The Stone Diaries: Pulitzer Prize Winner By Carol Shields - 11

CHAPTER NINE

Illness and Decline, 1985

Eighty-year-old Grandma Flett of Sarasota, Florida, is sick; every last cell of her body, it seems, has been driven into illness.

When she collapsed a month ago, a heart attack while watering the row of miniature geraniums on the south side of her balcony, she went down hard on the concrete paving and broke both her knees. Luckily Marian McHenry, whose balcony is separated from Mrs. Flett’s by a flimsy bit of lattice-work, heard her cry out, and summoned an ambulance.

A double bypass was performed two days later at Sarasota Memorial Hospital (the possibility of such an operation had been discussed by Mrs. Flett’s cardiologist more than a year earlier, but for various reasons postponed). A week after the surgery, just as she was beginning to come around nicely, Grandma Flett suffered what appeared to be partial kidney failure, and one of her kidneys, the left, was removed and found to be cancerous. “But at least we got the goldarn thing out sweet and clean,” her urologist said, in the muddied southern tones that Mrs. Flett’s family find so alarming.

Suddenly her body is all that matters. How it’s let her down.

And how fundamentally lonely it is to live inside a body year after year and carry it always in a forward direction, and how there is never any relief from the weight of it, even when sleeping, even when joined, briefly, to the body of another. An x-ray of her left knee reminds her just how insubstantial she is, has always been—an envelope of flesh, glassine. She lives now in the wide-open arena of pain, surrounded by row on row of spectators. The nights are endless, the morning sun a severity. Those hospital mornings!

A thermometer planted between her lips, her blood pressure roughly taken, and a cardiac monitor rolled into her room, heavy, masculine, with dials like a human face, ready to condemn her vascular weakness. Her ancient feet poking out at the side of the sheet have an oyster-like translucence and are always cold, though, oddly, no one notices this, no one says, “Why is it your feet are so cold, Mrs. Flett?” Urine passes from her body through a catheter stuck between her legs and disappears along with other cloudy fluids into the unknown. Into the universe. She spits into a basin, makes obscene gurgling sounds when brushing her strong old teeth, trying to remember a time when her body had been sealed and private.

After a few days the drainage tube is removed from her nose and the intravenous needle from her arm, and she is told—with a congratulatory salute—that she has earned the right once again to partake of food and liquids. “Some lemonade’ll do you good, sweetie-pie,” the juice girl yells into her ear. “A person can never, never get enough fluids.” This girl with her rolling cart of apple juice, milk, iced tea, and lukewarm cocoa is eighteen years old, black-faced, purple-lipped, with a high, tight, one-note laugh: oppressive.

In the early morning hours Mrs. Flett experiences nightmares that are uniquely invasive, reaching all the way to her heart’s core, and their subject, which she can never recollect afterward, is violent. “It’s just the drugs,” her doctors tell her, “a common complaint.”

In her much milder daytime dreams she drifts through scenes shabby like old backyards, dusty, with strewn trash in the flowerbeds and under piles of dead shrubbery, past streets where white-faced men and women are watering lawns choked with plantain, dandelions, and creeping charlie, lawns that because of ignorance and insufficient money are doomed never to flourish.

In the pleat of consciousness that falls between sleeping and waking she is capable of marching straight into the machinery of invention. Sketching vivid scenery. Laying out conversations, arguments. Certain phrases, remembered and invented, rattle in her afflicted head, taunting her with their rhythms and abraded meaning.

“The chaplain’s here to see you, sweetie-pie.”

“What?” Out of a spiral of thin-colored sleep.

“The chaplain, Mrs. Flett. Y’all feel like talking to the chaplain?”

“Who?”

Louder this time. “The chaplain. Reverend Rick. You remember Reverend Rick.”

“No.”

“Hey, you do so. You had yourself a real nice prayer together just yesterday. And some Bible verses.”

“No.”

“Hey, Mrs. Flett, don’t give me that stuff—you remember the chaplain, sure you do.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, I don’t want to see him. Not today.”

She has a private room at the end of the hall with a wide uncurtained window. In the days following her surgery she lies, wretchedly, in bed and during her brief waking moments stares out at the pale concrete Florida architecture, pink, green, lavender, like frosted petits fours shaped by a doughy hand and set out to stiffen and dry. The sun shines down on dented station wagons, glints on the heads of young mothers cooing at their children and banging car doors, and boils into whiteness the cracked cement fence that surrounds the parking lot. Doctors park their Mercedes and Lincolns in a reserved section close to the hospital doors, and the tops of these cars gleam with the hard brilliance of cheap candy, a rainbow of hues.

“No, I won’t see the chaplain today,” she says with dignity, with what she believes is dignity.

“If that’s what you want, so okay.” Shrugging.

“That’s what I want.”

“It’s up to you.”

“I know.”

“It does a world of good, though, the words of Jesus, the sweetest words there are in this crazy mixed-up world of ours.”

“I’m too tired today.”

“It’d perk you up. Hey, I see it happen every day, that’s the honest truth. ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’ The best medicine there is and it’s free for the taking.”

“No, really, I don’t think—”

“Whad’ya know, here’s Reverend Rick now. How ya doin’, Reverend? Why don’ya come on in for a minute or two. Cheer up our patient here, who’s all down in the dumps.”

“Please, I’m—”

“So—feeling up to a little chat, Mrs. Flett?”

“Well, I—”

“I could always come back tomorrow.”

“Well—”

“I’ll just stay a minute. Sure wouldn’t want to tire you out.”

“Oh, no.”

“Pardon? What’s that you say, Mrs. Flett?”

“Please sit down. Make yourself—”

“Afraid I didn’t quite hear—”

“Make yourself, make yourself”—here Grandma Flett comes to a halt, pushes her tongue across the ridge of her lower teeth, panics briefly, and then, thank goodness, finds the right word—”comfortable.”

“I’ll just pull up a chair, Mrs. Flett, if that’s okay with you.”

“So good of you to come.”

God, the Son and the Holy Ghost; suddenly they’re here in Grandma Flett’s hospital room, ranged along the wall, a trio of paintings on velvet, dark, gilt-edged, their tender mouths unsmiling, but ready to speak of abiding love. Not a sparrow shall fall but they—what is it they do, these three? What do they actually do? I used to know, but now at the age of eighty I’ve forgotten. It seems too late, somehow, to ask, and it doesn’t seem likely that young Reverend Rick will put forth an explanation. The cleansing of sins, redemption. And somewhere, a long way back, the blood of a lamb.

Something barbarous. A wooded hillside. Spoiled.

“Afraid I didn’t quite catch what you said, Mrs. Flett.”

“I said, it’s so good of you to come.”

Is Mrs. Flett shouting?

No, it only seems that way; she’s really whispering, poor thing.

From her trough of sheets. From her pain and bewilderment. Her tubes and wires. Her constricted eighty-year-old throat. The drugs. The dreams. Her feet, so chilly and damp, so exposed, ignored, and doomed. The pastel scenery outside her expensive window, the car doors slamming in the parking lot, Jesus and God and the Holy Ghost peering down on her in their clubby, mannish way, knowing everything, seeing all, but not caring one way or the other, when you come right down to it, about the hurts and alarms of her body—at this time in her life. Now. This minute. Go away, please just go away.

“It’s so good of you to come.”

Did you hear that, the exquisite manners this elderly person possesses? You don’t encounter that kind of old-fashioned courtesy often these days. And when you think it’s only two weeks since her bypass, six days since a kidney was seized from her body. And her knees, her poor smashed knees. Amazing, considering all this, that she can remember the appropriate phrase, amazing and also chilling, the persevering strictures of social discourse.

Never mind, it means nothing; it’s only Mrs. Flett going through the motions of being Mrs. Flett.

Grandma Flett’s room is filled with cards and flowers. The juice girl—it seems her name is Jubilee—makes a raucous joke of this abundance, shrieking disbelief, pretending horror—”Not anoth-ah bouquet! I swear, Mrs. Flett! Now, you tell me, how’m I supposed to find room to set down another bouquet in this here jungle you got?”

Mrs. Flett’s son, Warren, and his new wife, Peggy, have sent an inflatable giraffe, five feet tall, with curling vinyl eyelashes and a mouthful of soft teeth—it stands by the window, and wobbles slightly whenever a breeze passes through. A conversation piece, Mrs. Flett thinks, a little puzzled, wondering if giraffes hold special significance for the elderly, the infirm—or does it gesture toward some forgotten family joke? Her Oregon granddaughters—Rain, Beth, Lissa, and Jilly—have pooled their babysitting money and sent Grandma Flett a complicated battery-operated game called Self-Bridge. The thought of their generosity, their sacrifice, brings tears into her throat, though, in fact, she never once takes the mechanism from its box, never collects quite enough energy to read the tightly printed directions.

And at five o’clock every afternoon Grandma Flett receives an overseas phone call from her daughter, Alice, in Hampstead, England (ten p.m., Greenwich time). Alice used to joke that her mother, when the time came, would lift a hand gaily on her way out, rather like Queen Elizabeth in a motorcade, hatted, gloved, bidding farewell to everything, to life—this mystery, this little enterprise. But now she understands her picture will have to be reordered. Her mother is sick, helpless, and Alice, speaking on the transatlantic line, adopts a clear, quiet, unrushed voice, as though she were phoning from across the street, as though she were someone in a television drama.

“I’ve spoken to the doctor, Mother. He says you’re doing wonderfully well. He says you have the most remarkable strength, and if you only had, you know, just a little more patience. At the rate you’re going you’ll be able to go home in a couple of weeks, but why push it when you’re getting such wonderful care and attention, and luckily Blue Cross covers almost everything.”

Alice also phones her sister Joan in Portland, Oregon, and says, plunging right in: “She can’t possibly go home, the doctor says it’s impossible. How would she manage? She’s helpless.”

To her brother Warren in New York she says, the telephone wires taut: “I’ve talked to the orthopedic surgeon and he says she’ll never be able to walk again, not without a walker, and maybe not even that. I mean, Christ, we have to face it, this is the beginning of the end.”

All three of Mrs. Flett’s children feel guilty that they are not at their mother’s bedside. Alice is planning to fly over at the end of her teaching term, another month. Warren’s new wife has recently given birth to a Down’s syndrome child—christened Emma—and he feels, rightly, that he can’t possibly abandon his family at a time like this, not even for a few days. Joan has actually made one quick trip—Portland, Chicago, Tampa, and back—but she has, after all, four teenaged daughters to look after and a husband who is prone to extra-marital involvements. Mrs. Flett’s niece, Victoria, writes a witty little note every second day, but for the moment her professional responsibilities, as well as her husband, Lewis, and the twins, keep her in Toronto. When Grandma Flett thinks of her scattered family, her children, her grandchildren, her grandniece, she is unable to form images in her mind of their separate and particular faces. The young girl, Jubilee, is more real to her now. And Dr. Aaronfeld and Dr. Scott on their daily rounds, their jokes, their loud, hearty, hospital laughter. And, in his way, Reverend Rick. And faithful Marian McHenry who has not missed a single evening’s visit, never mind that all she can talk about are her relations back in Cleveland. And the Flowers! Where would she be without the Flowers, who come by cab every two or three days, and what a time they all have then!

Even when Mrs. Flett still had the drainage tube in her nose, when she could scarcely lift her head from the pillow, the Flowers arrived for a round of bridge by her bedside. Just a couple of hands that first day, then gradually increasing. You’d hardly think it possible that Grandma Flett could concentrate on hearts and spades, points and tricks, trumps and cross-trumps at a time like this, but she can, she does; they all do. Lily, Myrtle, and Glad are their names; Glad, of course, is really Gladys, not Gladiola, but she considers herself a full-fledged Flower nevertheless. The four of them live on various floors of Bayside Towers, where Mrs. Flett has had her condo all these years, and it was here, in the basement card room, that the foursome first got together. (This would be in the late seventies, after Mrs. Flett lost her two dearest friends, Beans dying so suddenly, Fraidy Hoyt going senile; a terrible time.) The Flowers get on like a house afire, like Gangbusters. Other people at the Bayside envy their relaxed good nature, their shrugging conviviality, and each of the Flowers is acutely aware of this envy, and, in their old age, surprised and gratified by it. At last: a kind of schoolgirl popularity. Unearned, but then, isn’t that the way with popularity? The four Flowers are fortunate in their mutual attachment and they recognize their luck. Lily’s from Georgia, Glad from New Hampshire, the breezy-talking Myrtle from Michigan—different worlds, you might say, and yet their lives chime a similar tune. Just look at them: four old white women. Like Mrs. Daisy Flett, they are widows; they are, all of them, comfortably well off; they have aspired to no profession other than motherhood, wifehood; they love a good laugh; there is something filigreed and droll about the way they’re always on the cusp of laughter. On Sundays they go to church services at First Presbyterian and, from there, to an all-you-can-eat brunch at The Shellseekers (a sign over the cash register says “Help Stomp Out Home Cooking”); and every single afternoon, Monday to Saturday between the hours of two and four-thirty, they play bridge in the card room at Bayside Towers, invariably occupying the round corner table which is positioned well away from the noisy blast and chill of the air conditioner. This is the Flowers’ table and no one else’s. “How’re the Flowers blooming today?” other Bayside residents call out by way of greetings.

“My husband used to say that girls with flower names fade fast.”

It was Myrtle who said this one day, out of the blue, and for some reason it made them all go weak with laughter. Now, when asked how the Flowers are blooming, one of them will be sure to call back, cheerfully: “Fading fast,” and one of the others will add, with a calypso bounce, “but holding firm.” It’s part of their ritual, one of many. They have a joke, for instance, about a beige cardigan Glad’s been knitting for the last ten years. And another joke about Mr. Jellicoe on the sixth floor who cradles his crotch when he thinks no one’s looking. And about Mrs. Bolt who looks after the library corner and hoards the new large-print books for herself.

And Marian McHenry and her everlasting nieces and nephews up in Cleveland. And about the inevitability and sinfulness of the pecan pie at The Shellseekers. They celebrate each other’s birthdays—with a bakery cake and a glass of California wine—and on these occasions one or other of the Flowers will be sure to say:

“Well, here’s to another year and let’s hope it’s above ground.”

This, to tell the truth, is the joke they relish above all others, a joke that shocks their visiting families, but that rolls off their own tongues with invigorating freshness, with a fine trill of mockery—a joke, when you come right down to it, about their own deaths.

Their laughter at these moments wizens into a cackle. It’s already been decided that when one of them “hangs up her hat” or “kicks the bucket” or “goes over the wall” or “trades in her ashes” or “hops the twig” or “joins the choir invisible”—that then, given a decent week or two for mourning, the surviving three will invite the unspeakable Iris Jackman (third floor, west wing) to fill in at the round table, even though Iris has the worst case of B.O. in captivity and is so dumb she can’t tell a one-club hand from a grand slam.

A secret rises up in Grandma Flett’s body, gathering neatly at her wrist bone where the light strikes the white plastic of the hospital bracelet, which reads: Daisy Goodwill.

That’s all—just Daisy Goodwill. Someone in Admissions bungled, abbreviating her name, cutting off the Flett and leaving the old name—her maiden name—hanging in space, naked as a tulip.

Fortunately this error does not appear on her hospital chart and has so far gone undiscovered by the staff and by Mrs. Flett’s many visitors. A secret known only to her.

She cherishes it. More and more she thinks of it as the outward sign of her soul.

Not that she’s ever paid much attention to her soul; in her long life she’s been far too preoccupied for metaphysics—her husband, her children, the many things a woman has to do—and shyly embarrassed about the carpenter from Nazareth, unwilling to look him in the eye or call him by his first name, knowing she would be powerless to draw him into an interesting conversation, worrying how in two minutes flat he would be on to the cramping poverty of her mind. Mrs. Flett, who attended Sunday School as a child and later church, has never been able to shake the notion that these activities are a kind of children’s slide show, wholesome and uplifting, but not to be taken seriously—though you did have to put on a hat and fix your face in a serious gaze for the required hour or so as you drifted off into little reveries about whether or not you had enough leftover roast beef to make a nice hash for supper, which you could serve with that chili sauce you’d made last fall, there were still two or three jars left on the pantry shelf, at least there were last time you looked. Committees and bazaars, weddings and baptisms, yes, yes, but never for Mrs. Flett the queasy hills and valleys of guilt and salvation. The literal-minded Mrs. Flett has never thought deeply about such matters, and why should she? The Czechoslovakian crèche she sets up at Christmas does not for her represent the Holy Family, it is the Holy Family—miniature wooden figures, nicely carved in a stiff folkloric way and brightly painted, though the baby in the manger is little more than a polished clothes peg. Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. It was all rather baffling, but not in the least troubling.

Do people speak of such things? She isn’t sure.

But then Reverend Rick commenced his visits in the early days after her surgery and began to mention, cautiously at first, then with amplified feeling, the existence of her soul, the state of her soul, the radiance of her soul, et cetera, et cetera, and now, in her eighty-first year, the rebirth of her soul through the grace of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Needless to say, Mrs. Flett doesn’t mention to Reverend Rick the fact that her soul’s compacted essence is embraced by those two words on her hospital bracelet:

Daisy Goodwill.

And behind that name, but closely attached to it, lies something else, something nameless. Something whose form she sees only when she turns her head quickly to the side or perceives in the rhythm of her outgoing breath. These glimpses arrive usually in the early morning hours, taking her by surprise. She has almost forgotten the small primal piece of herself that came unshaped into the world, innocent of the least thought, on whose surface, in fact, no thought had ever shone. Nevertheless (it can’t be helped) whatever comes later, even the richest of our experiences, we put before the judgment of that little squeaking bit of original matter.

Or maybe it’s not matter at all, but something else. Something holy. Torn from God’s great forehead.

“I’m still in here,” she thinks, rocking herself to consciousness in the lonely, air-conditioned, rubber-smelling discomfort of the hospital, “still here.”

“She’s a real honey,” Jubilee says to anyone who happens to be around. “Not like some on this floor I could mention.”

“A fighter,” Mrs. Dorre, the head nurse says. “A fighter, but not a complainer, thank God.”

“A sweetheart, a pet,” says Dr. Scott.

“A real lady,” says the physiotherapist, Russell Latterby, “of the old-fashioned school.”

Which is why Mrs. Flett forgets about the existence of Daisy Goodwill from moment to moment, even from day to day, and about that even earlier tuber-like state that preceded Daisy Goodwill; she’s kept so busy during her hospital stay being an old sweetie-pie, a fighter, a real lady, a non-complainer, brave about the urinary infections that beset her, stoic on the telephone with her children, taking an interest in young Jubilee’s love affairs, going coquettish with Mr. Latterby, and being endlessly, valiantly protective of Reverend Rick’s sensibilities, which, to tell the truth, are disturbingly ambivalent. “She’s a wonder,” says her daughter, Alice, arriving from England in time to help her mother move out of Sarasota Memorial and into the Canary Palms Convalescent Home, “she’s a real inspiration.”

Inspiration, Alice says, but she doesn’t mean it. She means more like the opposite of inspiration.

Alice is a strong, handsome woman in her mid-forties who has thought very little about life’s diminution—not until a moment ago, in fact, when she happened to look into the drawer of her mother’s bedside table at Canary Palms and saw, jumbled there, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a comb, a notebook, a ring of keys, some hand cream, a box of Kleenex, a small velvet jewelry box—all Mrs.

Barker Flett’s possessions accommodated now by the modest dimensions of a little steel drawer. That three-story house in Ottawa has been emptied out, and so has the commodious Florida condo.

How is it possible, so much shrinkage? Alice feels her heart squeeze at the thought and gives an involuntary cry.

“What is it, Alice?”

“Nothing, Mother, nothing.”

“I thought I heard—”

“Shhhhh. Try to get a little rest.”

“All I’ve been doing is resting.”

“That’s what convalescence is—rest. Isn’t that what the doctor said?”

“Him!”

“He’s very highly thought of. Dr. Scott says he’s the best there is.”

“Did you tell the nurse about the apple juice?”

“I told her you thought it had gone off, but she said it was fine.

It’s just a different brand than the hospital uses.”

“It tastes like concentrate.”

“It probably is concentrate.”

“It’s not even cold. It’s been left out.”

“I’ll talk to her again.”

“And the gravy.”

“What about the gravy.”

“There isn’t any, that’s what’s the matter. The meat comes dry on the plate.”

“People don’t make gravy any more, Mother. Gravy was over in 1974.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. Just a joke.”

” ‘Yolk, yolk,’ you used to say. You and Joanie, clucking like chickens.”

“Did we?”

“There’s nothing to see from this window.”

“Those trees? That lovely garden?”

“I liked the hospital better.”

“I know.”

“I miss Jubilee.”

“Oh, God, yes.”

“And the Flowers. Glad, Lily—”

“It’s so far for them to come.”

“I’m not myself here.”

“You will be. You’ll adjust in a few days.”

“I’m not myself.”

“You and me both.”

“What’s that? I can’t hear with all that racket in the hall, that woman screaming.”

“I said, I’m not myself either.”

Alice has officially adopted her mother’s maiden name; it appears now on her passport: Alice Goodwill. Her ex-husband’s name, Downing, was buried some years ago in a solicitor’s office in London, although their three grown children, Benjamin, Judy, and Rachel, retain it. And for Alice the name Flett was symbolically buried two years ago with the publication of her fifth book which received unfavorable reviews everywhere: “Alice Flett’s first novel should be a warning to all academics who aspire toward literary creativity.” “Posturing.” “Donnish.” “Didactic.” “Cold porridge on a paper plate.”

What was she to do? What could she do? She went to court and changed her name. Even as a girl Alice had complained about the name Flett, which suffered, she felt, from severe brevity; Flett was a dust mote, a speck on the wall, standing for nothing, while Goodwill rang rhythmically on the ear and sent out agreeable metaphoric waves, though her mother swears she has never thought of the name as being allusive. Alice is discouraged at the moment (that damned novel), but hopeful about the future. Or she was until she arrived in Florida and saw how changed her mother was. Thin, pale. Crumpled.

On the plane coming over she had invented rich, thrilling dialogues for the two of them.

“Have you been happy in your life?” she’d planned to ask her mother. She pictured herself seated by the bedside, the sheet folded back in a neat fan, her mother’s hand in hers, the light from the window dim, churchy. “Have you found fulfillment?”—whatever the hell fulfillment is. “Have you had moments of genuine ecstasy? Has it been worth it? Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, at the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean?

Everything suddenly fits, everything’s in its place. Like in our Ottawa garden, that kind of thing. Has it been enough, your life, I mean? Are you ready for—? Are you frightened? Are you in there?

What can I do?”

Instead they speak of apple juice, gravy, screams in the corridor, the doctor, who is Jamaican—this Jamaican business they don’t actually mention.

When Alice reaches for her mother’s hand she is appalled by its translucence. She can’t help staring. Knuckles of pearl. Already dead. Mineralized. She reminds herself that what falls into most people’s lives becomes a duty they imagine: to be good, to be faithful to the idea of being good. A good daughter. A good mother.

Endlessly, heroically patient. These enlargements of the self can be terrifying.

“Just tell me how I’m supposed to live my life.”

“What did you say, Alice?”

“Nothing. Go to sleep.”

“It’s only nine o’clock.”

“The light’s fading.”

“It’s the curtains, you’ve closed the curtains.”

“No, look. The curtains are open. Look.”

Grandma Flett has good days, of course. Days when she puts on her glasses and reads the newspaper straight through. Days when she is praised by the staff for her extraordinary alertness. A nurse describes her, in her hearing, as being “feisty,” a word Mrs. Flett doesn’t recognize. “It means tough,” Alice tells her. “At least, I think so.”

“I’ve never thought of myself as being tough.”

“It’s meant as praise.”

“I’m not really tough.”

“You’re an old softie.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Don’t call me that. It reminds me of those soft-centered chocolates your father used to bring home from his trips. I could never bear them, biting into them.”

“I’m sorry.” Alice has heard about the soft-centered chocolates before. Many times before.

“Nougat. Butter creams. And those other ones.”

“Turkish delight.”

“They make me feel sick. Just thinking of them.”

“Don’t think of them.” Alice shuts her eyes, feeling sick herself: love’s faked ever-afterness.

“He traveled a lot. I don’t know if you remember, you were so young. Always going off. Montreal, Toronto.”

“I know. I do remember.”

“I could never understand what those trips were for.”

“Meetings.”

“Never understood just why they were necessary. I asked, of course, I took an interest, or at least I tried to. Women back then were encouraged to take an interest in their husbands’ careers—but it was never clear to me. Not clear. Just what those meetings were about, what they were for.”

“Administrative blather probably.”

“It worried me. Bothered me, I should say.”

“Don’t think about it now.”

“He’d bring a two-pound box sometimes. Oh, dear. Not that I ever let on I didn’t like them. I used to give them to Mr. Mannerly.

You remember Mr. Mannerly, Alice. He helped out in the garden.

With the heavy work.”

“Of course I remember Mr. Mannerly.” Alice knows that now her mother is about to remind her how Mr. Mannerly’s wife died of diabetes, how their son, Angus, went into politics.

“His poor wife died young. It was sugar diabetes, they couldn’t do much about it in those days.” Whispering. “I don’t suppose she ever ate any of the chocolates, at least I hope she didn’t. Their son Angus, he couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen when his mother went. Sixteen, I think. And he’s done so well. Serving his third term, if I’m not mistaken. I used to see him mentioned in the papers. Angus Mannerly, a wonderful name for a politician, I always thought.”

“It’s a lovely name.” Living so long in England has given Alice the right to use the word “lovely,” and she uses it a lot.

“I’m glad you’re here, Alice. I appreciate you being here. I don’t mean to sound so out of sorts.”

“You’re not. You’re—”

“It’s all right, you don’t have to say anything.”

“I just meant—”

“Really, dear, I mean it, you don’t have to say anything.”

“All right.”

“What was that word again? What the nurse said?”

“Feisty.”

“It sounds like slang. Is it in the dictionary?”

“I don’t think so. It could be.”

“It sounds so terribly—I can’t think of the word, it’s on the tip of my tongue, it sounds—”

“Nasty?”

“No. More like superior.”

“Condescending?”

“Yes. That’s it. Condescending.”

“You’re right, you know. It is condescending. It’s reductive. Insolent, as a matter of fact.”

“Yes.”

“We pretend to admire feistiness in others,” Alice muses, “but we’d hate like hell to be feisty ourselves. To have someone call us that.”

“It’s got a bad smell.”

“A bad what?”

“Overripe. Like strawberries past their prime.”

“Exactly.”

“He had a very long back, your father. I think that’s why he never learned to dance.”

“Dancing’s not for everyone.”

“I’m glad you’re here, Alice.”

“I’m glad to be here.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, I’m glad to be here.”

“Forgive me, darling Alice, if I don’t believe you.”

(Does Grandma Flett actually say this last aloud? She’s not sure.

She’s lost track of what’s real and what isn’t, and so, at this age, have I.)

When we say a thing or an event is real, never mind how suspect it sounds, we honor it. But when a thing is made up—regardless of how true and just it seems—we turn up our noses. That’s the age we live in. The documentary age. As if we can never, never get enough facts. We put on the television set and what we hear is the life cycles of birds. The replaying of wars. Interviews with mass murderers. And the newspapers know nothing else.

A Canadian journalist named Pinky Fulham was killed when a soft drinks vending machine overturned, crushing him. Apparently he had been rocking it back and forth, trying to dislodge a stuck quarter. Years ago Pinky Fulham did Mrs. Daisy Flett a grave injury, and so when she hears about his death she can’t very well pretend to any great sorrow.

“Good God,” her daughter, Alice, said, “how did you hear about this?”

“Someone told me,” Grandma Flett said mysteriously. “Or maybe it was in the paper.”

“Really? That’s incredible.”

“Actually eleven North Americans per year are killed by overturned vending machines. It was in the newspaper. I remember reading about it not long ago. Yesterday, I think. Or maybe it was this morning.”

“And Pinky Fulham was one of them.”

“So it seems.”

“Incredible.”

“I suppose it is.”

Since her heart attack everything takes her by surprise, but nothing more so than her willingness to let it, as though a new sense of her own hollowness has made her a volunteer for replacement. Her body’s dead planet with its atoms and molecules and lumps of matter is blooming all of a sudden with headlines, nightmares, greeting cards, medicinal bitterness, crashes in the night, footsteps in the corridor, the odors of her own breath and blood, someone near her door humming a tune she comes close to recognizing.

A parcel arrives for Grandma Flett. A bedjacket from her granddaughter, Judy, in England.

Oh dear, dear!—you know you’re sick when someone sends you a bedjacket instead of bath powder or a nice travel book. A bedjacket is almost as antiquated as a bustle or a dress shield. A bedjacket speaks of desperation, and what it says is: toodle-oo.

Nevertheless, old Mrs. Flett understands that her granddaughter has gone to a good deal of trouble to find this bedjacket. A bedjacket, these days, is a hard-to-find item. Major department stores might stock a mere half-dozen or so, if at all, and the sales clerks, women in their forties or fifties, look up baffled when you lean over the counter and say, “I’m afraid I can’t seem to find where the bedjackets are located.”

Where are bedjackets manufactured? New York? San Francisco? Maybe some little town in the middle of Iowa has cornered the market: the bedjacket capital of the nation. Of the world. But who designs this curious apparel? The lace borders, the little quilted sleeves, the grosgrain ribbons that tie under your chin?

Maybe no one designs them. Maybe they simply multiply like dandelion cotton on the back shelves of lingerie factories. Another thing—why and when should a person wear a bedjacket? Is a bedjacket a private or public garment? Do you sleep in it, or take it off before retiring? Does it come with an instructions manual?

“You seem a thousand miles away, Mother.”

“I was just thinking how sweet of Judy to remember me.”

“She adores you, you know.”

“I’ve never owned a bedjacket before.”

“You look lovely in it. Wait till Dr. Riccia sees you. He’ll be flowing with compliments.”

“That man.”

“He’s not so bad. Come on, now. Those eyelashes, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed his eyelashes? He’s really a perfectly lovely man. Admit it, now.”

“Well.”

“Well water! Personally, I find him ravishing. And, secretly, I think you do too.”

“Hmmmm.”

Alice does not find Reverend Rick ravishing; she knows the type.

She greets him coldly, almost rudely when he turns up one day at Canary Palms, and then she makes a point of disappearing, leaving him alone to chat with her mother.

Mrs. Flett understands, without being told, that Alice wants only to protect her from evangelical coercion, from this room-to-room peddler of guilt-wrapped wares. Alice, from her middle-age perspective, believes her mother to have a soul already spotless—spotless enough anyway—and is outraged to see the spectre of sin visited upon one so old and ill and vulnerable.

However, the conversation between Mrs. Flett and Reverend Rick today takes a sharp turn away from elderly souls and the dream of redemption.

“I’m gay, you see,” Reverend Rick tells Mrs. Flett. “Homosexual. I didn’t know it when I studied for the ministry but then, well, I discovered my true orientation. For a long time I stayed, you know, in the closet. Then one or two people knew, then, gradually, half a dozen, now almost everyone knows—except for my mother.

That’s my problem. Do I tell her or not? And I was wondering, you’re about the same age as my mom. Well, actually my mom is only about sixty, but for some reason you remind me of her. I don’t know what to do. She keeps asking me when I’m going to find a nice girl and settle down. It’s got so I hate to go home, I just know she’s going to ask me.”

There’s a part of Mrs. Flett that longs to close her eyes at this moment and drift into sleep. And she knows perfectly well she could get away with it; her age gives her the privilege.

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 attitude.”

“Being gay, Mrs. Flett, is not a question of attitude.”

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 God bless you, Mrs. Flett.”

How does one reply to God’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 crevasses; 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, knobs 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 grass, 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 glass 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 institution 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 glass 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 butting 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.