Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [12]
My mother, as I have already said, was an extraordinarily obese woman, and, with her jellylike features, she was rather plain, I’m afraid. It’s true her neighbor, Mrs. Flett, glimpses a certain prettiness behind her squeezed eyes and pouched chin, but the one photograph I possess, her wedding portrait, tells me otherwise. My mother was large-bodied, heavy fleshed. My father, in contrast, was short of stature, small-boned and neat, with a look of mild incomprehension flitting across his face. It can perhaps be imagined that among the men of the community coarse jokes were made at his expense.
With all my heart, Mrs. Flett heard him say to my mother. He seemed exhausted by the utterance, leaning back now in his chair.
With all my heart. This was the sort of phrase that lovers in books invent. Love talk, sweetheart talk. The poetry of rapture. Occasionally Clarentine Flett has read cheap novels—hiding them from her husband who would think them time-wasting—in which people speak to each other in soft ways, but she had never suspected that such pronouncements might be uttered in the houses of ordinary quarry workers in a village such as Tyndall, Manitoba. Nor had she imagined the enrichment of voice or tone that could be brought to these offerings. "Oh, how I love you," Cuyler Goodwill said to his wife Mercy, crying out to her with a pitch of entreaty which Clarentine Flett has been unable to wipe from her remembrance. It’s been with her all spring, raining down on the dry weave of her daily comings and goings. It’s with her now as she stands beside the clothesline, sneezing and blinking in the brilliant sunshine and fighting a temptation to withdraw for the afternoon.
And then an idea comes to her. She would boil up a kettle for tea and invite Mercy to come across and share it.
Yes, a nice pot of tea, Clarentine Flett decides. And she’ll take down the best rose tea cups, Royal Albert, that belonged to her mother, and while she’s at it, she’ll set out a plate of jam biscuits.
Women need companionship—that was the very thing Dr. Spears was fussing her about. Maybe that was all that was the matter with her, nothing but loneliness, not the unhappiness of life itself, but only a seasonal attack of loneliness. And Mercy Goodwill, the poor dear young soul, was lonely too—Mrs. Flett knows, suddenly, that this is true. She divines it. Never mind Mercy’s secret hoard of tenderness and the soft words her young husband pours into her ear, never mind any of that. She and Mercy are alone in the world, two solitary souls, side by side in their separate houses, locked up with the same circle of anxious hunger. Why had she not seen it before? This is what’s been keeping Clarentine Flett close to home these last weeks, away from the Mothers’ Union and the Needlework Auxiliary, away from the possibility of a few days’ visiting in Winnipeg; she cannot bear to travel outside the ring of disability that encircles the two of them, herself and Mercy Goodwill—a pair of Christian sisters uniquely joined.
Something must at last be done, and she will do it; she’ll knock on Mercy’s door this very minute and call her over. She’ll make the tea light and sweet the way Mercy prefers it. And she might—she feels suddenly bold at the thought of an afternoon tea party, the sort of tea party Dr. Spears’s wife might have with Mrs. Hopspein, the Quarry Master’s wife—she might, after a cup or two, ask Mercy to call her by her Christian name. "Why don’t you call me Clarentine," she’d say. "I wouldn’t mind one bit, I’d welcome it, in fact.
We’ve been neighbors these two years now. Why, you’re like a daughter to me, that’s my feeling, and if you could only bring yourself—"
But this is the moment when her reverie is interrupted. She hears a voice, a man’s high-pitched yipping, and looks up to see the old Jew stumbling toward her across the garden.
It’s hard nowadays to talk about the old Jew. It’s a tricky business.
The brain’s got to be folded all the way back to the time when the words "old Jew" could be