What the Objects Know

The kitchen table between us was birch, pale and scuffed, and someone had left a ceramic bowl of lemons on it that neither Munro nor Lahiri had touched. The lemons were decorative, I think. Or they had been real once and become decorative through neglect — the kind of slow transformation that happens in houses where people are busy not saying things to each other.

Munro picked one up and turned it in her hand, examining it the way you’d examine a stone you found on a beach. “These are waxed,” she said. “You can tell by the shine. Real lemons get dull.”

Lahiri looked at the lemon and then at Munro and said nothing for a moment. Then: “My mother would have been upset by waxed lemons. She would have said something about waste. About how in India the lemons are small and ugly and they have more juice than anything you can buy in a North American grocery store, and she would have been right, and also she would have been talking about something else entirely.”

I said I thought that was exactly the territory we were in. Objects that stand for what people can’t say directly. A woman arranging flowers, and the flowers meaning more than flowers.

Munro set the lemon down. “Be careful with that. The minute you decide that the flowers mean something, you’ve killed them. They have to be flowers first. They have to be specific — what kind, what color, where she bought them, how much they cost, whether the stems were trimmed properly. The meaning comes after, if it comes at all. You can’t start with the symbol and work backward to the thing.”

“I don’t disagree,” Lahiri said, “but I think the character knows. The character is aware that she is arranging more than flowers. She may not articulate it — she almost certainly doesn’t articulate it — but there is a consciousness in the act. When I write about a woman cooking rice, the woman knows that cooking rice in a particular way is a form of cultural persistence. She doesn’t frame it in those terms. But her hands know.”

“Hands knowing things. Yes.” Munro leaned back. “I’ll accept that. My women know things in their hands, in the way they hang laundry, in the cupboard they reach for. But I still want the flowers to be flowers. I want the reader to be able to smell them before they start thinking about what they represent.”

I wrote this down. I was taking notes on a legal pad, which felt old-fashioned next to both of them, and also right, because what we were discussing was old-fashioned in the best sense — the interior life of a woman in a marriage, in a house, in a small town. The bones of domestic realism. I asked about the town.

“Small Ontario,” Munro said immediately. “I know these places. Four hundred people. A United Church. A general store that’s hanging on by its fingernails. Everyone knows your car. Everyone knows when you’re not at the Sunday service and nobody says anything about it and everyone notices.”

“And into this place,” Lahiri said, “you put a woman who is not from there.”

“Yes.”

“An Indian woman.”

“Yes. Married to a local man. Or — not local, exactly. From Toronto. But white, English-speaking, at ease in the landscape in a way she will never be, no matter how long she lives there.”

Lahiri’s face changed slightly — a tightening I recognized. “This is the thing I keep returning to in my own work. The woman who has been in a place for fifteen, twenty years and is still, in some fundamental way, a guest. Not because anyone is cruel. Often because everyone is kind. The kindness itself can be a form of distance. ‘You make such wonderful samosas’ — do you see how that sentence contains both warmth and a border?”

I said I did. I asked whether the husband should be aware of this distance.

“He shouldn’t be unaware,” Munro said. “That’s too easy. The oblivious husband. He notices. He just doesn’t have the vocabulary for what he’s noticing. Or he has the vocabulary but not the — what’s the word — the stamina. It takes stamina to sit with someone’s displacement. To really sit with it. Most people can do it for an evening, maybe a weekend. But twenty years?”

“He falls back on practical questions,” Lahiri said. “‘Should you go?’ — meaning, to see your mother. The right question. The question a decent person asks. But it costs nothing to ask it, and the woman knows this, and the man knows she knows this, and they both let it sit there like a cup of tea going cold between them.”

Munro smiled — not warmly, exactly. It was a smile that acknowledged something had been precisely named. “A cup of tea going cold. Yes. That’s the marriage. Nineteen years of tea going cold and being poured out and refilled and going cold again.”

I pushed on something that was bothering me. The woman — I was already thinking of her, though we hadn’t named her — this woman who arranges flowers and makes dal and stands at windows, did she almost leave? Had there been a moment, years ago, where she nearly walked away?

“There has to be,” Munro said. “Not a dramatic moment. Not a suitcase by the door. Something smaller. Looking up bus schedules. Checking her passport to make sure it hadn’t expired. The kind of almost-leaving that happens entirely in the head and that nobody else ever knows about, and that changes everything because once you’ve thought it, you can’t unthink it. You’re choosing to stay, every day after that. And the choosing costs something.”

Lahiri frowned. “I’m less interested in the almost-leaving than in what she does instead. The staying. The way staying becomes — not acceptance, that’s the wrong word. It becomes a discipline. Like a practice. Like prayer, almost. She gets up every morning and she stays and she makes the house beautiful and she arranges things, and the arranging is both genuine — she really does have a talent for it, she really does have the eye — and also it’s a kind of — ” She stopped. Searched for the word. “A kind of proof. That she is here. That she chose this.”

“But she’s always in two places,” I said.

“Everyone is always in two places,” Lahiri said. “The immigrant just knows it.”

Munro reached for the lemon again. Held it. Put it back. “I want to talk about the mother. The dying mother. Because that’s the engine, isn’t it? That’s what makes the flowers urgent instead of just habitual.”

I hadn’t planned on the mother yet, but Munro was right. The phone call from India — Calcutta, I was thinking, though we hadn’t settled it — the phone call that arrives while the woman is washing grapes or cutting vegetables, some ordinary act that gets interrupted by news that the world is ending in the place she came from.

“The mother should not be sentimental,” Lahiri said. “She should be practical. Almost bureaucratic about her own dying. ‘The doctors found something in my lungs. The treatment is not going well. You should not worry.’ That flatness is how my mother’s generation speaks about death. It is not denial — it is a refusal to burden. Which is its own form of burden, of course.”

“The daughter stands there with a colander in one hand and the phone in the other,” Munro said, “and her husband’s grapes are in the colander because he eats grapes after dinner, he’s eaten grapes after dinner every night for nineteen years, and her mother is dying, and the grapes need to be put in the bowl.”

Something about the way she said it — the flatness of it, the specific domestic detail placed against the enormity — made me stop writing for a moment. That was the story. Right there. The grapes and the dying. The bowl and the phone. I said as much.

“Don’t be too pleased with yourself,” Munro said. “That’s a starting image, not a story. A story is what happens next. What does she do with the knowledge? How does it move through the house? Does she tell him at dinner or does she wait? And when she tells him, what does she not say, and what does he not ask?”

Lahiri nodded slowly. “The not-asking is where I live. The silence between the question and the answer, which is where the entire marriage fits. He asks the right things. He always asks the right things. And she answers with approximately the truth, which is not lying, exactly, but is a form of — curation. She curates what he receives. She has been doing this for nineteen years and she is very skilled at it and it is exhausting and she would not know how to stop.”

“An animal,” Munro said abruptly. I looked up.

“A stray cat. Something that appears in the yard around the same time the mother calls. Not a metaphor — or not only a metaphor. A real cat with a torn ear. The woman isn’t supposed to feed it. The husband says, ‘Don’t feed it — if you feed it, it stays.’ And the word stays does something to her, though she doesn’t examine it, not consciously.”

“You’re giving me a symbol,” Lahiri said. “You just said not to do that.”

“I said don’t start with the symbol. The cat starts as a cat. A stray in the yard. It becomes something else because the character’s attention makes it something else. That’s different from putting a white whale in the ocean because you need a symbol of obsession.”

I could feel them circling each other. Not arguing, exactly — orbiting the same problem from different altitudes. Munro wanted the physical world to come first and generate its own meaning. Lahiri wanted the character’s consciousness to recognize the meaning as it formed. They were both right, and I said so, and they both looked at me with the expression experienced writers give to someone who says “you’re both right.”

“Let me ask you something,” Lahiri said, and I realized she was addressing me directly. “When this woman feeds the cat — and she will feed the cat, we all know she will feed the cat — what is she doing?”

I said she was keeping something alive that her husband told her not to keep.

“Too neat,” Munro said.

“She’s feeding a stray because a stray is a thing that doesn’t belong anywhere and she recognizes that,” I tried.

“Getting warmer,” Lahiri said. “But still too clean. In my experience, the real reason people do these things is muddier. She feeds the cat because the cat is there and it’s hungry and she has leftover chicken and the act of putting food on a saucer and setting it on the step is something her hands can do while her mind is in Calcutta. It’s not a symbolic act. It’s a practical act that happens to contain an enormous amount of feeling.”

“That’s what I said,” Munro said. “You just said it in different words.”

“I said it better,” Lahiri said, and the corner of her mouth moved, and Munro made a sound that might have been a laugh.

I wanted to ask about the ending — how the story should close, what resolution was possible — but I already knew what both of them would say. Munro would say the ending should arrive like a change in weather: not a climax, not a revelation, just the light shifting in the room. Lahiri would say the last image should be precise and contained and should hold everything the story has been building without naming it. And they would both be describing the same ending, and I would have to figure out what it was.

Instead I asked about the neighbor. The woman who asks Kavitha — I had started calling her Kavitha, silently, and now the name came out — the woman who asks Kavitha to do the flowers.

“She should be friendly,” Munro said. “Genuinely friendly. That’s important. She’s not a villain. She’s not even thoughtless, exactly. She’s a woman who has lived in the same county her whole life and who sees Kavitha as — as someone who makes things beautiful. And she means it as a compliment. It IS a compliment. But it also defines the space Kavitha is allowed to occupy.”

“‘You have the eye,’” Lahiri said. “Something like that. Something that is praise and also a kind of — assignment. You have the eye, so your job is to make things beautiful. My job is to run the committee. Betty’s job is to organize the bake sale. We have all been assigned our roles and we are all performing them and some of us had more roles to choose from than others.”

“But Kavitha isn’t bitter about it,” I said.

“No,” they said at the same time.

Lahiri continued: “Bitterness requires a certain kind of entitlement — the sense that the world owes you something different. Kavitha doesn’t have that. What she has is an awareness. A very precise awareness of the shape of the space she occupies, and of the spaces she doesn’t occupy, and of the cost of the awareness itself, which is that she can never simply be in a room. She is always also watching herself be in the room.”

Munro was quiet for a while. She turned the lemon over again, and then she said something that surprised me. “I don’t think the story should move forward very much. Nineteen years have already happened. The mother is already dying. The flowers are already being arranged. The cat is already in the yard. What the story does is hold all of these things at once and let the reader feel the weight of holding them. That’s the action. The holding.”

“A woman stands in a kitchen,” Lahiri said.

“A woman stands in a kitchen,” Munro agreed.

“And the kitchen is in Ontario but the kitchen is also in Calcutta,” Lahiri said.

“And the flowers are white,” Munro said, “and the flowers are for someone else’s party, and the flowers are perfect, and the woman who arranged them goes home.”

There was a silence. The kind of silence that is not empty but full, the way a pause in music is full. I looked at my notes and they were a mess — fragments, arrows, underlined phrases, a drawing of a lemon I didn’t remember making. I didn’t have a plot. I didn’t have a structure. What I had was a woman with a colander and a phone and a cat in the yard and a husband who eats grapes and a mother who refuses to say the word dying and a neighbor who thinks she is being kind.

I asked one more question. “Does she go? To Calcutta?”

Munro and Lahiri looked at each other. It was the only time in the conversation they seemed to consult each other silently, to check whether they were on the same page.

“She goes,” Lahiri said.

“She comes back,” Munro said.

“She always comes back,” Lahiri said, and her voice had a weight to it that made me put my pen down.

Munro stood up. She was done, I could tell. She picked up the lemon one last time and held it near her nose, checking for scent, and found none. “Waxed,” she said again, to no one in particular, and set it back in the bowl among the others.