The Stone Diaries Part 18

This is too bothersome. Too painful.

She feels a tearing sound behind her eyes, and understands that she is flattered by this confidence and also resentful. For one thing, it wounds her to be put, thoughtlessly, into the same box with Reverend Rick's mother, who is a woman she senses she might not like. As a matter of fact, she does not really like Reverend Rick, has never liked him; there's something greedy about his zeal, and then there are his slumped shoulders and his shirt collars which look oddly chewed. On the other hand, this young man has driven all the way across town, all the way out to Canary Palms-and on a murderously hot day-in order to consult with her, to seek her wisdom. This has not happened often in Mrs.

Flett's life. Never, in fact. It almost certainly will not happen again.

"Have you tried," she says at last, "not being gay."

"What?" He shakes a dangling lock of hair out of his eyes.

"You know. Finding yourself a girlfriend and seeing if-well, you might surprise yourself, you may find that you really like having a girlfriend-what I mean is, it's possible you might change your att.i.tude."

"Being gay, Mrs. Flett, is not a question of att.i.tude."

She has offended him. Without turning her head and looking directly at him, she can tell that his whole body has stiffened. This she cannot bear. To be the cause of injury. Her greatest weakness-she's always known this-is her fear of giving injury, any more, that is, than she's already given. And so, despite her irritation, despite what she's read in the papers about Aids, she stretches out her hand to him, and feels it taken.

"Don't tell your mother," she says after a minute.

"But I can't go on living a lie."

"Why not?" Then she pauses. "Most people do."

"Not if we take our Christian faith seriously-"

"Your mother already knows." She says this crossly.

Suddenly it seems to Mrs. Flett that Reverend Rick's mother is here in the room with them, and that she really is, after all, a rather nice woman. Full of bustle and go. Full of smiles.

"Let me put it this way. Your mother half-knows. Soon she will fully know. She'll work it out. People do. It's not something the two of you will ever have to discus if you don't want to. Not ever." (She can't help feeling just a little proud of this speech.) "But to live with this barrier between us!" he says in a silly, whispery voice. He is weeping now. Weeping and sniffling.

"I'm afraid I'm feeling, all of a sudden, terribly tired. These pills they give me."

"It was different in your day. People were afraid to be open.

They lived their whole lives as if they were fairytales."

"Terribly, terribly sleepy." Her throat tingles, it really does. "If you'll forgive me."

"May G.o.d bless you, Mrs. Flett."

How does one reply to G.o.d's blessing? "Goodbye," Mrs. Flett says firmly, shutting her eyes, pressing her head hard against her pillows, and then adding a motherly, grandmotherly, womanly, feminine tossed-coin of a benediction, "Drive carefully now."

In the middle of writing a check she forgets the month, then the year. She's gaga, a loon, she's sprung a leak, her brain matter is falling out like the gray fluff from mailing envelopes, it's getting all over the furniture. What she needs, she tells her daughter, is open-heart surgery on her head.

"Ha," Alice says obligingly.

Everything makes her cross, the frowsiness of dead flowers in a vase, the smell of urine, her own urine. She's turned into a bitter hag, but well, not really, you see. Inside she's still a bowl of vibrating Jello, wise old Mrs. Green Thumb, remember her? Someone you can always call on, count on, phone in an emergency, etc.

It surprises Grandma Flett that there is so much humor hidden in the earth's creva.s.ses; it's everywhere, like a thousand species of moss. Almost every day she sees an item or two in the paper or on Good Morning America that brings a smile to her lips. Or else something amusing will happen on the floor, the nurses kidding back and forth, some ongoing joke. Who would have thought that comedy could stretch all the way to infirm old age?

And vanity too. Vanity refuses to die, pushing the blandness of everyday life into little pleats, pockets, k.n.o.bs of electric candy.

She looks into her bedside mirror, so cunningly hidden on the reverse side of the bed tray, and says, "There she is, my life's companion. Once I sat in her heart. Now I crouch in a corner of her eye." Nevertheless she applies a little lipstick in the morning before Dr. Riccia comes around, and a dusting of powder across her nose (she's had to give up her favorite Woodbury). Just how is it she finds the energy to lift her powder puff, knowing what she knows?

And she inspects her nails. It was Alice who arranged for the manicurist to drop in last week. Naturally Mrs. Flett resisted at first-she has never in her life had a professional manicure, such an extravagance!-but Alice insisted; a little treat, she called it.

And so Mrs. Flett's hands were lowered into various soapy solutions, then taken into this young woman's lap and gently dried with a towel. Her cuticles were trimmed and the nails shaped into perfect ovals. "Moons or plain?" she was asked. "What do you suggest?" said Mrs. Flett. "Well, now," the manicurist began, and it was clear that this decision would require some serious thought, some discussion. A French polish was finally decided on; "It gives a beautiful clean look, nice for summer." As though Mrs. Flett would soon be attending a series of garden parties or dropping in at one of Sarasota's finest dining establishments.

She keeps her ten buffed beauties carefully under the top sheet, but withdraws them every half hour or so for inspection, spreading them out in the sunshine. She looks at them first thing in the morning and last thing at night, but the fact is, she is almost continuously aware of them. They flutter lightly at her sides, and their lightness travels up to her wrists and flows into her arms and body.

They look elegant; they do! They look brand new. When you think of the slippage her body has undergone, the spoilage, you can perhaps understand her latest foolishness. But this concentration on fingernails is close to being obsessive, a distortion of normal powder-and-lipstick vanity. It shames her to think about what it means. How thin and unrewarding her life must have been, that such a little thing should give her so much pleasure. If she's not careful she'll turn into one of those pathetic old fruitcakes who are forever counting their blessings.

"Have you ever thought of having a pedicure?" Alice asks her.

Pictures fly into her head, brighter by far than those she sees on the big TV screen in the patients' lounge. A sparkling subversion.

Murmurings in her ears. She can tune in any time she likes.

She is seven years old, standing in her Aunt Clarentine's garden, stooping over the snapdragons, pinching them with her fingers so that their mouths open and close. They possess teeth and tiny tongues. Do other people know about this? She picks a spear of chive and sucks it. "Daisy," she hears. She's being called in to supper. Aunt Clarentine's promised to make pancakes tonight. All this: the thought of pancakes, the hot bite of chives, the hidden throats of flowers, the sun, the sound of her own name-she is suddenly dizzy with the press of sensation, afraid she will die of it.

Snow fell on the neighborhood houses and at once they, and their small fenced yards, became whitened with soft fur, with what used to be called in those days spring sherbet. She scooped a handful from her bedroom window sill, held it against her forehead until she could bear it no longer. A test of some kind. A test of courage. The moonlight was cold and clear.

She found something beautiful. A dazzling iridescence on the road. A rainbow pressed into the paving. No one else knew it was there, this marvellous thing she had discovered. But she made the mistake of showing it to one of the older girls in the neighborhood who said, calm as can be, "Why it's only oil, just a little oil spilled on the roadway, nothing to make a fuss over."

Summer again. She took a blade of gra.s.s, split it with her fingernail, held it between her thumbs and blew. Someone showed her how to do this, she can't remember who. It was easy-making this wailing sound, like a loon screeching. You got better and better at it. You learned, and you never forgot. You were like other people, you could do the same things other people did.

The brown leaves had been raked into a pile ready to burn, and she longed to lie down on top of them for just a minute, flat on her back in the rustling leaves, staring upward. She let herself fall backward, her arms straight out, trustingly, and at once the complications of branches, fences, sheds and houses, so dense and tangled together, burst with a cartoon pop into the spare singularity of sky, the primary abruptness of blue. That's all there was.

Herself suspended in a gla.s.s sphere. You could go back and back to that true and steadfast picture, hold it in your head for the rest of your life.

What is your name?

Daisy.

Daisy what?

Daisy Goodwill.

Do you know what the word "Daisy" means? It means "Day's Eye."

That's right. I used to know that. I'd forgotten.

A daisy really is a bit like an eye when you think about it, round and fringed with lashes, staring upward.

Opening, closing.

The odd thing about the pictures that fly into Daisy Goodwill's head is that she is always alone. There are voices that reach her from a distance; there are shadows and suggestions-but still she is alone. And we require, it seems, in our moments of courage or shame, at least one witness, but Mrs. Flett has not had this privilege. This is what breaks her heart. What she can't bear. Even now, eighty years old.

Grandma Flett knows she rambles, she knows she repeats herself, and Alice, bless her, never stops her, never says, "You've already told us about that, Mother."

All she's trying to do is keep things straight in her head. To keep the weight of her memories evenly distributed. To hold the chapters of her life in order. She feels a new tenderness growing for certain moments; they're like beads on a string, and the string is wearing out. At the same time she knows that what lies ahead of her must be concluded by the efforts of her imagination and not by the straight-faced recital of a throttled and unlit history. Words are more and more required. And the question arises: what is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression?

The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge? She needs a quiet place in which to think about this immensity. And she needs someone-anyone-to listen.

It's an indulgence, though, the desire to return to currency all that's been sampled and stored and dreamed into being. She oughtn't to carry on the way she does, bending Alice's ear, boring poor Dr. Riccia to death. She chastises herself; she's getting as bad as Marian McHenry, always going on and on about her own concerns. Instead of thinking of others. Putting others first.

Little Emma is dead. Or perhaps she has been put into an inst.i.tution with other Down's syndrome children. Mongoloids they used to call them back in a crueller time.

No one says a single word to Grandma Flett about Emma for fear of upsetting her, but she knows anyway: here, coming into focus at her bedside, is her son, Warren, and his new wife-whose name Grandma Flett cannot at this moment recall. The room has slipped sideways. The window lies on an angle. Her own tongue is coiled upon itself. She asks for a gla.s.s of water, a simple request, a simple phrase, but she can't get it right. "Mongoloid," she says instead. Alarm touches Warren's face and spreads downward through the erect, elastic column of his neck. She would like to comfort him with a look or a tender word, but her body is weighed down with its own confusion. She doesn't mean to be unkind. She shuts her eyes, concentrating, shutting out her son and his young wife, regarding something infinitely complex printed on the thin skin of her eyelids, a secret, a dream. A kind of movie.

Alice abruptly marries Dr. Riccia. She moves with him to Jamaica where they live in a beautiful bungalow by the ocean. They have a child, a little boy with long curling eyelashes and courtly manners.

No, none of this is true. Old Mrs. Flett is dreaming again.

How do these spurious versions arise?

Think, think, she tells herself. Be reasonable.

Dr. Riccia is already married and the father of two children; Grandma Flett has been shown snapshots of the Riccia family standing in front of their colonial-style house in Kensington Park.

Alice returns to England. The summer is over. Her teaching term begins next week, and she's already planning a weekend party for a dozen or so friends: Moroccan music, something curried, cold beer, herself loud and ironic in swinging earrings. She's found a buyer for the condo in Bayside Towers and she's looked after a number of minor legal matters for her mother, having been granted power of attorney. Papers have been signed. Arrangements made for the future. Alice takes back to rainy Hampstead a gorgeous Florida tan, though everyone, even her mother, warns her that Florida tans don't last. Never mind, she'll be back at Christmas. The pattern of her life is unfolding, a long itinerary of revision and accommodation. She's making it up as she goes along.

This is not how she imagined her middle years, but this is the way it will be.

Something has occurred to her-something transparently simple, something she's always known, it seems, but never articulated. Which is that the moment of death occurs while we're still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being b.u.t.ting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. A person can go on and on tuned in to the daily music of food and work and weather and speech right up to the last minute, so that not a single thing gets lost.

She is surprisingly heartened by this thought, and can't help telling her mother how she feels.

Her mother, Daisy Goodwill, is still alive inside her failing body. Up and down, good days, bad days. She's doing as well as can be expected, that's what everyone keeps saying. She could go on like this for years.

CHAPTER TEN.

Death.

DAISY (GOODWILL) FLETT Peacefully, on -, in the month of - in the year 199- at Canary Palms Rest Home, Sarasota, Florida, after a long illness patiently borne.

"Grandma" Flett was predeceased by her husband, Barker Flett, a respected Canadian authority on hybrid grains. She leaves to mourn her daughter Alice Goodwill-Spanner of Hampstead, England, daughter Joan and spouse Ross Taylor of Portland, Oregon, son Warren and wife Peggy of New York City, and grandniece Victoria and spouse Lewis Roy of Toronto. She was the adored grandmother of Benjamin, Judith, Rachel, Rain, Teller, Beth, Lissa, Jilly, and Emma (?), as well as the loving great-grandmother of Madeleine, Andrew, and Mordicai, and the great-aunt of twins Sophie and Hugh.

A memorial service will be held at Canary Palms Chapel, 10:00. Flowers gratefully declined. Interment will follow at Long Key Cemetery.

Flowers gratefully accepted in remembrance of DAISY GOODWILL FLETT who embraced as well as she was able most growing things gardens children balloons of memory though she feared greatly the encircling shadow of solitude and silence which she came to equate with her own life Daisy Daisy Give me your answer true Day's eye, day's eye The face in the mirror is you "It was in her bedside drawer. This little velvet box."

"What is it? It looks like-"

"That's what it is. Fingernail clippings. Hers, I a.s.sume."

"Christ."

Flett, Daisy (nee Goodwill), who, due to historical accident, due to carelessness, due to ignorance, due to lack of opportunity and courage, never once in her many years of life experienced the excitement and challenge of oil painting, skiing, sailing, nude bathing, emerald jewelry, cigarettes, oral s.e.x, pierced ears, Swedish clogs, water beds, science fiction, p.o.r.nographic movies, religious ecstasy, truffles, Kirsch, jalepeno peppers, Peking duck, Vienna, Moscow, Madrid, group therapy, body ma.s.sage, hunger, distinguished honors, outraged condemnation, who never drove a car, never bought a lottery ticket, never, never (on the other hand) was struck on the face or body by another being, never once perched her reading gla.s.ses (with a sigh) in the crown of her hair, never (for fear of ridicule) investigated the possibilities of plastic surgery or yoga, never gave herself over to the kind of magazine article that tells you to be good to yourself, to believe in yourself and do things for yourself. Nor, though she knew she had been loved in her life, did she ever hear the words "I love you, Daisy" uttered aloud (such a simple phrase), and only during the long, thin, uneventful sleep that preceded her death did she have the wit (and leisure) to ponder the injustice of this.

"A blessing," exclaims the noted Chekhov scholar Alice Goodwill Spanner when informed of her mother's death.

"My mother's quality of life had been hovering at sub-zero for some time," remarks Warren Flett, musicologist for the Lower Manhattan Public Schools.

"She was worn out," announces Joan Taylor, the unemployed soon-to-turn-fifty youngest daughter of the Flett family. "Her life wore her out and then her death wore her out."

"She told me she was ready to go any time," murmurs the award-winning paleobotanist Victoria Louise Flett-Roy. "But is anyone ever really ready?"

"She had this crazy kind of adjustable intelligence. She could hoist it into view when she wanted to."

"Egregious. I heard her say that word once, egregious! It just rolled off her tongue."

"And holy smokes. She used to say holy smokes."

"Really?"

"And like sometimes she wasn't quite there. Knock, knock, anyone home?"

"Those clothes! She had this way of dressing so no one knew if she spent too little money or too much. Or if she was four years behind her fashion moment or twenty-four years."

"Ha."

"She was evasive."

"Yes, but evasion can be a form of aggression."

"Come again?"

"You heard me."

Bluebirds, Pioneer Girls in Service, GSA, Tudorettes, History Circle, Christian Endeavor, Alpha Zeta, Quarry Club, United Church Women, Mothers' Union, The Arrowroots, Mutchmor Home and School a.s.sociation, Ottawa Horticultural Society, Beautiful Glebe Committee, Carleton County Heart Fund, Rideau Luncheon Series, Ontario Seed Collective, Bay Ladies Craft Group, The Flowers.

"No definitely, I do not want to have any of her body parts donated."

"It was just a thought."

"Everything about her was worn out anyway."

"I just thought-"

In Laving Memory of Daisy Goodwill Flett 1905199-In Loving Memory of Daisy Goodwill Who in Sound Mind And without malice And Over the Objection of her Family Made the Decision After Prolonged Reflection After Torment With Misgivings With Difficulty With Apologies With Determination To Lie Alone in Death "She left you what?" Joan shouted over the telephone. (A bad transatlantic connection.) "Her trug," said Alice, grimacing.

"What in G.o.d's name is a trug?"