Unless. Carol Shields

animal underbodies. This act is called enrolment, a rather common behaviour for arthropods, and it seems to me that this is what Tom has been doing these past weeks. I clean my house and he “enrols” into a silence that carries him further away from me than the fleeting figure of Mrs. McGinn, who rests like a dust mote in the corner of my eye, wondering why she was not invited to her friend’s baby shower on that March evening back in 1961. It nags at her. She is disappointed in herself. Her life has been burning up one day at a time—she understands this for the first time—and she’s swallowed the flames without blinking. Now, suddenly, this emptiness. Nothing has prepared her for the wide, grey simplicity of sadness and for the knowledge that this is what the rest of her life will be like, living in a falling-apart house that wishes she weren’t there.

      After the conference in Toronto, some trilobite friends from England wanted to go for a meal at a place called the Frontier Bar on Bloor Street West, where the theme is Wild West. They’d read about it in a tour guide and thought it might be amusing.

      Everything’s in your face at the Frontier Bar—from the cowhides nailed to the walls to the swizzle sticks topped with little plastic cowboy hats. The drinks have names like Rodeo Rumba and Crazy Heehaw, and we felt just a little effete ordering our bottle of good white wine. Before we said goodnight at the end of the evening, I excused myself to go to the women’s washroom (the Cowgals’ Corral), and there I found, on the back of each cubicle door, a tiny blackboard supplied with chalk, a ploy by the management to avoid the defacing of property.

      I’ve often talked to Tom about the graffiti found in public bathrooms; we’ve compared notes. The words women write on walls are so touchingly sweet, so innocent. Tom can hardly believe it. “Tomorrow is cancelled,” I saw once. And another time, “Saskatchewan Libre!” Once, a little poem. “If you sprinkle / when you tinkle / Please be a sweetie / and wipe the seatie.” I love especially the slightly off witticisms, the thoughts that seemed unable to complete themselves except in their whittled-down elliptical, impermanent forms.

      I’d never before felt an urge to add to the literature of washroom walls, but that night, at the Frontier Bar, I picked up the piece of chalk without a moment’s hesitation, my head a ringing vessel of pain, and my words ready.

      First, though, I wiped the little slate clean with a dampened paper towel, obliterating “Hi, Mom” and “Lori farts” and leaving myself a clear space. “My heart is broken,” I wrote in block letters, moved by an impulse I would later recognize as dramatic, childish, indulgent, grandiose and powerful. Then, a whimsical afterthought: I drew a little heart in the corner and put a jagged line through it, acutely aware of the facile quality of the draftsmanship.

      At once I felt a release of pressure around my ribs. Something not unlike jubilation rubbed against me, just for a moment, half a moment, as though under some enchantment I was allowed to be receptor and transmitter both, not a dead thing but a live link in the storage of what would become an unendurable grief. I believed at that instant in my own gusto, that I’d set down words of revealing truth, inscribing the most private and alarming of visions instead of the whining melodramatic scrawl it really was, and that this unscrolling of sorrow in a toilet cubicle had all along been my most deeply held ambition.

      I went to join the others gathered on the pavement outside the bar. They hadn’t noticed I’d been away so long, and perhaps it really had been only a moment or two. Everyone was topped up with good wine and bad food and they were chattering about Toronto and how strange that such campy curiosities as the Frontier Bar continued to exist. Tom slid an arm around my waist, oh so sweetly that I half believed I’d left my poison behind. The night air was bitingly cold, close to freezing, but for the first time in weeks I was able to take a deep breath. My Heart Is Broken. My mouth closed on the words, and then I swallowed.

       So

      So-oo-oo?” my daughter Norah once asked me—she was about nine years old. “Why exactly is it that you and Daddy aren’t married?”

      I had been waiting for the question for some years, and was prepared. “We really are married,” I told her. “In the real sense of the word, we are married.” She and I were in Orangetown on a Saturday morning, in the only shoe store in town not counting the ones out at the mall, and Norah was trying on new school shoes. “We’re married in that we’re together forever.”

      “But,” she said, “you didn’t have a wedding.”

      “We had a reception,” I told her cheerily. This diversion from wedding to reception had always been part of my plan. “We had a dinner for friends and family at your father’s apartment.”

      “What kind of reception?”

      How easily I managed to lead her sideways. “We had pizza and beer,” I said. “And champagne for toasts.”

      “Was Grandma Winters there?”

      “Well, no. She and Grandpa Winters had another reception for us later. Sort of a tea party.”

      “What did you wear?”

      “You mean at the pizza party?”

      “Yes.”

      “I had a caftan that Emma Allen made out of some African cotton. A blue and black block print. You’ve seen the picture. Only she was Emma McIntosh then.”

      “Was she your bridesmaid?”

      “Sort of. We didn’t use that word in those days.”

      “Why not?”

      “This was back in the seventies. Weddings were out of style back then. People didn’t think they were important, not if two people really loved each other.”

      “I hate these shoes.” She wiggled in the chair.

      “Well, we won’t buy them, then.”

      “What kind of shoes did you have?”

      “When?”

      “At the pizza thing.”

      “I’m not sure I remember. Oh, yes I do. We didn’t have shoes. We were barefoot.”

      “Barefoot? You and Daddy?”

      “It was summertime. A very hot summer day.”

      “That’s nice,”she said.”I wish I’d been there.”

      This was much too easy. “I wish you’d been there too,” I said, meaning it. “That would have made the day perfect.”

      “So, is there anything new?” It was Emma Allen phoning a week ago from Newfoundland. She has been a friend since high-school days in Toronto. There is no need for reference points between Emma and me. Our brains tick over in the same way. She is a writer, a medical journalist, a redhead, tall and lanky, who once lived, briefly, in Orangetown with her husband and kids and was part of the same writers’ workshop. We speak at least once a week on the phone. When she asks if there’s anything new, she is talking about Norah, about Norah living on the street.

      “She’s still there. Every day.”

      “That has to be some comfort,” she said in her measured way. “Though it’s not bloody much.”

      “I worry about the cold.”

      It was October, and we were having a frost almost every night. We’d even had a fall of snow, which had since melted.

      “Thermal underwear?” Emma asked.

      “Good idea.”

      “On the other hand—”

      “Yes?”

      “The cold may bring her home. You know how a good cold snap makes people wake up and look after themselves.”

      “I’ve thought of that.”

      “I