Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [96]
she sends Christmas cards; she has a compulsion to hold her farflung family and friends in a tight embrace, and her charity extends to her mother’s old girlhood pals, chiefly myself and Labina Greene Dukes, who has recently moved down to Florida and who once described Alice to me as Her Holy Miss Righteousness.
Alice addresses me in her little notes and cards as "Aunt" Fraidy, and in that aunt-ish salutation I read proprietorial claims.
Also benevolent respect. Also love. The last time I saw her was at little Judy’s christening in Ottawa—that’s one more odd bump on Alice’s psyche: she’s an agnostic who nevertheless christens her children; she actually brings them across the Atlantic Ocean to be anointed by pure and holy Canadian water in the presence of pure and impure family and friends. Ceremony, she says, is society’s cement; ceremony paints large our sketchiest impulses; ceremony forms the seal between the cerebrum and cerebellum. Alice has a theory about every bush and button and human gesture, sometimes several theories.
After Judy’s ecclesiastical sprinkling in that wonderful Ottawa garden, Alice and I stood with our glasses of bubbly and had a good jabber about The Feminine Mystique. I could tell she was surprised I’d read it. Like many young people she believes we elderly types have long since shut down our valves and given way to flat acquiescence about the future. Her eyes widened when I began taking issue with Betty Friedan’s exaltation of work as salvation. "We are our work!" Alice cried. "Work and self cannot be separated."
Oh, dear. I opened my mouth to protest.
"Look at my mother," Alice interrupted, lowering her voice, but not quite low enough, and gesturing toward the blooming lilac where Daze was standing in a circle of friends, her body widened out now to a powerful size eighteen, little Judy nestled in the crook of her arm. "Before my mother became a newspaper columnist she had no sense of self-worth whatsoever. Whatsoever! Really, when you think about it, she functioned like a kind of slave in our society. She was unpaid. Undervalued. She was nobody. Now look at her. She’s become"—here Alice groped for words, waving her hand toward the nodding lilacs—"she’s become, you know, like a real person."
Work is work, I wanted to tell Alice, and don’t I know it. Work’s not just sitting in the corners of shadowy libraries and producing beautiful little monographs every couple of years. It’s the alarm clock going off on winter mornings when it’s dark and cold and you’ve forgotten to iron the green blouse that goes with the gray suit and the car’s not working right and you can’t afford to get it fixed this month because it’s been four years since the Official Board of the Monroe County Art Gallery thought of increasing your salary or even dropping you a word of praise, and on top of that there are whole mornings when no one comes into the gallery at all or if they do they stand around griping about the exhibitions and giggle and smirk at the abstracts, letting you know their kindergarten darlings could do just as well with a pot of fingerpaint, and furthermore (hem, hem) it’s taxpayers who support this kind of thing when what people really like, only they’re too damned intimidated to say so, is a nice landscape, fields and sky and a horizon line that looks like a horizon line for God’s sake. And what else?
Well, there are meetings with the board and the books to balance and the publicity that somehow always misfires and the fund drives that peter out and the misplaced grant applications and the catalogues coming back late from the printers, and the crazies who phone at all hours and beg you to take just one little peek at their portfolio, you owe it, you owe them, who the hell are you anyway but a glorified clerk.
And then—lately anyway, since Mel left—it’s home to a glass of bourbon and a scrambled