Dressing Up for the Carnival Read Online Free Page B

she didn’t know. The notice in the New York Times had been tiny. Anyone could have missed it.
    It became suddenly important that I let her know about the prize. It was as strong as the need to urinate or swallow. How could I work it into the conversation?—maybe say something about Tom and how he was thinking of putting a new roof on our barn, and that the Offenden money would come in handy. Drop it in casually. Easily done.
    “Right!” she said heartily, letting me know she already knew. “Beginning, middle, end.” She grinned then.
    She talked about her “stuff,” by which she meant her writing. She made it sound like a sack of kapok. A magazine editor had commented on how much he liked her “stuff,” and how her kind of “stuff ” contained the rub of authenticity. There were always little linguistic surprises in her work, but more interesting to me were the bits of the world she brought to what she wrote, observations or incongruities or some sideways conjecture. She understood their value. “He likes the fact that my stuff is off-center and steers a random course,” she said of a fellow writer.
    “No beginnings, middles, and ends,” I supplied.
    “Right,” she said, “right.” She regarded me fondly as though I were a prize pupil. Her eyes looked slightly pink at the corners, but it may have been a reflection from the cloth which cut a sharp line across her forehead.
    I admire her writing. She claimed she had little imagination, that she wrote out of the material of her own life, but that she was forever on the lookout for what she called “putty.” By this she meant the arbitrary, the odd, the ordinary, the mucilage of daily life that cements our genuine moments of being. I’ve seen her do wonderful riffs on buttonholes, for instance, the way they shred over time, especially on cheap clothes. And a brilliant piece on beveled mirrors, and another on the smell of a certain set of wooden stairs from her childhood, wax and wood and reassuring cleanliness accumulating at the side of the story but not claiming any importance for itself.
    She looked sad over her coffee, older than I’d remembered—but weren’t we all?—and I could tell she was disappointed in me for some reason. It occurred to me I might offer her a piece of putty by telling her about the discovery I had made the day before, that shopping was not what I’d thought, that it could become a mission, even an art if one persevered. I had had a shopping item in mind; I had been presented with an unasked-for block of time; it might be possible not only to imagine this artefact, but to realize it.
    “How many boutiques did you say you went into?” she asked, and I knew I had interested her at last.
    “Twenty,” I said. “Or thereabouts.”
    “Incredible.”
    “But it was worth it. It wasn’t when I started out, but it became more and more worth it as the afternoon went on.”
    “Why?” she asked slowly. I could tell she was trying to twinkle a gram of gratitude at me, but she was closer to crying.
    “To see if it existed, this thing I had in mind.”
    “And it did.”
    “Yes.”
    To prove my point I reached into my tote bag and pulled out the pale, puffy boutique bag. I unrolled the pink tissue paper on the table and showed her the scarf.
    She lifted it against her face. Tears glinted in her eyes. “It’s just that it’s so beautiful,” she said. And then she said, “Finding it, it’s almost like you made it. You invented it, created it out of your imagination.”
    I almost cried myself. I hadn’t expected anyone to understand how I felt.
    I watched her roll the scarf back into the fragile paper. She took her time, tucking in the edges with her fingertips. Then she slipped the parcel into her plastic bag, tears spilling more freely now. “Thank you, darling Reta, thank you. You don’t know what you’ve given me today.”
    But I did, I did.
    But what does it amount to? A scarf, half an ounce of silk, maybe less,