Old Babes in the Wood

The terse short-story writers, the poets who never capitalized or punctuated—they came into existence via the telegraph, and now that the telegraph is done with, that sort of writing has mostly vanished too.

My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family we don’t say, “My heart is broken.” We say, “Are there any cookies?” One must eat. One must keep busy. One must distract oneself. But why? What for? For whom? “Are there any cookies?” she manages to croak out. “No,” Lizzie says. “But there’s chocolate. Let’s have some.” She knows that Nell’s heart

So, when and where was this sordid liaison supposed to have taken place?” “In 1967, in Ottawa.” “Well then. More and more improbable. Nobody has affairs in Ottawa.” “Oh, they do,” said Csilla. “Civil servants have them all the time. They do it out of boredom.” “But nobody goes there from somewhere else to have them. Why would they even consider it?

The late 1960s was a time of big domestic breakups: the so-called sexual revolution, post-pill, pre-AIDS. Young bearded hippies everywhere, girls in maxicoats, then long flower-child skirts and granny boots, acid and weed freely available, plus—later—other substances. It was as if the 1950s ideal family had swelled up like a water balloon and then

Twenty-five years ago, when she and Tig had still been young, though they hadn’t thought back then that they were young. Middle-aged. Past the halfway mark. Countdown days. Already they’d been making jokes about creaky knees. What did they know about creaky knees back then? They could still go hiking, for heaven’s sakes. When had that become imposs

Rigidity is the symptom of a limited mind, and was far too typical of many in the so-called intelligentsia of my day. They mistook fixed ideas for thought.

It’s another hot day so Lynne has moved a pedestal fan into the garden. Csilla looks as good as ever, in a pale flowered sundress with ruffled cap sleeves. Maybe not as good as ever, Lynne silently edits. As good as possible.

The cake basket is no longer in evidence. At some point during the years it has disappeared. Where it is now? Lurking in an antiques shop, in a flea market? A message from the past, waiting for someone to decipher it; but waiting vainly, like most such messages. Nell pictures it as a time capsule, shot into the future, a future of aliens; aliens of

Protective colouration, she called her outfits. She looked like a dependable mother from a respectable neighbourhood such as ours. As she worked at the kitchen counter, she might have been demonstrating a jiffy recipe in Good Housekeeping magazine—something with tomato aspic, this being the mid-1950s, when tomato aspic was a food group.