Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from Unless: A Novel by Carol Shields (©2002 by Carol Shields).

From my mother I developed my love of flowers. Their shapes came folded inside tiny seeds, so small that fifty of them filled the bottom of a flat seed packet. They were miraculously encoded from the beginning, little specks of dark matter that we shook into our hands, then sowed into flower beds. They sprouted, then opened out in a studied and careful program of increments. Now, that was astonishing, all those compressed unfoldings and burstings, but no one said so. No one made a fuss when the seeds actually performed: sprouts, leaves, the long rivery stems, and finally the intricacy of blossoms. I liked to tear the silk of the petals between my fingers, rubbing the pollen into my hands. “But that isn't nice, Reta,” my mother said. “Why would you want to hurt a beautiful flower?” I didn't believe this, that flowers hurt, but nevertheless I didn't do it again. I was the inept child searching for those moments of calm when I would find adult validation or at least respite from my endless uncertainty.

I once scratched the banister with a spoon. My mother rubbed it with butter, and the scratch went away. She had no idea I had done it, her little girl wouldn't do a thing like that. With great good nature they laughed when I said eggshells were made of plastic, and also when I asked my father if we could buy some icicles, long sculptured fingers of silvery ice that lasted all winter. “Our little Reta,” they said, laughing. I was afraid of drowning in their approval. There was nothing hard to hang on to.

I had no siblings, but I closely observed small babies who entered our house, the children of my parents' friends. There they lay, tiny, bundled, smelling like spoiled milk, wound tight in fleece blankets. From the beginning I saw that they possessed a patient evenness of curiosity that reduced and simplified the mysteries thronging our household. They didn't worry as I did about the halo around the head of the baby Jesus, what it was made of, what kept it hovering over his head and traveling along with him wherever he went. They put their small hands on the plastic-ribbed face of the radio in the kitchen and laughed at the vibrations that poured out. I could see that they accepted simple electrical transmission for what it was, whereas I had special knowledge available to me: I knew there were little people living inside the radio's shell, the obliging citizens of a miniature village that clung to a steep dark mountain.

It wasn't neglect that spawned the ignorance I was captive to. Adults were too busy to deliver complicated explanations. In fact, it was partly the busyness of my parents that frightened me, the frantic responsibility that preoccupied them. Their job was to keep us alive. It never occurred to them that I worried about the fact that I could see through my nose when I looked to the left or right, straight through, except for the fleshy blurred outline. And certainly neither of them stopped to express their own bafflement about the universe they inhabited, that they too might be swamped by barely grasped concepts. My slender, long-legged father patrolling the garden, leaning down to inspect an iris; he possessed a gardener's watchfulness and did not appear to reel with wonder at this serenely formal flower, that its cape and collar opened out of a tightly packed bulb, every part of it predestined and perfectly in place. He was a dealer in early Canadian pine furniture and as a sideline worked as a distressor; that is, he took modern limited editions of books and battered their pages and their boards into decent old age, giving them the tact and smell of history.

The moon followed me. When I staggered, seven years old, across the grass in the backyard, my head thrown back, willing myself to be dizzy, I could see how the moon lurched along with my every step, keeping me company as I advanced toward the peony bed. Why, out of all the people in the world, had I been chosen as the moon's companion? What did this mean? Honour, responsibility, blame, which?

I confided to my friend Charlotte this curious business about the moon. But she insisted that, on the contrary, the moon followed her. So back to back, at the end of the lane we paced off steps, she one way, I the other. Immediately I grasped the fact that the moon followed everyone. This insight came mostly as a relief, only slightly tarnished with disappointment.

The fact is, I didn't need to know everything and no one expected it of me in the first place.