were marches in the streets; intelligent, responsible people were willing to spend months in jail. Around the world the political forces eclipsed an event as neutral and trivial and minuscule as a baby shower in a small Canadian town; a lost invitation weighed nothing at all on the scale of human concerns.
But maybe, if Mrs. McGinn happened to be a certain kind of woman, then maybe she had a good, affectionate friend who phoned to remind her of the event. March is a dreary month in our part of the world, with its blackened snow and random melts. The faint feminism of the early sixties had not yet ignited for women like Lillian (?) McGinn. Feminism was in its chrysalis stage, and Lillian was adrift between generations and between seasons. Probably she still wore a girdle and used a diaphragm to prevent further pregnancies. The house was drafty and the children were churlish. An evening social occasion would be welcome. Mrs. McGinn, standing at the green sink and slicing her beans, might be thrilled to be invited out for a shower and to know that an invitation had been sent, even though it had been mislaid somehow. She would be grateful for the telephone reminder and feel relief from the thoughts that preyed on her. She would rush her family through dinner and make a stab at the supper dishes, getting them soaking in Ivory Liquid at the very least. Or maybe, just this once, a teenaged daughter, overburdened with her own unhappiness and her concern about tomorrow’s biology test, would pitch in and offer to help. “Let me,” she would say to her featureless (to her) mother. “You go to your thingamajig.” The daughter who in my mind rather resembles Natalie, would feign disinterest but be moved at the same time by her own curiosity about the communal lives of adult women. And perhaps, if she were at all sensitive, she would feel the invisible wave of distress in the house; something was wrong with her mother, some element unanswered.
She would be a daughter who understood nothing about the care of a house. Her bedsheets in that upstairs bedroom—the same room Natalie has occupied all these years, going straight from a crib into a junior bed—were changed regularly, delivered crisp and fresh, but she has never considered the notion of domestic maintenance, and why should she?
“Leave the kitchen to me,” Mrs. McGinn’s daughter might have commanded her mother in March of 1961, speaking in an exasperated tone, exactly like Christine’s, wanting to prod a troubling root of kindness that she feels but can’t yet quite claim.“I’ll look after the dishes.”
A house requires care. Until recently the Merry Maids came and cleaned our house twice a month, but now I call on them less and less frequently. Their van rolling into our driveway, the women’s muscles and buoyancy and booming equipment wear me out. I mostly look after the house myself. I deal with the dust and the dog hairs, wearing my oldest jeans and a cotton sweater coming unknit at the cuffs. Cleaning gives me pleasure, which I’m reluctant to admit and hardly ever do, but here, in my thoughts, I will register the fact: dusting, waxing, and polishing offer rewards. Quite a lot of people would agree with this if pressed, though vacuuming is too loud and cumbersome to enjoy. I especially love the manoeuvring of my dust mop over the old oak floors. (It is illegal to shake a dust mop out of a window in New York, and probably even in Toronto; I read that somewhere.) Those Buddhist monks I saw not long ago on a TV documentary devote two hours to morning meditation, followed by one hour of serious cleaning. Saffron-robed and their shaved heads gleaming, they actually go out into the world each day with buckets and rags, and they clean things, anything that needs cleaning, a wall or an old fence, whatever presents threat or disorder. I’m beginning to understand where this might take them.
With my dampened dust cloth in hand I’m keeping myself going. I reach under the sink and polish that hard-to-get-to piece of elbow pipe. Tomorrow I’m planning to dust the basement stairs, swiftly, but getting into the corners.
I’m not so thick that I can’t put the pieces of my odd obsession together, wood and bone, plumbing and blood. To paraphrase Danielle Westerman, we don’t make metaphors in order to distract ourselves. Metaphors hold their own power over us, even without their fugitive gestures. They’re as real as the peony bushes we observe when we’re children, lying flat on the grass and looking straight up to the undersides of leaves and petals and marvelling: Oh, this is secret territory, we think, an inverted world grown-ups can’t see, its beetles, its worms, its ant colonies, its sweet-sour smell of putrefaction. But, in fact, everyone knows about this palpable world; it stands for nothing but the world itself.
I dust and polish this house of mine so that I’ll be able to seal it from damage. If I commit myself to its meticulous care, I will claim back my daughter Norah, gone to goodness. The soiling sickness that started with one wayward idea and then the spreading filaments of infection, the absurd notion—Tao?—that silence is wiser than words, inaction better than action—this is what I work against. And probably, especially lately, I clean for the shadow of Mrs. McGinn, too, wanting to drop a curtsey in her direction. Yes, it was worth it, I long to tell her, all that anxiety and confusion. I’m young enough that I still sigh out: what is the point? but old enough not to expect an answer.
I hurry with this work. I hurry through each hour. Every day I glance at the oak banister. Hands have run up and down its smoothed curves, giving it the look of a living organism. This banister has provided steady support, all the while looking graceful and giving off reflected light, and resisting with its continuity the immensity of ordinary human loneliness. Why would I not out of admiration stroke the silky surfaces now and then; every day, in fact? I won’t even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little dérisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending—these eat up a woman’s creativity, anyone’s creativity. But I’ve watched the way she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even when it is just me coming into Toronto to have lunch in her sunroom.
Her views often surprise me, though I like to think I know her well, and despite the forty years between us. Dr. Westerman: poet, essayist, feminist survivor, holder of twenty-seven honorary degrees. “It might be better,” I said once, pointing to a place in her first volume of memoirs and trying not to sound overly expository, “to use the word brain here instead of heart.”
She gave me a swift questioning look, the blue-veined eyelids sliding up. Now what? I explained that referring to the heart as the seat of feeling has been out of fashion for some time, condemned by critics as being fey, thought to be precious. She considered this for a second, then smiled at me with querulous affection, and placed her hand on her breast. “But this is where I feel pain,” she said. “And tenderness.”
I let it go. A writer’s partis pris are always—must be—accommodated by her translator. I know that much after all these years.
There are other things I could do with my time besides clean my house. There’s that book on animals in Shakespeare, the companion volume to my Shakespeare and Flowers. Or I could finish my translation of the fourth and final volume of Westerman’s memoirs, which would take me about six months. Instead I’m writing a second novel, which is going slowly because I wake up in the morning anxious, instead, to clean my house. I’d like to go at it with Q-tips, with toothpicks, every crack and corner scoured. Mention a new cleaning product and I yearn to hold it in my hand; I can’t stop. Each day I open my eyes and comfort myself with the tasks that I will accomplish. It’s necessary, I’m finding, to learn devious means of consoling oneself and also necessary to forgive one’s own eccentricities. In the afternoon, after a standing-up lunch of cheese and crackers, I get to my novel and produce, on a good day, two pages, sometimes three or four. I perch on my Freedom Chair and think: Here I am. A woman seated. A woman thinking. But I’m always rushed, always distracted. Tuesdays I meet my friends for coffee in Orangetown, Wednesdays I go to Toronto, every second Thursday afternoon is the Library Board meeting.
Last Friday, after days spent at home waiting for a phone call from Mrs. Quinn at the Promise Hostel—which yielded nothing but the fact that nothing had changed—I went into Toronto with Tom to a one-day trilobite conference at the museum, and even attended a session, thinking it might provide distraction. A paleontologist, a woman called Margaret Henriksen, from Minneapolis, lectured in a darkened room, and illustrated her talk with a digital representation of a trilobite folding itself into