Free Unless by Carol Shields Page B

I signed books for three rather baffled-looking customers and then a few more stock copies, which the staff was kind enough to produce. I handled the whole thing badly, was overly ebullient with the book buyers, too chatty, wanting them to love me as much as they said they loved my book, wanting them for best friends, you would think. (“Please just call me Reta, everyone does”) My hair had come unpinned—this happens only rarely—and was dangling in my hot face. My impulse was to apologize for not being younger and more adorable, like Alicia in my novel, and for not having her bright ingenue voice and manner. I was ashamed of my red pantsuit, catalogue-issue, and wondered if I’d remembered, waking up in the Writer’s Suite, to apply deodorant.
    From Politics & Prose I took a cab to a store called Pages, where there were no buying customers at all but wherethe two young proprietors took me for a splendid lunch at an Italian bistro and also insisted on giving me a free copy of my book to leave in the Writer’s Suite. I had the afternoon free, a whole afternoon, and nothing to do until the next morning when I was to take my train to Baltimore. Mr. Scribano had warned me I might find touring lonely.
    I returned to the hotel, freshened up, and placed my book on the bookshelf. But why had I returned to the hotel? What homing instinct had brought me here when I might be out visiting museums or perhaps taking a tour through the Senate chambers? There was a wide springtime afternoon to fill, and an evening too, since no one had suggested taking me to dinner.
    I decided to go shopping in the Georgetown area, having spotted from the taxi a number of tiny boutiques. My daughter Norah’s birthday, the first of May, was coming up in a week’s time, and she longed to have a beautiful and serious scarf. She had never had a scarf in all her seventeen years, not unless you count the woollen mufflers she wore on the school bus, but since her grade-twelve class trip to Paris, she had been talking about the scarves that every chic Frenchwoman wears as part of her wardrobe. These scarves, so artfully draped, were silk, nothing else would do, and their colours shocked and awakened the dreariest of clothes, the wilted navy blazers that Frenchwomen wear or those cheap black cardigans they try to get away with.

    I never have time to shop in Orangetown, and, in fact, there would be little available there. But today I had time, plenty of time, and so I put on my low-heeled walking shoes and started out.
    Georgetown’s boutiques are set amid tiny-fronted houses, impeccably gentrified with shuttered bay windows and framed by minuscule gardens, enchanting to the eye. My own sprawling, untidy house outside Orangetown, if dropped into this landscape, would destroy half a dozen or more of these impeccable brick facades. The placement of flowerpots was ardently pursued here, so caring, so solemn, and the clay pots themselves had been rubbed, I suspected, with sandpaper, to give them a country look.
    These boutiques held such a minimum of stock that I wondered how they were able to compete with one another. There might be six or seven blouses on a rod, a few cashmere pullovers, a table strewn casually with shells or stones or Art Nouveau picture frames or racks of antique postcards. A squadron of very slender saleswomen presided over this spare merchandise, which they fingered in such a loving way that I suddenly wanted to buy everything in sight. The scarves—every shop had a good half dozen—were knotted on dowels, and there was not one that was not pure silk with hand-rolled edges.
    I took my time. I realized I would be able, given enough shopping time, to buy Norah the perfect scarf, notthe near-perfect and certainly not the impulse purchase we usually settled for at home. She had mentioned wanting something in a bright blue with perhaps some yellow dashes. I would find that very scarf in one of these many boutiques. The thought of myself as