Free Unless by Carol Shields Page A

goodbye to the family and got on a train and travelled to Washington, staying in a Georgetown hotel, which had on its top floor, reserved for me by my publisher, something called the Writer’s Suite. A brass plaque on the door announced this astonishing fact. I, the writer in a beige raincoat, Ms. Reta Winters from Orangetown, entered this doorway with small suitcase in tow and looked around, not daring to imagine what she mightfind. There was a salon as well as a bedroom, two full baths, a very wide bed, more sofas than I would have time to sit on in my short stay, and a coffee table consisting of a sheet of glass posed on three immense faux books stacked one on the other. A large bookshelf held the tomes of the authors who had stayed in the suite. “We like to ask our guests to contribute a copy of their work,” the desk clerk had told me, and I was obliged to explain that I had only a single reading copy with me but that I would attempt to find a copy in a local store. “That would be most appreciated,” she said with deep sincerity.
    The books left behind by previous authors were disappointing, inspiration manifestos or self-help manuals, with a few thrillers thrown in. I am not a snob—I read the Jackie Onassis biography, for example—but my close association with writers such as Danielle Westerman has conditioned me to hope for a degree of ambiguity or nuance, and there was none here.
    In the great, wide bed I had a disturbing but not unfamiliar dream—it is the dream I always have when I am away from Orangetown, away from the family. I am standing in the kitchen at home, producing a complicated meal for guests, but there is not enough food to work with. In the fridge sits a single egg and maybe a tomato. How am I going to feed all those hungry mouths?
    I’m aware of how this dream might be analyzed by a dream expert, that the scarcity of food stands for a scarcity oflove, that no matter how I stretch that egg and tomato, there will never be enough of Reta Winters for everyone who needs her. This is how my old friend Gwen, whom I was looking forward to seeing in Baltimore, would be sure to interpret the dream, if I were so foolish as to tell her. Gwen is an obsessive keeper of a dream journal—as are quite a number of my friends—and she also records the dreams of others if they are offered and found worthy. She is, she claimed in a recent letter, an oneirocritic, having completed an extension course in dream interpretation.
    I resist the theory of insufficient love. I understand dreams to be an alternative language and one we don’t necessarily need to learn. My empty-fridge dream, I like to think, points only to the abrupt cessation, or interruption, of daily obligation. For more than twenty years I’ve been responsible for producing three meals a day for the several individuals I live with. I may not be conscious of this obligation, but surely I must always, at some level, be calculating and apportioning the amount of food in the house and the number of bodies to be fed: Tom and the girls, the girls’ friends, my mother-in-law, and various passing acquaintances. And then there’s the dog to feed, and water for his bowl by the back door. Away from home, liberated from my responsibility for meals, my unexecuted calculations steal into my dreams like engine run-on and leave me blithering with this diminished store of nurture and the fact of myunpreparedness. Such a small dream crisis, but I always wake with a sense of terror.
    Since My Thyme Is Up was a first novel and since mine was an unknown name, there was very little for me to do in Washington. Mr. Scribano had been afraid this would happen. The television stations weren’t interested, and the radio stations avoided novels, my publicist told me, unless they had a “topic” like cancer or child abuse.
    I managed to fulfill all my obligations in a mere two hours the morning after my arrival, taking a cab to a bookstore called Politics & Prose, where