I'll Tell You a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers - Hardcover

Coleman, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771022786 ISBN 13: 9780771022784

Verlag: McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

“Memory opens for me through my body. I slip back because I catch a smell, hear a sound, or hold an evocative flavour on my tongue. But these single-sense glimpses of or gusts from the past are often fleeting. More compelling for me, more total, is when my whole body, the entire surface of my skin, and my muscles’ movements connect me to my old self. Especially it is the movements of summer, when more of me meets the elements, while I am swimming, or feeling my bramble-scratched legs against hot rocks. Or when I am experiencing the lovely lassitude that fills me at the end of a long afternoon of sun and water as I stand slicing tomatoes for my supper, while corn boils, and sun falls in the window on a pile of raspberries in a bowl. All my senses, all, are alive.” – from I’ll Tell You a Secret

A delightful, beautifully written and thoroughly engaging story of coming-of-age in the 1950s that focuses on Anne Coleman between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, and her relationship with “Mr. MacLennan” (Canadian literary figure Hugh MacLennan), which played out in the summers in the village of North Hatley, Quebec, a picturesque resort that has been known to attract artists and writers and the upper-classes. In prose that is intimate, visual, and resonant with immediacy, Anne Coleman brings us back to summers in the 1950s, revealing the eccentricities of North Hatley and its residents, but most of all focusing on her special friendship with a man many years her senior.

Independent, individualistic, sensually alert, as a young girl Anne Coleman did not fit the mould. Later, when Anne is eighteen, she leads a double life, one which follows the course of a romance with Frank, the dark, brooding European young man who has a strange hold over her, and the enigmatic Mr. MacLennan, whose own feelings for Anne suggest themselves to her in ways that are at once confusing, tantalizing, and deeply important.

Along the way, the story also offers a wonderfully evocative portrayal of the 1950s, its sexual repressiveness and mores. The beautiful village of North Hatley comes alive in vivid ways.

This is a unique coming-of-age story by a writer who writes sentences that cut to the bone.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<b>Anne Coleman</b> was born in Toronto and grew up in Ontario and Quebec. She received a B.A. from McGill University and a M.A. in English from Bishop’s University. She taught for five years in Westmount, and then for thirty years at University College of the Cariboo, in Kamloops, British Columbia. She lives in Victoria, where she is a writer and novice sculptor, and a lover of the natural world.

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EARLY ONE MORNING
1950
I am swimming up into the morning through green-gold water that is shot with sunrays as I surface. It is a dream and I float out of the image as I open my eyes.

And I am in my own bed. I am lying on my smooth white sheet, my covers on the floor, and I can hear a wild tumult of birdsong: the trees, even the verandah vine, are full of so many birds singing that it is amazing that everyone isn’t awake, but all the sounds are outside. Within the house all is quiet and everyone still sleeps.

I lean up on my elbow to look through my wide open window. The air is cool but the day will be warm, maybe even hot.

I hitch myself up to look out and better see my maple tree, which is at this moment seething with the singing birds. It is huge and ancient and because of the way the lawn slopes below the house, I am almost on a level with its crown. The leaves nearest me are in shadow and the sun is lighting the ones only at the very top on the eastern side. The sunlit ones are the bright new green of early summer. Below me the grass is dark green, still wet with dew. I know just how it would feel, cold, under my feet and that I would leave silver tracks. By my new watch I see that it is six o’clock.

I will think about my secret.

I rest my arms on the sill and notice how brown they already are, making the little blond hairs on them look white as they catch the light. I am wearing pale orange pajamas, short-sleeved, many times washed, in fact a faint peach colour now, and rather shrunken. Or is it that I am now so tall? My arms and legs have lengthened even since Christmas.

At every time of year my first ritual on waking, when I am home, is to study the leaves and bark of my maple. I know from their look how early it is; also in the evenings, how late. I am not someone who really needs a watch but time is important to me and I like to be precise. And I like my watch, which is a man’s and what I asked for. On long summer evenings, I stare at the leaves until the shadows have gathered and deepened and then it is important that I sleep at once. I must not still be awake when darkness overtakes the tree.

From the tree, I also know the weather and the temperature: in winter the tree’s unprotected skin pales, becomes dry and brittle, grey with the cold. Watching from my window, I know how it would feel under my hand. And it darkens with warmth and moisture on a milder day while the snow around its base greys and coarsens. In spring the bark is a richer brown and I watch the thin, high branches, the fragile black twigs against the sky, and think of the sap mounting. My brother and I pound in sharp spigots, one to each side to hang a pail on, and tap it. The sap tastes of spring, thin and green. We boil it down and make a tiny jug of syrup.

I am obsessed with seasons as well as time. I am a very odd child, according to my sisters. Even though I am a quiet person, it seems that I am turning out to be the most extreme member of the family, in some ways anyway. I am not sure how much choice a person has in who she turns out to be. The difficulty is in wanting the things and being the ways other people expect. A person can make herself do certain things perhaps, but she can’t make herself want to. In my case I don’t even make myself do them.

The situation is getting worse because I am about to be fourteen. Increasingly I feel the push of other people’s expectations on me of what a girl is supposed to be and I can’t want any of the things I’m supposed to be eager for. My sisters have gone ahead of me along the path into, and in the case of my older sister, out the other side of, adolescence. They have had to endure miseries and perils, and I have watched in dread the tortures of shyness and holding back in the case of one, and the worrying but brave ventures forth in the case of the other, both of them being determined, throughout, to succeed at being the right sort of woman whatever the cost. The miseries and perils were about having the wrong sort of hair (we all have curly) and having in every way to look and behave unnaturally or face terrible scorn. I long to bypass the whole stage and I will, somehow. I don’t seem able to do anything else, in fact.

However, at the moment I am so happy I can’t even worry. I am home from boarding school and I will never go back there. Mother has promised. We may even move back to Toronto and I’d go to school there. I have been home for two weeks, but still each morning I wake up to joy and relief at being in my own bed. And there is my new and secret friendship. It makes me feel a little bit excited all the time, even when I am doing other things.

My grandmother is visiting, and my aunt, who lives with her. This is their summer holiday in the country and they are here for three weeks.

My grandmother has always worn a girdle and stays. When I was a smaller girl, I would sit on her bed and watch her get dressed. It was a long and complicated matter. She had to deal with several layers, while more or less lying down against the pillows. The room was dim because her window had an awning to keep out the sun, and that made her tasks all the more mysterious. While still in her loose summer dressing gown, she would begin. The first step was using a big peach-coloured puff to smooth talcum powder over herself, slipping her hands under her gown to do this. She never would be fully undressed in front of me. Then she would place tiny, flattish pink powder-puffs in strategic, tender spots against her pink plumpness (of which I would have some glimpses) to protect her soft skin from the bones of her stays, or girdle. This at first flapped hugely wide and spoked, and then was heaved firmly into position — an uncomfortable moment requiring an indrawn breath — and then hooked and laced. I remember how I would sit there, grasping my bony knees tightly, watching her body that seemed to have no bones at all.

Her drawers were heavy silk and had legs. They were oyster coloured, or deep cream. I planned, and still plan, never to wear anything but cotton myself, no matter how old I get. I will never wear anything that could be called “drawers.” Not that I can imagine getting old, not me. A slip next. Then garters, with more powder-puffs carefully placed to protect the soft, dimply skin of her thighs.

I always wear as few clothes as possible in summer.

And I have always planned to take my body entirely for granted.

But the fact of the matter is that my own body is changing. No one else is noticing, but it is.

Enough. I bounce my fists on the sill. And jump lightly off the bed, as I don’t want to wake anybody else up, not for their sake but for my own. I peel off my pajamas and thrust my legs into my shorts that still hold my underpants from yesterday and I stand for a moment looking down at my new, small breasts. I like them. They are interesting. And they feel interesting. There is a sort of firm disk inside them that is changing and softening and they are getting bigger. The funny thing is, and I know it may not be logical, but I feel that the changes in my body have no relation to, are in no way like, the changes that must have happened to other women in my family. They are entirely private and mine and will not make me a woman like any of them.

I pull on a crumpled cotton blouse. It has been mashed against the cushion on my chair under the heavy book I am reading and that I threw there last night. I snatch up the book and run silently downstairs in my bare feet.

No one else gets up until about seven-thirty, not even my younger brother. The kitchen has a large bay window but it faces west and so the room is cool and shadowy now though by lunchtime it will be full of sunlight. I pour...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McClelland & Stewart Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0771022786
• ISBN 13: 9780771022784
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar