Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [93]
I next made up my mind to grow kind. I was not a kind person, but I believed I could learn.
First I burned my old diaries in the fireplace and also the letters I had written home during my year away at college, letters full of gush and artifice. My mother caught me at this, and expressed concern. You may regret it, she said, you may want to look back and see what you were like at ten or twelve or sixteen years of age.
But I knew I wouldn’t need the diaries or letters to prod my remembrance. I had grown up a mean, bossy little kid. I was selfish.
I liked to hurt people’s feelings. I addressed my sister, Joan, as Miss Sneakypants and my brother, Warren, as Pimplenose. I ordered Cousin Beverly around as though she were an indentured servant and complained about the way her little girl cried in her early months; it was only colic, but I managed to suggest she was being mishandled or maybe there was brain damage or something.
I was forever clipping out dieting articles for my mother and reading them aloud to her in a cool disingenuous voice, and invariably I referred to the newspaper she wrote for as "that parochial rag." I remember the way I was. People like to think of memory as a lowlying estuary, but my memories of myself are more like a ruffed-up lake, battering against the person I became. A nice person. A thoughtful person.
I paid attention; I listened hard to the motor clicking on and off in my head; it was like doing beads, it was very intricate work. I entered the summer of 1956 a girl and came out a woman. Women, I learned, needed to be bloody, but they didn’t need to be mean.
The reverberations in my family were surprisingly minor, like the offhand ringing of distant chimes—as though all these years I’d been given the benefit of the doubt: Alice’s gained in maturity, they said. Alice’s a real young lady now. Alice’s come into her own.
Alice’s calmed down. Alice’s got rid of that chip on her shoulder, come down off her high horse, lost her rough edges. But then Alice always was a lump of butter underneath, wasn’t she? Why, she’s turned out to be a regular darling. Oh, you can count on Alice, you always could.
Well!
Here is a diagram of our family structure before and after my father’s death.
Before he departed (brain tumor, malignant) we were such a sweet little family: two loving parents and three healthy children.
Our father was Director of the Agricultural Institute where his work on hybrid grains was universally recognized (honorary degrees from Guelph and the University of Iowa), and after his retirement, never one to be idle, he wrote a weekly horticultural column for the Ottawa Recorder. My mother was a full twenty-three years younger than my father; that age-gap became her hobby and profession, being a young wife to an older husband—it kept her girlish, made her a kind of tenant in the tower of girlhood.
There she remained, safe, looked after. She stayed home and looked after her children and sewed and cleaned the house—even though she could have afforded help—and did the garden. That garden of hers, it functioned like a kind of trope in her daily life, and in ours too. She made suppers—roasted meat, boiled vegetables, pies and puddings or molded Jello things for dessert. These meals were planned, they didn’t just happen. Our family sat down at a table that was set. My mother was always concocting new centerpieces, she was part of that mid-century squadron of women who believed in centerpieces. We children had agreeable table manners. We kept our voices low. Always, after the dishes, Joanie and Warren and I got down to our homework without reminding.
We took piano lessons on Wednesday evening from a woman named Myrna Rassmussen, the Royal Raspberry we called her behind her back—and the mildness of this epithet says a lot about who we were and what we were capable of. On Saturdays we went for family walks—no one else we knew went