Clemence selects some apples, breaks off a couple of bananas from a bunch, and reflects on all the bananas she’d left behind in the chest freezer, possibly hundreds, gone too brown on the counter and saved for a banana loaf to be baked in a far-off future that would never arrive. What would Toad think when he discovered these? Another mark against her, along with the sexual deviancy. (“There are some husbands who might have been pleased to discover what he did,” her friend Naomi had remarked, but Toad wasn’t one of them. If he had been, Clemence would have had a different kind of marriage.)
She decides she will venture into the boulangerie for a baguette because the loaves on the grocery shelf are already a week past their best-before. She picks out a carton of milk, a bag of oatmeal, resisting the urge for mixings—brown sugar or even raisins—because Clemence longs to develop an appetite for plain tastes. Adds cans of tuna and chicken, a jar of mayonnaise because she’s not as plain as all that, and a brick of cheddar. What more does a woman need? Digestive biscuits, she decides as she spies them, dipped on one side in dark chocolate. She is obsessed with the concept of digestive biscuits, as though they were medicinal somehow. Good for gut health, entirely sensible.
She brings her armful to the counter and drops it before the woman waiting there who hasn’t moved since Clemence jangled into the shop. Close up, the hair on thewoman’s head is sparse and fine, like chicken fluff, which reminds her—
“Just wait,” Clemence calls back, speeding to the fridge, grabbing a carton of eggs, returning back to the counter where the woman remains a statue, strange. Clemence sets the eggs down with the rest of her things, and says to the woman, “That’s all.”
The woman regarding her finally. “But is it really?”
“Ithink so?” Clemence says, beginning to realize that she’s missing something here.
“Because of course,” the woman continues, “I’m here all day. Standing here waiting for you to add one more thing, and then another thing. I’ve got nothing better to do than wait for you to be satisfied, same with everybody who’s in the line behind you.”
Clemence turns around, but nobody is there.
“Oh, so thereissomething more,” says the woman in a cutting tone, making Clemence feel small. She wants to run. She wants to hide, but she is also hungry, with her heart set on a supper of sardines on toast, and if they even sell sardines at the dollar store, they’re likely to be off-brand and sold without the key.
So Clemence says, “No, that’s all,” annoyed at herself for having assumed a kinship with this miserable woman. That she’d felt benevolent supporting a small store stuck in a time warp, and no wonder the store is empty if this is what passes for customer service.
The woman begins packing the groceries in a flimsy plastic bag, ignoring Clemence’s protests that she’s brought her own cloth sack. And of course, this storedoesn’t take cards, cash only, but there’s anatmin the back whose withdrawals come with a five-dollar convenience fee. The plastic bag splits at the seams as soon Clemence picks it up off the counter.
She exits in relief when the whole thing is over, the shopkeeper’s chimes seeming a sinister tone now as the door slams behind her. And outside on the street there are more chimes, these ones rich and sonorous, as the bells at the church across the road sound in response to the hour.Six o’ clock, but they don’t toll for me, Clemence thinks, the joyous peals lifting her spirits again after the disappointment of the shop as she transfers her bundle of groceries from the tattered plastic bag to her cloth one. Amurmuration of butterflies lifts in her stomach, such lightness. She can do this. Because Clemence lives outside the rules now, the rituals and the hours, and there’s a freedom in that, to do whatever she likes and whenever it suits her.Oranges and lemons, goes the song in her head, the one that people use to sing to her because of her name, a cheerful tune, though it was years before she learned the unfortunate ending: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed / And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.”
But now the boulangerie is shut, the sign on the door being flipped toClosedas she’s standing there. Clemence has no cause to complain—the hour has gone, and she heard the bells to prove it, but here is the thing, and she decides to channel the nerve of the miserable woman in tweed at the grocery store counter, to use it instead of letting it destroy her. Raising her hand to rap on theglass, summoning a tired-looking baker at the end of a very long day.
“All Ineed is a baguette,” explains Clemence. “Could Ipossibly …?”
“We’re closed,” says the baker, who no doubt deals with these disturbances every evening. Which would have been the signal for retreat in Clemence’s previous life, where she’d adhered to rules and guidelines, deferring to politeness, caring deeply about what other people thought of her, as though such opinions would be what constitutes one’s self, instead the actual fibre of her being.
“But you have baguettes left,” Clemence points out, peering over the baker’s shoulder, catching a glimpse on the rack behind the counter. “I’m not choosy,” she says for the second time that day. “And if you’re closed, well, wouldn’t you be throwing it out anyway?” Edging closer. She’s relentless—and now she’s got her, Clemence knows, as soon as she hears the baker sigh.
“Hang on,” the baker says, and closes the door again. Secures the deadbolt. Clemence taking a step backwards, and inhaling a deep and most satisfying breath. Watching the life on the sidewalk of which she is a part, the couples and the families and the gaggles of friends, and yes, all the other people walking alone, like her, with their own directions and places they need to be.
Turning around again as the door opens a crack, the baker jams the baguette through. “Take it,” she says. “No charge,” and the door is shut and a deadbolt fastened before Clemence has time to properly thank her.
And now she has all she needs, the groceries and theshredded plastic bag neatly tucked into that cloth bag, her capacious hold-all, and she nudges the baguette alongside them. Her first dinner in her new home that night would be everything she has been hoping it would be, simple with substance, the bread good and fresh. She would wash out that tin of sardines and save it as a souvenir, a useful vessel for small objects, things like stray buttons or safety pins.
Three
The first few weeks in her apartment are an adjustment to its rhythms, learning to not be disturbed at what sounds like someone thundering up the stairs, because the thunder is actually a downstairs neighbour partaking in some elaborate exercise routine in his room. Clemence is not sure if it’s that neighbour’s alarm clock she hears every day at 6:55 a.m., an incessant buzz, or somebody else’s. She hasn’t met anybody in the house, except for Charles, and she hasn’t even seen Charles since then, though his mother, Mrs. Yeung, is everywhere and Clemence wonders if she should ask to be called Ms. Lathbury in return, but Mrs. Yeung doesn’t call Clemence anything. She doesn’t need to, because when Mrs. Yeung speaks, Clemence listens, whether it’s about garbage collection and locking the front door, and how there is absolutely zero tolerance when it comes to keeping pets. The last womanshe’d rented to, decades ago, had acquired a rabbit that chewed on the wiring.
Clemence does not have a rabbit, but she’s been adopted by a cat, a beautiful one-eyed Himalayan who creeps into her apartment when she leaves the balcony door open. The cat waits for her, skulking along the rooflines, perching on chimney tops, going unseen by most of the world below, and now Clemence waits for him, too, no longer attempting to shoo him away because there’s no point, he doesn’t budge, and also he seems well tempered and well groomed: altogether pleasant company. He seems like a creature that doesn’t have fleas or chew on wiring.
And so when she goes out for brunch with Jillian and Naomi, and they’re concerned about her being lonely, asking whether she’s managed to meet anybody in her neighbourhood, she will be able to tell them that she has indeed.
“I’ve been so worried about you,” says Jillian. “Just with all the upheaval, and you jumping into new things so fast. Coming back here, and renting that place before you’ve even seen it, and the smell in the stairs.”
“The smell in the stairs,” says Clemence, “has not improved. But Imean, it’s not like I’m hanging out on the stairs.”
“Is the smell why you haven’t had me over yet?” asks Naomi, and indeed it’s part of the reason. Naomi is famously fastidious, and even worse than simply being judgmental, she pretends she isn’t. To compensate for her judgment, she’d sit down on the stairs, and remarkon the fresh air. She’d breathe in deep and pretend it was fine, which would be awkward for everyone.
But the real reason Clemence hasn’t had her friends over yet, or even seen them lately, is that her friends are so busy. This brunch had been rescheduled three times already, and, up until the moment Jillian and Naomi arrived, Clemence wasn’t sure the gathering was going to happen this time, either. Jillian has two kids and a demanding law practice, and Naomi owns a boutique marketing firm whose downtown office has a living wall. They both own property and vehicles, and have dependents, if you consider a living wall such a thing, which Clemence does, having recently killed a cactus through lack of affection. She’d purchased the plant from the artisan market in Sorauren Park, which featured no fewer than seven purveyors of succulents, and how does a person even choose between all that? In the end, she’d selected the cactus that was most heavily discounted, and maybe you get what you pay for, because she’d taken it home and watched it wither before her eyes.
“You probably overwatered it,” Naomi explains once Clemence has filled them in.
“Ididn’t water it at all.”
“Well then,” says Jillian, “there’s your problem.”
