LITMIR.BIZ

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He doesn’t talk because he doesn’t like talking, so he rarely does, unless he has something important to say. Meredith was attracted to this quiescence, believing it to be depth, which it was. He was always preoccupied with the contortions and convolutions of existence; how greed and power superseded charity, how influence superseded compassion. He believed humans were primal, that “power over” was the engine of society and that manners and morals, intellectual and philosophical thought, art and music, were attributes of comfort and leisure without which instinct ruled. He was troubled by the fact that connection, the key to life was arduous and tenuous. Life was more about irony and survival than love.

      Except where his daughters were concerned. For them he felt a feeling so pure, so clear he could almost see it — as a bright, overwhelming light, all-encompassing, inescapable, which began and stopped with them. They took up all of his deepest vision, the vision that fed his quiddity.

      Even though she had always craved, commanded attention, it was a relief for Meredith to be with Thompson. His need for isolation was so embedded that it read like assurance, an independence that was appealing. But lately the restraint she had so admired in him had come to seem like indifference. She adored him, adores him, and she is certain he adores her, but she wishes it were not so complicated, that it did not require such effort to get him to acknowledge her. Sometimes she feels like screaming to get him to interact, to react.

      One of the things that redeems Thompson — because almost everyone who tries to talk to him has a difficult time — is his wry sense of humour. He is subtle, quick, and acute. This morning, after they had made love, he had cracked her up when he said, “What took you so long?”

      Above all, he loves her for her abundance: abundance of love and generosity, compassion, abundance of spontaneity and spirit, abundance of creative energy. Above all, she loves him for his spareness, his thoughtful withholding. They have had an embedded mutuality. They are like a wooden matchstick. Neither part is useful until the match is struck.

      Below, Lizbett has heard her parents’ lovemaking. Her bedroom is directly below theirs and their bed has a light squeak. She realizes they are not aware of this or they would do something about it. She is not the least disturbed. She has grown up with an openness toward sex, first, when she was little with Where Do I Come From? Now she has thoroughly read Our Bodies, Ourselves and The Joy of Sex with her best friends. She has felt that throb between her legs. She has not yet masturbated, but she has had “pretend” sex with her best friend. And she has kissed her best friend’s brother, who is fifteen. That was nice, arousing even. She looks forward to knowing what real sex feels like.

      She has been awake and up for some time. Ever since she was a baby, she has not been a sleeper. Meredith found her difficult because she was never still; always into everything. Always questioning. She continues to be like that. This morning she has already showered and dressed, tying her still-wet hair, the exact red of her mother’s, in a ponytail, putting on her favourite red shorts with a red-striped T-shirt and leather sandals. Before she leaves her yellow-and-white room with the daisy wallpaper, she makes her canopied bed and though she doesn’t play with them anymore, rearranges all her dolls in her old bassinette with the eyelet skirt. She loves the dolls. But she will be twelve in a few months and is on an ambitious new track.

      For a moment, she sits at the edge of her bed, as if contemplating her next move and idly runs her fingertips across her lips. She feels a tiny bit of ragged nail and bites it, then presses it and bites some more. She does this with all her fingers until one of them is bleeding.

      Recently she had the lead in a month-long run of Annie at the Nathan S. Hirschenberg Arts Centre and it has given her a kind of celebrity. Not that she didn’t earn it. She has been studying voice and ballet at the Conservatory since she was nine and told her parents she wanted to be an actress. Before Annie she had already played Gretel in a new musical version of Hansel and Gretel at The Children’s Theatre Workshop. She has done two television commercials, one for cookies, the other for cereal. She will go to sleepover drama camp in August, as she had last year. She has been acting, really, from when she could walk and talk and realized her antics got a positive reaction. Anytime she has an opportunity to perform, she does. The part of Annie was hard won. Dozens of other girls auditioned. For Lizbett, the thrill of the exposure has only whetted her appetite for more.

      She has no illusions, however. She is astute and practical. She knows life doesn’t always go as she’d wish. And she feels divided in courting her parents’ pleasure and finding her own way.

      Lizbett feels especially attached to her mother. They have a special “oneness”; their ways of being are in tune. Not that Lizbett isn’t aware her mother is the adult and she is the child. Her mother can be firm and demanding and she sets boundaries. But she is loose and loud and showy and Lizbett loves how she attracts attention. And Lizbett knows she and her mother think alike, have the same aspirations. She knows her mother is ambitious for her. She is ambitious for herself and she likes having an ally. Ever since she was very little she and her mother have chatted easily and laughed, exchanged feelings and ideas. Lizbett shares all her plans and misgivings with her. They have walked together, shopped together, gone to art galleries and films and the theatre together, cooked together, watched TV together. Before Lizbett was in school all day they even “lunched” together at spiffy restaurants. Though she knows it’s maybe inappropriate, she likes to think of her mother as her best friend.

      With her father, her relationship is more confined. She does not find him easy to talk to, but he is more affectionate than her mother. He is always available for a tight hug. And until recently, she could climb on his lap and snuggle into him with his arms around her and stay for an indefineable time. He was fun and funny. They used to have a silly game. They’d play it over and over. She never got tired of it.

      He would ask, “Lizbett, what’s the difference between a duck?”

      “Oh, Daddy, that doesn’t make sense.”

      “Then what’s the difference between a duck and a train?”

      Lizbett would laugh harder. “That’s ’dicilous,” she’d say.

      “Okay, then. What’s the difference between a duck and cheesecake?”

      As the comparisons got more and more absurd … “What’s the difference between a duck and a dinosaur, a sofa, a hamburger with ketchup?” Lizbett would be shrieking and giggling uncontrollably.

      She loved their reading and playing the piano together. They just didn’t talk much.

      In her acting, Lizbett has the ability to enter the character she is playing, slip into her skin and become her. Take on her identity. At the same time as she does this, she also animates the character with her own sensibilities and vitality. The two meld. For this she is praised: for her naturalistic, un-self-conscious portrayals.

      Meredith volunteers every second Saturday morning at a settlement house that provides daycare for single mothers. Most of them are teenagers who go off and do teenage things while their small children are looked after. Lizbett sometimes goes and helps out and the thing that most overwhelms her is not how shabby and unclean — even a bit smelly — the children are, but how passive. Their only stimulation has been the television, which they’ve been plopped in front of from their earliest months. No one has read to them, played hand and face games with them, coloured and drawn with them, performed puppet shows for them. Lizbett does all this with pleasure, but she feels, sadly and with some early cynicism, that it means very little. It bothers her to return to her privileged life when the children have to return to their deprived ones. She doesn’t know how to reconcile the imbalance.

      Down in the kitchen, she pours herself a glass of milk, then goes into the family room, sits at the piano, and begins to practise. First she does some hand stretches and then she begins the scales, then the arpeggios. She brings out a book of exercises and plays each one, diligently, though not effortlessly. She is a good pianist, but she is a careless one, going through the pieces the same way she goes through life, with enthusiasm and endurance, but not necessarily focus, concentration. Her head is in too many places at once.

      She begins a Schubert piece she has been working on for some time.

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