“Did you like it?” he asked her.
“I loved it.”
Tall mother and tall son walked along, the personality of one extending into the personality of the other. Coming towards them they saw Dinah, who said she wasn’t the least surprised when she spied
Man of La Mancha
under Harriet’s arm.
“He’s a smart man,” said Harriet of Peter O’Toole.
“So it’s brains you’re after now,” said Dinah.
“He was handsome too, in his day, really exceptionally handsome. I admit his body leaves something to be desired.”
“His chest is a size twenty-eight.”
“Like mine,” said Harriet, “and with the same hair count. Jack Frame recommended it. He said it broke his heart.”
“Then Jack Frame has a silly heart.”
Kenny, ever alert, asked, “Don’t you like Jack Frame?”
“Do
you
like him?”
“Don’t you?”
Harriet, too, was most curious.
Dinah said, “I’ve never been able to resist a man with dry, freckled lips.”
H
arriet would remember that the fall of 1997 was drier than usual, and the weather prevailingly cool. The first snow fell on October 22, a layer of soft wet stuff that clung to everything and was very beautiful. Kenny and Jane were up early, as if aware of the transformation, and when they came downstairs Jane said it looked purply outside, like her teacher’s hennaed hair. The same day Harriet was in a fish store in the market, fascinated by the beautiful blues of the blue crabs and of the lobsters too, whose armpits were a powder blue. A young woman with blood on her fingers and scales on her hands took her money. Harriet asked what lotion she used, and she said lots of Lubriderm. Is it the best? No. Neutrogena is the best. When she worked as a cleaner in Halifax and Maine, she said, Neutrogena was the only thing that helped her hands, so sore and dry were they from all the cleaning fluids. And it was only then that Harriet realized she was talking about cleaning houses, not fish.
The end of October was sunny and the painters came back to finish the trim on Bill Bender’s house. Indian summer returned on November 8 and left for good on Remembrance Day, November 11. While the warmth continued, the song detective ate outside, and in the morning Harriet would see an empty wine bottle or two on his picnic table. On Remembrance Day, the temperature dropped and she pinned Kenny’s poppy to a warmer jacket. A week later Lew came home, and a few days
after that she cut Kenny’s hair, kneeling on the floor afterwards and sweeping it into the dustpan, reminded of a previous time when Lew was the barber and said afterwards in a soft moaning voice, “Such beautiful hair, such beautiful hair. I’m so glad it grows back.”
That fall she slept very little, usually waking at three, worried that she couldn’t remember words. It took her hours one night to remember the word
waffle;
only
tortilla
would come to mind. When the teachers went on strike for two weeks, it wore out her nerves having the kids underfoot; then her comedy class began and one of the students, she discovered, had an exceptional memory. Every morning, as she dressed, Cheerio-woman would think about that same day a year ago, remembering the weather, her wardrobe, everyone she had met and everything they said. A year ago, she said, there was none of this: snow falling and muck on the roads. It was a beautiful day. She drove to Eganville to see her father, who had lost the use of his right arm after a stroke, and he said to her,
I feel that I’ve wasted my life in idleness
.
By early December, frost ferns provided her study windows with a permanent curtain, and she no longer felt so eerily visible to Bill Bender, but Dinah had disappeared. She wouldn’t return for a week, and when she did, her mother, Ida, came with her. On December 25, Harriet raised the blinds and snow was falling outside. In a sign of things to come, she saw a woman walk by under a large umbrella.
At first, Dinah thought she had the flu that everyone else had. But the symptoms persisted. She was tired, and coughing all the time. She went to her doctor. They did blood tests and took
X-rays at the end of November, and she went to her mother’s for a week without telling anyone where she was. Then, missing her own place, she persuaded Ida to move in with her. My illness is serious, she told Harriet on the phone, but my mother is a saint.
Harriet found her in bed, with an old and scented lawyer at her side. He wore a silver tie and leaned back in his chair as if he were at the beach, fixing his gaze on Harriet and asking her what she did for a living. Very nice, he responded, very nice. He confessed that he too wanted to be a writer. He wanted to write an epic, he had it all planned out, though he hadn’t begun to write it yet. It will be like Tolstoy, he said, laughing with great, fleshy-faced gusto. Very nice, he said, turning back to Dinah. Very nice.
“You should take Harriet’s writing class,” Dinah told him. And he laughed and laughed.
Dinah’s bed was big and white with many pillows. Her silver head lay against three pillows, piled up; her face was the colour of pewter. “I should have had a physical every year, the way they tell you to.” The lawyer had left. She and Harriet were alone. “So should you.”
“I’m only forty-seven.”
“Don’t boast. I hate boasting.”
“I’ve got an appointment with the sleep clinic. But not till February, unless there’s a cancellation.”
Ida appeared in the doorway and Dinah said, “Mother, tell Harriet to get a new mattress.”
“Have you thought of a new mattress?” asked Ida. Her hands were stained from dying a pink sweater a shade of plum. And she had a good system, she said. She did it in the washing machine. First, she dissolved the dye in hot water, then she put
in the clothes and ran the wash cycle twice, and
then
she let it go to rinse.
Ida was one of those less-than-beautiful women who turn into old beauties. On the bedroom wall there was a picture of her holding Dinah in her lap and she was nothing to write home about. But now! Her face had finally forgiven her big nose and taken it to its soft wrinkled self. Framing the truce was hair as thick and silvery as Dinah’s, whom she had named after Dinah Shore. “I wanted to call her Gilda but I knew Rita Hayworth would come to a bad end.”
“I loved Dinah Shore,” said Harriet. “At least, I loved her closet.”
“She was Jewish,” said Ida proudly.
“They had a picture of her closet in the weekend magazine when I was a kid. A walk-in closet with so many clothes and so many shoes. That was out of this world.”
“She was a game girl.”
Ida headed downstairs and Harriet said, “Your mother is wonderful.”
“She is,” said Dinah.
On the bedside table was Esther Williams’s autobiography. “Abysmally bad,” Dinah said, “but there’s a part where Esther, who I loved as a girl, all those swimming scenes, describes working in a clothing store patronized by movie stars.” A loud bang came from below. “Close the door,” she said, and Harriet closed the door.
“Garbo used to come to the store,” continued Dinah, “and they had to pretend they didn’t recognize her. Usually, she left empty-handed, since all she was interested in was getting a deal.
Marlene Dietrich came too, and Esther had to model outfits for her. She would go into Dietrich’s dressing room and find her stretched out on the sofa, stark naked.”
Dinah was in the mood for spilling any secrets but medical ones: about her health she didn’t want to talk. And so Harriet adjusted her worried ways and entered into the fragile spirit of things. In grade thirteen, Dinah said, she took a Garbo biography to school and read it in English class, tucked inside her textbook. She was supposed to be reading Keats. They also did
Macbeth
that year and
Antony and Cleopatra
, and because her hair was so long and fell forward over her face, she was asked to read Cleopatra’s lines aloud and was horribly nervous. “What did I do in high school?” she said to Harriet. “I grew my hair.” Inspired, she said, by a movie that came out in 1958. She was sixteen, and her aunt had invited her to Toronto for a visit. She went by train, it was Easter, and her aunt took her to see
South Pacific
. Dinah thought the Hawaiian girl with the long dark hair, the one who played the secondary love interest, was the most beautiful girl she had ever seen, and on the way home, on the train, she thought of nothing else but how she was going to grow her hair long and look like her. By grade thirteen her hair was down to her waist. “I loved Mitzi Gaynor too. Loved all those Mitzis, Angies, and Debbies. I was furious with my mother for naming me Dinah.”
“I loved Rossano Brazzi,” said Harriet.
“He was awful,” said Dinah. “But I thought John Kerr was thrilling, a Montgomery Clift kind of actor, and the story was tragic.”
“You like eggheads,” diagnosed Harriet with a certain pity. “I never saw
South Pacific
as a girl, but there was a movie I caught one night on
TV
.
A Certain Smile
. Joan Fontaine and somebody
young, some girl, who fell for Rossano Brazzi. Well, he was completely irresistible. That olive skin, those melting eyes, that chest hair. Then she fell apart when she realized that he wouldn’t leave his wife, ever.”
The clock ticked beside the bed.
“Why wouldn’t he leave his wife?” asked Dinah.
“Oh, they’d had a son who died. The usual nonsense.”
Dinah nodded. “Yes,” she said. “So how’s my Kenny?”
“He can’t sleep. His stomach aches as soon as he goes to bed.”
“Take him to the doctor.”
“I have. He’s fine. There’s nothing the matter with him.”
“Change teachers. Change schools.”
Harriet took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, then put them back on and smiled at her friend. “When did you cut your waist-length hair?”
“When I went to the
Journal
. I cut it shoulder-length. It was shoulder-length in the picture people sliced up with razor blades, especially after I panned that rotten singer Our Pet Juliette.”
“Well,” said Harriet, “you deserved it.” She reached for Dinah’s hand and held it. Then she got up to go. “More roses,” she said, spotting them on the desk in the corner of the room.
“From silly Jack.”
“Jack?” And the expression on Harriet’s face slid around like a too-large watch on a wrist. “Jack Frame? He’s the one?”
Dinah nodded, amused.
“Do you like him?” Still amazed. “I mean, I understand why he would like you, but do you like him?”
“Why not?” Dinah said. “You do.”
T
hey were supposed to be discussing plot. “I’ve never understood the word ‘plot,’” Professor Harriet admitted. “One thing leads to the next thing. But does it?”
Her students looked at her.
“It seems to me that one thing often leads to the same thing. Or back to an earlier thing. Or, more likely, to nothing at all.”
The Shawl wasn’t there. “Death is a good plot device, though. Even I can see that.”
“Only in a tragedy,” said North of England. “Tragedies always end in death, and comedies always end with a wedding.”
“Not Buster Keaton’s comedies,” said Harriet. “They end with a tombstone.”
And into her mind, as she picked up a broken chalk off the blackboard ledge, came the old burial ground in Halifax-gravestones weathered black on a grassy, shaded slope – a black as black as charred toast inside a halo of green, and English toast, not North American. Almost wafer-thin. The stones abloom on the back from years of having lain on damp soil.
Pencil Voice interrupted her thoughts with a question she had to strain to hear. “I wanted to ask you about having children? Is it good or bad? If you’re a writer?”
“Oh, I never recommend having children,” Harriet answered. “I never recommend it.” Scanning the class list, stopping at Miin-ling. “I could tell you homework stories that would make
your blood run cold. On the other hand, I’ve written more since having children. You convince yourself that raising children is a job, and then you get some child care, and you have a few spare hours every day…”
Only six of the eight, and so unsteady was the pole of humiliation, jokiness, ruefulness, shame on which she wobbled that it hurt her to see there were students who couldn’t be bothered to come, even when their absence was a godsend. She assigned an exercise. I’ll give you the first line, you go on from there. And she wrote on the blackboard:
She remembers waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of an egg smashing against her window
.
“No,” said Rod Steiger. “That’s not a good first sentence.”
“All right. Give me a better one.”
“It’s not funny. You won’t get a funny story if you begin that way.”
She held out the chalk to the man who wooed with roses. He stood up and walked slowly towards her, saying, “My brother wouldn’t come downstairs if we had eggs for breakfast. He couldn’t stand the smell.” He took the chalk, but stood there thinking.
Harriet said, “I wonder why pie throwing is funny and egg throwing isn’t. If you want revenge you throw eggs, if you want laughs you hit somebody in the face with a custard pie. It’s still eggs, but in a different form.”
“They’re both cruel,” Cheerio-woman said, and Harriet agreed. Then she turned to Jack. “Okay, Einstein. What’s your idea?” As usual she felt aggressively unsettled in his presence.
He wrote on the board,
My brother the egghead hated the smell of eggs so much he stayed at the top of the stairs and held his nose
during breakfast
. Harriet rubbed out everything after
the smell of eggs
, thinking as she did so that if Jack Frame turned out, in the end, to be a good writer she was going to slit her throat.
While her students wrote about their brother the egghead, she remembered a peculiar experience that occurred many years ago. She was sitting in a pew on Sunday morning, finding refuge from the loneliness of university life, when she felt a visitation of physical warmth. It came into her left side and for several minutes beat about her heart, filling her chest cavity and radiating through her limbs. Had she been someone else, someone less skeptical, she would have taken the sensation of warmth as an incident of spiritual moment. A benediction. She might have gone in that direction – towards the spirit – instead of falling into the wispy arms of cinematic flesh.
Did you know
, opening her notebook and writing to Pauline,
that Cary Grant ate sandwiches of thinly sliced turkey breast on thinly sliced bread? A most sparing lunch
.