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You would never expect Alfrida to write in this style, from the way she talked.
She was also one of the people who wrote under the name of Flora Simpson, on the Flora Simpson Housewives’ Page. Women from all over the countryside believed that they were writing their letters to the plump woman with the crimped gray hair and the forgiving smile who was pictured at the top of the page. But the truth-which I was not to tell-was that the notes that appeared at the bottom of each of their letters were produced by Alfrida and a man she called Horse Henry, who otherwise did the obituaries. The women gave themselves such names as Morning Star and Lily-of-the-Valley and Green Thumb and Little A
Dear Morning Star, Alfrida or Horse Henry would write,
Eczema is a dreadful pest, especially in this hot weather we’re having, and I hope the baking soda does some good. Home treatments certainly ought to be respected, but it never hurts to seek out your doctor’s advice. It’s splendid news to hear your hubby is up and about again. It can’t have been any fun with both of you under the weather…
In all the small towns of that part of Ontario, housewives who belonged to the Flora Simpson Club would hold an a
She always called her cigarettes ciggie-boos. When I was fifteen or sixteen she leaned across the table and asked me, “How would you like a ciggie-boo, too?” The meal was finished, and my younger brother and sister had left the table. My father was shaking his head. He had started to roll his own.
I said thank you and let Alfrida light it and smoked for the first time in front of my parents.
They pretended that it was a great joke.
“Ah, will you look at your daughter?” said my mother to my father. She rolled her eyes and clapped her hands to her chest and spoke in an artificial, languishing voice. “I’m like to faint.”
“Have to get the horsewhip out,” my father said, half rising in his chair.
This moment was amazing, as if Alfrida had transformed us into new people. Ordinarily, my mother would say that she did not like to see a woman smoke. She did not say that it was indecent, or unladylike-just that she did not like it. And when she said in a certain tone that she did not like something it seemed that she was not making a confession of irrationality but drawing on a private source of wisdom, which was unassailable and almost sacred. It was when she reached for this tone, with its accompanying expression of listening to i
As for my father, he had beaten me, in this very room, not with a horsewhip but his belt, for ru
My parents had been put in a corner by Alfrida-and also by me-but they had responded so gamely and gracefully that it was really as if all three of us-my mother and my father and myself-had been lifted to a new level of ease and aplomb. In that instant I could see them-particularly my mother-as being capable of a kind of lightheartedness that was scarcely ever on view.
All due to Alfrida.
Alfrida was always referred to as a career girl. This made her seem to be younger than my parents, though she was known to be about the same age. It was also said that she was a city person. And the city, when it was spoken of in this way, meant the one she lived and worked in. But it meant something else as well-not just a distinct configuration of buildings and sidewalks and streetcar lines or even a crowding together of individual people. It meant something more abstract that could be repeated over and over, something like a hive of bees, stormy but organized, not useless or deluded exactly, but disturbing and sometimes dangerous. People went into such a place when they had to and were glad when they got out. Some, however, were attracted to it-as Alfrida must have been, long ago, and as I was now, puffing on my cigarette and trying to hold it in a nonchalant way, though it seemed to have grown to the size of a baseball bat between my fingers.
My family did not have a regular social life-people did not come to the house for di
What our family did was put boards in the dining-room table two or three times a year to entertain my grandmother and my aunts-my father’s older sisters-and their husbands. We did this at Christmas or Thanksgiving, when it was our turn, and perhaps also when a relative from another part of the province showed up on a visit. This visitor would always be a person rather like the aunts and their husbands and never the least bit like Alfrida.
My mother and I would start preparing for such di
And dessert still to come.
There was hardly any idea of a general conversation, and in fact there was a feeling that conversation that passed beyond certain understood limits might be a disruption, a showing-off. My mother’s understanding of the limits was not reliable, and she sometimes could not wait out the pauses or honor the aversion to follow-up. So when somebody said, “Seen Harley upstreet yesterday,” she was liable to say, perhaps, “Do you think a man like Harley is a confirmed bachelor? Or he just hasn’t met the right person?”
As if, when you mentioned seeing a person you were bound to have something further to say, something interesting.
Then there might be a silence, not because the people at the table meant to be rude but because they were flummoxed. Till my father would say with embarrassment, and oblique reproach, “He seems to get on all right by hisself.”
If his relatives had not been present, he would more likely have said “himself.”
And everybody went on cutting, spooning, swallowing, in the glare of the fresh tablecloth, with the bright light pouring in through the newly washed windows. These di
The people at that table were quite capable of talk. Washing and drying the dishes, in the kitchen, the aunts would talk about who had a tumor, a septic throat, a bad mess of boils. They would tell about how their own digestions, kidneys, nerves were functioning. Mention of intimate bodily matters seemed never to be so out of place, or suspect, as the mention of something read in a magazine, or an item in the news-it was improper somehow to pay attention to anything that was not close at hand. Meanwhile, resting on the porch, or during a brief walk out to look at the crops, the aunts’ husbands might pass on the information that somebody was in a tight spot with the bank, or still owed money on an expensive piece of machinery, or had invested in a bull that was a disappointment on the job.