Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [95]
For years now she has sat down at her desk every morning, still wearing her robe and slippers, writing out her column in longhand, a first draft, then a second, then a third, and then checking over Cousin Beverly’s typed copy. Her rusty-gray frizz fluffs out over her forehead and ears—sometimes she brushes her hair before settling down to work and sometimes she doesn’t. She gets lost in what she’s doing and doesn’t even hear the phone ringing; none of us ever guessed she had this power of absorption. She’ll do, say, the propagation of lobelia one week and how to air-layer your rubber plant the next. When she isn’t actually writing, she’s answering mail from her readers—she averages at least twenty letters a week—or else she’s thinking up ideas or filing away gardening information in my father’s old filing cabinet. She’s done this for nine whole years, but now, suddenly, it’s over.
She’s lost her job. A man named Pinky Fulham has taken over the column, and my mother, fifty-nine years old, has been given the heave-ho. She got her walking papers. She’s been fired—and thrown into a despair deeper and sharper and wider than she ever suffered over her husband’s death or her children’s misbehavior.
A year ago she was sitting at that desk with her hair buzzing around her head like something alive and her pen scrambling across the paper. She was Mrs. Green Thumb, that well-known local personage, and now she’s back to being Mrs. Flett again. She knew, for a brief while, what it was like to do a job of work. The shaping satisfaction. The feel of a typescript folded into an envelope. And then the paycheck arriving in the mail. Now she’s like some great department store of sadness with its displays of rejection and inattention and wide silent reflecting windows, out of business, the padlock on the door.
I live thousands of miles away in England—Hampstead to be precise—but I’ve left my darling husband Ben for three whole weeks, also our two little sprogs, Benje and Judy, and I’ve come all the way home to see how matters stand. I find my mother seated in the garden, gripping the arms of a wicker chair, her chin oddly dented and old, her mouth round, helpless, saying, "I can’t get used to this. I can’t get over this."
Fraidy Hoyt’s Theory
You don’t expect Alice Flett Downing to believe in her mother’s real existence, do you?
It’s true she loves her mother, and true she’s a good daughter—didn’t she come all this way across the drink to try to jolly her out of her current state of the blues? The trouble is, Alice doesn’t know where to begin. In a curious, ironic way, she hasn’t known her mother long enough, hasn’t known her the way I’ve known her, since childhood in Bloomington, Indiana, when we were two eleven-year-old brats in pigtails—well, in point of fact, I was the one in pigtails and Daze had the naturally curly hair. Which she hated—Lord!—an ambulatory fuzzball, she called herself. Later, when the poodle-cut came into fashion, she was grateful, but by that time, the late forties, she was living up in Canada, married to a man named Barker Flett and the mother of three children, the oldest being Alice.
Alice can’t help herself, she’s got this fixation on work. She’s not like young girls were in our era, wavering between convention and fits of rebellion; she has serious interests of her own about which she is sometimes a little sententious. She’s twenty-eight years old, you’d think she’d be out there with the flower children, wouldn’t you, mooning about peace and love, and lolling around in public places, strumming a guitar and smoking grass and letting her life go sweetly to hell. But no, she’s got herself properly married to a teeny-weenie professor of economics, she lives in a little fairytale English house, she’s produced two perfect babes, and she’s published a moderately successful