Chapter 2
Two
Clemence Lathbury has never lived alone.
Born the second of three virtuous daughters, bookended by Prudence and Grace, Clemence grew up comfortable and happy enough in the bosom of family.
Her parents had celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary the summer before, Clemence and Toad flying across the country to be there, posing for gorgeous family photos that are now out of date because Toad no longer belongs to them.
Roger and Bonnie Lathbury are the type of people who make a good marriage seem easy, so in sync without even trying.
They even look alike, and dress alike, sometimes, mostly for tennis, which is their favourite game, and they’re a perfect pair.
They met in high school and have never dated anybody else; neither of them have even kissed anybody else, if Bonnie’s stories are true.
And Clemence had grown up taking for granted that she’d find her way into a similar situation, that she would find her other half, and he’d call her his “better half,” and while he’d not altogether be joking, really, they would be equals, partners in every way.
And when she met Toad, it had seemed like the threads of her life were unspooling, just as she’d imagined they would, into the same tapestries her mother had woven, and her mother before her.
As they’d been woven for her sister Prudence, mother of four, and as they also would for Grace, who’d come out as a lesbian in high school, creating a bit of a hullabaloo, but everything settled down and she’d been married the summer after Clemence, clearly making a more successful run of it.
So no, independence was not celebrated among the many Lathbury virtues.
After completing her media studies degree, Clemence moved straight from the student house she’d shared with Jillian and Naomi into Toad’s condo—three years older, he had his own place already—and nobody raised an eyebrow.
Not long after, she would follow him across the continent to Seattle, where he’d located for a new job, and settling down this way was as much an accomplishment as landing a dream job of her own, which she had also done about the same time, writing features for one of the more prestigious American bridal magazines.
Magazines’ online platforms still held some possibility then, and personal narratives were setting the internet on fire, which timed perfectly with Clemence and Toad’s engagement, so she’d pitched a blog series—My Journey to “I Do”—that readers were wild about, whether they considered Clemence a bridezilla (she learned not to read the comments) or had bought into her fairy-tale fantasy.
Clemence was something of a starlet in those corners of the online world obsessed with layer cakes and tulle.
Her marriage at least, Clemence thinks, had been good for her professionally.
Toad didn’t mind the attention, plus the wedding had cost them nothing, the entire event an advertisement for an array of vendors, from the picturesque vineyard venue near the Niagara Escarpment to the photographer who’d transformed picturesque-ness into actual prints.
The whole thing such a deal that they’d been able to blow a small fortune on a honeymoon in Tahiti—and they’d even found an airline to comp their flights.
The honeymoon had been where the comedown began, however.
Clemence had supposed that marriage, the fact of the ring on her finger, would have solidified her bond with Toad, creating an effortless connection like her parents’, a spark that would enliven them both, but, sitting across from Toad at a bar on the beach, sipping fancy cocktails, and with all the wedding planning over, she realized that they’d run out of conversation and there was nothing between them at all.
Toad had never felt so far away, the gulf only stretching wider as the years went by.
And here she is now in a place where Toad doesn’t factor.
Finally, a room of her own. The sun is beginning to set, the day’s radiance retreating, which makes the apartment less charming, but Clemence likes it that way.
Because she is tired of charm, and charms, and Prince Charming, or the idea of such a thing, all of which have managed to lead her astray.
Clemence wants to see things for what they are, to connect with solidity, with reality, and items that don’t disappear at midnight, transformed back into pumpkins and mice.
Although it’s still early for that. Late for dinner, though, and Clemence is hungry.
Heading out, locking her own door behind her for the very first time, feeling the weight of that key in her pocket as she heads back downstairs, breathing in the curious odours of other people’s lives, that blend of lemon cleanser and fried onions.
Are the men who live here cooking on their hot plates all day?
This seems unlikely from what Clemence knows of men, and hot plates.
She pauses halfway down to the ground floor and listens—it’s so quiet.
Who would her neighbours turn out to be?
Did Charles live here with his mother? What a thing to have moved into a house full of men, absolutely an accident, happy or otherwise.
It is a short walk to the main street, with the church on the corner, a small independent grocery store across the road.
The neighbourhood has been improving, as the lawn dumpsters would suggest, and now there is also a cheese shop and a boulangerie among the payday loan shops and dollar stores.
But Clemence knows if she starts frequenting the more fashionable establishments, she’ll be out of money in a matter of weeks.
She’s been living off her severance, and she has to make it stretch, and so it’s the plain old corner grocery store she heads for in search of something simple, the bell on the door jangling pleasantly as she steps inside.
Clemence recognizes immediately that the woman behind the counter is one of the excellent women of her aspirations.
The woman is wearing tweed, along with a sour expression, and no doubt she’s been sitting behind the counter since midway through the previous century.
Surely she lives above the shop with her cat.
All the staunch and silent lives, Clemence thinks, of these women living among us unnoticed.
And yet without such women, from whom would we buy our tinned fish?
Clemence likes the idea of tinned fish, ever sensible.
Economical and rich with protein, a most substantial essence.
Everything in this store is dusty, but tinned fish are as such that they’re likely still in their prime in such a condition, and Clemence particularly loves the keys on the top of the sardine cans, the satisfying way the lids peel off and curl up on themselves.
It’s a good choice for a woman who has just moved into her new apartment and is pretty sure she failed to pack a can opener when she fled her marital home.
Clemence and Toad had their groceries delivered.
They must have made a list once and then the groceries kept coming, an algorithm making adjustments based on the season and availability so she never had to think about it.
They didn’t cook much, anyway, both of them busy with their jobs and usually arriving home late for dinner, so there was always too much in the fridge, a veritable bounty.
Clemence was perpetually scrambling to find ways to work overripe produce into salads and shakes.
Thinking now about the decadence of mangoes and kumquats, all the avocados she’d discarded for being too soft.
There were infinite varieties of lettuce these days, but you’d never think so here in this corner grocery store’s modest produce section, a head of sad iceberg brown at the edges.
Clemence selects some apples, breaks off a couple of bananas from a bunch, and reflects on all the bananas she’d left behind in the chest freezer, possibly hundreds, gone too brown on the counter and saved for a banana loaf to be baked in a far-off future that would never arrive.
What would Toad think when he discovered these?
Another mark against her, along with the sexual deviancy.
(“There are some husbands who might have been pleased to discover what he did,” her friend Naomi had remarked, but Toad wasn’t one of them.
If he had been, Clemence would have had a different kind of marriage.)
She decides she will venture into the boulangerie for a baguette because the loaves on the grocery shelf are already a week past their best-before.
She picks out a carton of milk, a bag of oatmeal, resisting the urge for mixings—brown sugar or even raisins—because Clemence longs to develop an appetite for plain tastes.
Adds cans of tuna and chicken, a jar of mayonnaise because she’s not as plain as all that, and a brick of cheddar.
What more does a woman need? Digestive biscuits, she decides as she spies them, dipped on one side in dark chocolate.
She is obsessed with the concept of digestive biscuits, as though they were medicinal somehow. Good for gut health, entirely sensible.
She brings her armful to the counter and drops it before the woman waiting there who hasn’t moved since Clemence jangled into the shop. Close up, the hair on the woman’s head is sparse and fine, like chicken fluff, which reminds her—
“Just wait,” Clemence calls back, speeding to the fridge, grabbing a carton of eggs, returning back to the counter where the woman remains a statue, strange. Clemence sets the eggs down with the rest of her things, and says to the woman, “That’s all.”
The woman regarding her finally. “But is it really?”
“I think so?” Clemence says, beginning to realize that she’s missing something here.
“Because of course,” the woman continues, “I’m here all day. Standing here waiting for you to add one more thing, and then another thing. I’ve got nothing better to do than wait for you to be satisfied, same with everybody who’s in the line behind you.”
Clemence turns around, but nobody is there.
“Oh, so there is something more,” says the woman in a cutting tone, making Clemence feel small.
She wants to run. She wants to hide, but she is also hungry, with her heart set on a supper of sardines on toast, and if they even sell sardines at the dollar store, they’re likely to be off-brand and sold without the key.
So Clemence says, “No, that’s all,” annoyed at herself for having assumed a kinship with this miserable woman. That she’d felt benevolent supporting a small store stuck in a time warp, and no wonder the store is empty if this is what passes for customer service.
The woman begins packing the groceries in a flimsy plastic bag, ignoring Clemence’s protests that she’s brought her own cloth sack.
And of course, this store doesn’t take cards, cash only, but there’s an atm in the back whose withdrawals come with a five-dollar convenience fee.
The plastic bag splits at the seams as soon Clemence picks it up off the counter.
She exits in relief when the whole thing is over, the shopkeeper’s chimes seeming a sinister tone now as the door slams behind her.
And outside on the street there are more chimes, these ones rich and sonorous, as the bells at the church across the road sound in response to the hour.
Six o’ clock, but they don’t toll for me, Clemence thinks, the joyous peals lifting her spirits again after the disappointment of the shop as she transfers her bundle of groceries from the tattered plastic bag to her cloth one.
A murmuration of butterflies lifts in her stomach, such lightness.
She can do this. Because Clemence lives outside the rules now, the rituals and the hours, and there’s a freedom in that, to do whatever she likes and whenever it suits her.
Oranges and lemons, goes the song in her head, the one that people use to sing to her because of her name, a cheerful tune, though it was years before she learned the unfortunate ending: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed / And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.”
But now the boulangerie is shut, the sign on the door being flipped to Closed as she’s standing there.
Clemence has no cause to complain—the hour has gone, and she heard the bells to prove it, but here is the thing, and she decides to channel the nerve of the miserable woman in tweed at the grocery store counter, to use it instead of letting it destroy her.
Raising her hand to rap on the glass, summoning a tired-looking baker at the end of a very long day.
“All I need is a baguette,” explains Clemence. “Could I possibly …?”
“We’re closed,” says the baker, who no doubt deals with these disturbances every evening.
Which would have been the signal for retreat in Clemence’s previous life, where she’d adhered to rules and guidelines, deferring to politeness, caring deeply about what other people thought of her, as though such opinions would be what constitutes one’s self, instead the actual fibre of her being.
“But you have baguettes left,” Clemence points out, peering over the baker’s shoulder, catching a glimpse on the rack behind the counter.
“I’m not choosy,” she says for the second time that day.
“And if you’re closed, well, wouldn’t you be throwing it out anyway?
” Edging closer. She’s relentless—and now she’s got her, Clemence knows, as soon as she hears the baker sigh.
“Hang on,” the baker says, and closes the door again.
Secures the deadbolt. Clemence taking a step backwards, and inhaling a deep and most satisfying breath.
Watching the life on the sidewalk of which she is a part, the couples and the families and the gaggles of friends, and yes, all the other people walking alone, like her, with their own directions and places they need to be.
Turning around again as the door opens a crack, the baker jams the baguette through. “Take it,” she says. “No charge,” and the door is shut and a deadbolt fastened before Clemence has time to properly thank her.
And now she has all she needs, the groceries and the shredded plastic bag neatly tucked into that cloth bag, her capacious hold-all, and she nudges the baguette alongside them.
Her first dinner in her new home that night would be everything she has been hoping it would be, simple with substance, the bread good and fresh.
She would wash out that tin of sardines and save it as a souvenir, a useful vessel for small objects, things like stray buttons or safety pins.