by Sarah Reith
“Who is His Holiness?” I inquired, feeling my tongue shrivel with the alliteration and hoping I sounded graceful and neutral, like Fiona, when I said it.
She turned her pale, protruding eyes on me. I saw that the irises were separated into sections by thin black penstroke marks, like the spokes of a wheel. The sections were pulsing at what appeared to be slightly different frequencies, like the engine behind them was firing on a set of poorly synchronized cylinders. “The Buddha Maitreya,” she said gravely, like she was actively forgiving me for not already knowing that. “I don’t know how much of this you care to hear”—she smiled faintly—“or how much you know about Buddhist cosmology.”
Where was I while this was going on? I was standing around waiting for something real to happen. That’s where I was. And I think Fiona sensed it, in the uncanny way that crazy people sense the things about us that are most embarrassing, most trivial. Most real.
“It really is real,” she told me now, with the same brittle, peremptory briskness that crept into her voice when she insisted that the inner leaves of a head of lettuce cause cancer; that vegetables need to be hermetically sealed in large Tupperware containers so they don’t absorb the harmful chemicals inside the refrigerator. “It really is real,” was a common refrain, if you cared to hear what Fiona had to say.
So what had she discussed with the Buddha Maitreya? “Mariana has opened her heart to me.” Her voice was so cool when she said this that she might have been discussing the state of someone’s linen closet. “She’s done. She really is. Do you understand?” Again, the pulsing in the wedge-shaped sections of her pale blue eyes.
“Done,” I remarked thoughtfully. “With . . . what?” I have always prided myself on my ability to ask incisive questions.
“Done with all of it,” Fiona replied.
Her English rose complexion was dotted with freckles, doubtless from a wholesome outdoor childhood. Her auburn bangs turned up a little at the corners, because she didn’t waste her time and money on regular haircuts. She looked like an aging dainty tomboy, the kind who wears a rumpled frock and isn’t scared of frogs, but who won’t go so far as to get into a fist fight with the boys.
“She’s sick of lying in bed all the time. She’s sick of eating and she’s sick of drinking. It’s really hard on her. Don’t you see?” She was finally starting to sound a little heated. “She’s in pain all the time. She’s bored with the television. She can’t understand the way people talk these days, and she’s seen all the classic films. I try to plug her in to nature programs, but there’s only so much beautiful scenery a person can take, you know?”
“What is it she would like us to do?” I asked this very clearly, like I was conversing with someone who did not speak my language; someone with whom, therefore, it was useless to attempt verbal communication.
“She doesn’t know yet.” Fiona gave every impression of herself as a simple servant, standing at the ready. “I requested a special audience with His Holiness, when we celebrated the Buddha’s birthday last weekend . . .” She subsided momentarily. I remembered I had seen a box of hair dye next to the denture cleaning tablets. I had been touched by the poignance of this harmless vanity, on the part of one so devout. “He says we are to respect her decision,” she finished, like she was repeating something she’d heard in a dream.
“What is her decision?” I persisted.
I had a mental image of myself, running alongside a train departing a station, desperately trying to scramble on board. Modern trains have been designed to discourage this dangerous yet highly cinematic practice, so the vision must have come from one of Mariana’s classic films. And then I made what felt like a tremendous leap.
“I’m not comfortable doing anything,” I blathered, so hastily I heard my consonants jumbling into one another. I felt like the one kid who won’t light up in the girls’ room, the one whose frightened rectitude probably has something to do with how unattractive and badly dressed she is.
Fiona regarded me with cold politeness. I never think that would work on me, when I see a movie where some high-cheekboned villainess is wielding hostile courtesy against a lesser character. It seems so false, so posed, like fight scenes in cheesy martial arts epics where the combatants aren’t even touching each other. But why don’t you try facing someone delicate and British with your big chapped hands, your subordinate loneliness in someone else’s home. Try that, when you’ve spent your whole life in a snarling standoff with someone who uses the word cunt in casual conversation.
But I was in the middle of explaining something. “Until I’ve talked to someone. I mean someone . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to make sense. I wanted to say, “Until I’ve talked to a qualified medical professional who is not a member of a cult,” but how could anybody die in peace if I went around insulting people’s dearly-held beliefs?
I felt like we were standing right in front of something huge and recognizable and impossible to explain, like elephants or icebergs; that Fiona kept looking around with annoyed polite confusion saying, where? whatever do you mean? as I struggled to describe it before running out of time.
Incidentally, I was not that kid who wouldn’t smoke in the girls’ room. I was the kid who stole the cigarettes and smoked them in class if the teacher was a few minutes late. I knew exactly how I felt about the ugly dweebs who broke into a clammy sweat at the sight of my self-destructive defiance. Now Fiona was me, and I was all those quiet cowards, and I did not even reflect until just now upon the limits of a person’s character; how little childish defiance prepares one for a situation where character tells.
Meanwhile, Fiona had clearly cast herself as the one who is endlessly patient with those who are ignorant, stupid, or otherwise disadvantaged. “Her decision is that she doesn’t want to do it anymore.” Her eyes were flat and elegant as only the eyes of a girl smoking in a public toilet can be. “That’s all I know right now. I’m sorry. I know as much as you do.” Then she doled out one more tiny morsel of information. “The hospice nurse is coming out. To have a look.”
DO YOU REMEMBER Grace Poole, from Jane Eyre? She was the hard-drinking minder, secretive and careless, the one who failed to keep Miss Eyre’s imprisoned rival from burning down the house. When I think about what happened now, I think about Grace Poole, driven to drink by terror and tedium. I think about the inevitability of fire in a lonely attic room. It makes me hate that Gothic heartthrob Mr. Rochester more than ever, when I think of the hatchet-faced Poole, whose shift never ends, who must have wondered now and then if she was doing something terribly wrong.
“So you called hospice,” I confirmed. I felt like I had just awakened from a harrowing dream about pounding after trains to find myself seated in a noiseless German Bahnzug.
“Well, yes.” Fiona blinked at me. “I’ve pasted their card on the fridge.” She had. It was bright yellow, with letters about two inches high. “Reuben’s coming out just as soon as he can. They’ll stay in their cabin up in the mountains and make a bit of a vacation out of it.”
What could I have expected of poor Fiona, who was not a saint but was sufficiently good for this world? Did she not give every indication of disinterested compassion? Did she not consult the experts, spiritual and medical, and paste the proper notice in a highly visible location? It is sane and just and timely for a bed-bound woman in her eighties to surrender. Right?
How the hell should I know? I don’t know what happened when the dying and the mad were all alone in the cool, blue-shaded room. I was not privy to the murmurs underneath the ceiling fans. I only know that Verdelein the mutant housecat purred as steadily as if she were under a hypnotic suggestion to do so.
But in addition to sane, just, and timely: what could be more poignant than a final visit? The dying woman would have one last chance to press her family’s hands, to gaze into their eyes. They would bid farewell with the eloquence of grief: her son Reuben, a pilot with a radio announcer’s voice; his slender wife Colleen the stewardess; and
Hunter, their ten-year-old son with his head full of baby-doll curls. They would make a bit of a vacation out of it. They would take a few drives along the coast, all the while touched with the gentle sorrow of impending natural death. They would all clasp hands as they offered an ecumenical prayer to a genderless deity.
“But Mrs. Blanchefleur . . .”
“DO YOU KNOW,” Mariana said, in a way that indicated she was sure I did not, “they named that child Hunter.” She glared at me as if I might be a spineless sympathizer. “They know how I feel about hunting. She says it is a family name. That I am to think of Hunter green.” At the notion that she should be told what to think, she curled up her mouth in disgust. “I call him Reuben, because that is his middle name. Lots of people go by their middle names,” she informed me, as if I were the foreigner, not she. “I do not send him money for his birthday,” she continued, still as if she were explaining the local customs to a newcomer without a lot of native intelligence. “Instead, I make a donation in his name—which is Reuben Daniels, like his father—to the World Wildlife Fund, of which I have been a member for many years.”
When I scurried away from Germany without so much as completing a single academic year, I did so with one small triumph only: my ability to line up parts of speech in a foreign language in a coherent sentence. I saw now that this triumph never faded: that Mariana Blanchefleur would continue placing parts of speech as accurately as notes in a waltz until the day she spoke no more.
And then her eyes fell on the dinner I held. I had made it according to precise instructions from Fiona, who knew how much the patient hated pepper; how she liked lemon, not lime; who knew, in short, exactly what Mariana Blanchefleur wanted at all times.
Tonight, a small round hump of glistening white fish had come to its eternal rest on an even whiter plate. It was accompanied by three dainty broccoli florets, each of them easily grasped by a clumsy dying hand. I’d arranged them so they looked cheerful and springy, delighted to be of service.
“And so,” she concluded, regarding this arrangement. Then she looked back at me with eyes so blank I wondered where the opinionated supporter of wildlife had gone. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“This is your dinner,” I explained. “I thought you might like to eat it.”
She waved her weak right arm to the furthest extent of its mobility, which wasn’t very far. “How do I do that?” Now the eyes were frightened. She was about to be very angry.
“Well,” I proposed, “you can pick it up with your hands, and then, if you want, you can put it in your mouth, and chew it up and swallow it.”
She was looking at me so attentively she could have been memorizing the instructions for cracking a safe. I had the distinct impression that I was handling this exactly the wrong way.
“So!” I exclaimed, remembering how hopeless I’d been as a waitress. “Would you like to give it a try?”
And I actually gave that plate a little shake, like it might be more enticing if the broccoli bounced, if the dead fish quivered livingly. She looked at me like I’d just filleted a live snake, right there on the pale blue coverlet.
“Why should I do that?” she demanded now, mastering her revulsion. Her voice was strong and steady, as if she were bravely questioning an unjust order.
“Because you’ve barely eaten anything all day.” I might as well have told her she should eat her supper because that’s what good little girls do.
“But why eat?” she persisted.
“Because,” I told her. “Because. If you don’t eat, you’ll starve.”
And that’s when I knew that it really was real. Here was a woman who had been incontinent and motionless for years upon years; who no longer knew how to read; whose friends had all forgotten who she was or ever had been. She was lying in a narrow hospital bed, exactly as she lay there yesterday and the day before that, trapped, excreting, and losing her senses as the weeds in her yard crept up to the door and the lingo of badly-dressed young people began to sound like a foreign language, all over again.
“It’s very nice food,” I went on without conviction. “It nourishes your body.”
I looked outside, where the basil and tomato plants were leaping greenly out of the earth, delighted to nourish themselves with worm shit and the bodies of weaker plants. I was working every weekend now, plus one or two days in the middle of the week, so Fiona could go to classes at the Center. There was another part-time girl, but both she and her vehicle were extremely unreliable. I often found myself filling in for her, now that I had gotten my truck fixed.
“What happens if I nourish my body?” She looked a little less bleak now, more sure of herself. She looked exactly like she was laying a trap for me. So I walked right in.
“You feel better,” I admitted. I began to feel like I was doing something devious, trying to trick a helpless old woman into making an investment with no chance of return.
She paraphrased my argument neatly. “I eat, so I can”—she waved her hand again, as if it were a dreadful bother to remember my trivial words—“nourish my body; so I can just do it all over again?”
I realized I was disgusted by the triteness of this epiphany, as if despair required originality or eloquence to earn the rights of pity. As if it didn’t count, somehow, if it had all the literary merits of a slogan inside a depressive’s greeting card.
“So I live to go on living?” she concluded, as if no one else had ever noticed that this was indeed the case.
Suddenly I wished desperately that I believed in God; that I could say, “but Mrs. Blanchefleur. That is the will of the Lord,” and smile with dazzling confidence as I rebuked her in the knowledge of my perfect certainty. Instead, I stood there and waited.
She stared at the food in numb horror. “Take it away,” she mumbled, exhausted by the battle of wits she’d just won.
In the craigslist ad describing the job, Fiona had written that Mariana suffered from Alzheimer’s. Aside from the fact that I would never admit it if I’d lost an argument to someone with a degenerative brain disease, I don’t think I did. I think Mariana Blanchefleur was a tired old drunk. When she was seventy-one years old, she was pulled over half a mile from the only bar in town and arrested for drunk driving. Everyone knew about it before lunch the next day, and everyone but Reuben was strangely thrilled, the way people are when they see a woman beat a man, or when someone very proper starts screaming obscenities. The people in town felt that a point had been scored in favor of something fierce and independent. They admired Mariana Blanchefleur, who made grand entrances then, swaying in doorways with the folds of her great purple fat lady wraps billowing around her. She was one of theirs, subject to the same indignities they faced and always ready to prevail with an insight or a quip. She paid three times the going rate to have her ceiling painted, “like the sky”; and when she found out she’d been cheated, she bragged like she’d done it on purpose. Like she only ever paid top dollar for the finest craftsmanship, when everyone knew the painters were speed freaks who worked under the table to get out of paying child support.
I remembered a photograph I’d seen of her when she was almost young: “thirty-two or thirty-four,” she said with great precision, as if no one would ever believe she was German if her random certainties did not sound precise. We were trying to find some pictures of a trip she’d taken to San Francisco in pursuit of Reuben’s father. “I was chasing a man,” she declared, smacking her lips. She was a woman of tremendous appetite who had always known exactly what she wanted. In the picture, she was straight and strong, like all those Greatest Generation types who smoked and ate red meat and wore high heels and whose bellies were perfectly flat; whose arms were slim and taut. She wore a yellow dress with pleats in the skirt and a tightly cinched waist. She was not in San Francisco. She was standing on the stones of a street where black-haired people wore the clothing of their ancestors and smiled shyly at her.
I turned to the next photo and saw the same nearly youth
ful beauty. She was sitting in a field beside a picnic basket, holding a cream-colored sandal with a two-inch heel. She could have been giving a lecture on the lesser-known methods of drinking champagne from an open-toed shoe. To ensure maximum attentiveness on the part of her audience, she had removed her blouse to reveal a pair of suntanned, buoyant breasts. “That was before I had babies,” she remarked. “Hah.” Her eyes were carnivorous with remembered satisfaction.
From Foxglove to the Feudal Court
IT REMAINED UNCLEAR how Mariana Blanchefleur would choose to die. One thing, though, had become completely clear: there was no way an unemployed model and part-time caregiver could continue paying rent at Foxglove.
Foxglove was no longer a gathering place for women bereft of their men and their dreams. Reina took down a large framed photograph of Zack and replaced it with a soft-lit image of Monya caressing her rounded belly. A wedding picture disappeared, and in its place, she hung a playful shot of Gregory, spraying Akana with a garden hose.
“I hate to do this to you,” she told me. “You’re my friend.” Her voice was tender. Her eyes were liquid velvet.
“No!” I exclaimed. “I mean, of course. The baby . . .”
Reina nodded, like I’d just convinced her with the best possible argument. Who needs a verb when you have a baby? The sentence doesn’t even bear completion.
“The baby will need a room,” she agreed reluctantly. This was the house that she and Zack had rebuilt for their wedding. She’d let the grounds go wild to commemorate his death. And now, for the birth that would make this house a home, she was ready for a sumptuous nursery.
Monya was already installed in the room she’d occupied for the few short years of her teens, when her mother was married to Zack. She’d rolled up the posters of boy bands and horses, taken a few swipes at the cobwebs, and pronounced herself fully nested. She was beginning to exhibit a slight gleam, if not quite the prenatal glow that was expected of her.
