Gill’s anthology rich in touchstones
TOO UNSPEAKABLE FOR WORDS: STORIES BY ROSALIND GILL BREAKWATER BOOKS $19.95 154 PAGES
This volume of 10 stories is Rosalind Gill’s debut, but many of the pieces included have been published over the past decades. The work, in some formats, has been steeping since the 1980s, and is permeated with insight and authenticity.
Many of the physical and cultural touchstones in “Too Unspeakable for Words” will resonate with readers. Protagonist Nancy is being sent to the city’s best girls’ school, which earns taunts from former classmates. “But I was a Graham’s girl now, and above all that. We had elocution lessons, poetry readings and ‘deportment,’ just like Princess Anne. Graham’s was a little pocket of decorum, just off Military Road.
“Before long, I was toning myself down, softening my voice and composing my gangly body, arms by my side.” She also must re-navigate her neighbourhood, including Georgina Butler, whose conduct engenders the title, and her own family, where her father opposes her mother’s ambitions for their daughter. It’s not that he frets Nancy will get above herself, but that she might forget who she is.
“House Devil” catches up with Nancy and Georgina as teenage girls, with Nancy now in full rebellion against Graham’s and fed to the teeth with its institutionalized snobbery. She spends more and more time at the Butlers’, on the pretext of helping Georgina babysit the younger siblings. “Over at the Butlers’, it was, in fact, out-andout pandemonium. No smells of bread fresh-out-of-the-oven or clean-sheets-off-the-line here. Georgina’s tribe of brothers and sisters ran wild — no beds ever got made, kitchen cupboards were left open with food tumbling out, taps dripped, TV blared. Mrs. Butler spent her time in some kind of party den at the back of the house.”
Also featured at the Butlers’ is Jimmy Butler, who, as Georgina puts it, is “Nice? He’s the devil himself. And don’t go sayin’ I didn’t tell ya.”
Georgina then takes centre stage in “Consciousness Raising,” as nascent feminism intersects with Georgina’s troubled marriage. “The girls were having a grand time because I can spin a yarn and wine makes me funny as hell, if I do say so myself ... I guess I was enjoying the shock value and the attention they were giving me.”
These linked storylines then shift with “No Tears” to Cape Verde and the Mcgraths, a wealthy merchant family. Faith, the eldest of five, steps in to run the household as her mother’s “got to get her rest.” She seems destined to be an Old Maid, “the unkindest cut of all”; it’s no wonder she finds herself so entranced with John Slater, an American soldier she meets as she supervises the sitdown tea at the annual parish garden party. Which leads to “Fairyled,” with Faith, now decades older, still running the house and also expected to care for her niece, Sharon. This is told from the point of view of the maid, Bernice, the only one to appreciate the simple human notice and affection the little girl needs.
The Mcgrath’s house in “Carpenter’s Secret” is now empty and has been converted to a B&B, integral to a narrative concerned with the impact of tourism on the rural Newfoundland economy — and the force of a carpenter’s smile on a divorcée’s scruples: “Mary’s trying not to look at George.
“I wonder how he likes living in a bungalow in Gander. It’s like any marriage I suppose. He feeds off the good parts, puts up with the bad parts.”
“Learning to Tango” returns to schooldays in St. John’s, now at university; “I was nineteen and determined to learn French and go live in the south of France under the palm trees.” When the French fleet, “six steel hulks of warships, all flags flying,” docks during an unusually warm, lovely spring, the female French students are invited aboard, perhaps ill-advisedly, as champagne, shenanigans, and unexpected communions ensue.
“The Sweetest Meadows” finds Jamie poised between present and memory, his adult self and his youth dominated by his father. “The One I Got,” the longest piece, starts with an elopement and continues through the early marital negotiations of Emily and Patrick, whose different religions prove just the starting point of diverse takes on how to move through the world. And the collection closes with “La Fachada,” wherein a defrocked priest, and ‘no Don Juan,’ is transported to Cuba — and by Santeria. “In my wanderings, I’d befriended the newspaper seller by the cathedral, a wizened old man with tiny bright blue eyes and a deep ugly scar on his forearm. One morning he saw me looking at it.
“‘From a machetazo,’ he said, ‘a machete slice. The pain never leaves you. It cuts into your mind.’
“I sighed. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to control what’s in your mind.’
“He grabbed my arm. ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘Santiago entrances and bewitches.’”
It’s a new geography but Gill remains sure-footed on the emotional and psychological grounds.