Love, Fraidy
Ottawa, June 6, 1963
Dear Mrs. Green Thumb I agree absolutely that peonies are beautiful but stupid. The dumbest thing about them is the way they resent being moved—which is why my husband and I welcomed your suggestions last week. Many thanks. You’re the greatest.
Audrey LaRoche (Mrs.)
Ottawa, August 15, 1963
Dear Mrs. Green Thumb, Your piece on hollyhocks was terrif. I liked the part about their "frilled dirndl skirts," and their "shy fuzzy stems." I haven’t had hollyhocks in the yard for years, but after reading your column I ran straight out and bought a bunch of seeds, even though it’s too late for this year.
Thanks a bunch, Lydia Nygaard Ottawa, November 25, 1963
Dearest Dee, Couldn’t reach you by phone, hence this quick note. Most of the Sports and Home section will be cancelled next week because of the Kennedy coverage—so we’ll be using your rock garden piece the following week. What a world this is, everything falling to pieces.
Yours, J.
Ottawa, January 25, 1964
Dear Dee, I’m so sorry about this misunderstanding. I realize now, of course, that telling you on the phone was a mistake. I knew you’d be disappointed, but I had no idea you would take it this hard. You’ve been talking about wanting more time to yourself, more time to travel, maybe a trip to England to see your daughter. Hope we can get together as usual on Tuesday and talk this over like two sensible people.
Yours, J.
Ottawa, February 6, 1964
Dear Mrs. Flett, I’ve read your letter carefully and I can assure you I understand your feelings. But I believe Jay explained the paper’s policy to you, that full-time staffers have first choice of columns. As you well know, I’ve been filling in with the gardening column from time to time, all those times you’ve been away, and, to tell you the honest truth, I’ve had quite a lot of appreciative letters from readers who especially like the fact that my columns are illustrated and take the male point of view. Personally, I like the feel that a regional newspaper is a living, breathing organism that resists falling into rigid patterns. Think of it this way: our readers are always changing, and so must we. After nine years of being Mrs. Green Thumb, I feel sure you too will welcome a change.
With best wishes, James (Pinky) Fulham February 20, 1964
Dear Dee, I am so terribly sorry about all this, and I do agree the policy of the paper is ridiculous, but it’s a policy that has been in force since the time of my predecessor. None of this has anything to do with your competence as a contributor, you know better than that. The issue is that Pinky, as a full-timer, has a prior claim to any regular column as long as he can demonstrate capability in the area. I can’t tell you how much I regret all this, but I’m afraid my hands are tied.
Please let’s get together soon and talk of other things. You are, if I may say, taking this far too personally.
Your J.
February 28, 1964
Dear Mrs. Flett, Thank you for your letter. I am afraid, though, I am not at this time willing to change my mind. Frankly, I’ve been covering city politics for some ten years and am in need of a change. Even my personal physician has advised a change. I should think you would be eager for a change too after so many years. Change is what keeps us young.
Yours sincerely, Pinky Fulham P.S. As I said to you earlier, I hope this disagreement won’t interfere with our friendship.
Bloomington, Indiana, March 28, 1964
Daze, Beans and I are just wondering if you’ve broken your wrist. Neither of us has heard from you in ages—how about a line or two?
Fraidy Hampstead, England, April 10, 1964
It’s weeks since you’ve written. Hope all is well. Spring has come to England, glorious, and Judy’s already up to twelve pounds. Is everything okay? I’m a little worried. There hasn’t been a letter from you for weeks. Is anything wrong?
Love, Alice, Ben, and Benje and wee Jude
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sorrow, 1965
1965 was the year Mrs. Flett fell into a profound depression.
It happened overnight, more or less. Her family and friends stood by helplessly and watched while her usual self-composed nature collapsed into bewilderment, then withdrawal, and then a splattery anger that seemed to feed on injury. She was unattractive during this period. Despair did not suit her looks. Goodness cannot cope with badness—it’s too good, you see, too stupidly good. A person unable to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time and whose eating patterns are disordered—this type of person soon dwindles into bodily dejection—you’ve seen such people, and so has Mrs. Flett, shambling along the edges of public parks or seated under hairdryers. Their facial skin drags downward. Their clothes hang on them unevenly and look always in need of a good sprucing up. You want to rush up to these lost souls and offer comfort, but there’s an off-putting aura of failure about them, almost a smell.
The spring and summer of 1965—those were terrible months for Mrs. Flett, as she slid day by day along a trajectory that began in resignation, then hardened into silence, then leapt to a bitter and blaming estrangement from those around her, her children and grandchildren, her many good friends and acquaintances.
What was it that changed Mrs. Flett so utterly?
The phenomenon of menopause will probably leap to mind, but no. Daisy Flett is fifty-nine years old in 1965, almost sixty, and her hormonal structure, never particularly volatile—according to some—has been steady as a clock—according to others—since her forty-ninth birthday. Nor does she appear to be suffering from "delayed mourning," as some of her family would have it. She remembers her dear sweet Barker fondly, of course she does, she honors his memory, whatever that means; and she thinks of him, smilingly, every single time she rubs a dab of Jergens Lotion into the palms of her hands, floating herself back to the moment—a very private moment, she will not discuss it with anyone, though she records it here—in which he had extolled her smooth-jointed fingers, comparing them to wonderful flexible silken fish.
Fish? A startling idea; it took her by surprise; at the time she hadn’t completely warmed to the likeness, yet she apprehended, at least, her husband’s courageous lurching toward poetry. But does she actually pine for this dead partner of hers? For the calmness offered up by the simple weariness of their love? How much of her available time bends backward into the knot of their joined lives, those twenty connubial years?
To be honest, very little. There, I’ve said it.
Her present sinking of spirit, the manic misrule of her heart and head, the foundering of her reason, the decline of her physical health—all these stem from some mysterious suffering core which those around her can only register and weigh and speculate about.
Alice’s Theory
Something happened to me. At age nineteen I was on the verge of becoming a certain kind of person, and then I changed, and went in another direction.
The self is not a thing carved on entablature. Not long ago I read—probably in the Sunday papers—about an American woman who got up one morning and started practicing a new kind of handwriting, sloping all her letters backwards instead of forwards, concentrating on smaller and denser loops. It was almost like drawing. She wrote her name a dozen times in this variant way. She wrote out the preamble to the Constitution and then the Gettysburg Address, and by noon she had become someone else.
The change that happened to me went deeper than penmanship and far, far beyond such superficialities as a new hairstyle or dietary regime—although I did at age nineteen decide to let my hair grow long, which was not a popular style in the mid-fifties, and I did give up meat and white sugar and the smoking of cigarettes.
It was summertime. I had just returned after my first year away at college. It was the first morning back, in fact, and I woke up early in our family’s large, quiet, shabby Ottawa house and looked straight up at the ceiling where there was a long circular crack shaped like the hunch in an old crone’s back, high and rounded at the top, then tapering down. That selfsame crack had been there ever since I could remember, since earliest childhood. It was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing at night, this menacing inscription in plaster that roofed me over with dread.
Not that I feared the witchlike configuration, good Christ no—I knew perfectly well that such anthropomorphizing is fanciful and solipsistic; I also knew that other people, happier people, might see a river instead of a diseased spine, or a map of a buried subcontinent or, with a little imagination, a mountain topped by a Chinese pagoda, in turn topped by a knob of whipped cream. We see what we want to see. Our perceptions fly straight out of our deepest needs, this much you learn in Introductory Psych, a required course at my college. No, what I dreaded about the ceiling crack was its persistence. That it was always there. Determined to accompany me. To be a part of me.
I dragged the stepladder up from the basement, hoping it would reach. (The ceilings in that old house of ours were ridiculously high.) On a shelf in the garden shed I found a box of plasterer’s putty and mixed myself up a large sticky batch which I spread the length of the ceiling crack, using a spatula from the kitchen drawer, and moving the ladder forward foot by foot. I’d never done this kind of work before, but I read the directions on the box carefully and made a neat job of it. I’ve always been exceptionally neat.
"Very neat presentation" was what my professors wrote on the bottoms of my term papers, also "well focused" and "full of verve."
In half an hour the plaster was dry, and I sanded it smooth, letting the fine grains drift down on top of my head and into my face, breathing in the chalky dust, tasting it on my tongue. I did not find the sensation disagreeable, quite the contrary. By four o’clock that afternoon I had painted the entire ceiling, using a roller attached to an extension handle, and just before going to bed that night I gave the whole thing a second coat.
Then I lay down in the dark, possibly a little drunk from the heavy latex fumes that swirled downward and converged in midair with a mad proleptic wafting up of happiness. Sleep came quickly; I welcomed it; I was eager for morning; I wanted to wake up to the early light and observe, freshly, the transformation I had brought about.
This really happened. This event, this revelation! Not one of the various members of my family raised the least objection to my determination to repair and paint my bedroom ceiling. No one even challenged me as to why I needed the ladder, why I was scrounging around in the shed for a paint roller, whether this act of mine was a momentary whim or a charged metaphoric gesture. This surprised me, the general air of permission. My mother, of course, was preoccupied with the weekly gardening column she was writing for the local newspaper (Mrs. Green Thumb was the byline she used). My younger brother and sister looked on with interest, perhaps even a tincture of envy—why hadn’t they thought of improving their ceilings!—and Cousin Beverly, who had moved in with us a year earlier, gave me a hand spreading newspapers on the carpet and some useful advice about how to reach into the difficult corner angles. As for my father, had he still been alive, he might have discouraged me from assigning myself a dull and messy task, particularly on my first day home, though I can’t help thinking he would have understood the impulse driving me forward.
In one day I had altered my life: my life, therefore, was alterable.
This simple axiom did not cry out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin; I could feel its pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination, and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own will. My eyes would open in the morning to a smooth white field of possibility. The ceiling that had taunted me was shrunk now to a memory of a memory. It wasn’t just that I had covered it over. I had erased it. It was as though it had never existed.
I next made up my mind to grow kind. I was not a kind person, but I believed I could learn.
First I burned my old diaries in the fireplace and also the letters I had written home during my year away at college, letters full of gush and artifice. My mother caught me at this, and expressed concern. You may regret it, she said, you may want to look back and see what you were like at ten or twelve or sixteen years of age.
But I knew I wouldn’t need the diaries or letters to prod my remembrance. I had grown up a mean, bossy little kid. I was selfish.
I liked to hurt people’s feelings. I addressed my sister, Joan, as Miss Sneakypants and my brother, Warren, as Pimplenose. I ordered Cousin Beverly around as though she were an indentured servant and complained about the way her little girl cried in her early months; it was only colic, but I managed to suggest she was being mishandled or maybe there was brain damage or something.
I was forever clipping out dieting articles for my mother and reading them aloud to her in a cool disingenuous voice, and invariably I referred to the newspaper she wrote for as "that parochial rag." I remember the way I was. People like to think of memory as a lowlying estuary, but my memories of myself are more like a ruffed-up lake, battering against the person I became. A nice person. A thoughtful person.
I paid attention; I listened hard to the motor clicking on and off in my head; it was like doing beads, it was very intricate work. I entered the summer of 1956 a girl and came out a woman. Women, I learned, needed to be bloody, but they didn’t need to be mean.
The reverberations in my family were surprisingly minor, like the offhand ringing of distant chimes—as though all these years I’d been given the benefit of the doubt: Alice’s gained in maturity, they said. Alice’s a real young lady now. Alice’s come into her own.
Alice’s calmed down. Alice’s got rid of that chip on her shoulder, come down off her high horse, lost her rough edges. But then Alice always was a lump of butter underneath, wasn’t she? Why, she’s turned out to be a regular darling. Oh, you can count on Alice, you always could.