Chapter 7
Seven
Underlining every question Clemence is asked about her situation lately is another one unspoken: What exactly do you do all day?
Everybody too polite to come out and ask, even her sister Prudence, who usually says whatever she damn well feels like, but Prudence’s years of stay-at-home motherhood, where she hears it a lot, have surely made her wary of this approach.
Her father is the one who keeps asking her about a job, because he can’t comprehend an adult life in which work is not a central component, though Clemence wonders if Roger’s real trouble is how her situation puts a damper on their small talk.
If they can’t talk about work, what is there to talk about?
Besides the weather, or money, which is also work-adjacent.
Roger asks Clemence how her funds are holding up.
He also wants Toad to buy Clemence out of her half of their townhouse, but Clemence isn’t ready for the hassle yet, still hasn’t opened the letter from the lawyer.
She thinks the cost of half their house is a fair bargain for never having to talk to Toad again, or face what she did to him, but Roger disagrees.
He knows her severance is almost over; Roger would not remember Clemence’s birthday without Bonnie to remind him, but he’s keeping track of how long she’s been unemployed.
It’s not only money matters that are bothering people, Clemence knows.
The money is what they can ask about under the guise of concern, but their real concern is with her idleness.
For the first time in her life, Clemence doesn’t have a morning alarm set on her phone, and she wakes up when she feel like it, her body’s natural rhythms finally reset.
And most days, she has no real commitments, except to sit at her table, maybe open up a new document if she feels like it and just stare at that empty page.
And then to think, which is an integral part of the creative process, not a waste of time, until she closes her laptop and goes to make a cup of tea, the tiny electric kettle that came with her place perhaps the hardest-working appliance in the whole apartment.
Clemence measures out her day in tea bags, the unfancy brand she buys from the grumpy woman’s grocery store. Tea is tea.
She takes walks up and down the avenues, visiting the library on the corner, borrowing book after book.
She opens the door to the deck and she closes it when the sky becomes foreboding.
The cat stops by, and they spend time together, Clemence rubbing deeply into the thick fur around his neck.
Someone brushes this cat; he is well cared for.
Sometimes she meets friends, but not often, and it’s as though she hasn’t really moved back to town in some ways, or at least to the same town, because her schedule is so different from her friends’, everybody else’s particularly demanding and structured, so it’s as though they inhabit separate universes.
Sometimes Jillian and Naomi will make plans and suggest Clemence pick a date, which is tricky, because she can’t just say, “All of them?”
Instead, she gets to know the people in her new universe, or at least to recognize them, some of them friendly enough that they smile and say hi.
She loves the librarians. She’s a regular at the boulangerie now, Mila behind the counter having forgotten or forgiven that first time when she was forced to open up after closing.
Clemence knows now to get there on time, usually in the mornings when the bread is fresh, and sometimes if she’s feeling extravagant, she’ll stop at the cheese shop for Gorgonzola.
Because it’s summer, the neighbourhood is quiet.
Some of the older shops on the street have stuck a sign in their windows informing customers that they’ve shut down for two weeks in August in the old European tradition.
There is a truck parked on the corner that sells ice cream, and right now it’s the only business booming, a line usually stretching halfway down the street, and sometimes Clemence joins it, because ice cream from a truck is a delicacy that never disappoints.
But other times she doesn’t care to stand around waiting, and heads back to her nest. So high up in the trees, she gets a breeze even when the air down below seems immovable, and it’s a good house, however rundown.
The smells in the stairwell linger, but Mrs. Yeung vacuums the hallway, and most problems are seen to, Charles turning up in a tight T-shirt with a bag of tools.
He’s figured out a way for her to plug in the air conditioner by running an extension cord through a vent to the unit downstairs, and Clemence has used it a couple of times, though the roar is overwhelming and she’s worried the circuits will blow again.
Plus, she really doesn’t mind the heat, forcing her body into a cool bath on the most sweltering evenings before she goes to bed, sleeping with the French doors open to let the night air inside.
What Clemence’s days are giving her now is space, existential space, which means she doesn’t even mind that her room is so tiny.
Her only confines, really, with everything else wide open—her hours, her streetscapes, her possibilities.
When she does manage to make plans with her friends or her family, there’s a part of her that resents the obligation that any part of her day, of herself, should be spoken for.
She much prefers to move through the hours to see how they unfold.
Walking by the bookshop one morning and realizing it’s a Wednesday, when the pale book man had said the owner would be in, Clemence wonders, what if she walked right in there now and confronted the owner, demanding an explanation for the store’s sexist cataloguing system?
And because there is nothing else on her agenda, Clemence is free to partake in such an experiment.
As usual, the store is quiet, tinkling bells the only sound when she enters.
At first glance, it doesn’t appear that anyone else has been in the shop since her last visit, the dusty piles of paperbacks undisturbed.
How does a person make a living in a place like this?
How does the pale book man manage to get paid?
She’s been imagining Crampton, an old white-bearded fisherman, someone grizzled and grandfatherly, but the grumpy kind, the sort whose true heart of gold is not made evident until the end of the novel, and even then, he doesn’t want anyone to know about it.
Clemence will ask him about the cataloguing, and he’ll say he never actually knew that any woman has written a book.
For the past forty years, he’s been rereading infinite Moby Dick.
But it’s a different face that Clemence finds at the counter, a familiar one.
Tweed-clad, grey-haired, but here with a tiny pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of her nose, which she never wears at the grocery store.
The stern expression is the same, though, she and the pale book man apparently having been similarly schooled in customer service.
The woman says, “You. You’re everywhere. It’s like you’re haunting me.”
Clemence is caught off guard. “I mean—”
“I don’t see many customers. And then, suddenly, you start turning up all the time for groceries, and now you’re here. A little uncanny, that’s all I’m saying.”
“I just moved into the neighbourhood,” says Clemence. “It’s really not that strange. And I need groceries. I like books.”
The woman is unmoved. “Most people order online these days. You can do that, you know. Get your books delivered right to your door. Even food—they’ve got refrigerated vans. Don’t you know about that?”
“Of course,” says Clemence. “But I like picking out my own stuff, I guess. Getting out in the world, talking to people.”
“Well,” says the woman. “I’m not much of a people person.”
“Really,” says Clemence. She knows this might sound sarcastic, but she’s actually trying to be polite. She really does want to speak to the owner of the shop, imagining how this might all fit into her larger project, the denegation of women’s stories. “I’m looking for Crampton.”
“You’re looking at Crampton,” says the woman, meeting her eyes.
“You’re Crampton?” She doesn’t have a beard, only the trace of a bristly moustache. What kind of a name for a woman is Crampton? “Like the shop?”
“The shop was named for my grandfather,” the woman explains.
Evidently this is a story she likes telling because she’s just getting started.
“Thomas Crampton, developed the entire block. We had a shoe store, too. Things were different then. Nobody had to go far to get what they needed. The grocers took up three storefronts, but then once the big supermarkets opened up, people stopped coming. The bookstore never brought in much of a profit, anyway; more of a hobby project. My mother inherited it all, and ran it with my father, and then it was my turn, and I’ve not made such a bad job of it, considering what I had to work with. ”
And there she’d been, Clemence, walking around in the world, observing, imagining her instincts were good enough that she was getting the basic sense of things, that a tweed suit and a bad haircut might tell her everything she needed to know about this woman.
It took a certain kind of nerve to suppose understanding of anything at all.
“You still own the buildings?” Clemence asks. An entire block, with retail and two floors of apartments above, gorgeous century-old buildings with tin ceilings and huge windows. This woman was sitting on millions of dollars.
“As long as I can keep paying the taxes, yes,” she answers. “And I’m not selling. Don’t you start with that. I’ve heard the spiels before, and I’m wise to you.”