Unless (9 page)
In the morning I took the train to Baltimore. I couldn’t read on the train because of the jolting between one urban landscape and the next. Two men seated in front of me were talking loudly about Christianity, its sad decline, and they ran the words
Jesus Christ
together as though they were some persons first and second name—Mr. Christ, Jesus to the intimates.
In Baltimore, once again, there was little for me to do, but since I was going to see Gwen at lunch, I didn’t mind. A young male radio host wearing a black T-shirt and gold chains around his neck asked me how I was going to spend the Offenden Prize money. He also asked what my husband thought of the fact that I’d written a novel. Then I visited the Book Plate (combination café and bookstore) and signed six books, and then, at not quite eleven in the morning, there was nothing more for me to do until it was time to meet Gwen.
I hadn’t seen her since the days of our old writing group back in Orangetown, when we met twice monthly to share and “workshop” our writing. Poetry, memoirs, fiction; we brought photocopies of our work to these morning sessions, where over coffee and muffins—this was the early eighties,
the great age of muffin—we kindly encouraged each other and offered tentative suggestions, such as “I think you’re maybe one draft from being finished” or “Doesn’t character X enter the scene a little too late?” These critical crumbs were taken for what they were, the fumblings of amateurs. But when Gwen spoke we listened. Once she thrilled me by saying of something I’d written, “That’s a fantastic image, that thing about the whalebone. I wish I’d thought of it myself.” Her short stories had actually been published in a number of literary quarterlies, and there had even been one near-mythical sale, years earlier, to
Harper’s
. When she moved to Baltimore five years ago to become writer-in-residence for a small women’s college, our writers’ group fell first into irregularity and then slowly died away.
We’d kept in touch, though, Gwen and I. I wrote ecstatically when I happened to come across a piece of hers in
Three Spoons
that was advertised as being part of a novel-in-progress. She’d used my whalebone metaphor; I couldn’t help noticing and, in fact, felt flattered. I knew about that novel of Gwen’s—she’d been working on it for years, trying to bring a feminist structure to what was really a straightforward autobiographical account of an early failed marriage. Gwen had made sacrifices for her young student husband, and he had betrayed her with his infidelities. In the late seventies, in the throes of love and anxious to satisfy his every demand, she had had her navel closed by a plastic surgeon
because he complained that it smelled “off.” This complaint, apparently, had been made only once, a sour, momentary whim, but out of some need to please or punish she became a woman without a navel, left with a flattish indentation in the middle of her belly, and this navel-less state, more than anything, became her symbol of regret and anger. She spoke of erasure, how her relationship to her mother—with whom she was on bad terms anyway—had been erased along with the primal mark of connection. She was looking into navel reconstruction, she’d said in her last e-mail, but the cost was criminal. In the meantime, she’d retaken her unmarried name, Reidman, and had gone back to her full name, Gwendolyn.
She’d changed her style of dress too. I noticed that right away when I saw her seated at the Café Pierre. Her jeans and sweater had been traded in for what looked like large folds of unstitched, unstructured cloth, skirts and overskirts and capes and shawls; it was hard to tell precisely what they were. This cloth wrapping, in a salmon colour, extended to her head, completely covering her hair, and I wondered for an awful moment if she’d been ill, undergoing chemotherapy and suffering hair loss. But no, there was her fresh, healthy, rich face. Instead of a purse she had only a lumpy plastic bag with a supermarket logo. That did seem curious, especially because she put it on the table instead of setting it on the floor as I would have expected. It bounced slightly on the
sticky wooden surface, and I remembered that she always carried an apple with her, a paperback or two, and her small bottle of cold-sore medication.
Of course I’d written to her when
My Thyme Is Up
was accepted for publication, and she’d sent back a postcard saying, “Well done, it sounds like a hoot.”
I was a little surprised that she hadn’t brought a copy for me to sign, and wondered at some point, halfway through my oyster stew, if she’d even read it. The college pays her shamefully, and I know she doesn’t have money for new hardcover books. Why hadn’t I had Mr. Scribano send her a complimentary copy?
It wasn’t until we’d finished our salads and ordered our coffee that I realized she hadn’t mentioned the book at all, nor had she congratulated me on the Offenden Prize. But perhaps she didn’t know. The notice in the
New York Times
had been tiny. Anyone could have missed it.
It became suddenly important that I let her know about the prize. It was as strong as the need to urinate or swallow. How could I work it into the conversation?—maybe say something about Tom and how he was thinking of putting a new roof on our barn, and that the Offenden money would come in handy. Drop it in casually. Easily done.
“Right!” she said in her hearty, unimpeded voice, letting me know she already knew. “Beginning, middle, end.” She grinned then.
She talked about her “stuff,” by which she meant her writing. She made it sound like a sack of kapok. There were always little linguistic surprises in her work, but more interesting to me were the bits of the world she brings to what she writes, observations or incongruities or some sideways conjecture. She understood their value. “He likes the fact that my stuff is off-centre and steers a random course,” she said of an admirer. Her eyes looked slightly pink at the corners, but it may have been a reflection from the headwrap, which cut a sharp line across her forehead.
She had always claimed she had little imagination, that she wrote out of the material of her own life, but that she was forever on the lookout for what she called putty. By this she meant the arbitrary, the odd, the ordinary, the mucilage of daily life that cements our genuine moments of being. I’ve seen her do wonderful riffs on buttonholes, for instance, the way they shred over time, especially on cheap clothes. And a brilliant piece on bevelled mirrors, and another on the smell of a certain set of wooden stairs from her childhood, wax and wood and reassuring cleanliness accumulating at the side of the story but not claiming any importance for itself.
She looked sad over her coffee, older than I’d remembered, and I could tell she was disappointed in me for some reason. One can always feel this sense of non-delivery. Every encounter sets us up for success or failure. It occurred to me I might offer Gwen a piece of putty by telling her about the
discovery I had made the day before, that shopping was not what I’d thought, that it could become a mission, even an art if one persevered. I had had a shopping item in mind; I had been presented with an unasked-for block of time; it might be possible not only to imagine this artifact but to realize it.
“How many boutiques did you say you went into?” she asked, and I knew I had interested her at last.
“Twenty” I said. “Or thereabouts.”
“Incredible.”
“But it was worth it. It wasn’t when I started out, but it became more and more worth it as the afternoon went on.”
“Why?” she asked slowly. I could tell she was trying to twinkle a gram of gratitude at me, but she was closer to crying.
“To see if it existed, this thing I had in mind. This item.”
“And it did.”
“Yes.”
To prove my point I reached into my tote bag and pulled out the pale, puffy boutique bag. I unrolled the pink tissue paper on the table and showed her the scarf.
She lifted it against her face. Tears glinted in her eyes. “It’s just that it’s so beautiful,” she said. And then she said, “Finding it, it’s almost as though you made it. You invented it, created it out of your imagination.”
I almost cried myself. I hadn’t expected anyone to understand how I felt.
I watched her roll the scarf back into the fragile paper. She took her time, tucking in the edges with her fingertips. Then she slipped the parcel into her plastic bag, tears spilling freely now, wetting the pink kernel of her face. “Thank you, darling Reta, thank you. You don’t know what you’ve given me today.”
But I did, I did.
But what does it amount to? A scarf, half an ounce of silk, maybe less, floating free in the world, making someone happy, this person or that person, it doesn’t matter. I looked at Gwen/Gwendolyn, my old friend, and then down at my hands, a little garnet ring, a gift from Tom back in the seventies, one week after we met. I thought of my three daughters and my mother-in-law, and my own dead mother with her slack charms and the need she had to relax by painting china. Not one of us was going to get what we wanted. I had suspected this for years, and now I believe that Norah half knows the big female secret of wanting and not getting. Norah, the brave soldier. Imagine someone writing a play called
Death of a Saleswoman
. What a joke. We’re so transparently in need of shoring up that we’re asking ourselves questions, endlessly, but not nearly sternly enough. The world isn’t ready for us yet; it hurts me to say that. We’re too soft in our tissues, even you, Danielle Westerman, feminist pioneer, Holocaust survivor, cynic, and genius. Even you, Ms. Reta Winters, with your new old, useless
knowledge, your erstwhile charm. We are too kind, too willing—too unwilling too—reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don’t even know we want.
I
NEED TO SPEAK FURTHER
about this problem of women, how they are dismissed and excluded from the most primary of entitlements.
But we’ve come so far
; that’s the thinking. So far compared with fifty or a hundred years ago. Well, no, we’ve arrived at the new millennium and we haven’t “arrived” at all. We’ve been sent over to the side pocket of the snooker table and made to disappear. No one is so blind as not to recognize the power of the strong over the weak and, following that, the likelihood of defeat. It was only last Sunday, I think, that old What’s-his-crust was on Channel 2, the
Literary Lights
program, he of the square, bony, well-made head and the transparent ears clasped tight to his skull, and the look of being eighty and impish about it. “Who would you say your major influences were?” he was asked.
“Hmm.” This required some careful literary thought, but not too much thought. “Chekhov, definitely,” he replied, his face softening to dough. “And Hardy. And, of course, Proust, that goes without saying.”
What’s the matter with this man? Hasn’t he ever heard of Virginia Woolf? Isn’t he brave enough to pronounce the names: Danielle Westerman or Iris Murdoch? But of course it’s not a matter of bravery in his case; the idea simply does not occur.
But, wait!—here comes the “woman” question, delivered by the rumpled, anxious chairperson, coiffed, suited, sweating, consulting her script with a swift, fearful eye: “What about (pause) women writers? Surely women have reshaped the discourse of our century.” “Hmm.” More heavy thinking, more doughy pinching of the eyebrow between thumb and forefinger, then he looks with hope into the camera and says, “Now the nineteenth century—there were some interesting women writers back then.” Yes, but. The program is over in thirty seconds and he’s not about to bring a woman’s name to his stately fadeout.
Women have been impeded by their generative responsibility, he might have gone on to say had he been given time or encouragement from the chairperson, or had he been sufficiently embarrassed at drawing such an immense public blank. Women were busy bearing children, busy gathering edible grasses or bulbs. You see, he could have said, his little finger waving, it comes down to biology and destiny. Women have been hampered by their biology. Hampered: such a neutral and disingenuous concept and one that deflects blame.
Emma Allen sent me an e-mail from Newfoundland yesterday. She and her daughter and her widowed daughter-in-law were off to a health spa for the weekend, she wrote, and she was looking forward to being utterly “hampered” for a change.
Hampered; obviously a typo, not the kind of linguistic or cultural cross-wiring I sometimes experience when talking to Danielle Westerman, whose volume four memoirs I will eventually be translating.
Traduction
she insists on calling this process, even though she’s lived in an English-speaking milieu for forty years now. When am I going to be finished with the
traduction
of chapter two, she wants to know. This is the chapter in which she takes a long back view and deals with her ex-husband’s insane jealousy following the publication of her first book of poetry, which came out to ravishing reviews in France in 1949. It was titled L’Île, and published in Paris by Éditions Grandmont. I found the poems themselves very tricky to translate (poetry is not my specialty), but I was younger then and willing to stretch myself and be endlessly patient about moving words back and forth, singing them out loud under my breath as translators are told to do, attempting to bring the fullness of the poet’s intention to the work. The poems were like little toys with moving parts, full of puns and allusions to early feminism, most of which I let fall into a black hole, I’m sorry to say.
We agreed to change the title to
Isolation
. The direct translation,
Island
, didn’t quite capture the sense Danielle had
at that time in her life of being the only feminist in the world. She also wanted me to change the name of her original publisher, from Éditions Grandmont to Big Mountain Press, on the copyright page. She can be emphatic and stubborn, as everyone knows, but there’s sometimes a bead of logic beneath her obduracy. “This is a translation, dear God,” she breathed from beneath her bright pink makeup, “why not give those pretentious French
éditeurs
a nice name from the New World, something with a gasp of oxygen and a glossy new liver?”
