Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [56]
Between Daisy and Maria grows an intricate rivalrous dance which can never, never be brought to light.
You’d think she’d be lonely, Daisy tells Fraidy and Beans, you’d think she’d be lost in a foreign country where she doesn’t speak the language and hasn’t got a single friend. "She’s got your father," says Fraidy. "Maybe that’s all she needs."
"Oh, Lordy," says Daisy, rolling her eyes and thinking of the night noises, the wild love cries. His as well as hers.
"People have different requirements." This from Beans. From Mrs. Dick Greene. "She never stops," Daisy tells them. "Cooking, cleaning, sewing. She keeps wanting to make me a dress. She yanks at my skirt, just yanks, and makes these barking noises and wrinkles her nose and then she gets out her dress patterns, Butterick, and holds them up to me."
"Maybe you should let her if it would make her happy," says Beans, who, now that she is settled into married life with two babies, is always going on about making other people happy.
"Maybe you should think about finding a place of your own," Fraidy says. "Personally, I couldn’t stand living in the midst of an ongoing operetta."
"She’s always kissing me. Morning, noon, and night, kissing."
"On the mouth?"
"Yes."
"Ugh." A social shiver from Beans.
Fraidy stares. "Well, tell her you don’t want to be kissed morning, noon, and night."
"Of course, physical affection is natural for certain nationalities," Beans contributes in her new sweet expository tone that makes Fraidy want to throw up.
"I say, move out. It’s time. You’re over thirty, for crying out loud."
"They’d both be so hurt."
"They’ll get over it. My mother cried for a month when I moved to my own apartment, and now she’d hate it like h-e-double toothpicks if I came back."
"Well, actually—"
"Yes?"
"Actually"—Daisy looks from one to the other, seeking approval, encouragement, and wanting to surprise them too—"I was thinking of going on a trip."
"Alone?"
"Yes."
"You lucky thing."
"Where to?"
"Canada," she answers She surprised herself. She sat down with a pile of train schedules and travel booklets and planned a two-week vacation. Her itinerary was eccentric, with a certain amount of doubling back and forth: Niagara Falls first, then Callander, Ontario, to see the quints, then Toronto to visit, on her father’s behalf, the site of a great new bank building, and finally Ottawa to call on her Uncle Barker whom she hasn’t seen since her childhood. Her arrangements were modest, touristy even, and yet she regarded her schedule with wonder, as if this little venture of hers were a kind of mythic journey—and perhaps it was, for she has never traveled alone before, and, except for a few hours in Montreal boarding ship on her honeymoon, she has never visited Canada, the country of her birth and early childhood. "I feel as though I’m on my way home," she wrote in her travel diary, then stroked the sentiment out, substituting: "I feel something might happen to me in Canada."
It was summertime. Her train moved northward through the bright little towns of eastern Michigan. In between these towns were cultivated hills and groves of trees. Beyond those hills, she thought, just behind those trees and clouds lies the Dominion of Canada. The Dominion; she repeats the word solemnly to herself, rolling it on her tongue. Do-min-i-on.
Please, please let something happen.
A cool clean place, is how she thinks of it, with a king and queen and Mounties wearing red jackets and people drinking tea and speaking