As Tallis silently handed the laptop back to Nora, both mother and daughter smiled over the head of Fabienne, who was ensconced between them on the couch, deeply absorbed in the Y.A. fantasy novel she was reading.
Sometimes it seemed Nora and Tallis understood each other perfectly (other times, not so much). “You’re so funny, Mom. You’re such a Hamm.”
“‘Funny haha or funny peculiar?’ as Nana Hamm would say.”
“Both. I’d like to try that with a poem, actually,” Tallis ventured. “Not the baby one. The Shelley. Well maybe the baby one too. What made you write such things?”
“It was just… random,” Nora explained, using what seemed to be both of her daughters’ favourite adjective. “Random” was a word that for Tallis’s generation had seemingly taken on a significance Nora didn’t fully understand–but she embraced it anyway. (“So random!” the girls often exclaimed, to express… what? Nora wasn’t sure, but she had taken to exclaiming it herself–almost at random!)… “Seems a bit odd now that I look back on it–but it made so much sense at the time!”
“Mom, why are you not famous? What else did you write?” asked Tallis.
“I’m not sure what you’d make of it.” Nora moved to push her laptop closed, as if to seal the vault of her past writing. “Not that I don’t appreciate your endorsement!”
Her reluctance to share her past with her daughter had been augmented by a recent enquiry from one of Tallis’s teachers after a short-story writing assignment. “Is everything OK at home?” Miss Aylesworth had asked Tallis. The story in question was about an orphaned serial killer in a post-apocalyptic megalopolis. Geez, thought Nora, you do your best to give your kid a happy childhood in the country, complete with two parents, a sibling, and a dog, and the Shredder of Atomic City is what you get.
Mind you, didn’t they say you needed unhappiness to be a writer? Whatever demons Tallis had, beyond her father’s illness, they were fuelling her imagination and her drive to self-expression. Who was Nora to question it all?
Clearly, Tallis was at the beginning of something that Nora felt slipping through her fingers like water. She wanted to tell this daughter, so full of potential, all the things she wished she’d known before it was too late: some pretty obvious; others pretty cynical. For example, the simple fact that money matters. Or the enduring truth that if you live your life in fear, it will pass you by and leave you standing by the side of the road. How many times had Nora said “No,” or changed her mind from “Yes” to “No”? Not a risk-taker, Nora. Not a leader, a follower. Not a quitter. Or was she?…
Yet hadn’t it been precisely these qualities, these limitations, that had led to her current level of boiling-point frustration, her intolerance of being told, in any context, what to do and how to do it, her inability to be flexible, to grow, to learn?
Nora would have always said she could “get along with anyone,” but two recent flare-ups had radically disproven this maxim. One was a committee situation in a community group, where she hadn’t been consulted about changes and amendments to plans and practices; the other was in a community work group of volunteers, where Nora lacked expertise in the work being done but hated direction. Nora would suppress her emotions until they finally emerged in ugly, and even embarrassing, form: sarcasm, tears, you name it. And even in this release there was a brand of passive aggression that was pure Nora.
Staring at her laptop screen and sipping the strong coffee she knew would provide both stimulus and palpitations, Nora gently nudged Fabienne. “I can’t type with you snuggled so close, honey,” she gently admonished aware of day, her younger daughter, Fabienne, had brought home from school a friend who had ended up staying for dinner. When the Dad, one of those sugar-daddy types from the Marry-Well set, arrived later to retrieve Fabby’s friend, explaining that his wife had requested the extra time before pick-up, Nora had made a snide comment about the wife’s ambiguous health: “Well, she’s got that condition, right?” Sugar Dad smiled politely, no doubt uncertain how to respond. Unsatisfied, Nora persisted, “It’s not real, you know. I looked it up.” An awkward laugh ensued; then the moment was past; the kid and Sugar Dad were gone. “Oh my God,” said Nora out loud to the empty hallway. “I can’t believe I just said that. What’s wrong with me? Some ambiguous condition, no doubt!”
Accordingly, Nora decided not to attend the final meeting of the parent committee. She had already tendered her resignation, pending the end of a two-year volunteer commitment. What if she said something unforgettable/ unforgivable to the committee chair, such as “I would have thought a highschool English teacher would be a better communicator”? You never live it down, that sort of thing, in a small-town world. Best to stay home and bingewatch Midsomer Murders on Netflix.
It went against the grain to skip the Annual General Meeting, in which she would have publicly resigned, but she just couldn’t face the group, which was headed by a petite firebrand who reminded Nora of her childhood arch-nemesis at school (name forgotten). Communication and miscommunication regarding committee matters had become the flashpoint of conflict. In this situation, Nora had opted for an email declaring her intention of discontinuing her involvement. She only hoped she hadn’t jeopardized her chances of being selected as Community Volunteer of the Year.
She had aimed for a nice, neutral tone, clearly stating that she would not be part of the group going forward, not mentioning why (e.g. “it’s sucking away my soul”) and politely thanking the group (again, not mentioning for what). She resolved to show the email to Tallis, who, a skilled communicator herself, often served as a barometer of appropriate communication these days for Nora. Unfortunately, Nora pressed “send” before she showed the email to her savvy daughter.
“Mom,” cautioned Tallis, “You’d better hope to heck they’re familiar with the proper use of the semicolon.”
“Why?” asked Nora, in some trepidation.
“Well,” explained Tallis, “You have two statements separated by a semicolon. One is ‘Thanks to all of you’ and the other is ‘I am resigning from the Committee and will not be seeking re-election next year.’”
“Uh…” the light was beginning to dawn.
“If they don’t know about how semicolons work, they might read it as ‘Thanks to all of you, I’m resigning from the Committee and will not be seeking re-election next year.’”
“Shit.”
Meanwhile, although the potential for disaster was just as great elsewhere, she didn’t see how she could get out of her weekly stints at the Lowood Garden community work group: the summer was just starting, and she’d agreed to volunteer until the end of the fall harvest. The Lowood Garden Co-operative was supposed to be her happy place, but something was going sideways as Nora realized she lacked the knowledge and skill-set to do anything except follow orders with a limited level of competence. Just the other day, one of the co-op members, a diminutive, athletic, uber-competent woman who reminded Nora of Mira (name certainly not forgotten, one of the women on the Opal Island Farm in Ontario, where Nora had spent her childhood), had said, “Isn’t it funny, ladies, how we all have these big, burly men in our lives, but here we are on our own doing all this manual labour?”
Apart from triggering Nora’s breadwinner sensibilities, the comment seemed better to ignore–but it was followed up with a direct appeal: “Nora! Wouldn’t you agree? Wouldn’t you say that chivalry is dead?”
Something inside Nora snapped. She tried to sound cheerful, but somehow it came out with that twist of bitter sarcasm that Nora feared was now her trademark.
“As a feminist, I don’t think you can say that. I mean, just think about it!”
“What do you mean? Oh, I see. But I’m a feminist! Oh… I get it, I guess…”
Again that awkward laugh all round.
Now Nora dreaded going back to Lowood Garden. What in heaven’s name would she say next?
Why and how had she become this person? Time to get your head screwed on right, she told herself. Maybe time to start writing again. Or would that be a risk in itself?
These questions scuttling around in her mind echoed a novel she was reading in order to help one of her tutoring students; the book was Kaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Nora had intended to write the quotation in her diary (a Marie Kondo book intended to prompt the journal writer to ask what in daily life could spark joy)–but instead, as with most things she wanted to remember or keep track of, she recalled only the essence of the idea. Hosseini’s narrator had said something about how we become who we’re going to be even before we hit our teenage years, and something about how the past keeps coming back to us as if it had a will of its own.
Somewhere, again amidst some writing she’d done in her early thirties, that watershed of virtual ink, there was a story–if Nora could track it down (maybe on her G-drive) she might find the answers to some of her questions, including why she’d let almost twenty years lapse between bursts of creativity and self-expression.
Protestant work ethic and Nana Hamm’s meaty legacy notwithstanding, it beat the bejesus out of going back to the Garden for the cooperative work party, or attending the AGM with the Committee.
Nora poured herself (nay, positively dove into) a long, cool Red Racer ale (this was not going to be the right week to dry out–Nora wasn’t feeling very abstemious, and she took an all-or-nothing approach to virtue). She settled in with Fabby on the couch (Tallis was off to her weekly piano session–having both girls in lessons was breaking the bank) with some tortilla chips and salsa, and switched on Midsomer Murders, the perfect backdrop to her search for the story that danced on the edge of her mind.
Something about getting her head sorted out.
“Tally, would you like to read some more of my stuff?” Nora asked, with trepidation. She couldn’t help but think that if only her older daugher understood more about her past, they’d be closer somehow, before it was too late.
“Uh, sure,” said Tallis, and clicked.
Deborah Blenkhorn is a devoted teacher, writer, and community activist. Herstories are set in Ontario, New Brunswick, and British Columbia, and have appeared in several literary venues in North America, Britain, Australia, and India
