreciation for the sincerity of her moral stance, and I understood perfectly well that there was something just a little bit darling about my own book.

  My three daughters, Nancy, Chris, and Norah, all teenagers, were happy about the book because they were mentioned by name in a People magazine interview. (“Mrs. Winters lives on a farm outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is married to a family physician, and is the mother of three handsome daughters, Nancy, Christine, and Norah.”) That was enough for them. Handsome. Norah, the most literary of the three—both Nancy and Chris are in the advanced science classes at General MacArthur High School—mumbled that it might have been a better book if I’d skipped the happy ending, if Alicia had decided on suicide after all, and if Roman had denied her his affection. There was, my daughters postulated, maybe too much over-the-top sweetness about the thyme seeds Alicia planted in her window box, with Alicia’s mood listless but squeaking hope. And no one in her right mind would sing out (as Alicia had done) those words that reached Roman’s ears—he was making filtered coffee in the kitchen—and bound him to her forever: “My thyme is up.”