Duet. Carol Shields

know fiction isn’t my thing.’

      ‘Ah yes, Judith,’ he said. ‘It’s your old Scarborough puritanism, as I’ve frequently told you. Judith Gill, my girl, basically you believe fiction is wicked and timewasting. The devil’s work. A web of lies.’

      ‘You just might be right, Furlong.’

      When Martin came back with our drinks, Furlong issued a general invitation to attend his publication party in November. He beamed at Martin, ‘You two must plan to come.’

      ‘Hmmm,’ Martin murmured noncommitally. He doesn’t really like Furlong; the relationship between them, although they teach in the same department, is one of tolerant scorn.

      The lights dipped, and we found our way back to our seats. Back to the lovely arched setting, lit in some magical way to suggest sunrise. Heroines moved across the broad stage like clipper ships, their throats swollen with purpose. The play wound down and so did they in their final speeches. Holy holy, the crash of applause that always brings tears stinging to my eyes.

      All night long memories of the play boiled through my dreams, a plummy jam stewed from those intelligent, cruising, early-century bosoms. Hour after hour I rode on a sea of breasts: the exhausted mounds of Susanna Moodie, touched with lamplight. The orchid hills and valleys of Mrs Eberhardt, bubbles of yeast. The tender curve of my daughter Meredith. The bratty twelve-year-old tits of Anita Spalding, rising, falling, melting, twisting in and out of the heavy folds of sleep.

      I woke to find Martin’s arm flung across my chest; the angle of his skin was perceived and recognized, a familiar coastline. The weight was a lever that cut off the electricity of dreams, pushing me down, down through the mattress, down through the floor, down, into the spongy cave of the blackest sleep. Oblivion.

       October

      The first frost this morning, a landmark. At breakfast Martin talks about snow tires and mentions a sale at Canadian Tire. After school these days Richard plays football with his friends in the shadowy yard, and when they thud to the grass, the ground rings with sound. Watching them, I am reassured.

      It is almost dark now when we sit down to dinner. Meredith has found some candles in the cupboard, bent out of shape with the summer heat but still useable, so that now our dinners are washed with candlelight. I make pot roast which they love and mashed potatoes which make me think of Susanna Moodie. In the evening the children have their homework. Martin goes over papers at his desk or reads a book, sitting in the yellow chair, his feet resting on the coffeetable, and he hums. Richard and Meredith bicker lazily. Husband, children, they are not so much witnessed as perceived, flat leaves which grow absently from a stalk in my head, each fitting into the next, all their curving edges perfect. So far, so far. It seems they require someone, me, to watch them; otherwise they would float apart and disintegrate.

      I watch them. They are as happy as can be expected. What is the matter with me, I wonder. Why am I always the one who watches?

      

      One day this week I checked into the Civic Hospital for a minor operation, a delicate, feminine, unspeakable, minimal nothing, the sort of irksome repair work which I suppose I must expect now that I am forty.

      A minor piece of surgery, but nevertheless requiring a general anaesthetic. Preparation, sleep, recovery, a whole day required, a day fully erased from my life. Martin drove me to the hospital at nine and came to take me home again in the evening. The snipping and sewing were entirely satisfactory, and except for an hour’s discomfort, there were no after effects. None. I am in service again. A lost day, but there was one cheering interlude.

      Shortly before the administering of the general anaesthetic, I was given a little white pill to make me drowsy. In a languorous trance I was then wheeled on a stretcher to a darkened room and lined up with about twelve other people, male and female, all in the same condition. White-faced nurses tiptoed between our parked rows, whispering. Far below us in another world, cars honked and squeaked.

      Lying there semidrugged, I sensed a new identity: I was exactly like a biscuit set out to bake, just waiting my turn in the oven. I moved my head lazily to one side and found myself face to face, not six inches away from a man, another biscuit. His eyes met mine, and I watched him fascinated, a slow-motion film, as he laboured to open his mouth and pronounce with a slur, ‘Funny feeling, eh?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As though we were a tray of biscuits.’

      ‘That’s right,’ he said crookedly.

      Surprised, I asked, ‘What are you here for?’

      ‘The old water works,’ he said yawning. ‘But nothing major.’

      Kidneys, bladder, urine; a diagram flashed in my brain. ‘That’s good,’ I mumbled. Always polite. I cannot, even here, escape courtesy.

      ‘What about you?’ he mouthed, almost inaudible now.

      ‘One of those female things,’ I whispered. ‘Also not major.’

      ‘You married?’

      ‘Yes. Are you?’ I asked, realizing too late that he had asked because of the nature of my complaint, not because we were comparing our status as we might had we met at a party.

      ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m married. But not happily.’

      ‘Pardon?’ Courtesy again, the scented phrase. Our mother had always insisted we say pardon and, as Charleen says, we are children all our lives, obedient to echoes.

      ‘Not happily,’ he said again. ‘Married yes,’ he made an effort to enunciate, ‘but not happily married.’

      A surreal testimony. It must be the anesthetic, I thought, pulling an admission like that from a sheeted stranger. The effect of the pill or perhaps the rarity of the circumstances, the two of us lying here nose to nose, almost naked under our thin sheets, horizontal in midmorning, chemical-smelling limbo, our conversation somehow crisped into truth.

      ‘Too bad,’ I said with just a shade of sympathy.

      ‘You happily married?’ he asked.

      ‘Yes,’ I murmured, a little ashamed at the affirmative ring in my voice. ‘I’m one of the lucky ones. Not that I deserve it.’

      ‘What do you mean, not that you deserve it?’

      ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘Well, you said it,’ he said crossly.

      ‘I just meant that I’m not all that terrific a wife. You know, not self-sacrificial.’ I groped for an example. ‘For instance, when Martin asked me to type something for him last week. Just something short.’

      ‘Yeah?’ His mouth made a circle on the white sheet.

      ‘I said, what’s the matter with Nell? That’s his secretary.’

      ‘He’s got a secretary, eh?’

      ‘Yes,’ I admitted, again stung with guilt. This was beginning to sound like a man who didn’t have a secretary. ‘She’s skinny though,’ I explained. ‘A real stick. And he shares her with two other professors.’

      ‘I see. I see.’ His voice dropped off, and I thought for a minute that he’d fallen asleep.

      Pressing on anyway I repeated loudly, ‘So I said, what’s the matter with Nell?’

      ‘And what did he say to that?’ the voice came.

      ‘Martin? Well, he just said, “Never mind, Judith.” But then I felt so mean that I went ahead and did it anyway.’

      ‘The typing you mean?’

      ‘Uh huh.’

      ‘So you’re not such a rotten wife,’ he accused me.

      ‘In