To Do List

"She wants to, you know, dear--your mother always wants to see you, [...] But look at her list---just for this morning!" the secretary continued, handing over a tall morocco-framed tablet, on which was inscribed, in the colourless secretarial hand:  

"7.30 Mental uplift. 7.45 Breakfast.  8. Psycho-analysis. 8.15 See cook. 8.30 Silent Meditation. 8.45 Facial Massage. 9. Man with Persian Miniatures. 9.15 Correspondence. 9.30 Manicure. 9.45 Eurythmic exercises. 10. Hair waved. 10.15 Sit for bus. 10.30 Receive Mothers' Day deputation. 11. Dancing lesson.  11.30 Birth Control committee at Mrs. --------"

----Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (1927)

 Taken from the very first page of Wharton's novel, Mrs. Manford's busy day typifies modernity.  The "birth control committee"meeting sounds especially fun, which is why I have created an entirely new category here on The Bee Dance just for this one element of this fictional to-do list.  For other interesting to-do lists, see the To Do List blog, which "celebrates the world of the overlooked and the mundane." 

The Little Burst

Today's lengthy selections are devoted to a scene taken from the short story, "A Little Burst," included in Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize winning collection of stories, Olive Kitteridge.   The stories focus on the life of a retired schoolteacher in coastal Maine.  A 21st century counterpart  to Sarah Orne Jewett's late nineteenth century stories about the changes of the once familiar coastal communities of Maine in the aftermath of the Civil War, Strout's collection documents change, loss,  and disappointment as well as life's unexpected tendernesses.  Much like Jewett's unconventional heroine from The Country of the Pointed Firs, Mrs. Todd, Strout's own heroine looms large, literally and physically.  She is a formidable and yet comforting presence in the collection, which is told not only from her perspective, but from those whose lives are entwined with hers.   In the best of the regionalist tradition, we grasp the importance of perspective from the collection's own shifting viewpoints, which position Olive at center-stage as well as on the periphery.  (This aspect of the collection reminds me a bit of Jewett's Strangers and Wayfarers).  In this story, Olive introduces a theory about life that she describes as  "big bursts" and "little bursts":

 Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents.   Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

Yet this wholesome definition of the "little burst" is soon revised when Olive is at her son's wedding and she overhears her new daughter-in-law (the perfectionist therapist, "Dr. Suzanne Bernstein, MD PhD")  making fun of her flowered dress and critiquing her parenting of Christopher.   Crushed, she retreats to the couple's bedroom. Snooping in the closet and drawers, she is further humiliated by Sue's petite clothing, which only reminds her of her own large physique. Soon, however, she discovers a way of diminishing Dr. Sue: 

Olive slides open the top drawer of the bureau.  Once a place for a boy's sock and T-shirts, the drawer is now filled with her daughter-in-law's underwear---tumbled together, slippery, lacy, colorful things.  Olive tugs on a strap and out comes a shiny pale blue bra, small-cupped and delicate.  She turns it slowly in her thick hand, then balls it up and pokes it down into her roomy handbag. 

Then, she marks a sweater: 

The beige sweater is thick, and this is good, because it means the girl won't wear it until fall.  Olive unfolds it quickly and smears a black line of Magic Marker down one arm.  Then she holds the marker in her mouth and refolds the sweater hurriedly, folding it again, and even again, to get it as neat as it was at first.

And finally she steals just one shoe, satisfied that in introducing chaos into her daughter-in-law's life, that she will subject her to the common denominator of self-doubt:   

It does not help much, but it does help some, to know that at least there will be moments now when Suzanne will doubt herself.  Calling out, "Christopher, are you sure you haven't seen my shoe?  Looking through the laundry, her underwear drawer, some anxiety will flutter through her.  "I must be losing my mind, I can't keep track of anything....And my God, what happened to my sweater?"   And she would never know, would she?  Because who would mark a sweater, steal a bra, take one shoe?

The story ends with a sharp revision of the earlier notion of a "little burst." As it turns out, life's little lifts are not simply a matter of human kindness, but are equally produced by our  less magnaminous acts--our attempts to correct and compensate, even devilishly, for life's injustices:

 As a matter of fact, there is no reason, if Dr. Sue is going to live near Olive, that Olive can't occasionally take a little of this, a little of that---just to keep the self-doubt alive.  Give herself a little burst.  Because Christopher doesn't need to be living with a woman who thinks she knows everything.  Nobody knows everything--they shouldn't think they do."

---Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge (2008)

Damn straight.

Every Party Has a Pooper

"But my dear sir," cried Mr. Weston, "if Emma comes away early, it will be breaking up the party."

"And no great harm if it does," said Mr. Woodhouse, "The sooner every party breaks up, the better."

           ----Jane Austen, Emma (1815)


It's hard to argue with this.