Memory, Grief, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 24

Cold tea is cold comfort

May 11, 2.54 a.m.

Bad night. Every 15 minutes or so the smoke alarm lets go with a loud, anxious cheep, like a fledgling bird, hungry in the nest. WTF? Am I meant to chow down on whatever is in the fridge (not much), then regurgitate the mess into its mouth? Which is where, exactly? Every quarter hour, on the regular, it issues its demands. This really gets in the way of restorative REM sleep. Were there smoke in the room, it would be one thing; but there is not. So, what gives? What can it possibly want, what are its requirements, what need is it expressing, the alarm, with its short, sharp yelps, its shrill ejaculations? Also, why is this happening? It must be that the batteries are running low, that this is the only way it can express its concern that I am at risk of spontaneous combustion, like poor Krook, the boozy rag dealer in Bleak House. The only other plausible explanation is that, after four years of cohabitation, two of them during Pandemic, the alarm has come to see me as an object of desire and is sending signals. “Oh, baby. You are HOT, you are SMOKING HOT. I want to take you in my arms, oh wait, I don’t have any arms. I want to - I want to - beep, beep, beep.”

I think not. This is what comes of insufficient sleep.

Up at midnight, standing on the piano bench, trying to muffle the inconvenient klaxon with what I have on hand, which would be duct tape and bath towels, aware the whole while that this is exactly the kind of enterprise against which we’re warned by advocates of industrial safety, that this is a classic recipe for death by domestic mishap. I rolled out of bed dressed for work, not dressed to die, not done up in a way that would best suit being found on the worn parquet, cold and akimbo. Not to make light. Falling is a terrible thing. Nothing makes you realize more quickly how vulnerable you are, have always been, how much you’ve taken the vertical for granted than the sudden imposition of the horizontal. What could be more morally neutral than gravity? To lie there, like a beetle on its back under a streetlight, desperately trying to upright itself and get on with whatever had been its beetley business and with no one to blame but yourself, with no thought to think other than — if only. Or repeating the old familiar self-accusatory litanies: how stupid, how like me. One wrong move, one slight misstep. All it takes. This happens, of course. It happens all the time. It happens to people who are old and stubbornly live alone, which sums me up as well as anything. It’s one of the good things about having books all over the floor, at least there’d be something to read. Reach out and grab whatever the volume. What’s this? Please don’t let it be the Bible. Oh, good. It’s Mavis Gallant! MG! That’s a surprise. Look, it’s From the Fifteenth District, always a reliable go-to when comfort is most required, specific as it is to all ills and conditions. Open it up and read about Carmella, maybe, the observant hired girl in MG’s “The Four Seasons,” who sees to the daily needs of the daft, Bohemian, Mussolini-loving Unwin family.

As for her room, it was off the pantry, almost higher than long, with a tiled floor and a good view, if one wanted that. Someone had died there — a relative of Mrs. Unwins; he had come for a long visit and had been found on the tiles with an electric bell switch in his hand.

“A peaceful death,” said Mrs. Unwin, utterly calmly, talking as if Carmella would need to know the history of the place. “Not even time to ring.”

… Carmella felt the sad presence of the poor relation who had come ailing to a good climate and had been put in the meanest room; who had choked, panicked, grabbed for the bell and fallen on it…

Or else maybe it would open of its own accord, as books will to pages often read, to “The Moslem Wife,” and the section where Jack’s mother, dotty Vera, who is Netta’s aunt (she and Jack are cousins), and with whom Netta will get stuck during the long confinement of the war, is found on the ground, in the garden, underneath her window.

In her fall she had crushed the plants, the yellow minted giroflees de Nice. Netta thought that she was now, at last, for the first time, inhaling one of the smells of death. Her aunt’s arms and legs were turned and twisted; her skirt was pulled so that her swollen leg showed. It seemed that she had jumped carrying her walking stick—it lay across the path. She often slept in an armchair, afternoons, with one eye slightly open. She opened that eye now and, seeing she had Netta, said, ‘My son.’

Anyway, as I was saying, the better to facilitate early rising I’ve taken to retiring in the clothes I’ll wear to the store come morning. It sounds sordid — perhaps because it is — but it’s a great time saver and also undetectable. The first time you do it you worry, perhaps, that someone will notice, will judge. But notice what, precisely? It’s not as though I wear crease-prone garments to go stock shelves, it’s not as though I’m turning up in a linen shirt that’s going to give the game away. All I need to do to escape notice at work — here I address the question of wardrobe — is to avoid contravening the dress code, which prohibits facial piercings, loud patterns, stylishly ripped jeans, and conspicuous logos. All slogans are also banned. The dress code is a fairly recent imposition from on high, and at the staff meeting where it was explained to us, and we were asked if we had any questions, I raised my hand, inquired if I would still be allowed to wear my underwear that says “Home of the Whopper.” No one laughed. Honestly. It can be hard being me.

I can get away with Cold Tea t-shirt: it’s black, the logo is discreet, and mostly it’s obscured by my grocer’s apron. No one will notice or take offence. Cold Tea is a dim sum restaurant in Vancouver and it’s the last place I was fired from. From which I was fired. I’d secured a job there as a dishwasher — this was just before pandemic, and — bad timing — Cold Tea was just about to open. Everything about it was wrong — wrong for me, I mean, not for the restaurant, I think it’s still open and doing well. I hope so. The owners were enthusiastic and the menu was interesting, innovative, and everyone loves dim sum, but for a variety of reasons — the volume of the work, the state of the kitchen, an absence of sympathy with Chef — is there another profession where the article is ritually dropped? No one ever says, Please come in, Accountant will see you now — it just wasn’t going to work out. I knew it, they knew it, someone had to say it, and when I arrived for work on day 3, they said, kindly but firmly, it would be best if I simply didn’t bother clocking in. This message might have been delivered on the phone earlier in the day, I might have been spared the public humiliation of getting sacked on site, but it was as it was. I made my way around the kitchen, I said goodbye to everyone I’d worked with, I made my way home. That was a kind of fall, the fall of the mighty. When you’ve been fired as a dishwasher, well, buddy, you’re exploring the depths. On the other hand, it’s a really hard job. Not everyone is suited to it, and not everyone is suited to every situation. Like everything else, it’s show business, and brutality is its oxygen. I like to wear the Cold Tea T-shirt to remind myself how lucky I am to have found a place where I can be upright, in my person, my bearing, my spirits; also to remind myself not to take myself too seriously, but to proceed with caution. Stumbles are easy. They have consequences. At this age, especially.

Now, it had been my intention here to continue the story of Mildred Wood, which I began yesterday. Mildred — I wonder if her friends and family called her Millie? — was the fiction editor at The New Yorker who first saw the worth in an MG short story, and so began a long career, and a long professional association with the magazine, and with William Maxwell. In yesterday's diary entry I told about what I’d learned about Mildred from the few embers that glow when you huff on the public record. I found out about her tangential connection to some really fascinating family stories, stories that pertain to her in-laws, and those were today’s intended fodder. Quite what small misstep sent my collection of digital clippings into the ether I can’t say. Whatever curb I’d built around them was insufficient. Some truck rolled by when I wasn’t looking, veered off the pavement, and took them all out. One small misstep is all it takes. Anyway, I put myself before you, prostrate — I hope that’s the word, I have a long history of mixing it up with prostate — on the floor, but still able to rise. I’ll gather them up from their sources, and try again tomorrow. Sometimes, we fail.

That first story, the one in which Mildred saw something, was not, by the way, accepted. MG got a note back saying, “Not this, send something else.” Her reply was the ticket for a forty year ride. Most writers — I am one of them — have careers larded with rejection. MG did not. A notable exception was her novella “The Pegnitz Junction,” which The New Yorker turned down, saying — this is what she told interviewers — that it was a mess, unsalvageable. But it was, she said, the work she cherished most, that meant the most to her, the story she wrote because it pleased her to write it, because she wrote it for herself. I’m sure that’s so, but I’d also be willing to bet that rejection stung. It hurts to be misunderstood. It hurts when you stick your head above the parapet, when you show yourself for who you are, who you have become, and all anyone wants is for you to go back to being who you were. It’s confidence sapping to lie there, to have everyone looking down, to know that they’re wondering, Jumped or fell?

Well.

This has been cheerful.

4.33. The smoke detector, at least, has decided whatever the danger has passed. Time to splash some water on my face, purge my mouth of the night, and head into the store. There’ll be lots of ladder climbing, as there always is. One small misstep is all it takes. Wish me luck. At least I’m already dressed. Cold Tea, I’ll have you know, is cold comfort. Thanks for reading. xo B