Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 15
No dreams at breakfast
April 30
Thirty days hath. Month end. At the store, in the name of food safety and public health and so on, we do a daily date check of all the items in the dairy cases and pull anything that’s two days before its “best before date.” Shortly, I’ll walk the three blocks to the store and gossip a bit with whoever the other early arrivers and scan the shelves with removal in mind and anything bearing the sell-by of May 2 will get hoisted and sent to the food bank. There’s a jolly Irish woman who turns up every morning round about 8 and collects the big red totes that we fill with superannuated discards: still lots of life left in them, of course, those best-before dates are extremely conservative, a bane, and a contributor to food waste. She’s about my age, the food bank lady, is funny and blustery and loquacious. She sorts through the bins, takes whatever is takeable, which is most of it. She thinks my name is John, which is fine by me. She’s called me John for so long now that that there’s no point or reason in correcting her. If ever there were a question that merited the answer “nothing,” it would be, in this regard, “What could matter less?”
End of April and there’s enough light in the sky by 5 a.m. that I could read by it while walking to work, were I so inclined. I’m not. I have a friend in Winnipeg who’s an ambulatory reader, quite famous for it in the neighbourhoods through which he circulates, at a clip, nose in a book, somehow aware of what’s around him, never known to come to grief on a curb or trip on cracked pavement. In some Miriam Toews novel — oh, dear, which? — there’s a character who does the same, and we take it as an article of faith that he owes his origin to my walking / reading friend.
End of April and the skunk who dens at the end of our parking lot will be having her babies soon, assuming she found a mate; I think she did, there was what I took to be a gentleman caller hanging around a month or so back. Kits, that’s what they’re called, wee skunks. Whether it’s the same skunk, or whether it’s someone who took over the lease from last year’s tenant, and the year before, I can’t say. The site of the den is a hole that accommodates a gas pipe and meter fixture. It doesn’t look to me like a glamorous birthing suite, not an ideal place to rear young ones; then again, who am I to judge? I’m childless. I’ll go to work soon, and if I’m lucky I’ll see, by the dawn’s early light, the skunk on her rounds, rooting for grubs, eating for six, cautious, not eager for social contact, ready to defend herself, should it be required. Now and again comes a tell-tale, middle of the night blast: her one and only trick, the party piece no one wants her to perform.
I have only one distinguishing gift — future obituarists should here take note — which is that if there is a skunk to be smelled, I will be the first person in the room, the park, the car, to grab it out of the air. My palate is otherwise blunt, I can’t tell the cardamom from the cinnamon from the mace, but to the whiff of skunk I am exquisitely attuned. Skunks are also the animals about which I’m inclined to dream; they’re totemic. If my subconscious, for whatever reason, feels the need to slot in a creature, it’s a skunk who gets called by central casting. I have no idea why this should be so. The brain has its reasons.
There’s not much in this world that can coax me to envy, but I do feel a twinge when boyfriend Billy tells me his dreams. His are remarkable, technicolour, detailed, often involving the gift of flight. They take him to otherworldly environments, elaborate futuristic cities, some subaquatic, some built in the crowns of tropical forests, and they are inhabited by a cast of friends and strangers, all imaginatively costumed; often there’s a soundtrack, original music. He remembers these, can speak of them in great detail. His is a rich inner life. Me, I dream of skunks and, sometimes, of looking for milk bottles with worrying dates.
Now and again, it’s true, something a bit more striking comes along. Yesterday morning, for example, my 3 a.m. alarm interrupted a dream about Margaret Atwood who, as a public figure, probably works her way into the REM reels of many of our fellow citizens, rather like the Queen. In my dream — and yes, you knew this was coming, I’m going to tell you — she was in her early 20’s, and of Amazonian proportions, broad-shouldered, tall, about 6” 5.’ Her hair was remarkable, lavish and long and coiled, she was a viking Medusa getting through college on a basketball scholarship. Our encounter took place in a cafeteria, clinically dull. She entered this refectory holding to her chest, like breastplate armour, a book, hardcover, the title not visible, but I understood, in the way one does in one’s dreams, that it was her own work, her most recent writing. I wanted to approach her — she was on one side of the room, I on the other — and needed only cross the floor, describe an easy diagonal. The view shifted to an overhead pan. From this optic, I could see there was no easy path to get to Margaret Atwood. The cafeteria was, in fact, a maze. We had eye contact via a view corridor. She looked at me and said — whether this was spoken or telepathic, I’m not sure —“If you want to get here, you have to get here.” This was disappointing. What kind a Delphic statement is that? It’s not enigmatic, not gnomic, just dead dull. My alarm went off. That was that. I never got there. It was ever thus.
I bet Margaret Atwood has great dreams. I know Mavis Gallant, MG, did. Whether MG kept a specific dream journal I can’t say, but certainly she was interested in dreams, more than casually, and kept track of some of her more significant oneiric adventures in her diaries: she recounts them in several of the extracts she published over the years in Antaeus, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Queen’s Quarterly. They come up in her stories as well, quite often. In the dark and unsettling and Grimm-coloured “Jorinda and Jorindel,” collected in Home Truths, young Irmgard — safe to say, the MG stand-in — has a gift for dreaming and wants to tell them to her jazz-age, incompetent parents for whom she’s a kind of pet, an inconvenience. Her father, though, shuts her down. No dreams at breakfast, please, he says and for once, her mother agrees.
“Nothing as dreary as a dream… I think we might make a rule on that: no dreams at breakfast. Otherwise, it gets to be a habit.”
Irmgard wakes from her dream — it’s of her cousin, Bradley, and of cracked sidewalks bristling with ribbon grass — and enters a waking world of an after-party morning: gin-scented hangers-on are still in the house. This is also a kind of dream, a predictive look at the waiting world of adulthood, a world governed by people who can easily overlook or dismiss the risks and hazards of childhood, can brush off accounts of its nearly fatal encounters as imaginings, or dreams. Not that’s it necessarily unpleasant in its entirety, of course. I read about Irmgard and her parents and I remember how I used to love coming downstairs on the mornings after my parents had entertained, finding the traces of what they’d all been up to, the physical connection to the sounds and the laughter that had drifted up through the hot-air vents along with the cigarette smoke. Bowls with chip remnants, tumblers marked with lipstick, an ashtray still unemptied. One of the reasons we read is for the surprise of these connections, for the tripwires, the small bursts of memory, the brain disgorging what you didn’t know it contained. This off-gassing, sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, is unreliable, unsuitable as evidence, unadmissible. What we think we remember might also be contaminated by invention and longing and, sure, the tailings of dreams. Which isn’t to say it’s not compelling, even directive. That dream that Vera — sent from home as far away as possible to have and to give away her baby — describes in “Virus X,” the dream of the dark and pathless forest, the dream of the lost child — sent me down an unexpected corridor. I remembered someone long-absent from my thoughts, with whom I’d had no contact for almost 50 years, a friend from school, who’d had a baby at 15. That she was absent from school was remarked, the reason was known, but it was never spoken of, never addressed, it was like a dream at breakfast, not relatable. This was protocol, then, how it was handled, cold and cruel and pragmatic. Cone of silence. She left for a while and she endured what she endured and she returned. She was changed, was marked, but also resilient, defiant. She looked straight ahead as she walked down the hallway, took up her place in the high school band without missing a beat. The past was the past, what was done was done, she got on with things. Many, many years later, in an entirely other place, talking with a friend of a friend of a friend, someone I knew not at all, never met again, we were comparing high school notes. I mentioned the name of my alma mater. He told me his brother — someone in another city — had, at a young age, married a girl from that high school, but the marriage had ended after a few months when he had come home and found his new wife’s lover, quite literally, escaping half-dressed out the window. Of course I asked her name. Of course you can guess who it was. She was an adventurer, always.
Reading stirs things up. Vera abandons her baby and dreams of a forest and I remember my high school friend and I think to do what I’d never done and googled her name. Her obituary appeared right away; she’s almost ten years dead. I’d had no idea. Why would I have known? It was a beautiful account of a life that was energetic and rich with friends and far-flung travels and satisfying work and music and engaging hobbies and a loving husband who had to work to keep up her, and a short illness. Doctors were acknowledged. No children were named. It was a tender, true telling of an eventful time on earth and, of course, as any such recapping will be, it was selective, incomplete. I sat for a while with this, remembered what I could, filled in a few gaps, but not with an airtight wadding. What I remember from so long ago has about it the quality of a dream. It was only as I was about to hit close and leave the screen that I took in her death date: August 11. MG’s birthday. Also mine. A meaningless coincidence. Still, a shudder. She lived freely, my friend; impertinent of me to call her that, though it was true, once upon a time. She exercised her agency. She did as she pleased as she passed through the world, and that is bound to excite disapprobation from certain quarters. MG, I feel sure, who valued personal freedom and independence above all else, would have approved. MG, I’ll venture to guess, who looked for signs, who paid them mind, would have sensed a kind of kinship that the random, semi-tragic death day / birthday dovetailing would have bolstered. It means nothing until you want it to mean everything. This is what comes to us, unbidden, from reading. You can prescribe these connections, can’t predict them. They’re found money, a lucky chance, a moment, come and gone. For a second, you can see your way through the maze. An alarm goes off. You look around. The room is empty of ghosts. You get on with whatever you need to get on with. For me, it’s milk, and Food Bank Mary, for whom I am, and will be forevermore, John. Thanks for reading. xo, B