(1993) The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

  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 wri
ting 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 t
hem 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.