Dressing Up for the Carnival Read Online Free Page A

photocopies of our work to these morning sessions, where over coffee and muffins—this was the age of muffins, the last days of the seventies— we kindly encouraged each other and offered tentative suggestions, such as “I think you’re one draft from being finished” or “Doesn’t character X enter the scene a little too late?” These critical crumbs were taken for what they were, the fumblings of amateurs. But when Gwen spoke we listened. Once she thrilled me by saying of something I’d written, “That’s a fantastic image, that thing about the whalebone. I wish I’d thought of it myself.” Her short fiction had actually been published in a number of literary quarterlies and there had even been one near-mythical sale, years earlier, to Harper’s . When she moved to Baltimore five years ago to become writer-in-residence for a small women’s college, our writers’ group fell first into irregularity, and then slowly died away.
    We’d kept in touch, though, the two of us. I wrote ecstatically when I happened to come across a piece of hers in Three Spoons which was advertised as being part of a novel-in-progress. She’d used my whalebone metaphor; I couldn’t help noticing and, in fact, felt flattered. I knew about that novel of Gwen’s—she’d been working on it for years—trying to bring a feminist structure to what was really a straightforward account of an early failed marriage. Gwen had made sacrifices for her young student husband, and he had betrayed her with his infidelities. In the early seventies, in the throes of love and anxious to satisfy his every demand, she had had her navel closed by a plastic surgeon because her husband complained that it smelled “off.” The complaint, apparently, had been made only once, a sour, momentary whim, but out of some need to please or punish she became a woman without a navel, left with a flattish indentation in the middle of her belly, and this navel-less state, more than anything, became her symbol of regret and anger. She spoke of erasure, how her relationship to her mother—with whom she was on bad terms anyway—had been erased along with the primal mark of connection. She was looking into a navel reconstruction, she’d said in her last letter, but the cost was criminal. In the meantime, she’d retaken her unmarried name, Reidman, and had gone back to her full name, Gwendolyn.
    She’d changed her style of dress too. I noticed that right away when I saw her seated at the Café Pierre. Her jeans and sweater had been traded in for what looked like large folds of unstitched, unstructured cloth, skirts and overskirts and capes and shawls; it was hard to tell precisely what they were. This cloth wrapping, in a salmon color, extended to her head, completely covering her hair, and I wondered for an awful moment if she’d been ill, undergoing chemotherapy and suffering hair loss. But no, there was a fresh, healthy, rich face. Instead of a purse she had only a lumpy plastic bag with a supermarket logo; that did worry me, especially because she put it on the table instead of setting it on the floor as I would have expected. It bounced slightly on the sticky wooden surface, and I remembered that she always carried an apple with her, a paperback or two, and her small bottle of cold-sore medication.
     
     
    Of course I’d written to her when My Thyme Is Up was accepted for publication, and she’d sent back a postcard saying, “Well done, it sounds like a hoot.”
    I was a little surprised that she hadn’t brought a copy for me to sign, and wondered at some point, halfway through my oyster soup, if she’d even read it. The college pays her shamefully, of course, and I know she doesn’t have money for new books. Why hadn’t I had Mr. Scribano send her a complimentary copy?
    It wasn’t until we’d finished our salads and ordered our coffee that I noticed she hadn’t mentioned the book at all, nor had she congratulated me on the Offenden Prize. But perhaps