The Stone Diaries Part 20

Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables, Freckles, Twice Told Tales, Beautiful Joe, Mill on the Floss, Pocahontas, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, Helen's Babies, Our Mutual Friend, Nellie's Memories, Jane Eyre, The Unification of Italy, Beowulf, The Romantic Poets, In His Steps, Wild Geese, Gone With the Wind, Claudia, The First Six Years, Grapes of Wrath, Forever Amber, The Egg and I, Cheaper by the Dozen, l.u.s.t for Life, The Web and the Rock, The Skutari Saga, A Brief History of the Orkney Isles, Chekhov's Daughter, The Edible Woman, The Good Earth (large print edition), Murder in the Meantime (large print edition, half finished).

"What do you mean you don't think anyone's ever ready?"

"Christ, I'm ready right this minute."

"That's because you're feeling depressed about not having a job. You're not really ready at all. And I'll bet you she wasn't either."

"I don't know."

"Did you ever get a chance to talk to her about, you know-"

"Death? You couldn't talk to her about things like that."

"She'd change the subject."

"She'd put on the baffled schoolgirl look."

"Blink her eyes."

"Her mouth in a little round circle."

"Her eyebrows."

"When it comes right down to it, I freeze, too, at the thought of dying."

"It runs in the family."

"Our genes are pure granite."

"Little pellets."

"Hailstones."

"I do remember that once she said she liked pansies at a funeral. Not those dumb pansies with faces. What she liked were the absolutely pure purple ones, those deep, deep velvety petals.

That's the only thing I can remember her saying apropos to death."

"She just let her life happen to her."

"Well, why the h.e.l.l not?"

"It was like-"

"Like?"

"Like she was always going after some stray little thought with a needle and thread."

"Afraid to look inside herself. In case there was nothing there."

"Isn't that what Buddhists try so hard to get to?"

"The Buddhists?"

"Wanting to arrive at a state of nothingness?"

"Really?"

"What an awful thought."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I mean, nothing isn't, you know, much."

"Nothing's nothing."

"Amen."

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Behind stove, under ice box cheque for Mr. M.

gas moth b.a.l.l.s magazines to thrift shop furnace piano poison lamp fixtures Colic, chicken pox, measles, bronchial pneumonia, allergies, influenza, menstrual cramps, eczema, cyst.i.tis, childbirth, blood pressure, menopause, depression, angina, blocked arteries, broken bones, coronary bypa.s.s, kidney failure, cancer, bladder infection, stroke, bed sores, ulcerated leg, incontinence, stroke, memory loss, failing eyesight, inappropriate response, speech deficiency, depression, stroke, stroke.

Daisy Goodwill, in her final illness, the illness she is reputed to have borne with such patience, was left with only her death to contemplate-and she approached it with all the concerted weakness and failure of her body. Somewhere in the course of those final dreaming weeks, there had occurred a shifting of the tide. It arrived suddenly during one of her frequent comatose periods.

She entered sleep, as through a tunnel, still groping in the past, breathing in like a species of inferior oxygen the real and imagined episodes of her life, and then a kind of exhaustion took over, or perhaps boredom-in any case a rapid fading of color and of line, and a failure of the mechanism that had previously called up the earlier scenes. What pressed on her eyelids, instead, was a series of mutable transparencies gesturing not backward in time but forward-forward toward her own death. You might say that she breathed it into existence, then fell in love with it.

Her initial vision was theatrical, the usual pastel coffin, droning scripture, and shuddering pipe organ-all the stirred confetti of grief floating loose in a vividly inhabited room, loud with trashy weeping and tribute. But this was preposterous.

The brilliant room collapses, leaving a solid block of darkness.

Only her body survives, and the problem of what to do with it. It has not turned to dust. A bright, droll, clarifying knowledge comes over her at the thought of her limbs and organs transformed to biblical dust or even funereal ashes. Laughable.

Stone is how she finally sees herself, her living cells replaced by the insentience of mineral deposition. It's easy enough to let it claim her. She lies, in her last dreams, flat on her back on a thick slab, as hugely imposing as the bishops and saints she'd seen years earlier in the great pink cathedral of Kirkwall. It wasn't good enough for them, and it isn't for her either, but the image is, at the very least, contained; she loves it, in fact, and feels herself merge with, and become, finally, the still body of her dead mother.

She's miles away now from her clavicle, her fat cells, her genital flesh, from her toenails and back gums, from her nostrils and eyebrows, and the bony nameless place behind her ears. Her brain is purest mica; you can hold it up to the window and the light shines through. Empty, though, that's the catch.

With polite bemus.e.m.e.nt she lingers over each detail of her frozen state, adding and subtracting, refining, polishing. The folds of her dress, so primitive and stiff, are softened by a decorative edge, a calcium border of seash.e.l.ls of the kind sometimes seen on the edges of birthday cakes. A stone scroll dips gracefully across her slippered feet, the date worn away, illegible, and a stone pillow props up her head, the rigid frizz combed smooth at last. Her hands with their gentled knuckles curve inward at her sides, greatly simplified, the fingers melded together, ringless, unmarked by age, but gesturing (that minutely angled thumb) toward the large, hushed, immutable territory that stands beyond her hearing. From out of her impa.s.sive face the eyes stare icy as marbles, wide open but seeing nothing, nothing, that is, but the deep, shared common distress of men and women, and how little they are allowed, finally, to say.

Her final posture, then, is Grecian. Quiet. Timeless. Cla.s.sic.

She has always suspected she had this potential.

Only minimal energy is required to call up her stone self and hold it in place. Deaf to all but the loudest echoes, it flourishes on its own declining curve-the whiteness, the impermeable surface-and fills the hemisphere of her vision so completely that previous strategies and arrangements are cast aside. The blameless teeth, hair, and bones of Daisy Goodwill embrace this final form, or rather, it embraces her, allowing her access, at last, to a trance of solitude, attaching its weight to her faltering pendulum heart, her stiffened coral lungs. It grows harder and colder, and will soon take over altogether. Next week. Tomorrow. Tonight.

14 Grange Road, Tyndall, Manitoba (demolished 1922) 166 Simcoe Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba (demolished 1947) Apt. 12,144 East Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 6 Hawthorne Drive, Vinegar Hill, Bloomington, Indiana (Heritage designation 1975) Alpha Zeta House, Long College for Women, Hanover, Indiana (converted to Alumni Offices 1957) 583 The Driveway, Ottawa, Ontario (subdivided into condominiums 1981) 419 East Bayside Towers, Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Florida (condemned: failure to meet fire code 1986) Canary Palms Convalescent Home, Marine Drive, Colmann, Florida (bought by ICW Meditation and Cognitive Study Center 1990) Canary Palms Care Facility, 1267 Fauna Avenue, Colmann, Florida "I am not at peace."

Daisy Goodwill's final (unspoken) words "Daisy Goodwill Flett, wife, mother, citizen of our century: May she rest in peace."

Closing benediction, read by Warren M. Flett, Memorial Service, Canary Palms "The pansies, have you ever seen such ravishing pansies?"

"She would have loved them."

"Somehow, I expected to see a huge bank of daisies."

"Daisies, yes."

"Someone should have thought of daisies."

"Yes."

"Ah, well."