On a postcard with a photograph of Bob Dylan on it bought at the St. Lawrence Antique Market:
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Carter:
There were three of them on stage and they very much looked as if they were enthusiastic about Arts and Crafts and Mother Earth. They appeared like the sort of women that would form a band and call it Frida’s Brow, and they sang about topics that included Louis Riel and Wage Increases.
The crowd was comprised almost wholly of people who looked like they’d enjoy that sort of thing. Everybody in their late fifties, the men all wearing beards, the women in sexless flannel shirts suggesting an outdoorsy life of practicality. Like smaller, yet sturdier men without beards. I could not keep my eyes off of one of these couples.
A medicated looking woman sat serenely, staring straight ahead, a thin and pointless smile on her face. Beside her was a man. A bearded man. He was reading a book of some sort, pointedly underlining passages with a pencil as if trying to project an intellectual rigour out into the world around him. I hated him immediately. I did not like the way he was ignoring his wife, the way he had treated her for the last twenty-five years, how his relentlessly selfish behaviour had caused her to quietly ask her doctor for a prescription for Zoloft one afternoon while refilling her birth control pills over a decade ago. And of course, he would take no responsibility for this, condescending, making her feel like her blue moods were all her fault.
Always has been, always will be.
And because of all of this, of the way he made her feel that everything she did was an intellectual failure, I was giving him the stink eye. He didn’t notice me but just kept on reading with that look on his face, and then it struck me that what I was doing, turning around and staring, was just going to make his wife feel worse. That is what life with her husband was like, unarticulated clouds of hostility floating about all the time, and she, poor thing, thinking that it was somehow her fault.
Love,
Madeline
xo