(1993) The Stone Diaries (36 page)

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.