Norma, p.1
NORMA, page 1
© Sarah Mintz, 2024
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Norma / Sarah Mintz.
Names: Mintz, Sarah, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230571034
Canadiana (ebook) 20230571042
ISBN 9781778430404 (softcover)
ISBN 9781778430411 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8626.I699 N67 2024 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Edited by Melanie Simoes Santos
Cover design by Anonymous
Interior design by Megan Fildes | Typeset in Laurentian
With thanks to type designer Rod McDonald
nvisible Publishing | Halifax, Fredericton, & Picton
www.invisiblepublishing.com
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.
“Thus they gathered in a pell-mell of mad confusion and the earth groaned under the tramp of men as the people sought their place.”
—The Iliad
The older I get, the dirtier I feel. I’m sixty-seven. I have short grey hair. My body is a murky site of mutant growth. I imagine dressing loudly in a sequin gown and metallic hat, catching the sun and corrupting an eye—if I was seen I wouldn’t want to be seen. I don’t think I was always like this. But now that it’s here, this thought feels like the only thought I’ve ever had. One running thought, and I’m always in the middle of it. I used to feel busy. I used to be occupied. Always making dinner and folding laundry. Setting alarms and getting the day going. I used to iron. I used to read. I used to balance the books and answer the phones. And now it seems like one book is as good as any other book is as good as anything on TV is as good as anything on the radio—sometimes I think nothing is any good. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough. Maybe I’m looking too hard. Listen, I know I’ve become ridiculous. But, you know, rats, cats, fucking dogs—they just run around until their bodies are spent. Birds fly then fall into the ocean. So what’s the use in feeling turned out by youth and betrayed by middle age?
* * *
Amelia Landover: I know you have Jason.
Derek DeMarco: There’s nothing you can do about it, Amelia. If you tell anyone, they’ll find out that I’m Jason’s real father.
Amelia Landover: What do you want, Derek?
Derek DeMarco: You know what I want. Jason. He’s mine. You’re mine. I want us to be a family again.
Amelia Landover: You’re delusional. We were never a family. I’ll never leave Thurston for someone like you.
Derek DeMarco: I know you love me! Jason proves that our love is real! Leave with me or I’ll tell Thurston everything!
A gang of Russian soap fans are relying on me. For the last three months, I’ve been typing out the lives and loves of the Landover and Callister families in two-minute increments for fifty cents a minute—or it’s fifty cents if you can type fifty cents worth in a minute. If a minute takes six minutes because the speech is garbled or the recording is obscured by another recording of a deep-voiced Russian saying the things the characters are saying like it’s one long emotionless speech, then fifty cents a minute is more like ten cents a minute—but fifty cents might as well be ten cents to me; I just like the soaps, or anyway, I’m trying to stay active.
Paradise Bluffs was a short-lived 1980s American soap opera with an enduring, primarily Eastern European fan base. The Russians found me—or I found them, or we found an amicably anonymous working relationship—through the monopolistic transcription site DERG, working slogan: We’ll sit screen-side for you, maybe we were going to anyway.
I liked the soap fans so much I invaded their lives. Only a little, and they haven’t noticed. I once posted on a Ted Kinder message board in praise of the young hunk’s oiled body, re: the episode where Ted got caught in the rain with the new girl in town—the stunning, dark, and mysterious Andrea Wesley. The rain bounced off Ted, and he stood there glistening, gazing hotly at Andrea. “Swoon!” I said, and posted a picture of Ted, shirtless. No one replied to my comment. The conversation went on around me. Others noticed that the relationship between Thurston and Amelia in 1987 was peak Thurston and Amelia and made collage-like cut-outs of the love affair, sparkling in pixel hearts on dated websites. They couldn’t believe how Amelia had ruined everything with her lies. How could she help it though? It could happen to anyone kidnapped as a child and raised on the something-that-stops-at-nothing of Vivienne LaRoque—Vivienne, whom Amelia’s father, Phillip Callister, left for Amelia’s mother, Juliana. Amelia was tragic, absolutely. There are hundreds of sites in Cyrillic script, in Latin script, devoted to the plot, the many plots, in detail microscopic, not an episode missing—not a character, a relationship, a hairstyle. I became lost for an hour if not a day if not a week on a website ranking the three-thousand-plus looks of Christie Callister—with minor attention paid to the costume design of Janice White and, later, David Gelding (not an insubstantial change).
Pristine Christie’s following extended beyond her time on The Bluffs—which, while it enjoys unexpected niche legacy, didn’t really hit in North America. Christie (Kaitlyn Durante) went on to star in the majors—ten years on Love and Life and twelve on Rockcliff Falls.
And while the conventions for current, ongoing soaps are worldwide events, with thousands lining up for Brock McAdams or Delaney Coombs, the universe of discontinued serials has its only real-world counterpart in basements on VHS tapes with hand-drawn labels. The online existence of a world that contains the best years of many an actor and many a housewife is as marginal as the discoloured sign of a dead grocery store cracking beneath the sign of a larger grocery store—awe at the immense amount of life that fills obscurity and seventh place.
My husband’s father, Horace, for example, once owned a steel factory in Montreal. He inherited it from his father, dead, age fifty, colon cancer. Horace, when he was young and eager and keen, put up the frames of innumerable Montreal buildings. His bones, the bones of the city, forgotten under the weight of time before the internet. What could he be now, remembered forever in an online filing? A social media fan page for the steel industry? Forgotten under the weight of information after the internet. But if you turn off the power, but if you put out the sun, nothing gets its day. Obviously. That’s what my husband would’ve said: “Obviously.” Hank said that whenever I tried to make a point or sound smart. “Where d’you get this shit?” he’d say, smirking, shaking his head, chuckling, as if to an audience, as if saying, “Get a load of this one,” pointing with his thumb and waiting for laughter to come and go. And it’s not that I’m happy he’s dead, it’s just that I don’t know why I don’t feel worse. Maybe I do. Maybe it’s grief that causes me to sit in front of the computer day after day, transcribing off-air American soap operas.
Not only soaps—I misspoke. There’s a wealth of worlds from which I write out my time and fill out their fetishes. Soap operas, writing retreats, painters’ podcasts, political talk shows, and more and more and so much incest. The incest sticks with you. Gets inside, if you can understand that. You listen with guilty fascination, hunting out any other files that colour in the affair, the incident. And when the files play and you type absently, you’re in the room. The same room as Detective Amber Goodwin on February 20 “…with Inspector Mcreally and Doug Deleanor. Doug, can you state your name and date of birth.”
Doug Deleanor: Douglas Rhodes Deleanor. July 6, 1985.
Amber Goodwin: And can you tell me what happened on November 19 of last year.
Doug Deleanor: What happened… what happened was that, like, just like before, like the other time we talked about.
Amber Goodwin: Your daughter, Marigold, was sitting on the couch. And how did it get started? I mean, what exactly did you do?
Doug Deleanor: What I did, I don’t know what I did.
I just… I was rubbing her shoulders,
I think.
Amber Goodwin: You were rubbing her shoulders. Can you… And then… How did that progress? Or did it progress?
Doug Deleanor: What… It was… I was sitting next to Mari, she was wearing a skirt, and I think it was just… I had my arm around her, sort of like rubbing her shoulders. Probably…maybe…moved my arm down and put my hand on her leg.
Amber Goodwin: Okay. Okay, is that all that happened? You just rubbed her shoulders and put your hand on her leg?
Doug Deleanor: Well, it was like… How it happened, I did put my hand between her legs, I mean. I think after that, I got down…I put my mouth…
Amber Goodwin: Where did you put your mouth?
Doug Deleanor: I mean, I pulled her skirt up, I put my mouth, like…on her thigh, like…and then I think that was it.
Amber Goodwin: Okay. On her thigh. Okay. And was that the only time?
Doug Deleanor: There was the time at the house on Broadland, in the bedroom. I think I mentioned it. It was… I don’t know. I don’t know. It was maybe the first time. She just wanted to hug me, she’s just like that, it isn’t her fault. I don’t know. It made me uncomfortable, when she was just being, like, a normal kid, because it would make me… I felt things.
Amber Goodwin: When she would hug you, you were uncomfortable because you felt things?
Doug Deleanor: Right, right. Not always. I mean, when she was younger I never thought anything like that. It was just in the past few years. When she started getting her period, I guess. I don’t know what happened. Like, she started hugging me and I’d…I’d just have those feelings. And sort of rub her shoulders or whatever else…
There’s guilt over feeling frigid at the loss of your life partner after forty-seven years, noting relief—relief—or just nothing—not able to note anything. Then there’s guilt over finding intrigue in the real-life incestuous deposition of a man who has no choice but to trust the police with his private information in a world of outsourcing and flimsy NDAs. And there’s guilt over being moved to lust, then action, then tears over the bud of a girl who dares to wear a skirt around the house. I mean Doug—Doug was torn apart.
The transcriptions, the problem with the transcriptions, is that they contain nothing of the tender voice of Amber Goodwin, a voice you might, when flat from a printout, assign harsh, or not harsh enough, judgment upon—such judgment extending obviously to the overloaded voice of Doug. Doug who skirts the meat of it, Doug whose voice slows then breaks, speeds then stops. Doug who wept because he knew he must weep. What if we lived in a world in which no one jerked around at that which occurred—would Doug still be sad? I don’t know. I doubt it. Unless he was sad about something else.
It isn’t all sensational. The sensation isn’t always sordid. The sensation doesn’t always make you wonder about your own morality and your own humanity and the humanity of others—what seems like most others—living public lives at, say, the grocery store, and private lives on couches with their daughters, or private lives in the lives of others, or private lives in the lives of fictional others. Most of the audio files available for transcription are jargon, compu-jargon, business nonsense—material around which an uninitiated person may find it impossible to wrap their head, and, as such, wrangle: “So you would wanna, if that’s your plan, you’d wanna architect it as such that you have a toggle that is, you know, a toggle that is solid that we can make sure is turned off in the weRAMP environment and turns off in the server, service itself. Um, now assuming you’ve done that— End of message.” The contextless mass. The worlds of which you will never be a part, of which you don’t wish to be a part, but immerse yourself in nonetheless for a moment or too many moments, enough moments that you feel you’re in the world and you’ve chosen not to understand. You struggle to escape the impossible multi-cult of various meanings.
Detached, then, from the worlds made within the world as it appears, you join or watch or sit or watch. You are listening: “What are you reading in the bread that suggests to you that it’s fresh?” The line makes you laugh in your kitchen, and the laugh alone you find pure and sincere and lost on empty space. A woman in a grocery store with a subject, presumably. The two of them discussing the supermarket. Discussing the bread and imparting to the items strange significance. You assume the task is taken up for marketing purposes, but the interrogation has a psychiatric tone. “What are you reading in the bread that suggests to you that it’s fresh?” the interviewer asks. Although she doesn’t ask. That isn’t the real line. Few of these are the real lines. The real line would be something like “And, um, what do you think… How… What is it that you read or see…Um, what are you reading in the bread that suggests to you about it…about that, uh, that it’s fresh?” But you don’t write that unless the transcription requestee has requested a verbatim, and, so, virtually unreadable, transcript.
So derg makes readable the way fast food makes edible an input of real messy bits polished into, processed into, itself—working slogan revised: Taste of DERG. Done, like, with lab-made spice, branded, trademarked, sprinkled into everything—that is: readable by the inconsistent application of company-specific grammar.
In the style guide, they advise against informal contractions. In the style guide, they advise that when one can cut a comma, one should cut a comma. There are no semicolons allowed. No colons, no parentheses, no em dash. In the style guide, they advise not to change the structure of the speech. In the style guide, they advise not to change the meaning of the speech. When the meaning is unclear, when the meaning is elusive, how does one—I, me—determine which words are superfluous?
“Shhheeeeeeeeeeeee, Norma, what’re ya on about?”
Listen, Hank, if you’re gonna be dead, be dead. This is a real conversation, a real conversation with a dead man, and I know it’s only partial—I know the meaning isn’t hard—but the meaning feels real, like real conversations generating the kind of off-the-cuff grammar that just emerges—not grammar presumed to exist, that shiny magazine grammar made from studies where they cut tails and make rules from the mean, or else those studies with hyper tail focus for when the mean is too messy. Stick to the style guide. Nobody makes any sense. Everything is context and flailing limbs. Here, the context was the grocery store, limbs dislocated. All you have to go on is a suspicion of bread.
Subject in a supermarket with a woman with a tape recorder or perhaps with her phone set to record, or with a system that saves and holds this moment and any other moment you ask it to forever, or until you throw it away. But still, they say once it’s made, it’s made. But if no one listens, I’m not sure it continues to be. “It’s not a lot of variety, but when you need a cake, you need a cake, right?” the interviewee says in regard to a limited selection of baked sweets, and somehow it strikes you as both wrong and profound. Or correct, though accidently or naively borne out by some diurnal profundity.
The interviewer asks the woman to be taken to the freshest item in the bakery, like it’s a test. It’s unclear whether the interviewer knows the answer. The interviewee walks over, shuffles, and there’s a man’s voice in the distance squawking over a phone call in the produce department. The shuffling woman answers that the freshest thing in the bakery is “probably the baked breads.” The interviewer asks, “And why do you think these are the freshest things in the bakery?” seeking meaning, making static. The interviewer goes on: “What are you seeing or reading in them that suggests that to you?”
You’re giddy.
I’m giddy.
At home, in my pyjamas, in a room filled with waxed wrappers and plastic bags with yellow smiling faces, I’m tickled by the idea of reading bread. I laugh; I look around. There’s nothing to do with it; it rests, settling in the space between the discrete pieces of filth all over my floor.
“And I know you said because you saw someone bring it out into the bakery, but is there anything else, any other cues that suggest to you that these are the freshest items here?” The interviewer is strange and stiff. “Is this as fresh as this or this? How do you know which item is fresher than one or the other? Do these items that you’ve identified as being less fresh get credit for freshness because they’re in the same section?” Who gets credit for freshness.
The audio file ends with the interviewer in the car, listening to rush-hour rock radio, the swishing of the fabric of her jacket cutting at my eardrums through noise-cancelling headphones. She mutters, “Oh my God,” and the file ends. A brief relation. Me with them. Following them around the grocery store, bedroom sociologist listening to no end little marketeers work over a field of well-stocked bread stores—I hope, I dream, that someone eats the cake.
* * *
The grocery store I like altogether. I mean, I like the grocery store. I like all the grocery stores. There are three within twelve blocks of my house, and I visit them all. I don’t always buy things; I just like to walk around. I walk to the grocery store; I walk around the grocery store. On the walk there, black-edged snow melts slow into holey puckers showing all the wet ends of things. I see, for example, the flattened carcass of a sea bird in the gutter between the street and the sidewalk. Although on second look, it’s only a length of tree bark. On the same walk, for example, I see the root system of a tree emerged from the concrete like the distended intestines of an aged thing, and then, when I look again, note that it’s only a gummy black T-shirt twisted into a small pile. This is the same day I spot a comically steamrolled snake in the centre of a crosswalk—but then, it’s only a flecked green bungee cord fallen off the back of a truck. Not long after, I come across two immense hamsters sitting on either side of an asphalt driveway. Though it seems that the final appearance is just an ill-defined wish for large guard hamsters to take the place of dead yellow grass in weathered planters the city over.
