Chapter 10 #2
But she’s been checking her phone a whole lot less anyway, which means, two weeks after the wallpaper afternoon, that she’s already waited well into the evening before finally reading and responding to a text message from her sister Grace: “CALL ME!” Grace answering the phone and railing against Clemence for being so hard to reach these days.
“How am I even supposed to know you’re alive?
” she asks. Clemence has stopped using social media.
“I keep checking for updates,” says Grace, “but there’s been nothing since that bird at your backyard feeder last May. What’s going on there?”
Clemence explains that she’s abandoned the virtual realm for the actual, for things that can be touched and held, and whose satisfactions are much less ephemeral.
Grace tells her she sounds like a space cadet. “Anyway, Clem, Prudence is pregnant.” Confidential. This is supposed to be the kind of call where two sisters discuss the third sister in concerned tones, and pretend it isn’t gossip.
“She told you?” Clemence has only just come home after spending the afternoon in the library hard at work on Puddicombe’s index. It’s stuffy in her apartment, and she walks across the room to open up the door.
“She told you?” Grace is asking.
And Clemence says, “Yes,” without thinking. Without thinking about how this is Grace’s trigger, being left out of the trinity. She’s going to flip, and she does, because Prudence hasn’t said a word to her yet. “Why did I have to hear it from Mom?”
“I think it’s been complicated,” says Clemence. “I don’t know. You could ask her.”
“I don’t want to have to ask her,” says Grace. “How come you got to hear it first? You haven’t lived in town for seven years, and all of a sudden you’re the centre of the loop.”
Don’t tell Grace she’s being childish. Don’t tell Grace she’s being childish. “Grace, you’re being childish,” says Clemence’s worst self, and Grace explodes. Clemence sets her phone down on the table and goes to put the kettle on.
Picking up the phone again a few minutes later to hear Grace saying, “Do you know what I mean?”
Clemence says, “I do. You’re right.”
Grace says, “It means a lot to hear you say that.”
“Of course.” Clemence settling down on her bed, whose lumpiness she’s grown accustomed to. The only thing adorning it is a crisp white sheet, and it feels cool against her skin. And Grace is talking about their sister now, how their mother isn’t sure how Prudence is taking it.
“Well, Prudence isn’t even sure how she’s taking it. It was an accident.”
“It was?”
“The fertility awareness method.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Grace, who often returns to her tirade on the heteronormative privilege of the nuclear family. “Do you know what I’d have to do to get pregnant by accident? How far out of my way I’d have to go? It’s not fair.”
“Maybe you should have married Sandro.”
Grace says, “Gross.” There are phones ringing in the background.
“You’re at work.” Grace is a social worker.
“I’m on my dinner break,” says Grace.
The kettle is boiling, and Clemence gets up again to fill her teapot. “Why don’t you call Prudence and talk to her?” she suggests.
“You know I can’t do that.” Prudence is occupied all hours of the day by her children’s activities, and once the children are in bed, she’s too tired to talk. “Besides, I didn’t want to talk to her. I wanted to talk about her.”
Clemence says, “Fair enough.” She places the lid on her teapot. “The twins are okay?”
“The twins are fine. They’re at Mandarin tonight.”
“You’re not Chinese.”
“If I was, they’d probably know Mandarin already. Anyway, it’s the only program we could get them into. It’s a skill, at least. Looks good on a CV.”
“They’re four years old!”
“Clemence, they’re three.”
“No, I knew that.” She hadn’t. “But isn’t that even more absurd?”
Grace doesn’t want to pursue this. She says, “Mom said you got a job in a bookstore?”
“Kind of. I’m mostly sorting stuff, moving boxes around.”
“Sounds like you’re definitely thriving.”
And Clemence can’t tell if Grace is making fun of her.
Clemence hard-boils two eggs for dinner, and mixes them in a bowl with some mayo, salt, and pepper, and a few clippings from the chives growing outside.
She’s got the tail end of a loaf of bread, with only a bit of mould growing on one slice.
She cuts off the mould, keeping the rest, and eats the sandwich lying in bed, crumbs falling down around her on the sheet, which concerns nobody except herself.
When it comes time for bed, she’ll brush them to the floor and, because she chooses not to think deeply about the mouldy part, her meal is delicious.
And could this be considered thriving, she wonders, recalling her sister’s words.
To be cobbling together a life out of scraps and other people’s discarded furniture?
She actually thinks it might be. Something about it is substantial in a way her previous existence had never been.
The following afternoon she has a call with Jillian’s friend Sarah, who writes the newsletter about women and their remarkable stories.
“I don’t know that I’m so remarkable, though,” Clemence notes.
Sarah tells her, “Everybody says that.”
Clemence talks to her about the plan she’d had, like Eat, Pray, Love.
“My own personal odyssey,” she explains, but the voyages are all in her head.
“I wanted to start from nothing and see what I’d become.
” All these women, the spinsters and maiden aunts who’d made their lives in single rooms. “Less Elizabeth Gilbert, and more your Auntie Mildred.” Not everything needs to be so dramatic, she means. Not everybody is meant to be Odysseus.
And what is she discovering, Sarah asks?
“That no woman is an island,” Clemence answers.
“No matter how hard she tries.” The cat walks in through the patio door, as if to underline the point, and Clemence gets up to fetch him a saucer of milk.
“And when you move more slowly, or even not at all, you notice things. Instead of a pilgrimage, you get to be where you are.”
“It’s like the opposite of optimization.”
“Completely.” This woman gets her. Sarah has been divorced herself, years before. She talks about these opportunities when it all falls apart and you get to figure out what kind of life you want to lead, what kind of person you want to be. All the possibilities inherent in disaster.
“From Bridal Blogger to Serene Spinster?”
“Sadly, being divorced means I don’t get to be a spinster,” says Clemence. “Which, I think, is one of the great tragedies of my life. Still, the angle’s a little reductive, don’t you think?”
“Reduction,” Sarah reminds her, “is the point of an angle, after all.”
“I don’t want to be reduced,” says Clemence. “And maybe that’s my point. I don’t know where I’m going, but what if that’s okay? I’ve spent my whole life jumping from one institution to another, and I don’t want to do that anymore.”
“Jillian said you’re writing a book.”
“No, I’m making a life.” Any book Clemence wrote now would have to be like a recipe book, but for more than just meals.
So self-referential that she isn’t sure it would resonate with somebody else, but she wouldn’t care if it didn’t.
Clemence has been writing to please herself, for the very first time, and it’s integral to her becoming.
How could she know anything if she didn’t write it down?
Sarah asks her to send a photo to accompany the piece, and Clemence realizes she hasn’t seen an image of herself in months, besides the reflection of her face in the cloudy mirror in her bathroom.
Easing off her social media habits has changed her practice, and she thinks about how this was one area in their marriage in which Toad had come in handy.
He’d known her best side, and where she should stand for the good light, and he was always happy to photograph her outfits of the day, and take pictures of her in bed in the morning (after having showered and changed into fresh pyjamas) inhaling the scent of a cup of coffee with her eyes closed.
She doesn’t do any of that anymore, such obsessive documentation, as though an experience hadn’t actually existed until it was made virtual.
No woman is an island, but these days Clemence’s self-regard seems to be, which is almost like a superpower.
She’s not interested in external feedback, in the likes and the follows, and the doses of dopamine they result in.
Fearing judgment, perhaps—this might be the slightest part of it after everything that happened with Toad.
But it’s also part of her wider project of liberation.
Clemence doesn’t need to know what she looks like, or what anybody else thinks about what she looks like, because she knows what she feels like, and she is in tune with those feelings for the first time in her life.
But of course, it’s still a familiar face that greets her when she turns her phone camera on and flips the screen to selfie mode.
Smiling without even trying, like she would at the sight of an old friend.
Her chin-length bob has grown out and she hasn’t even thought about getting it cut, because then she’d have to get it cut again, and she has no desire for that kind of commitment.
She doesn’t want any commitments, and so her hair is long and wild.
She’s not wearing any makeup, the lines around her eyes on display, but her skin looks good—she’s well rested, and eating wholesome food these days, full of good fats and heritage grains.
She’s wearing a loose-fitting cotton dress because it’s still too warm to wear anything else, never mind that it’s autumn, and the colour is flattering.
Clemence likes how she looks; can it be so easy?
Too easy—she almost feels compelled to find fault with the woman before her now, like a habit.
It feels rude not to, to be so pleased with oneself.
But nope. Clemence just doesn’t care, and she has missed her face, she’s fond of her face, and she clicks the photo to capture it as is.
She sends it off to Jillian’s friend Sarah who will put it on the internet for everybody to see, and the prospect should be terrifying, but she doesn’t mind.
The only things that concern Clemence these days are the things that are right in front of her.