though I like to think I know her well, and despite the forty years between us. Dr. Westerman: poet, essayist, feminist survivor, holder oftwenty-seven honorary degrees. “It might be better,” I said once, pointing to a place in her first volume of memoirs and trying not to sound overly expository, “to use the word brain here instead of heart .”
She gave me a swift questioning look, the blue-veined eyelids sliding up. Now what? I explained that referring to the heart as the seat of feeling has been out of fashion for some time, condemned by critics as being fey, thought to be precious. She considered this for a second, then smiled at me with querulous affection, and placed her hand on her breast. “But this is where I feel pain,” she said. “And tenderness.”
I let it go. A writer’s partis pris are always—must be—accommodated by her translator. I know that much after all these years.
There are other things I could do with my time besides clean my house. There’s that book on animals in Shakespeare, the companion volume to my Shakespeare and Flowers . Or I could finish my translation of the fourth and final volume of Westerman’s memoirs, which would take me about six months. Instead I’m writing a second novel, which is going slowly because I wake up in the morning anxious, instead, to dean my house. I’d like to go at it with Q-rips, with toothpicks, every crack and corner scoured. Mention a new cleaning product and I yearn to hold it in my hand; I can’t stop. Each day I open my eyes and comfort myself with the tasks that I will accomplish. It’s necessary, I’m finding, to learn devious means of consoling oneself and also necessaryto forgive one’s own eccentricities. In the afternoon, after a standing-up lunch of cheese and crackers, I get to my novel and produce, on a good day, two pages, sometimes three or four. I perch on my Freedom Chair and think: Here I am. A woman seated. A woman thinking. But I’m always rushed, always distracted. Tuesdays I meet my friends for coffee in Orangetown, Wednesdays I go to Toronto, every second Thursday afternoon is the Library Board meeting.
Last Friday, after days spent at home waiting for a phone call from Mrs. Quinn at the Promise Hostel—which yielded nothing but the fact that nothing had changed—I went into Toronto with Tom to a one-day trilobite conference at the museum; and even attended a session, thinking it might provide distraction. A paleontologist, a woman called Margaret Henriksen, from Minneapolis, lectured in a darkened room, and illustrated her talk with a digital representation of a trilobite folding itself into a little ball. No one has ever seen a trilobite, since they exist only in the fossil record, but the sections of its bony thorax recorded in stone were so perfectly made that, when threatened, these creatures were able to curl up, each segment nesting into the next and protecting the soft animal underbodies. This act is called enrolment, a rather common behaviour for arthropods, and it seems to me that this is what Tom has been doing these past weeks. I clean my house and he “enrols” into a silence that carries him further away fromme than the fleeting figure of Mrs. McGinn, who rests like a dust mote in the corner of my eye, wondering why she was not invited to her friends baby shower on that March evening back in 1961. It nags at her. She is disappointed in herself. Her life has been burning up one day at a time—she understands this for the first time—and she’s swallowed the flames without blinking. Now, suddenly, this emptiness. Nothing has prepared her for the wide, grey simplicity of sadness and for the knowledge that this is what the rest of her life will be like, living in a falling-apart house that wishes she weren’t there.
After the conference in Toronto, some trilobite friends from England wanted to go for a meal at a place called the Frontier Bar on Bloor Street West, where the theme is Wild West.
She gave me a swift questioning look, the blue-veined eyelids sliding up. Now what? I explained that referring to the heart as the seat of feeling has been out of fashion for some time, condemned by critics as being fey, thought to be precious. She considered this for a second, then smiled at me with querulous affection, and placed her hand on her breast. “But this is where I feel pain,” she said. “And tenderness.”
I let it go. A writer’s partis pris are always—must be—accommodated by her translator. I know that much after all these years.
There are other things I could do with my time besides clean my house. There’s that book on animals in Shakespeare, the companion volume to my Shakespeare and Flowers . Or I could finish my translation of the fourth and final volume of Westerman’s memoirs, which would take me about six months. Instead I’m writing a second novel, which is going slowly because I wake up in the morning anxious, instead, to dean my house. I’d like to go at it with Q-rips, with toothpicks, every crack and corner scoured. Mention a new cleaning product and I yearn to hold it in my hand; I can’t stop. Each day I open my eyes and comfort myself with the tasks that I will accomplish. It’s necessary, I’m finding, to learn devious means of consoling oneself and also necessaryto forgive one’s own eccentricities. In the afternoon, after a standing-up lunch of cheese and crackers, I get to my novel and produce, on a good day, two pages, sometimes three or four. I perch on my Freedom Chair and think: Here I am. A woman seated. A woman thinking. But I’m always rushed, always distracted. Tuesdays I meet my friends for coffee in Orangetown, Wednesdays I go to Toronto, every second Thursday afternoon is the Library Board meeting.
Last Friday, after days spent at home waiting for a phone call from Mrs. Quinn at the Promise Hostel—which yielded nothing but the fact that nothing had changed—I went into Toronto with Tom to a one-day trilobite conference at the museum; and even attended a session, thinking it might provide distraction. A paleontologist, a woman called Margaret Henriksen, from Minneapolis, lectured in a darkened room, and illustrated her talk with a digital representation of a trilobite folding itself into a little ball. No one has ever seen a trilobite, since they exist only in the fossil record, but the sections of its bony thorax recorded in stone were so perfectly made that, when threatened, these creatures were able to curl up, each segment nesting into the next and protecting the soft animal underbodies. This act is called enrolment, a rather common behaviour for arthropods, and it seems to me that this is what Tom has been doing these past weeks. I clean my house and he “enrols” into a silence that carries him further away fromme than the fleeting figure of Mrs. McGinn, who rests like a dust mote in the corner of my eye, wondering why she was not invited to her friends baby shower on that March evening back in 1961. It nags at her. She is disappointed in herself. Her life has been burning up one day at a time—she understands this for the first time—and she’s swallowed the flames without blinking. Now, suddenly, this emptiness. Nothing has prepared her for the wide, grey simplicity of sadness and for the knowledge that this is what the rest of her life will be like, living in a falling-apart house that wishes she weren’t there.
After the conference in Toronto, some trilobite friends from England wanted to go for a meal at a place called the Frontier Bar on Bloor Street West, where the theme is Wild West.
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