2

NONE OF THE ABOVE

I.

When she was nine years old, Jennifer sank ankle deep into the thicket mush behind her family’s cornfield and had a mystical experience. She had been off on her own, as was her habit, her station. The other children endured the vibrating July heat by ranging across town. They searched through floridly named subdivisions and behind barren strip malls for ants and the odd frog to burn with bifocals liberated from their grandparents’ bureaus. They dropped vengeant fistfuls of pennies in the mailboxes of retired teachers, dental hygienists, and other local warlords known to be at their afternoon naps. But Jennifer was bulling through the swollen cornstalks of her family’s few acres. Their green tongues were slapping at her with rain catch dropped down by a sun shower. Which had just stopped.

Coming out on the other side of the drooping green poles, she wiped the water and sweat from her forehead. Everything was dripping warm. She parted the reeds and came upon something that looked like an upside-down fancy candle, or maybe, she thought with a vault in the chest, an iced cruller. She walked forward. She didn’t mind the ooze sucking around her shoes when she neared the indifferent elm tree, or the sensation of her bag-of-potatoes body sinking into the wet bottom. She craned her neck and squinted against the sunlight that shot through the higher branches. Because something was happening.

Hanging from a bent twig was a twirling braid of wet mottled fatness. Two yellowy, whitish slugs, pocked with red dots, wrapped around each other. Twisting and turning, taffy-slick and slow-mating in the tumid thick of Ottawa Valley summer. Jennifer watched them for a long while. Then a bird came at them and they dropped onto the leafy, squashy ground with a SMACK! But only for a moment before another swoop down and a scoop up. Following the bird back to its perch, Jennifer wondered if the slugs were still swinging because they hadn’t quit doing to each other, or if they were now just dangling from the beak. But then the bird threw back its head and its throat bulged and they were gone.

Slogging home, something pulling at her ankle, she couldn’t decide what it was about the slugs and that bird in the woods. But she would look for them again.

II.

At the start of her final year of high school, Jennifer Ursula Thickson declared for Graduating Class President. She ran unopposed. She lost.

“And for Graduating Class President, well, it seems that Jennifer Ursula Thickson has been defeated, has lost to—I’m not sure of how to put this—well, she’s lost to ‘None of the Above.’”

Mrs. Bureaux, the civics teacher, had been unsure of what to do. This was without precedent at the high school Jennifer attended, in a conscientiously unremarkable town where not unhappy lives shuffled to hushed ends. Whose Latin motto, invented in a Civic Pride contest during the once and once only, federally funded exuberance of 1967, was provided by a clever favourite son who had gone on (escaped, as he later put it to colleagues) to lecture in Classics at a university in Ottawa. Status quo.

A simple majority of an otherwise genetically indifferent graduating class had crossed Jennifer’s name off the ballot and written “None of the Above.” They did this with a bland insolence inherited from the blended loins of generations in the Ottawa Valley, those Scots and Irish and French farmers whose tribal hatreds and seeding secrets and uglier ethnic features got all mixed up in cars and fields after a century of harvest dances and Canadian Legion wedding receptions and Knights of Columbus bingo nights and all-church Christmas parties. Who, thus combined, gave to each successive crop dispositions formed to resist someone like Jennifer because she was trying to raise herself higher than her family, her history, her teeth allowed for. This being the mortal sin of every small town. So it was decided by tacit referendum that she should be prevented, the decision passing among her classmates like the silent, purposeful spread of fog on a warmed-up autumn morning in their postage stamp of a township northwest of the capital. There was no other discernible source for the decision, no evidence of a vengeful campaign, no traces of animosity, and no alternatives offered.

Everyone just understood. Jennifer. She wasn’t supposed to be Class President. She had heavy ankles. She would have made sense as Correspondence Secretary. She would have been acceptable as Treasurer of the Prom. But anything more than that would have been off, unbalanced, mutually embarrassing—like using the good dishes for dinner with lesser relations, or a wife referring to the front porch as the veranda in front of her in-laws. Jennifer would have to push against this sullen, grain-fed logic in her every effort to be something more than was preordained as her lot by virtue of being born into a large-boned, small-farm family.

In place of a president, the faculty decided on something fancifully known as a Provisional Collective Authority, comprising the smarter students and better athletes and prettier girls. Jennifer was still invited to join. With the embarrassment of receiving unexpected and unwelcome company, they had to acknowledge her shunted desire to participate in school life. To their relief, she declined the offer. She would show them.

She required neither the pity nor the charity. She was not upset by the loss. She had gained a view of the life that she decided had to be hers. She knew this much from the sucking thrill, the ache of expectation, the cold steel taste in her mouth the unsleeping hot night before election day; and from her ragged heartbeat in the moments before and then after the historic results were announced. All of which gave her a stabbing excitement that her prior pursuits—crossing guard’s assistant, recess monitor, Friday night handler for the backward child Benjy one farm over—had only pricked at. Waiting for the election outcome, she had been wrapping and then unwrapping her blond plaits around her thick fingers, as was her habit when excited. When she heard, she let go and went limp for a moment. But then something else.

She was supposed to agree, graciously, with the unassailable logic of the late teen electorate, for whom such elaborate and meaningless high school elections were devised and regularly held as natural preparation for their full immersion in the political life of the nation. Jennifer was supposed to recede back into the Canadian Shield whence she seemed to have come. Instead, she got hungry.

She went in search of knowledge to prepare for the next election. It didn’t matter what it was for, when it would happen. She sensed already that there is always, always another chance to get people to put their finer senses aside and be willingly duped into seeking their betterment in billowy slogans and cold buffet promises. Having watched enough chatty sewing machine salesmen from Cornwall and haughty farm subsidy officers from Ottawa come by the house and have at her parents, Jennifer only had to discover how to master what she sensed was this universally accepted, even necessary trickery. But she needed more to work with. Her family wasn’t ever going to make enough money, which was clear enough from their recent crop yield and long-standing policy of reheating leftovers until the plates and pots were finger- and thumb-licked clean. She also knew there was little in the way of ambition in the bloodline; her father was hopeful of someday saving enough to put down a little on a cabin up north, not even thinking about a cottage, mind you, and with river frontage at best. Plus, Jennifer had come to terms with her own slabbish frame and had never been interested in the dress patterns from the McCall’s books that her mother occasionally showed her and gamely described as slimming options for the coming Christmas dance. She didn’t bother with any of that. She was never going to trim down and tit up enough to get pregnant enough to marry well enough, like other ambitious poor girls in town did.

Instead, Jennifer approached the civics teacher, Mrs. Bureaux, for assistance. This was reasonable: she had been the elections monitor, and once the other students had slouched out of the portable after the results were announced, she had pulled Jennifer aside and offered a mess of therapeutic pottage. If there was anything more she could do; When you need to talk; It’s not you, it’s society; etc.

Mrs. Bureaux was sorting through overheads for a unit on the Red River Rebellion when Jennifer came up beside her. After checking her shock that the girl seemed interested in actually taking up the offers to talk and such, she went worried that Jennifer was going to make a scene. She calibrated her distance from the intercom and tried to remember the code for the school’s on-call guidance and emotive care counsellor. A scene being a venal, not mortal, sin in a small town, but still to be avoided along with any near occasion to commit it. The teacher listened, blinking rapidly, to Jennifer’s request, followed her jabbing finger as it pointed at the prime minister’s portrait hanging beside the smudgy clock. She was immediately relieved by the option that presented itself. A good book or two on politics is better than a boring lecture any day! The bait worked. The girl left.

But like a door-rapping Jehovah or a tent-smacking deer fly, something kept coming at her. That ponytailed bloodsucker, the teacher thought, would have clung on until she had taken enough and then more of whatever it was she wanted.

III.

Hortense Spillway was demonstratively unmarried. Which is to say that at fifty-two, she was gradually blending into the static landscape around her, noticed by others with less and less frequency, like wallpaper patterns in gently rundown homes. She walked as if on padded feet. Her body, only a few pounds heavier and plusher than when she was in her twenties and first took the job in the school library, was, in her early fifties, a slender, barren willow branch. Her wrists and neck were always garlanded with colourful, clinking jewellery, the cut glass resembling bits of bruised fruit. The acceptable flourishes of a respectably aging, single woman. She was companioned by two cats, Charlotte and Emily. She lived for her monthly reading group—the Hoarfrost Romantics, a name she had helped devise. It was composed of a half-dozen town ladies and one single but artistic man. He was a night school drawing instructor and occasional director at the Community Playhouse. Save Christmas visits to a very married sister in Renfrew, the Hoarfrost Romantics was Hortense’s only let-up from the litter box of her daily life. Otherwise, it was along the gravel of the town’s streets that she went, passing from her first-floor rental to the school library’s front door to the greengrocer’s to the family pew in the gingerly upright and echoing Anglican church, then back to the first-floor rental, repeated every week since she first took rooms a few months after her parents had passed on. There had been a man, once, but having failed to secure her father’s blessing, she was alone, measuring her days in the steeping of teapots and the collecting of Victorian figurines from a mail-away collectibles society based in Brixton.

She was arranging date slips at the front counter when the osprey diorama that hung in the middle of the library was suddenly blotted out. There was a largish girl standing in front of her, staring with massing insistence. A girl at a hulking right angle to Hortense. She sensed that the girl was lonely, being heavy-set and plain, and there arose the dim prospect of fellowship, which was welcome. The reading group adjourned in May, under the collective ruse of crowded summer months. But Hortense was too quick. Before the girl could explain what she had come for, she was directed to paperback copies of The Stone Angel and The Edible Woman, their mustardy pages stacked together providentially on the nearby returns cart. The overture did not have its intended effect.

The girl wanted to know about politics, about how great men were made, how they came to become what they were.

“Politics, please. That’s what I want to know about. Mrs. Bureaux said you’d have books on politics in here. You keep your fairy tales, Miss Spillway. Books on politics. Please.”

This was an aggressiveness that Hortense knew didn’t run in Jennifer’s diffident clan. She wondered if maybe the girl was trying to impress a boy by reading up on his interests but then remembered hearing about the unfortunate election results some months earlier. Sympathy came, momentarily. The stupid hurtful pointlessness of rejection.

But then she went angry, wasp-stung by this thick-lipped, this thick girl calling her proffer of literary titles, of friendship, fairy tales. For Hortense, recalling her well-received write-up for the March Hoarfrost meeting, these two novels were corrugated testaments to the tragedy of being born at once Canadian and woman. And this girl was calling them fairy tales. Fairy tales! But she also felt a dab of heartsink at the now-receding possibility of afternoon teas for two. She was accustomed to the superior indifference of the girls who were sent to work in the library—bored, wan AV monitors rejected for yearbook club and making do; pouting painted circulation assistants on the verge of pregnancy whenever they uncrossed their legs in detention hall. Who were always reassigned to Miss Spillway in the best interests of school hygiene and public morality.

But in this girl she saw something else. A wider emptiness and maybe a little ambition, a hungry hollowness that, she thought, might have been an opening, something to be filled in, fed with sophistication and knowledge and other forms of human fineness. The ability to pronounce German words; subscriptions to leading magazines from Toronto and Boston; a taste for salad as the second course; cheese on a plate unto itself.

Hortense stopped herself. She was no elegant womanly mentor, Europe-returned and man-wise. And this girl was no money-swaddled ingenue in want of tutoring in the ways of civilization. This was no budding Henry James story. Hortense was reminded of the where and the what and the who. She was a lonely coat-rack of a high school librarian, talking to a heavy parka of a high school girl.

And while of course in polite company Hortense was just as troubled and outraged by her nation’s guilt by geographic association to its elephantine neighbour, in private she had the sense of living in a nowhere corner of a small-town country. History and culture and capital E events happened below the border and across the sea. Her nation was, at best, a cousin by marriage to all of this. But still. Calling its great books fairy tales? That was unnecessary, uncharitable, un-Canadian. Steeping and steaming, she decided someone still had to come to the defence of what goodness this place managed to produce. She fretted the pleats of her skirt until she had enough pluck.

“They’re—these are not fairy tales, young lady. You’re simply misinformed. If you would open your mind and, yes, your heart enough to read them, I think you’d find that these writers know more about you and where you are and where you come from and where you’re probably headed than you do. But in the meantime,” she continued, a little breathless and overexcited but recalling her asthma and professional responsibilities, “if it’s politics you want, must have, I’ll see what we have for you.”

Her chip of a chin set at a flinty angle, Hortense glided around her desk and into the stacks. She was satisfied with her performance even if the audience seemed unmoved. Jennifer had listened with the mute patience of a mule at a railway crossing. Her only response was reiteration. “Politics, please.”

Waiting for Hortense to come up with some books conducive to her design, Jennifer again shot her voice through the library quiet. “Books on politics, that’s what’s wanted. Books on politics.” She said this with even more force when Hortense slipped behind a bookcase. To make sure she was being heard. The effect on Hortense, in her solemn hushed library, on Hortense, who had been raised to know that one never discussed politics, pregnancy or plumbing in polite company, was of extreme offence.

The librarian found three titles for the girl, one on Churchill, one on the Fathers of Confederation and a third on the American president Lyndon Baines Johnson. A fourth suggestion, Macbeth, was turned away as soon as Jennifer recognized the author’s name from English class. The girl waited in stuffed silence as her books were stamped, enduring Hortense’s brittle sermon on the many lessons the Elizabethans could teach those willing to listen—about love, friendship, betrayal and, with this play in particular, about women and politics. Hadn’t Jennifer seen the production in Centennial Park last summer?

Hortense had thought it very lovely, entirely dark and rather deep, but perhaps a tad much, particularly the actress who had played Lady Macbeth like a malevolent Bea Arthur. But how the woods had moved, what with lit tallow dangling from each stand to light the actors’ paths! That, with its symbolic suggestion of new light coming to vanquish the wickedness of Dunsinane, had been, she thought, very well done. She had rubbed these observations into a small humid glow on her walks to and from the grocers that August, in preparation for the first fall meeting of the Hoarfrost Romantics. But when Hortense told all of this to the lone and single and creative man in her book club, he had dismissed her with a sniff, declaring that showy stage props were the opium of the masses while he was of the Brecht school on such matters.

“Which,” he continued, snickering to himself so that his thin reed of a moustache seemed to hum and vibrate, “is why I happen to be so bloody estranged from everyone around me in this vaudeville of a township. Estranged, I said. Brecht! Doesn’t anyone understand me? Brecht!”

Someone said “Gazoontite” and he was too pleased with himself to catch the sarcasm. He sniffed that he didn’t care if no one else around here was as estranged as he was, or could even know what he was talking about.

In the kitchen slicing banana bread later that afternoon, Hortense learned from the hostess, Faye, that Grant had applied and been turned down for the position of stage designer for the Macbeth production.

“But then again, between us girls, given my husband’s position in this town, George thinks he’s just Viking gay is all,” the hostess concluded with a shrug as they gathered the teacups and dessert plates and eased their way back into the sitting room.

Hortense made a sour-cherry face. This was the expected and properly ambivalent response among women in town to hearing that an insensitive man like a husband figured that a sensitive one like an older, well-read bachelor had to be that way. The sour-cherry face condemned the evaluation and agreed with it and disapproved of the universal race of men all at once.

The girl’s eye-blinking and shut mouth suggested to Hortense that she hadn’t seen the play. When they had been stacked in front of her, Jennifer scooped the three books off the counter and made to leave. Staring a moment longer at a spinster face the colour and firm of eggshell, she was off.

Two weeks later, Jennifer was back, marching, her face shaped into expectancy and a smile impressed upon it as if by a baker prettifying a lump of pastry dough by turning a fork around its edges. She had returned to the library to drop off the books, two of them anyway. She had come for another reason as well. Jennifer found Hortense behind a book cart burdened with end-of-the-year returns. To be helpful, she took it from her and started pushing and pulling it across the library on its rickety shrill wheels, trailing Hortense around the shelves. The librarian was glad to have someone else manoeuvre the heaving cart but felt uneasy. Something was hanging in the air.

Her lips opened.

“Miss Spillway. You said women and politics. In that play by Shakespeare, you said. But I never saw it last summer. And I can’t read that stuff very well on my own. But you could. Will you talk to me about it maybe sometime, maybe when school’s done?” Her white teeth dug into her lower lip as she smiled.

Hortense politely, cautiously, apologetically started to say—but then she agreed, remembering with heart-sink that it was soon to be lonely summer Saturdays and that here was someone who just might be made to understand the terror and beauty of Birnam Wood and the virtues of cloth napkins and other such fancies of the civilized imagination. Jennifer made a date and time and took directions. She left the cart still swaying a little from her twisting and turning.

IV.

During the summer after she graduated from high school, Jennifer visited the librarian on a series of Saturdays and then one Sunday, after which there were no further meetings. She visited Hortense Spillway and her crinkling doilies and porcelain cats and ballerinas and CBC FM always in the background. This was where Jennifer took her lessons about Shakespeare and scones in the time before she started her HR program at a nearby community college. But going to see Miss Spillway, Jennifer liked to think, had not been only for herself. She also went because, she decided, this chalk stick of a woman probably needed another human face to look at now and then. It was well known that Miss Spillway had lost both parents and had only a younger sister left, who lived and married well outside of town. So her going over there was also an act of community service, a response to the needs of the lonely and the alien.

She’d asked for the meetings because reading those books on politics had taught her that anyone who became a Beloved Leader had to have something to do with Shakespeare. The problem was, she had never had anything to do with him except read the Coles Notes before her grade ten Christmas final. She wanted clarifications. To know what made it a compliment to say that “Sir John A. was perhaps the only figure for the premiership because he alone inspired hatred from neither the Capulets in Upper Canada nor the Montagues in Lower Canada.” To find out what she was supposed to take from “Churchill, who, from a middling mediocrity after his Navy stint, enjoyed a meteoric rise to an historical greatness that made lazy Prince Hal’s ascent to valiant King Henry the Fifth seem little more than changing seats on the West Hampstead lorry.” She didn’t have questions about the book she had held on to well past the due date, which was about that American President from Nowhere, Texas. She didn’t care to know why “Johnson had raged across the Oval Office like Lear upon the heath when Party elders told him that they didn’t want him to stand for re-election in 1968.” She didn’t have any questions about that book because it was immediately taken on as something of a saint’s life, an exemplar after which to model herself. Johnson’s story was one that Jennifer hoped to reflect on, later in life, as resonant. An unremarkable man from an unremarkable place who wanted, needed, had to have at any cost to himself and those around him recognition and admission that he was capable of more than his blood and drawl allowed for. Which could come not from wealth or beauty or fame but only from power, the hard power of ruling others and being feared and loved for it. But it was how Johnson did it that took Jennifer. He never stopped at the getting. She also studied the biography’s pictures of Johnson at his business, politicking himself onto others, with his deep lean-ins and collar grabs and extorted promises of support for his programs and slogans. Johnson, she thought, was like a defenceman who couldn’t keep up with the snipers, so he turned his bulk into an asset and crushed them along the boards. She found her method there.

Her own parents were not people to ask for help. Their interest in periodicals ran from farming journals to Reader’s Digest and, after one surprisingly good crop some years earlier, TV Guide. Also, the annual Sears catalogue, and occasional church bulletins whenever Sunday mornings were just too blank to be spent at home waiting for that evening’s roast to thaw.

Wanting to bust and slug through mere Thickson expectations, Jennifer visited the librarian at her home in hopes of having these questions about Shakespeare and great men answered. She also sensed that this could be something like “a broadening experience,” which, she knew, the richer girls from her school were given as graduation gifts. Weekend shopping excursions to Montreal and even to Toronto; the daughter of the richest man in town—he owned the lone car, truck and RV dealership—was sent for half a summer to some kind of young ladies’ camp in New York where, it was rumoured, they had sailing lessons and Jews and other such fancy things. Her own graduation gift had been, in truth, a very nice surprise: a distended encyclopedia set that had sat through the spring thaw in a half-flooded basement. Its age was evidenced by the overwhelming length of an entry on the Lindbergh Baby. Her mother, with gift money granted by her father, had purchased it at significant discount at one of the first May yard sales. But it was also Barb Thickson’s attempt to match what seemed to be her daughter’s new interest in books. She was worried that Jennifer might fail to attract a husband and leave them with no way to continue the farm. This was certainly possible, what with the girl’s overgrown gourd of a body, and with more scrub grass than corn rows on Thickson land these last couple of years. She thought the books, which the seller advertised as “four years at Carleton for forty bucks,” might save her. Or at least help a little with what she was looking to do for herself.

The Thickson family, being firmly Middle Canadian, prided itself on permafrost reticence whenever anything close to the inner life came up; this was as much of a virtue for them as sending prompt funeral flowers and filing early tax returns. Which meant that Barb never entirely told her daughter that she was also a little sympathetic with her wanting to go and get for herself something more than just okay in life. Equally, Jennifer, though moved some by the graduation gift, by its implications and the quiet sanctioning for her designs that it suggested, had simply nodded and purse-lipped her mother’s cheek and grazed up at her father’s neck stubble in thanks. But then she noticed how her mother was lingering nearby as she thumbed through the first few books in the collection while her father packmuled the rest to her room. Jennifer caught a look at how Barb’s fingers were wriggling and her hands hovering around her blouseflounced waist. Waiting to say, wanting to hear.

“You know, Mum,” Jennifer began, her lungs feeling a little more than pinched by the breathing necessary to say something of matter to a near relation, “there’s a lot of information in these pages, just an awful lot. Which is, well, pretty good.”

“More than that, Jennifer. More than simply information, because that’s what’s in the phone book, you know. There’s knowledge in these books.” In answering her daughter, Barb was low-voiced and kitchen-retreat-ready in case she heard Gus’s tread on the topmost step. But this was her chance to tell, to tell what she dared to. “And knowledge, they say someone said, well, knowledge is power. And power—” Now this was getting to be too much, so Barb got up to check on their chicken dinner and reread those directions for softening the ice cream cake brought home in honour of Jennifer’s graduation. “—power just might do you fine. In fact, it might be worth more to you”—now she was verging on the autobiographical—“than a clammed-up fist of from-the-field flowers and what, well, what he’ll probably call a champagne diamond. At least that’s what they used to call them.”

After this, Barb Thickson almost always mouthed the proper lines about the superior goods of marriage and children to her daughter, and agreed in nodding silence with Gus that politics was like urinals and moustache combs: they were designed for men and God help the woman who tried them out. But that one time, just that once, after giving her daughter the encyclopedia set, Barb wanted her to know that it was okay to look for, and want, more in life than smiling at your husband’s news that he found a sale on wiper blades in the middle of January, or accepting that a Canadian Homemaker’s report about interesting variations on the butter tart was, in fact, interesting.

Jennifer hadn’t openly responded to Barb’s words about the encyclopedias and power at the time—this was prevented by simple shock at her mother’s capacities, by a little fear in Jennifer about what her mother thought about her own marriage, by Barb’s mad dash into the kitchen, and by her father’s return downstairs to get the rest of the books and loudly predict a visit to the chiropractor later that week— but they went to work on her even more than the books themselves, pulling and pushing like some Old Testament prophecy. Like double yeast baking in a hot summer kitchen.

V.

At Jennifer’s first visit, on a Saturday mid-morning in early July, Miss Spillway served spongy angel food cakes covered in confectioner’s sugar that left a fine white dust in the webbing between the thumb and index finger. Nervous, hungry and accustomed to such finery only at funerals and weddings, where meat-handed cousins were always lurking open-mouthed, she ate three off the platter right away. Like they were dressed-up potato chips. Her face went reddish when she saw Hortense pick up a tiny fork and eat her own, her one cake, in moused nibbles, while telling Jennifer the stories of the Henry plays and Romeo and Juliet in response to the opening volley of questions. Hortense had noticed without comment what had happened to the other cakes and took this, courageously, as a sign of the magnum opus work-in-progress before her. Meanwhile, Jennifer successfully resisted the urge to suck her hand clean. This was, for her, an indication of how far she’d come already.

“You mean to say, Jennifer, that they don’t study at least Romeo and Juliet in grade ten English anymore?” Hortense asked, nudging a fork and napkin closer to Jennifer’s unused plate and then nestling the final cake onto her doily.

“No, Miss Spillway. Only the one about the Jew who went around asking people about his prick and blood and pound of flesh.”

Now Jennifer wanted to show Miss Spillway that she could do like civilization. She went to her task of portioning off just a little corner of the new cake with her fork. Extracting a wedge, she plugged it into her mouth, where it dissolved with Eucharistic solemnity, her jaw clamped for politeness. Meanwhile Miss Spillway was coughing up a cakey hairball at Jennifer’s Elizabethan paraphrase. Neither woman was optimistic that this thing would go on. She can only fail at this, each thought of the other. Jennifer decided that she should give up, slam the rest of the cake into her maw and forget about someday addressing Parliament. She should just go home and wait for her father to come in from burning up stalks from this year’s fallow field and have supper and dishes and folding the laundry with her mother and maybe a few hands of Hearts before bed if they’re feeling like it and then, at most, a Revenue Canada information counter position in accord with the suitable-careers profile her guidance counsellor had given her, which would be but the penultimate stop on her way to an unremarkable, to a regular, to a Canadian death. No.

She passed Hortense a napkin for the cake bits still coming up. With this, an honest, secret look passed between them. Of mutual need. Their schedule of Saturday morning tea and books was thus confirmed as being so necessary to both as to be acceptable beyond crammed mouths and a little spit-up.

As summer in the Ottawa Valley beat on, Jennifer grew to like their weekly two-hour conversations, the cubes of sugar arranged beside stacks of shortbread, the oval platter set on the knee-high table between them. She listened and watched Hortense weave together tea cosies, creative autobiography, marmalade tins, and the storylines and characters of Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. She was gaining far more than the how and what of fine books here. Because smarts and book knowledge in general she was already getting at night by ploughing the encyclopedia. (She was currently on the Rs, finished with Rasputin, Richelieu, Robespierre, and presently on the second Roosevelt.) Tea with Hortense was, for Jennifer, her face-to-face preparation to be close by the real hard power of the world. Of knowing how many bites should be taken to finish a tea sandwich, the number of times a butter knife could respectably pass over a scone, the proper interval between mouthfuls during an interesting conversation. Of knowing, after more than one attempt, how to dispatch an outraged housefly trapped against a window screen without gucking up one’s palm.

She sensed that these tutorials would only help her when she made it to those places that Hortense, in her small quiet rooms, could only puppet. Receiving lines and cocktail hours and drop-ins and dinner parties. Before getting her hands on these, Jennifer needed to practise a more basic human science, the humming at the top of the throat and the anglepoise of head and brow that conveyed interest on the leader’s part in the voter’s humanity. She had gleaned as much from the politics books. Especially from the pictures of LBJ. With Hortense, Jennifer was developing that sense of when to lean in and ask a further question, when to sit back and ruminate on an observation. Her broad shoulders would crowd everything else out, but the effect, after much practice on Hortense, was less suffocating than beguiling, because Jennifer was fast developing a great blankness of face that was poised to fold into whatever—shared concern, shared excitement, shared outrage, shared admiration—the interlocutor’s tone and looks needed. All of which were necessary to the sine qua non of her political training, which Bokarie had likewise trafficked in by the time they met: to make those whom she depended on for what success she could get depend on her even more to get theirs.

Jennifer thought she was doing very well, so far, with Miss Spillway, who was made to feel that she was coming into her prime with the girl. Hortense discovered unknown powers of persuasion and instruction as Jennifer was refined over the summer, soon dropping the s from anyways and eventually remembering to hold back her braids while leaning over the pots of jam to ask a follow-up question. In the near corner of the family pew of a Sunday, Hortense would regret being so cheap with her charity when the poor hulking thing had first come to her in her library, and then she would commend herself on the enhancement she was effecting. Rapturously unaware of what was coming up and around her grandmother’s bone china.

Everything was building towards the great unveiling that was to occur that August, when Jennifer was to accompany Hortense to a performance of The Tempest that the Community Players were doing in Centennial Park. For which, boldly breaking the summer hiatus, Hortense had written out invitations to members of the Hoarfrost Romantics on her Crème Anglaise stationery. This had been left over from when she had sent notes to friends and family in gratitude for their prayers and casseroles and concerns when her parents had passed on.

Please you, draw near. You are cordially invited to un petit déjeuner sur l’herbe with Ms. Hortense Spillway and her blossoming young friend, Miss Jennifer Ursula Thickson. Centennial Park, August 25, 2ish. Tea and The Tempest will be served.

RSVP regrets only

Impressed by the heaviness of the paper and curious about Hortense’s new friend, all the members of the reading group called to say they were coming.

To round out Jennifer’s training in advance of the performance, they had read the play and discussed it on the previous Saturdays. Hortense further encouraged Jennifer with the pronunciation of certain French cheeses that were to be served, and she helped her practise clever and thoughtful observations for presentation. Their attempt to read aloud particular exchanges from the play, however, was unsuccessful. There had been some disagreement over roles. Over who would be Prospero and who would play Caliban.

On the appointed date, Hortense was feeling like a grand lady of theatre. She had even purchased, from the Bay, no less, an expensively in-season sun hat, whose Upper Canadian austerity she offset by affixing a spray of lilacs to the band. When they met in Centennial Park, Hortense was satisfied and relieved to see Jennifer arrive un-plaited, her hair held round her head by the paisley kerchief the librarian had given her. Which was ostensibly a going-away gift, but was in fact intended to deter that mesmerizing and unseemly habit Jennifer had of twirling her braids when thinking, listening, watching. Which, Hortense knew, would be a judgment on herself when the others descended onto their quilt to consider what she’d created. Forged, of sorts.

Jennifer was feeling top-heavy, waiting in the park as it grew to half full in the hour before the performance. It was because her hair, no longer clamped and braided on either side but bandaged back by the librarian’s gift, felt as if it was tugging her face up over her head. But it did make it easier, she would later notice, to smile and raise her eyebrows at the same time, in response, say, to an interesting observation about climate or to a personal story of hardship. When the others arrived, Hortense placed Jennifer in the rough centre of the picnic spread. Like a dressed-up game bird. The tins of cheese and olives and crackers and fruit and bony women and smiling women and nibbling women were schooling around her. Jennifer started feeling all this swirl and attention, and also the tea they were drinking. Hortense had delicately emptied a Niagara Valley VQA into a Thermos in the parking lot. Heart going fast with the scandal of it while pouring out the cups, she had giggled through her nostrils that afternoon tea was courtesy of Stephano and Trinculo.

“Who were responsible for getting the poor monster Caliban drunk didn’t they Miss Spillway but then really what man, drunk or otherwise, isn’t a monster I wonder. Of an occasion now and then,” Jennifer fired on cue, and was pleased with the nodding and murmuring she caught from the women around her. As was Hortense, who was now whispering for approval to Faye, the de facto Hoarfrost hostess because she alone had a husband and a real sitting room. Hopeful of earning a private dinner invitation, Hortense was telling Faye, arrayed as ever in her Timothy Eaton finery, how far Jennifer had come. The poor girl had called sugar cubes “mare candy” a mere eight weeks ago.

Jennifer was watching the librarian talk to this woman. Who seemed, by comparison with Miss Spillway, less straw than stalk. She had more and better meat on her bones, but also a presiding way to her. Jennifer sensed here something suggestive of power. Perhaps it was how she smiled such evident dental coverage and waved at other members of the audience on nearby quilts, who seemed anxious to catch her eye. Who, Jennifer also noticed, whispered among themselves afterwards, a little flushed.

Meanwhile, the little wine she’d taken, along with the gym-sock whiff of the soft cheeses and the general atmosphere—the black-shirted men and women pulling and pushing thrones and canoes across the stage, the Hoarfrost women comparing their summer reading lists and estate sale linen finds—all of this gave off a great swelling and excitement. Bravely, she had breached a new world, and for this, she decided, chewing on a little squishy brie rind, Miss Spillway was to be thanked. But then the performance began.

Good boatswain, have care. Where’s the master? Play the men.

That was all she could recall from the first few acts. Because Jennifer spent them studying Faye and resenting Miss Spillway for how she had done the seating, plopping Jennifer in the middle, like an Easter ham or something. So far from her. From Faye. Who sipped her cup and nodded with such relaxed, vacant intelligence while Hortense and the other women bubbled around her with clever observations and curious facts. A woman who could do her better than forks and fairy tales.

She started moving at the intermission, when Stephano exited stage left after his scene-ending declaration, which was received with much Port-A-John-ready applause.

O brave monster! Lead the way.

Hortense could feel the pressure on her hat, her shoulders, and now coming around in front as Jennifer circled and sat down, close in on Faye. Jennifer’s blank face was expectant, her nose distending. Everything smelt sweet and low-slung with the flower-busted fullness of Faye’s husband-gifted perfume, with this musk of proximate, blooming power. Waiting to be introduced, Jennifer undulated her fork across and beneath and overtop her fingers, which Hortense noticed with middling approval. This, Hortense held, was better than doing it with the braids but seemed a little too close to fancy card-table manners. But still, Hortense thought, the wine opening her up a little, look how far this girl, otherwise consigned to the dustbin of a small-town country’s history, had come with her! So she fixed her hat, Dalloway- and Prospero-proud of the absolute masterpiece she had brought off.

“Oh yes, I’m so sorry, Jennifer. What with all the commotion of our little picnic, I didn’t introduce the two of you before the play started. Faye, this is Miss Jennifer Ursula Thickson, who promises much. Jennifer, this is Mrs. Faye Gallagher. She’s Alderman Gallagher’s wife. Speaking of women and politics, perhaps she could—”

The last words anyone of importance ever heard from Hortense Spillway.