Lemon thyme coming into bloom. It's another sunny day, promising to be warm. I'm pegging away at some fiction this week, the novel whose characters I've been writing about for more than twenty years, which I pick up whenever I don't have anything else to work on. It's the sort of project that I half feel I should let go, because if I've been spinning my wheels about it for this long, it might just be not meant to be. On the other hand, I keep thinking that if some big picture could just come into focus, then I could move it to a conclusion.
It is a big story, with a lot of people in it. Just today I recalled what I've often thought about Trollope's novels: that his sense of story is like a conveyor belt that people get onto and then back off, whether their circumstances have been brought to a conclusion or not. They come in and out, but they themselves are not the story, or at any rate, it doesn't belong, really, to any one of them. It is its own entity. Now I'm wondering whether I'm supposed to have that thought: that is, that I've had it for a reason that speaks to this litter of characters and situations that I have before me. What if I did just think of the story as something larger than any of them, not really about any one of them, but a thing they get onto and are carried forward in, and then set down? If I stopped worrying about plot as a charcter- and conflict-driven thing, and just saw it as the forward momentum of time, in which things happen?
All these people do have their conflicts:
*There's Polly, in her thirties, the one overtly religious member of a sprawling artistic and intellectual family, who has gone into religious life but discerned out again, taking refuge in her aunt Ruth's house and in the care of her ancient grandmother, Pauline.
*There's Pauline, the family matriarch, a painter, who is about to turn a hundred years old. After a wild and dissipated life, she is bedridden, blind, and wandering (and unpleasant to deal with), and until the story opens, has been cared for by her martyred daughter-in-law Ruth.
*Ruth is American and married Pauline's son Owen, an aging and also rather wandering university don, after her first husband left her for one of his graduate students. Ruth has been doomed to spend her life ABD; she has also found herself saddled with care of her mother-in-law, in whose house she and Owen live. There has been something of a struggle for control over the household, but as Pauline has aged and become helpless, Ruth has --- somewhat dubiously -- won.
*Owen, the child of Pauline's wartime liason, goes into College every day, whether he is actually seeing students and supervising theses, or simply sleeping in a chair by the electric fire in his rooms. He also surreptitiously goes to Chapel daily.
*Sophie is Owen's younger sister, the child of a later liason of Pauline's. She is a violinist and violin teacher, divorced, living in a little house, managed by her very managing elder daughter Helena, and angry at her younger daughter, Polly, for deserting her to be a nun. She is even angrier that Polly has come out without telling her and gone to live with Ruth, to help with Pauline's care.
*Helena is a psychologist. Her husband Alasdair is a vicar, but the vicarage study has been co-opted by Helena for her private practice. They have two daughters, Antigone, aged 13, and Imogen, 10. Helena has just broken off with Simon, her lover since her undergraduate days, and is miserable about it.
*Michael is the son of Owen's first marriage; his mother died at his birth. He has been brought up in Pauline's house, though mostly sent away to school. Now in his forties, not much younger than Ruth, his stepmother, he has bounced from job to job and never made a success of himself. In the installment I have just written, he has turned up on Ruth's doorstep, about a week behind Polly.
*Simon Keen curates a modern-art gallery, Monckton House. As well as having been Helena's lover, he was, briefly, Polly's employer -- in this family, those who are not artists either do something intellectual or work in the art world, as the two acceptable alternatives. Polly left his employ abruptly on discovering his affair with Helena; he is now putting together a centenary exhibition of Pauline's work and therefore must turn up at the house and come face to face with both Polly and Helena.
*Alasdair: rather a good guy. Not as stupid as Helena thinks. The kind of person whose apparently vapid and wishy-washy religion masks an actual, ironclad faith, of whose existence maybe the person himself is not entirely aware.
*Antigone: also called Tiggy, abrupt, blunt-spoken and bullying
*Imogen: shy, teary, bullied, observant.
Whose story is it? I don't really know. Everyone's and no one's. What's going to happen? Who can tell? Not me. Michael has just turned up at Ruth's. Polly remembers Michael with pity; Ruth has zero patience with him, or with Owen, who of course has forgotten to tell her Michael was coming. And there we are. I'm also continually plagued with doubts about the fact that I'm an American writing an English novel, in the mode of the Victorian English novel, peopled almost entirely, with a token exception, by English people. Why am I doing this? I don't know. I just can't stop myself.
So that's going on, at least inside my head. What I've clothed my body in, meanwhile:
Continuing the blue-with-sage-green theme: thrifted Gap twill shorts with thrifted tencel shirt, yesterday's pink belt, secondhand Birk Floridas. These shorts by themselves are very basic and utilitarian and masculine. I like to pair them with a feminine top, lacy or tucked or otherwise detailed, but today I've just gone for something light and flowing, to balance the stiffness and structure of the shorts. I think it works. I'm not sure it shows up in any of the photos I took, but I left the top button of my shirt unbuttoned, and am wearing under it a dusty-pink Boody bralette, which being unlined works better as a crop-top layer over an actual bra with some padding. It's their ribbed longline bra, or something like that, but in truth it is more like a cropped tank top. That's how I've worn it here, and I anticipate wearing it a lot through the summer, whenever I need the coverage of a tank under something, but don't want the weight of a whole extra layer. Both layers I'm wearing, the crop top and the actual bra, are bamboo, so should be pretty light and breathable against my skin.
Doing the trendy shirt-half-untucked thing, which breaks up the line at the waist and hips. I don't do a lot of very trendy things, and I've had my doubts about this trendy thing. It hasn't always felt right. But today it does, and it also does a concretely useful thing, in creating multiple lines across my midsection in a way that's more flattering than if I had either tucked the shirt in all around OR left it all hanging loose. Either of those options would have made one unbroken horizontal line, dividing my body visually into two big blocks. The visual effect this way is a lot less blocky, and the effect is slimming.
I have the exact same body today that I had, for example, on Tuesday. It's a body I want to love and accept as it is. But as it is, it feels a thousand times slimmer and fitter in this outfit than it did in the tank-maxi ensemble I wore, albeit quite comfortably, two days ago. I feel far more polished in these shorts than I did in that skirt. I also feel that all I'd have to do to go out for the evening is throw on a jean jacket, and this would be a warm-weather date-night outfit.
Also: here's one shorts outfit that did NOT work for me at all. And another. I don't know that these were objectively bad outfits, or that I looked objectively bad in them. The second was marginally better than the first, but I still wound up not wearing it beyond the time it took to snap a photo. They just were wrong for me: the shorts felt too short and tight for one thing, but also, it was all too structured, too sporty in a way that grated against my natural energy. I am: active, outdoorsy, organic. I'm not really sporty or preppy. Also, I wanted to love those lemon-yellow shorts. I really, really did. In the abstract, I like yellow. But on me it feels weird. I can't explain why. It just does. Even outfits where I paired those shorts with a more organic kind of top . . . better, but ultimately nah, not so much. Also, I find I like the line of these green shorts: their narrowness makes them easier to work with somehow, as well as their length. The way they follow the line of my leg feels right. So I got rid of the other two pairs of shorts, which I'd bought in thrift stores anyway, and kept these, which I find really versatile and wearable in a variety of contexts.
On tap for today, besides writing: I need to call my mother, and I have to take Dora to the vet for her spring checkup, heartworm, and renewed rabies shot. That should be fun. But the sun is shining, and it's a perfect day, so we'll enjoy whatever we can.