A Celibate Season - Carol Shields

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an early night of it, crawl into bed with a hot toddy and a good book. Not a word about the kids, or about the cauliflower casserole she’d promised to bring.

      An hour later it was Mrs. Finstead on the phone—she’s the mother of Laurie, that little friend of Mia’s across the way (the one who looks as though she popped out of an ad for fresh milk). Mrs. Finstead—Marjorie—asked if it was all right if Mia came over for Thanksgiving dinner. They would just “love to have her aboard,” she said. They were all “nutty about her.” I didn’t know what to say, but then Mrs. Finstead said—or whispered, rather—how sorry she was about, well…about…well, she didn’t really know what to say, but she was just so very, very sorry.

      I interrupted at this point and made it clear to her that Mia’s mother was only away temporarily on a government contract, that we were not separated, that Mia was not a victim of a broken and uncaring family, and that I had just that minute been basting our own perfectly respectable turkey. At the same time, I could see that Mia was dying to go to the Finsteads, so what could I do without playing the part of the ogre?

      That left Greg and me to tackle our golden beast. The phone rang, and Greg tore into the den to get it. Emerging a mere one-quarter of an hour before dinner, he announced that he had to go out. Naturally I asked why. Something had come up, he said, something he couldn’t get out of. We stood in the kitchen facing each other for a good minute or two; I was reminded of a scene in High Noon. Neither of us said a word. Just how far can you press a seventeen-year-old kid on an issue like this? I could hardly say, given the circumstances, that he was disrupting a sacred family occasion. I shrugged and waved a weak hand in the direction of the oven, but I didn’t want to get into my mother’s brand of self-pity. Greg made a dash for the door. I yelled after him, “How about a turkey sandwich at least?” but I don’t think he even heard me.

      For about ten minutes I sat in the kitchen and listened to the countdown of the oven timer. Then the dinger went and everything was ready, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce—my least-favourite dinner in the world, and there was a mountain of it. I happened at that moment to glance out the window and see Gil Grogan’s smiling face. I waved him over, and between the two of us we made a small dent in the turkey and finished off the last two bottles of the Beaujolais your mother gave me for my birthday. It was a somewhat silent meal, just the two of us chewing and swilling, though once Gil mumbled something pious about how we had much to be thankful for. I wasn’t up to the topic, I’m afraid.

      Which all goes to say, my lovely and hard-headed realist, that we miss you from time to time around here. By the way, how do you make that turkey curry you used to do?

      With love,

      Chas

      P.S. Found the lentils. Now what?

      4 Old Town Lane

      Ottawa, Ont.

      Oct. 10

      Dear Chas,

      Rotten, rottener, rottenest—that’s how I felt after reading about your Thanksgiving dinner. Quite simply, I felt the rottenest I’ve felt since I left. What in sweet heaven was wrong with The Mothers?

      I’ve sat through countless harangues from mine, as you know, on the subject of dinner guests who didn’t have the manners to let one know well in advance—“Don’t they know the amount of preparation…? No regard for a person’s feelings…Nothing but a servant…” Really, I don’t know when I’ve been so goddamned mad!

      In fact, Chas, I couldn’t turn off the mental harangue that circled and swirled and harped away at me in a voice suspiciously like my mother’s. As I explained to Vance, the cauliflower casserole was the last straw, and when he snorted and guffawed my first instinct was to punch him right on his aristocratic nose. Fortunately, Mother’s voice blipped off in mid-sentence and I was restored to temporary sanity. No, I don’t discuss personal matters with Vance as a rule, but when I was so obviously upset he was persistent, and Mother’s voice never needs a lot of encouragement.

      He is a surprisingly warm man, considering, as you say, the BMW et al. And he did cheer me up with a rather wry account of his own Thanksgiving dinner, which was marred irreparably by the poor burgundy that his wife had chosen. What suffering!

      My own Thanksgiving dinner was not lonely, although loneliness might have been preferable. I know that sounds ungrateful after Jessica was good enough to invite me to the group home turkey spree, and other than a three-year-old who rubbed cranberry sauce in his eye, a dog who choked on a turkey bone and had to be clipped smartly in the dog equivalent of the solar plexus (dislodging the bone along with other stomach contents), a baby who threw her bottle at my wine glass and scored a direct hit (there was lots more wine—that kind comes in gallon jugs)—other than that, as I say, it was not bad and I wasn’t hungry anyway.

      I think my difficulty came from feeling out of place. Before dinner Jessica and I were having one of our interminable dogfights about background being a poverty determinant. She’s bound she’s going to radicalize me, but I’m not at all sure I’m ready to abandon the good old middle class, which has, after all, been good to us.

      She had just launched into a tirade about power and how nobody—especially men—relinquishes it without a fight, when one of the women who lives in the house came over and asked if she could talk to Jessica for a minute, about a problem.

      “Shoot,” Jessica said.

      “Well, like, I hadda quit my job and I’m gonna have trouble with the rent this month, so I was wondering if it would be a hassle if I didn’t pay for a couple of weeks, just until I line something up.”

      “No sweat,” Jessica said. “What happened to the job?”

      The woman’s eyes slid away. She’s about twenty-five, I would guess, and quite pretty, and she was holding the baby that later spread my plonk over the tablecloth. (Plastic, fortunately.)

      “Here, have a cigarette,” Jessica said, getting up and pulling a pack out of the hip pocket of her jeans.

      The woman helped herself, and Jessica took the baby while she lit up. The woman looked rather shyly at me, and all at once I was conscious of how I looked, in my good wool skirt and that nice silk blouse your mother gave me last Christmas. The young woman had on jeans and a polyester blouse and very high heels…no—it wasn’t clothes that separated us. I mean, everyone wears jeans, it wasn’t that, it was something else I’m having trouble defining. Here it is. If we met at a social event I would know instantly that she wasn’t my kind and she’d know the same thing about me and in fact that was what was making her uneasy. What is it? The cut of our hair? the shade of lipstick? the jewellery or lack of it, the thousand little signals that say “different class”—God, I’m beginning to sound like Jessica.

      “This here’s Jock,” Jessica said. “She won’t harm you none, I mean, you can talk in front of her. Let’s all take a load off our feet.” And, still holding the baby, she plopped back onto the grimy chesterfield beside me and the woman—Jean—sat down across from us.

      Jean blew out cigarette smoke rather self-consciously and said, “Well, like, I tried to stick it out but the manager—my boss—he doesn’t own the restaurant but it’s like, a chain, eh? Anyway, he kept coming on so strong, you know? I couldn’t keep him off, so finally I just figured it wasn’t worth it, he was making my life so miserable, eh?”

      I was shocked, as you can imagine. I glanced at Jessica and waited for the explosion I thought was bound to come. But she just lowered her eyes and jammed her cigarette butt into an ashtray, then handed Tricia to me (I was nervous that she would spit on my blouse, silk is not a wonder fabric and I can’t afford to get it cleaned) and said, “You don’t need to take that kind of shit you know, Jean.”

      Jean looked terrified. “It’s not worth it to start trouble, Jess. I’ve been through all that when I tried to get support from the kid’s father. It just isn’t worth it. I’ll find something else, but for now I’ll be a bit tight. I got some unemployment coming, I think, except I dread going in for the separation

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