Chapter 18
Eighteen
Mrs. Yeung puts Clemence in put in charge of promoting the jumble sale, and Clemence has ideas about social media and email marketing.
About targeting local influencers, and everybody on the committee humours her in this respect, but they insist that she has to do posters, too.
The church has a laser printer, they keep reminding her, which must have been remarkable once upon a time.
Reverend Michelle prints the posters using last year’s template with the dates adjusted, and Clemence walks around the neighbourhood with a big roll of packing tape on her arm like a bangle, sticking those posters to poles and fence posts and community boards.
She convinces Crampton to stick one in the window at the grocery store, though she has to clean away the grime with a wet cloth before the poster can be visible through the glass.
In addition to being sensitive about her windows, Crampton isn’t crazy about the cause—she’s been furious at St. Saviour’s since she was a child and made to feel unwelcome at the Sunday school picnic on account of her father being Jewish.
Which Clemence understands entirely. “But I don’t think they do that anymore,” she says.
“They had Neapolitan ice cream,” says Crampton, not listening, still far away in her memory. “I’ve always had an affinity for stripes. I wanted to try it, but the other mothers made me leave. They said it wasn’t appropriate.”
“Neapolitan isn’t very good.”
Crampton eyes snap back open. “It would be years before I knew that for myself.” Clemence struggles to imagine Crampton as a child, or eating ice cream for that matter.
Surely she was born wearing a tweed suit with her grey hair closely cropped.
She explains, “It was our neighbour who brought me to the picnic. I used to hang around her place, because my father was always working, and my mother had just died. I’m sure I was a nuisance, but she was kind, and after what happened that day, she was mortified, though I’m not sure if it was for my sake or her own. ”
“And what did your father think?” They are standing outside, looking in through the window, and out in the fresh air, Crampton is most forthcoming. As though leaving her shop has broken the spell that Clemence has long suspected Crampton lives under, the kind that freezes time entirely.
Crampton dismisses Clemence with a wave. “My father didn’t care. He hated the church. He told me I was a fool to bother with them, anyway. And I vowed to never have anything to do with them again. So I haven’t. Until you came along and started pilfering my books for your jumble.”
“I didn’t pilfer! You gave me permission.”
“I gave you codswallop,” says Crampton, and then she faces Clemence head-on. “What I want to know is, what did you do to Toby? Because either something’s going on, or he’s been attacked by a vacuum cleaner.”
Clemence tries to keep a poker face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She really doesn’t. Mostly.
Crampton actually cracks a smile. “I have to say that you’ve impressed me.
Your nerve at demanding to reorganize my bookstore was really something, but that you’ve somehow compelled Toby to be intimate with another human being.
” She shakes her head in amazement. “They should give out prizes for that.”
Clemence is not sure how to take this, if Crampton is mocking Toby, but also is it so far-fetched that Toby might find Clemence desirable? He’d practically dragged her into the closet. She feels like telling Crampton this, but restrains herself. “I like Toby,” is all she says.
And Crampton says, “Then you’re smarter than I first took you for, because Toby is brilliant, and gentle, and good. The world needs to be a kinder place for strange people. So many of us would benefit. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t.”
“Toby’s not so strange,” Clemence says, if only to be polite.
Crampton says, “Then you don’t know him yet.
He only gets stranger the more that you do, but beyond that sickly exterior, he’s got the most surprising vitality.
And you must be a fairly substantial person yourself if he’s put his book down.
” Looking at Clemence narrowly now. “He did put his book down, right?”
“He did.”
Crampton’s tiny eyes actually sparkle with glee, and she rubs her hands like an evil sprite. “And so this is the reason I let you put your poster in my window,” she says, “even in violation of a decades-old grudge. I don’t violate my grudges for just anybody, you know.”
That weekend Clemence is forced to take an afternoon off from her usual practice of lounging in her daybed eating apple slices and blue cheese off a chipped china plate while fantasizing about her body being ravaged by someone who is kind of Toby, but a little more John Keats, complete with Charles Yeung’s biceps.
She’s currently steeped in the erotic poetry translation, and she’s actually glad to have a reason to shift her mind to other things, although her sister’s twins’ fourth birthday party probably wouldn’t have been the diversion she would have chosen.
But the birthday party is the diversion she has, and it’s such common knowledge her days are wide open that she could hardly make excuses.
“I would prefer to stay home alone with my filthy thoughts” wouldn’t go over well, and while filthy thoughts are a movable feast, it’s impossible to think most of them in the midst of a children’s birthday party.
When Clemence arrives home again at the end of the day, she will write three paragraphs about how remarkable it is that the presence of one’s siblings’ offspring can quell any urges toward activities that lead to reproduction.
But right now in the middle of the party, she’s been fixed up with sangria, so she’s doing all right, and with so many grandchildren to occupy her, Clemence’s mother leaves her alone.
The children are risking their lives on a bouncy castle that’s been squeezed into Grace and Allison’s tiny backyard, their screams at ear-splitting levels, and Clemence’s dad is sitting beside her, but she’d have to yell to talk to him, so she doesn’t, and they both prefer it this way, the only peace for miles around.
Bonnie and Prudence are hiding bags of candy for a treasure hunt, and they’re arguing because Prudence’s kids aren’t supposed to have sugar and so she wants to hide the treasures too well.
And Grace and Allison are arguing because this is what happens whenever they have people over, Grace getting all stressed out and anxious, ending up yelling at everyone, which nobody minds too much because Allison is a professional caterer, so the hors d’oeuvres alone are worth it.
Even if Allison smokes, that remarkable thing, and Clemence is always a little afraid she’s going to uncover a bit of cigarette ash dropped in her sausage roll.
Jarvis has shimmied up the top of the bouncy castle now, and is perched on the roof, which Clemence suspects isn’t meant to be part of the play area, but no one’s going to call him out, not just because it’s his birthday, but because his parents don’t believe in constraining their children’s spirits.
“The most dangerous thing a child can be exposed to is too much ‘Be careful,’” is one of Grace’s favourite axioms, also convenient because it serves as a dig at Bonnie, who was a very nervous mother.
And this is why Clemence decides to get up and distract Bonnie before she realizes what Jarvis is up to, partly to keep the peace but also because she is tempted to screech, “Be careful!” herself.
Putting down her glass, she takes Bonnie by the elbow, leading her inside, out of one chaos into another kind, because there is music blasting from the living room, that incessant song about a horse on the old town road.
She locates the speaker and turns the volume down, just as her mother says, “So you’re seeing someone.”
Clemence is caught off guard. “How did you know?” she asks, instead of denying outright, which would have been more accurate, anyway, because it’s not like she and Toby have some kind of formal arrangement.
“Seeing somebody” implies a person she isn’t kissing the dark, someone who isn’t Toby and so prone to rashes and outbreaks, which she can’t explain in a way her mother would understand.
And then Prudence walks in as this exchange is happening, just to make everything more complicated.
“I knew it!” she screeches, clutching her virgin cocktail to her burgeoning belly whose burgeoningness is so unremarkable after all these years.
And Clemence is sometimes grateful that her sister is always pregnant, because of how it takes attention away from the fact that Clemence never will be.
Fingers crossed. Her favourite thing about no longer being married is that nobody asks about it anymore.
Prudence easing her body down onto the couch—she’s already huge, and she has months to go. “Spill the beans,” she instructs.
But there are no beans. Not really. “I mean, it’s complicated.” It always is for Clemence, her family expecting her stories to map onto their preconceived notions of how a woman’s life should go, but Clemence keeps disrupting the narrative. “I’m not seeing somebody exactly.”
“Polyamory!” Prudence claps her hands in delight. “Sandro called it. He saw the whole thing a mile off. He and Mom had a bet.”
“A bet?”
“Not about polyamory,” says Bonnie, who’s made visibly uncomfortable by the word. “He said you looked like you were in love.”
“He said you looked like you were getting boned,” Prudence corrects her. “Sandro is usually right about these things. He said it’s in the complexion. So who are they?”
“They?”
“Your, um, partners,” says Bonnie, who finds the vocabulary awkward, but will embrace her daughters’ happiness wherever and with whomever they find it. She just doesn’t want to be left out of the loop.
“Tell us why you’re glowing, Clem,” urges Prudence.
And should she tell them it’s oily fish? Coupled with plenty of sleep? Or should she tell them it’s Toby, though she’s sure it’s not that. The only thing Toby has done to her skin is to irritate where the parts of his beard he missed shaving had rubbed against her neck.
“It’s not really anything,” she tells them, but they don’t believe her.
She imagines if she’d brought Toby with her, what they’d make of him.
What he’d make of them, how long he might last in the midst of this chaos.
Toby is impossibly incongruous. She cuts her mother off before she goes to speak again, “And I promise it’s not polyamory.
” One Toby is enough. But her mother and Prudence are waiting, demanding to know more.
“It’s this guy who works with me at the bookshop.
But I mean, it’s nothing. We kissed once.
And that was all.” But yes, the whole experience has been running through her mind on a film reel ever since then. “No one’s getting boned,” she promises.
“Maybe no one’s getting boned yet,” says Prudence. “It’s like Sandro has a sixth sense sometimes.”
“Well, he is European,” offers Bonnie, thoughtfully. “And now I owe him twenty dollars.”
“I think it’s healthy,” says Prudence, as they all get up and move into the kitchen to help with the cake. “It’s good that you’re starting to move on from—”
Don’t mention Toad, Clemence telepaths to her sister, who must get the message because her words trail off.
Good. Clemence doesn’t want their mother to ask if she’s been in touch with Toad yet, and she’s actually glad she hasn’t been, because doesn’t that prove that Clemence left him behind months and miles ago?
That she has moved on? Why must she be getting boned in order for everyone to see that?
Especially when she has so much else to show for how far she’s come since then?
In the kitchen, Allison is assembling a seven-layer cake made of rainbow stripes, scraping off the icing on the side in a deconstructed style.
“Now that’s different,” says Bonnie under her breath, which is what she always says when anybody varies from the motherhood practices she set in stone in the late 1980s.
Bonnie’s fancy birthday cakes were those with coins wrapped in wax paper baked inside.
She’d had to stop when it was one of Prudence’s kids’ birthdays and somebody swallowed a dime.
And because Juniper and Jarvis are twins, there are actually two seven-layer rainbow cakes, lit with sparklers, and Clemence is called up to carry the other one outside.
Holding the cake out beyond her so the sparkler doesn’t spark in her face, or set her hair on fire, but the cake is heavy and awkward, and she doesn’t want to drop it, and how does anybody manage to hold it all and not get burned?