A Celibate Season. Carol Shields

surprisingly conciliatory. “Just don’t be dazzled by his fancy footworK, that’s all.”

      Before I could ask her what the hell she meant by that she parked the car in front of the group home. As we got out she shot at me, “Well? Did you learn anything?”

      Sometimes Jessica gets a bit tiresome, although I do enjoy a good discussion with her. I know I’ve painted you a pretty sordid picture, but Jessica’s not just an uprooted bag-lady. She has a brain. And loves a good argument. On the other hand, I think she thinks it’s good for me to see “real life”—this is twice now that she’s dragged me to her place, an ancient brick house in Sandy Hill where we wallow in Group Home Modern. Pandemonium, what with eight mothers and kids of every age, a common living room dominated by TV, common eating areas, and common God knows what else—I could never live like that. (Why not? I ask myself.)

      We parked ourselves on benches at the kitchen table and she ladled up nourishing stew and baking-powder biscuits—good, but I wasn’t terribly hungry. She started in again about poverty being a state of mind. “During the Depression—”

      I groaned.

      “You got something against the Depression, Jock?”

      “Sorry. It’s just that everyone hauls it out when they want to make a point.”

      “That’s called learning from hi6tory.”

      “Okay, okay.”

      Her point was well taken, even by me. Intelligent, educated people then were poorer than plenty of welfare cases today, but according to Jessica they didn’t feel poor. “They never thought of themselves as belonging to a social class defined by poverty, any more than you thought that when you went to law school.” I have to admit that Jessica can be intellectually challenging, which was about the last thing I expected her to be when I first met (and heard) her. She went on about how I might be broke but would never be poor, “Because, one, you haven’t got the negative social conditioning, two, you’re educated, and three, even if your husband walked out tomorrow you’d manage very nicely.”

      No I wouldn’t, Chas. I would not manage at all nicely.

      “Your state of mind isn’t poor,” Jessica forged on, “ergo you aren’t poor.”

      Ergo? I don’t get Jessica. I mean, she affects this awful speech and those terrible clothes, but if she gets wound up she can’t hide the fact that she’s educated. I’ve tried to find out something about her background, but she isn’t talking. I asked her if she’d ever been poor.

      “Oh, I once went for a week without eating because I didn’t have any money, and in the sixties I hitched through Europe and managed on a hundred bucks. Without selling my bod, in case that’s what yer thinkin’.”

      It wasn’t. In fact it was about the farthest thought from my mind.

      “But I sure as hell wasn’t eating at Maxim’s,” she went on. Ha! Would Maxim’s have let Jessica in? Even with money? Not bloody likely. (Although I didn’t say so.)

      In some ways I suppose we’ve led sheltered lives, Chas. Contemplating my bedsitter, I’ve been feeling kind of—noble, I suppose, or self-sacrificing—being willing to live like this. Temporarily. But what if this was it, for the rest of my life? With no escape?

      God, we are incredibly lucky to more or less own our nice cedar house. Glad you got a cleaning woman, but sorry she didn’t like the kitchen curtains. I hope she doesn’t start redecorating. Aren’t you getting a bit chummy with the hired help? I thought you were the one who always made it a point to stay out of office politics and thought it strange that I knew all about my secretary’s rather inspired love life. Anyway, I know the curtains were too heavy, but they were there precisely because of Gil. Unnerving, isn’t it? I used to drink the fixed regard was focused lustfully on that sexy grey jogging suit I wear around the house. But if you’re getting it too, he must be just plain lonely.

      I’ve finally found the perfect way to lose weight. When I couldn’t eat today I thought I might be getting flu, and then realized it was just like the time thirty-five years ago when I went to camp and couldn’t eat. Homesick—can you believe it? At my age? Let’s look into cheap fares if you get the Sanderson thing.

      Much love,

      Jock

      P.S. I guess Thanksgiving is a little soon.

      P.P.S. Tell the kids to write! Those grunts on the phone aren’t doing anything for me.

      P.P.P.S. You do think we’re doing the right thing, don’t you? Today we heard a brief from a woman whose mother deserted her when she was thirteen, and she never got over it.

      29 Sweet Cedar Drive

      North Vancouver, B.C.

      30 September

      Dear Jock,

      Couldn’t wait to sharpen the old quill and tell you about Creative Connections. (Remember, the substitute communications course?) I may say that after one session I’m having second thoughts.

      We sat around a seminar table, about eight of us, in a little room with no windows (goddamn architects!), and I can’t remember when I’ve felt more ill at ease. The teacher is a blowsy and frowsy woman who lost no time telling us she was a published poet with a number of awards to her credit. Davina Flowering’s her name—do you know anything about her? She’s one of those women—you know the type—who manages to make an art form out of ebullience. She stabs the air, shrieks, curses, clutches her hair, yanks her sweatshirt—yes, Jock, her sweatshirt, and not from Chapman’s either—and pounds on the table. The resonance soon had my teeth chattering. Two hours of this and I was frazzled—and so were the others, I think. Each of us sat there, dazed—and looking ashamed of ourselves for having come, but Davina assured us that within a mere week or two we would know the inside scrapings of each other’s souls. (If I decide to drop the course after next week I can still get my money back; and maybe my soul too.) She gave us an assignment for the next class—to write a poem, Xerox it, and bring it for “workshopping,” whatever that is. I thought I might dig out that parody I wrote for the firm banquet when Bill Bettner retired. You remember the one.

       If you can keep a shaky firm together

       Despite slow-paying clients all around,

       If you can wangle contractors’ agreements

       Who for their fees are not ashamed to hound Etc., etc.

      Anyway it got a good laugh at the dinner, and Bill even asked me for a copy if you recall.

      In my spare time (laugh please) I’ve been doing some drawings, partly to pass the days while I wait for Sanderson’s to come through and partly because I think I might have a workable concept for the west side of the house. It occurred to me that maybe we’re beyond the idea of a separate dining room, and if we knocked out that wall between the living and dining rooms and went out a couple of feet with glass panels—double, of course—we could get a kind of solarium effect, maybe even try some solar heating. I’ve got a good book from the library about it and it sounds feasible. What do you think?

       October 8

      Sorry if I sounded a bit glum, as well as fuzzy, when you phoned Thanksgiving night. The fact was that the festive family gathering I’d planned gradually disintegrated as the day wore on, and by evening there was no one in the house but me and an eighteen-pound turkey. First my mother phoned (at least she had the grace to call early in the morning) to say she was feeling a bit shaky and not up to driving over the bridge. I said I would come over and get her, but you know what she’s like; said she didn’t want to be a burden and a bother, she’d just make do with a Swanson’s frozen dinner in front of the TV” even though there was never anything to watch but foul-mouthed gangsters and young women with hair in their eyes, etc.

      Around noon the phone