Object of Your Love (25 page)

The women with whom she plays are bloated with widowhood. After their husbands died, they ate and ate until they swelled up like slugs, expanding to fill the void. She senses them waiting for her to join them in widowhood. These are her friends but today Mrs. Hazzard notices things about them: powder settling like sand in the creases of their faces, their bracelets jangling with potent charms, their pink hair, lipstick bleeding in rivers around their mouths.

“Mr. Hazzard has been transferred to White Oaks,” she tells them.

“Oh, White Oaks,” they say gravely. “Nobody ever comes out of there. How
is
Mr. Hazzard?” they ask.

She feels their eyes burning into her forehead. “He is thin,” she tells them.

“How much longer?” they ask.

“How much longer for what?” she says.

A silence falls in the room. The women stare at Mrs. Hazzard, smug as fortune tellers behind cards fanned out in their hands. She can feel the force of their desire like something evil, a deadly spell. The room is hot and filled with their flowery perfume. Mrs. Hazzard cannot breathe. She rises suddenly, tipping the table. The cards slide sideways. The women's eyes grow wide with alarm. Mrs. Hazzard hurries down a hall to the bathroom, where she locks the door behind her. The women follow. They try the doorknob. They tap gently with their lacquered nails.

“Come out of there,” they tell her. Mrs. Hazzard imagines them on the other side of the door, their soft bodies pressed together in the narrow hallway.

“I could not live without William,” she tells them through the door. “If William dies, I will die.”

“You will not be permitted to die,” they tell her. “You will have to go on. There is nothing special about you. You will have to get through it just as we have. Then you will become one of us.”

Outside it is cold. Dusk is falling. The snow on the ground is turning blue.

*   *   *

It is nearly Christmas, and Mrs. Hazzard comes home and sees Conte McTavish's grandchildren building a snowman in front of his house. She stands on Conte's driveway and watches them, pleased to see something being created in this season of death. When she arrives the children have just mounted the head on the snowman. They add snow, packing it on where the spheres join. She watches them building up the body with handfuls, miracle of white flesh adhering to white flesh. It is a bright day. Mrs. Hazzard feels warmed by the life-giving sun. The snow is soft, the children's mittens stick to the snowman, pull off with difficulty. The snowman's curves are full and nourished, his belly swollen with health. He casts a robust shadow across the lawn.

Mrs. Hazzard stares at the children. They are amazing to her because they are so whole and lithe of limb, because they are so lucky, because they know little of their power to give life and to take it away. Above all, to take it away. The snowman belongs to the children, just as, in a way, Merilee holds the life of her father in her hands. It is within their means to create the snowman and to destroy him by their brief memories, their loss of faith, their suscepti-bility to distractions. The children inherit the earth.

“Hello,” Mrs. Hazzard says, smiling at them.

“You are the woman whose husband is dying,” they say.

“He is not dying,” Mrs. Hazzard tells them. “He is only very ill.”

The children stare at her. Their eyes grow wide, revealing the whites, so pure and unblemished, like the white of a hard-boiled egg, like snow before it has touched the ground. In their disbelief, the children are taking away with their hard-boiled eyes the life of my husband, Mrs. Hazzard thinks. The children's thick snowsuits distort their bodies, protecting them from the cold that Mrs. Hazzard feels and from something else within her, some fallacy.

The children go to the side of the house looking for branches piled there by Conte from the cherry tree. They bring out two vein-red sticks, which are multibranched, so that when they are stuck into the snowman's sides, they do not look like arms at all, but like whole circulatory systems.

“Do you have eyes for the snowman?” Mrs. Hazzard asks the children. She goes into her house and brings out a bowl of bright gumdrops she bought for Christmas though there is no one to eat them, she will have no visitors.

“I have brought you some eyes,” she tells the children, holding out the bowl. The children look at the glittery orbs and begin to tremble. They run into the house, their scarves flying behind them like flags.

Dusk is falling. Lights come on up and down the street. Mrs. Hazzard stands in the snow with her bowl of candies, looking at the replete, sightless snowman.

*   *   *

Mrs. Hazzard has made for dinner a baked potato and a fried egg. This is a simple and healthy meal but she does not feel hungry. She is thinking about the pounds Mr. Hazzard has lost. Reaching for the telephone, she dials the long-distance number that will connect her with her daughter. The phone rings and rings. Finally Merilee answers breathlessly. She says she was on her way out, she was in fact in her car with the key in the ignition when she heard the phone ringing and came running back in. She thought it might have been someone important. Mrs. Hazzard looks out her kitchen window and tells Merilee that a heavy rain has been falling for several hours, though in Canada it should be snowing on the second day of January.

Merilee says, “God! I wish we had some of that where I am. The ground is cracking. We haven't had rain in three months. Water is rationed. What do you want, Mother? I'm late for my aerobics class.”

Mrs. Hazzard tells Merilee that she has asked for an operation to put a tube in Mr. Hazzard's stomach because he cannot swallow food. Merilee is very angry.

“This is an artificial means to sustain him,” she says. “We agreed not to do anything like this.”

“I cannot sit here and watch him starve to death,” says Mrs. Hazzard with emotion.

“Under the circumstances it would be the kindest thing,” says Merilee. “You are doing this for yourself, not for him. You are being selfish.”

“He's going to get better,” Mrs. Hazzard insists.

“Oh, Mother,” says Merilee bitterly, “you have always been so unrealistic.”

“After the operation,” says Mrs. Hazzard, “he's in God's hands.”

Merilee snorts. “There must be somebody better than God we could put in charge of this,” she says.

Mrs. Hazzard hangs up, quite shaken. She looks down at the potato and egg, solitary and undefiled on the plate. The egg yolk is the sun and Mrs. Hazzard will not break it, will not turn it into a watery eye. She puts the plate in the refrigerator.

She thinks about Merilee going out again to her car, walking across earth cracked like the surface of an overbaked cake. She pictures her at her aerobics class wearing one of those bright skin-tight costumes, and others in similar attire, young men and women leaning, bending trancelike before a wide mirror, stretching their firm, glistening, immortal limbs.

Dusk has fallen. Mrs. Hazzard goes out on to her porch with a bag of garbage. She sees the blind snowman, illuminated by Conte's porch light. The rain beats hard and steady on his shoulders, washing him away. It runs down his shrinking belly. His arms droop, loosened in their sockets. His flesh has become translucent as alabaster. It glows with a gentle but extraordinary quality, like a fading light bulb.

*   *   *

It is the morning of the operation and Mrs. Hazzard comes outside on her way to the hospital. She looks for the snowman in the neighbour's yard but he is gone. She stands on the white lawn, looking down at all that is left of him: the cherry tree branches lying on the ground.

At the hospital, a young intern intercepts Mrs. Hazzard on her way to Mr. Hazzard's room. He is tall and narrow-chested, with beautiful eyes and a woman's long lashes. Mrs. Hazzard does not know how such a thin, delicate man will be strong enough to save Mr. Hazzard.

“How is my husband?” she asks him. The intern tells her that Mr. Hazzard is dying. It is not the operation that is killing him, the intern explains, but pneumonia. He says pneumonia is something to be grateful for. It is known as the friend of the elderly. Mr. Hazzard will now die quickly. He will probably not live through the day.

“Death is very efficient,” the intern says. “First the lungs shut down, then the kidneys, then the heart.
Bam bam bam,
” he says, emphasizing his words by striking his fist in his hand. Mrs. Hazzard decides she does not like these young modern doctors. They are too smart, too confident, too unscathed.

A nurse indicates Mr. Hazzard's room. At first Mrs. Hazzard thinks they are playing a joke on her. You have shown me to the wrong room, she is going to say. This is not my husband. She is stunned by his appearance. He is unconscious and wearing an oxygen mask, through which Mrs. Hazzard can see his tongue rising and falling in his throat like a ship bobbing on a sea. Everything about his body now seems out of proportion. Parts of him have withered away and other parts look larger. His ears are like monarch butterflies, his nose is the size of a potato, his labourer's chest is massive, heaving beneath his hospital gown. His hands have grown puffy, filling up with fluid like the balloon hands in a child's drawing. He looks, thinks Mrs. Hazzard, like a clown. It seems that he is mocking her, with this droll exterior, this transformation. You have left me, William, she thinks. You have turned into someone else.

Mrs. Hazzard thinks about her daughter. She feels Merilee willing Mr. Hazzard to die. Merilee has more power from a thousand miles away than Mrs. Hazzard has standing here, beside her husband's bed. How foolish I have been, she thinks. No one ever told her hope could be so cruel. Hope seems to be killing her now, at the same time that it is making it difficult for Mr. Hazzard to die. She thinks about calling the doctor back, calling Merilee, calling Conte McTavish. Yes, she would tell Conte. Yes, you were right. Better to cut the tree down than to hold out hope. “It's all right, William,” she says to her husband now. “It's all right. You can let go. You can stop breathing.” Suddenly, Mrs. Hazzard feels a tension flowing out of herself and the onset of a terrible, comforting fatigue.

*   *   *

Mrs. Hazzard walks in the dim yellow light of the hallways in her heavy zipped boots. Though people die here every day, every hour, the nurses, rushing past her, do not seem to grasp the magnitude of what is happening to her. She is filled up, Mrs. Hazzard is brimming with the knowledge of Mr. Hazzard's death. She is like a cup gently running over, yet there is no one to catch the precious overflow.

Now Mrs. Hazzard is down on the first floor looking for the cafeteria, with her stiff square purse over her arm. She will buy a muffin. She must keep up her strength for the vigil. The big front doors swing open letting in warm air that sweeps around Mrs. Hazzard like a healing river. Hospital staff are coming in from the outdoors, coatless. They have been walking in the warm sunny streets carrying their winter coats over their arms here in January in the centre of the city in an old neighbourhood of sturdy brick homes. They are astounded, grateful, lightened by the springlike temperatures. It is my husband, Mrs. Hazzard wants to tell them. It is my husband who has brought this weather. He is dying and his body is absorbing all the cold.

OBJECT OF YOUR LOVE: STORIES
. Copyright © 1996 by Dorothy Speak. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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ISBN 0-312-18638-x

First published by Somerville House Books Limited, Toronto, Canada.

First U.S. Edition: July 1998

eISBN 9781466891845

First eBook edition: February 2015