The professor from Drama and Philosophy left the store almost forty-eight minutes ago, and Edith has no idea what she bought, but she estimates that all the other female professors who have published books wear long cardigans like this, or unstructured blazers that drop past the hips, or skirts that fall below the knee. Patterned blouses. She has never managed to dress au courant. She imagines she would be happier in the 1920s housewife clothes Beulah wore. Dresses recycled from sturdy, sprightly patterned flour sacks. A single, Sunday-best dress for special occasions. Her outfits always morph into ill-fitting costumes once she rolls her car up to the university campus, sits through meetings, pontificates in classrooms. But this year will be different. This year she will look like everyone else. With a book, she will be like everyone else. And finally Beulah will get her due and eventually settle into her place in the Canadian literary canon. This year will be perfect.
She tugs a credit card from her wallet, deposits the ironed folds on the counter, their buttons ticking on the glass. Her watch bangs the glass too: 3:03 p.m. This afternoon is drifting away from her.
A pair of fake pearl earrings, each pearl the size of a knuckle, perches on an oily faux-satin ball under the glass of the counter.
– I’ll need those too, she says. She taps her credit card on the glass. – And this scarf. Please.
She twitches a scarf from a stand on the counter, it waterfalls into her hands. She smiles at the clerk. The clerk shows Edith her teeth.
She could perhaps wear the scarf, an airy tulle thing with harlequin diamonds, around her neck. The pattern moves her, the cloudiness. But she never wears scarves. At best she might twirl around with it exactly once in her bedroom, pretending she’s Josephine Baker. But then it will likely just go in a drawer. Or she’ll tie it around the handle of the small suitcase she takes to conferences.
She needs the proper clothes to start the academic new year right. Her new psychologist told her to try it. – They don’t call it retail therapy for nothing, said Vivianne. – Back-to-school shopping isn’t just beneficial for children, she said, her voice rich and nutritious as an avocado on the other end of the line.
Edith has never met Vivianne in person, but she imagines her as an older black woman, with elaborate grey braids, round and wise as a fir tree. An older version of Beulah, but contemporary. Silver drop earrings. Or old Roman coins. A stuffed owl on a perch in the background.
Edith will continue filling out her Academic Achievement Overview and finish her third course outline tonight. Also write the first draft of an abstract for a conference she should attend next year.
Next Edith will buy shoes from Hangaku even though they don’t look that comfortable, verging on too architectural for human feet. All the fashionable female professors wear Hangakus. The distinctive hourglass-shaped heels. Edith learned about them last year when she finally broke down and asked a history professor in line at the IT help desk what they were. She scribbled the name down on the edge of a student’s essay, ripped the corner off the paper, and stuck it with a magnet to the fridge.
– Clothing is how you want the world to see you, said Vivianne. – See me, your clothes say. Look at who I am.
Edith will tighten up her marshmallow body too; she’s signed up for a Wednesday night Ballet for Beginners class at a ballet studio near her house, and she will do some kind of exercise at least once a week. Vivianne suggested she try a scheduled, regular fitness class to encourage her to balance her work and life. When Edith told Vivianne she enrolled in a hatha yoga class some years ago, bought a mat and everything, but thought it made her too twitchy and worried about inadvertently farting, Vivianne told her to try a class that didn’t seem like exercise and didn’t happen in a gym. Like a ballet class with the Inivea City Ballet Company. Or scuba diving.
Edith said, – I like watching ballet. I like to swim.
Vivianne said, – Excellent! So swim your heart out. The negative ions in the water will stimulate your happiness centre. The University of Inivea has an Olympic-calibre swimming pool, so you could slip in a swim before or after your day.
– But there’s never any time.
Vivianne cleared her throat, turned pages. No doubt in a notebook she uses to write down assessments of her patients. No doubt Vivianne’s fingers starred with silver rings and turquoise rectangles. A hippie earth goddess with multiple PhDs who begins each morning with a hundred fervent sun salutations.
– There’s time for anything if you make time, said Vivianne. – Time is an illusion. Think about the metaphors. Time spent, lost, wasted, behind the times, passing, keeping time. Time being made. What’s something you like to make, Edith?
– I like to … when I was a teenager I used to like making … matrimonial squares.
– Make your time the way you would make matrimonial squares. Time is your tool. Delicious.
– Time is my tool, Edith repeated. – Delicious.
– Time doesn’t own you. You own time.
– I own time.
– Yes!
– Yes.
– Make the time. Eat the time.
– Make the time. Eat the time … like matrimonial squares.
– You own yourself.
– I own myself.
Once upon a time, Edith’s PhD supervisor, Lesley Hughes, said, I own you. But that was a long time ago. And of course Lesley lied. Edith blots out the thought.
Vivianne always told Edith to forget about Lesley. Edith would fret about Lesley becoming an Endowed Chair at the university, worrying about how she would cope with being in the same room, the same building, as Lesley, day after day.
– That’s a history best left interred, Vivianne’s voice would cluck from the phone. – Move on with your life. Let Lesley move on with hers. You are a Philosophiae Doctor. You have tenure. You are not her puppet. She is not your puppet master. Bulldoze away that room. There. We’ve bulldozed it.
In her brand-new Hangakus with their hourglass heels, Edith stilt-walks past the Victorian lotion and the caramel corn shops without stopping, wobbles past the escalator leading up to the rows and boring rows of white and stainless steel refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, and dryers, her hand swinging a cloth bag with its P. T. Madden logo, another bag with the Hangaku brand swirl holding her old loafers, her wrists smelling like imaginary gardens. She bought a bottle of the perfume that smells like vanilla pudding too, so her neck smells new. She attempts to stride, swinging her bags, like a proud professor, about to swing into a new academic year. Bold, brilliant, and fresh as a girl in a tampon commercial.
The shoes still stiff, she admits, the odd heels like walking with spurs. But all shoes need some breaking in, right?
She piles her bags into the Taurus.
Riding a wave of self-congratulation, she tops up the gas tank at the Novacrest station at the east end of the mall parking lot, the clicks of the litre indicator matching the clicks of happy retail-therapy self-righteousness. Her credit card bloats just a little bit.
She revs around the concrete silos of the shopping centre parking lot to the ramp leading onto the highway, her right Hangaku heel digging in, her car bullying its way into belligerent traffic. She motors past the campus, past Crawley Hall, barely registering its brutalist gloom. She drives five more minutes, then clicks to turn left toward the thicket of brand-new condominiums where she lives.
On her quilted bedspread at home, the P. T. Madden bag crinkles as she slides out the clothes in their tissue paper envelopes. She unfolds the first envelope. She holds the navy-blue flowers up to the fading afternoon light through the window.
Sweet