Small Ceremonies by Carol Shields

named after him. Old friends from Montreal telephone him and write him chatty letters at Christmas as though he really might care about their new jobs or the cottages they are building. His university friends often drop in on Saturday afternoons and, in addition, he hears regularly from his colleagues in England. He is not an effervescent man, but when he is with his friends he listens to them with a slow and almost innocent smile on his face.
    His closest friend at the university is Roger Ramsay who teaches Canadian Literature. Roger has a fat man’s face, round and red, with a hedge of fat yellow curls. But his body is long and lean and muscular. He is younger than we are, young enough so he is able to live with someone without marrying her, and he and Ruthie have an apartment at the top of an old Gothic house which is cheap and charming and only a little uncomfortable. Posters instead of wallpaper, ragouts in brown pots instead of roasts, candles instead of trilights, Lightfoot records instead of children. A growing collection of Eskimo carvings and rare Canadian books.
    Ruthie St. Pierre is small, dark and brilliant; assistant to the head of the translation department in the Central Library. They both smoke the odd bit of pot or, as Roger puts it, they’re into it. We love them, but what we can’t understand is why they love us, but they do, especially Martin. In this friendship I am the extra; the clumsy big sister who is only accidentally included.
    My closest friend is a woman named Nancy Krantz. She is about my age, mother to six children and wife to a lawyer named Paul Krantz, but that is strictly by the way. Nancy is not really attached to anyone, not even to me, I admit sadly. I am an incidental here as well.
    She generally drops in unexpectedly between errands, usually in the morning. She almost, but not quite, keeps the Volkswagen engine running in the driveway while we talk. She is in a rush and she dances back and forth in my kitchen with the car keys still jingling in her fingers. I cannot, in fact, imagine her voice without the accompaniment of ringing car keys. Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.
    We talk fast, both of us, as though we accelerated each other, and there is a thrilling madness in our morning dialogues. Nancy has always just been somewhere or is on her way to somewhere – to an anti-abortionist meeting, to a consumers’ committee, to a curriculum symposium. And into these concerns, which in the abstract interest me very little, she manages to sweep me away. I stand, coffee cup in one hand, wildly gesticulating with the other, suddenly stunningly vocal. The quality of our exchanges is such that she enables me to string together miles of impressive phrases; my extemporaneous self reawakened. I pour more coffee, and still standing we talk on until, with a loud shake of her key ring, Nancy glances at her watch and flies to the door. I am left steaming with exhaustion and happiness.
    Today she has come from a committee which is fighting rate increases in the telephone service. It is her special quality to be able to observe these activities as though she were a spectator at a play. She can be wildly humorous. This morning, as a footnote to her recital, she delivers what I think to be a stunning theory of life, for she has discovered the mechanism which monitors her existence.
    Every month, she tells me, the water bill arrives in the mail. The Water and Sewerage Office informs her how much money she must pay and, in addition, how many gallons of water her household has consumed during the month. But that isn’t all. Underneath that figure is another which is even more fascinating, the number of gallons which she and her family have consumed on the previous billing.
    She has noticed something: since she and her husband Paul have been married, the number of gallons has gone