Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  Jury for the 1998 Governor General’s Award

  In the Language of Love

  0-00-648544-8, 18.95 (tpb)

  In the Language of Love is a perfect example of Diane Schoemperlen’s fearless play with literary convention. A novel in 100 chapters, it uses the 100 stimulus words from the Standard Word Association Test as a framework. It is the story of Joanna, who has been brought up to believe that if she just does the right things, happiness will be hers. As she discovers, life and love are determined more by chance than by control.

  “One of the finest montages of language to head south from Canada since Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing…With this novel, Schoemperlen triumphantly establishes her literary credentials.”

  Publishers Weekly

  An Excerpt from Diane Schoemperlen’s Forms of Devotion

  I have learned not to underestimate the power of rooms, especially a small room with unequivocal corners, exemplary walls, and well-mannered windows divided into many rectangular panes. I like a small room without curtains, carpets, misgivings, or ghosts.

  I. SMALL ROOM WITH PEARS

  I like a room painted in confident full-bodied color. I steer clear of pastels because they are, generally speaking, capricious, irresolute, and frequently coy. Blue is a good color for a small room, especially if it is of a shade called Tidal Pool, Tropical Sea, Azure, Atoll, or Night Swim.

  I once painted a room a shade of blue called Rainy Day. I find a rainy day to be a fine thing on occasion, particularly after an unmitigated stretch of gratuitous sunshine. In that blue room, I kept a stock of umbrellas ready at hand just in case. This was the first room I had ever painted all by myself. For years I had believed that painting a room was a task I could never master, a task better left to professionals or men. After I finished painting this room, I was as proud of myself as if I had discovered the Northwest Passage.

  This room had many outstanding features including lots of large cupboards and a counter ample enough to perform surgery on if necessary. In the cupboards I kept all kinds of things: dresses that no longer fit or flattered me, a bird’s nest I’d found in the park when I was six, a red and white lace negligee, the program from a musical version of Macbeth, several single socks and earrings, instruction manuals for a radio, a blow-dryer, and a lawn mower that I no longer owned, a package of love letters tied up with a black satin ribbon. No matter how many secrets I stowed in these cupboards, they never filled up.

  Often I found myself wandering into the blue room in the middle of the night. I would stand naked staring into the refrigerator at three in the morning, until the cold air gave me goose bumps and my nipples got hard. It was a very old refrigerator which sometimes chirped like a distant melancholy cricket. I was searching not for food so much as for memories, motives, an alibi: how it looked, how it happened, when.

  I would reach into the refrigerator and pull out a chunk of ham, a chicken leg, a slice of cheese, or some fruit. Pears were my favorite. Imagine the feel of the sweet gritty flesh on your tongue, the voluptuous juice on your chin. Pears are so delicate. My fingertips made bruises on their thin mottled skin.

  This was nothing like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach? / I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. Peaches I am not fond of. Their fuzz gives me shivers like fingernails on a chalkboard. The color of their flesh close to the pit is too much like that of meat close to the bone. My consumption of pears had nothing to do with daring or indecision. It was strictly a matter of pure pleasure, which always comes as a great relief. At that point in my life I’d had no dealings with mermaids and did not expect to. I am tone deaf and, much as I admire a good body of water, I have never learned to swim.

  As for the women who come and go, they are not likely to be talking of Michelangelo.

  —From “Five Small Rooms (A Murder Mystery)”

  Praise

  I paint the Virgin Mary descending to the earth, which is covered with snow and slush. She is wearing a winter coat over her blue robe, and has a purse slung over her shoulder. She’s carrying two brown paper bags full of groceries. Several things have fallen from the bags: an egg, an onion, an apple. She looks tired.

  —Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

  The irony of writing about such an experience in the modern era is such that, if I say to people, “This really happened,” not unreasonably, they will be inclined to doubt me. They might suspect me of boasting, or assume that I have lost my mind. If I say, “I imagined it, I made it up, it’s fiction”—only then are they free to believe it.

  —Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace

  Ultimately, I have found it is meaningless to hold the yardstick of fact against the complexities of the human heart. Reality simply isn’t large enough to hold us.

  —A. Manette Ansay, River Angel

  Also by Diane Schoemperlen

  Forms of Devotion

  In the Language of Love

  Hockey Night in Canada and Other Stories

  The Man of My Dreams

  Hockey Night in Canada

  Frogs and Other Stories

  Double Exposures

  Red Plaid Shirt

  Copyright

  Our Lady of the Lost and Found

  © 2001 by Diane Schoemperlen. All rights reserved.

  P.S. section © Diane Schoemperlen 2005

  A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This HarperPerennial edition: 2005

  www.harpercollins.ca

  * * *

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Schoemperlen, Diane

  Our lady of the lost and found : a novel

  “A Phyllis Bruce book”.

  I. Title.

  PS8587.C4578097 2002 C813’.54

  C2002-900530-2

  PR9199.3.S34087 2002

  * * *

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  EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-554-68958-3

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