She’s miles away now from her clavicle, her fat cells, her genital flesh, from her toenails and back gums, from her nostrils and eyebrows, and the bony nameless place behind her ears. Her brain is purest mica; you can hold it up to the window and the light shines through. Empty, though, that’s the catch.
With polite bemusement she lingers over each detail of her frozen state, adding and subtracting, refining, polishing. The folds of her dress, so primitive and stiff, are softened by a decorative edge, a calcium border of seashells of the kind sometimes seen on the edges of birthday cakes. A stone scroll dips gracefully across her slippered feet, the date worn away, illegible, and a stone pillow props up her head, the rigid frizz combed smooth at last. Her hands with their gentled knuckles curve inward at her sides, greatly simplified, the fingers melded together, ringless, unmarked by age, but gesturing (that minutely angled thumb) toward the large, hushed, immutable territory that stands beyond her hearing. From out of her impassive face the eyes stare icy as marbles, wide open but seeing nothing, nothing, that is, but the deep, shared common distress of men and women, and how little they are allowed, finally, to say.
Her final posture, then, is Grecian. Quiet. Timeless. Classic.
She has always suspected she had this potential.
Only minimal energy is required to call up her stone self and hold it in place. Deaf to all but the loudest echoes, it flourishes on its own declining curve—the whiteness, the impermeable surface—and fills the hemisphere of her vision so completely that previous strategies and arrangements are cast aside. The blameless teeth, hair, and bones of Daisy Goodwill embrace this final form, or rather, it embraces her, allowing her access, at last, to a trance of solitude, attaching its weight to her faltering pendulum heart, her stiffened coral lungs. It grows harder and colder, and will soon take over altogether. Next week. Tomorrow. Tonight.
14 Grange Road, Tyndall, Manitoba (demolished 1922)
166 Simcoe Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba (demolished 1947)
Apt. 12,144 East Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 6 Hawthorne Drive, Vinegar Hill, Bloomington, Indiana (Heritage designation 1975)
Alpha Zeta House, Long College for Women, Hanover, Indiana (converted to Alumni Offices 1957)
583 The Driveway, Ottawa, Ontario (subdivided into condominiums 1981)
419 East Bayside Towers, Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Florida (condemned: failure to meet fire code 1986)
Canary Palms Convalescent Home, Marine Drive, Colmann, Florida (bought by ICW Meditation and Cognitive Study Center 1990)
Canary Palms Care Facility, 1267 Fauna Avenue, Colmann, Florida "I am not at peace."
Daisy Goodwill’s final (unspoken) words "Daisy Goodwill Flett, wife, mother, citizen of our century: May she rest in peace."
Closing benediction, read by Warren M. Flett, Memorial Service, Canary Palms
"The pansies, have you ever seen such ravishing pansies?"
"She would have loved them."
"Somehow, I expected to see a huge bank of daisies."
"Daisies, yes."
"Someone should have thought of daisies."
"Yes."
"Ah, well."
(1993) The Stone Diaries Page 31
