Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [97]
Well, once in a while a family has to surrender itself to an outsider’s account. A family can get buried in its own fairy dust, and this leads straight, in my opinion, to the unpacking of lies and fictions from its piddly shared scraps of inbred history. With the Fletts, for instance, the work ethic has always been writ large.
Barker and his hybrid grains. Alice and her Russians. Warren and his music. Joanie and her—whatever the hell it is she does down there in New Mexico—and so it’s only natural that they should attribute Daze’s breakdown to the loss of her newspaper column. I thought as much myself for the first month or so, but gradually I’ve come to believe that the forfeiting of her "job" was only a trigger that released a terrible yearning she’s been suppressing all her life.
Sex is what I’m referring to, what else?
Not that Daze and I ever discuss sex. Well, not for a long time anyway, not since we were young girls trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the copulative act: how long did it last? How much did it hurt? Were you supposed to talk at the same time you were doing it, whisper little endearments and so on? What did a "climax" feel like and how could you be sure you had it or not, and why did it matter anyway, and was it cheating to pretend you did even if you didn’t? That kind of thing.
Then suddenly it became lèse-majesté to discuss our sexual lives.
I think we both wanted to; each of us, when we got together, made a few clumsy gestures in that direction, but we never managed to find any common footing. There’s too much space between us, too much disproportion, you might say. Our awful imbalance.
Daze with her plodding Barker, that epicene presence—and perhaps, or perhaps not, a brief flutter with an editor at her paper, Jay Dudley his name was, who ended up a regular shit, handing her job over to someone else like a king anointing a new lord—well, that sums up Daze’s erotic experience, about one and a half bean sprouts by my count. And on the other side of the fence, here I sit with my fifty-three lovers, possibly fifty-four. I’ve been on the side of noise, nerve, movement, and thanking my lucky stars too, and raising a toast to my army of fifty-four—that’s how I see them, a small, smartly marching army with the sun shining on their beautiful heads and shoulders.
I’ve kept track. This is possibly a perverse admission, that I possess a little pocket diary in which I’ve made note of dates, initials, geographical reference points and coded particulars, going back to 1927, such as duration, position, repetition, degree of response, and the like.
My "phantom" fifty-fourth lover was encountered just weeks ago on a train to Ottawa, no names exchanged, only a pair of ragged weepy histories. We had both drunk too much bourbon in the club car, the hour was late, and we may or may not have made love before we passed out, the two of us drearily naked on the coarse blanket of my lower berth. I have an impression of a rosy, pleated male belly pushing against me. I have a recollection, like a black-and-white movie, that we were noisy, that we made a spectacle of ourselves. He was gone—thank God—when I opened my eyes in the morning. And my body, my sixty-year-old body (Christ!), was unwilling to report what had happened, other than a soreness "down there" that could have been anything, a dryness that puzzled. A question mark went into the diary instead of the