View From a Kite (13 page)

Three of the six chairs around the table sport flowered, embroidered, or crocheted cushions, the property of the patients who sit only on those particular chairs and can leave their cushions on those chairs twenty-four hours a day, unattended, because the penalties for cushion snatching are horrific. I don't know what they are, but I know, intuitively, that they are horrific.

My dining companions are: Denise, twenty-two, from Shelburne County, who is engaged to a guy working out in Alberta on the oil rigs. She is due for release in three months and plans to join him as soon as she's sprung. Mrs. Oikle, from the Valley, who wears a hairnet and forks her food apart at the start of every meal, searching for stray hairs. She sits on the pink and green flowered cushion. Her legs don't quite reach the floor and her slippers fall off and have to be searched for and re-attached at the end of every meal.

Mrs. Driscoll. Mrs. Driscoll comes from Dartmouth and she knows everything about everybody. She uses her knowledge to soften, modify, straighten, and tidy up wayward gossip.

“I don't believe that's quite what he said,” she begins, quietly, and then goes on to set you straight. We don't have the juiciest gossip at our table, but we have the most accurate. True gossipers shut up when they see her coming because she spoils their fun with the facts.

Bernard is the lone male. Fiftyish, he is built like a box, very nearly square. His eyes swim at the bottom of his glasses and his dull black hair gives off the faintest whiff of shoe polish. He dresses up for every meal in black pants, white shirt, clip-on bowtie, and bulky cardigan. He wears black leather slippers and black socks. He says, “Good morning,” and “Good evening,” and “May I have the salt, please.” I would not have given him another thought, but for Elaine.

Elaine is a magnificent tropical insect, all iridescent scales, clattering knees, elbows, and dizzy flutterings and whirlings-about. She chatters, she waves her extravagant limbs, she bosses and scolds and interrupts. Her long hands, all bangles and painted nails, twist the air into wind devils of crash and colour. She wears pseudo kimonos of pseudo silk, embroidered with dragons, phoenixes, unicorns, and hopped-up Pekingese. I thought there was only ever one phoenix at a time, but not according to Elaine's wardrobe. On her left hand is an enormous diamond.

When I finally understand that it is Bernard to whom she is betrothed—betrothed is Elaine's word, she adores the sound of it, it takes her three syllables to pronounce it—be-tro-thed —I am so taken aback I drop my spoon in my chocolate pudding and splatter it all over myself, Bernard, and the pale enamel wall.

“They've been engaged for months.”

Denise and I are having a smoke in the stairwell after supper.

“Ten days after he arrived, she announced their engagement, and two weeks later she was blinding us with that diamond. He gave her a blank cheque and she picked it out on her next leave.”

“How practical.”

“How unromantic.”

“Does he always kiss her hand when he leaves her? That's pretty romantic.”

“She'd probably kill him if he didn't. I just never know where to look. I mean, they're both so old and weird looking—imagine how they look having sex.”

“Where would anyone have sex in a dungeon like this?”

“Laundry room, stairwells after midnight, broom closet, craft room after hours, furnace room. X-ray room's very popular.” Denise takes a long drag from her cigarette. I don't know if she's pulling my leg or not.

“Elaine wouldn't,” I decide. “She wants romance. She won't do it until The Big Night, in a heart-shaped bed in a honey
-
moon suite somewhere tacky.”

“She wants to be married. And she's got Bernard wrapped around her little finger and pointed in the direction of the altar. She's giving him something.”

I don't feel comfortable with this conversation. I wish Mrs. Driscoll would push open the heavy fire door, straighten us out and tidy us up.

CHAPTER 25

Jell-O is the safest food. No matter how long it's been sitting in the fridge, it isn't going to form a disgusting mold on top. It isn't going to go off, clot, rot, and stink. You won't find any bitter lumps of baking soda where the batter wasn't stirred properly, and you can see right through it—so you know there are no flies masquerading as raisins.

You don't have to use a knife to cut it. You can eat it with your fingers if you're spoonophobic—if you're careful and don't squeeze it too tightly. You can squint and look right through it. You can make the muddy yard greener (lime), make the bitchy supervisor yellow as her bilious personality (lemon).

Cool, as it slides down your throat. Sweet, as it dissolves in your mouth. Some days, Jell-O is all a person can eat.

Sister Clare isn't in a home for loopy nuns, she's here. I met her in the hallway; she looked up at me and said hello.

She's had the operation.

She carries her right arm across her chest, and her left hand supports it like something in it is broken. In her right hand is a soft white ball. She squeezes it constantly, grimacing with the effort. She is trying to put some strength back into the ravaged muscles of her chest wall. At meals she sits across the dining hall from me and although I avoid her eyes I am constantly, secretly, watching her. She answers politely to her tablemates when they speak. She sits perfectly straight, her back perpendicular to her chair, and scarcely moves. She chews slowly, carefully as the little white ball compresses, swells, compresses, over and over. I can't eat meat anymore, I can't touch the steak knives.

I can't look at sharp edges cutting meat.

I can't.

CHAPTER 26

I have a roommate, a very quiet, washed-out girl called Evvie, who is from some farm backed up to the North Mountain. There's almost no colour to her hair, it hangs down, lank and semi-transparent. Her bangs fall into her eyes, and her eyes are faded too, the colour of ginger ale when all the effervescence has gone out of it. Her nose is a narrow bone in the middle of her face and her chin looks like it could cut you. There's no colour to her face, even her lips are bloodless, but sometimes at night when she can't sleep she gets a ragged patch of red in each cheek. She's about a year and a half older than me and has two babies and a twenty-year-old husband. She's shown me her pictures—the babies look like regular babies, but in her wedding picture her husband looks as if he isn't old enough to shave and she looks to be about fourteen. She looks all of fifteen, now. Her husband came in to see her last Sunday and brought her a bright turquoise-blue chenille robe which she thinks is the prettiest thing in the world. It's not her colour, to put it mildly, but I agreed that it is beautiful and, yes, he is some good to her. He's, well, frankly, gorgeous. The babies have got his dark eyes and black hair. He's also dumb as a post, or maybe just too scared to say anything to anyone but Evvie. He looked terrified of the hospital, the nurses, even of me. God knows what his reaction was to Dr. Grass; she scares everybody. She probably scares herself when she looks in the mirror.

Nelson, that's the husband, came shambling in and sat on Evvie's bed and they hunched there together holding hands while she asked him questions and he mumbled yep or nope. The two of them scare the living hell out of me. The one thing that gives me hope for her is that the doctor has prescribed birth control pills and she studies the instructions as if her life and sanity depend on them, and she counts the pills, and strokes the pink plastic case they come in as if it was made of solid gold.

“I'm not having no more babies,” she says. “Dr. Grass says I can't have no more babies.”

She's a baby herself; she doesn't know anything about anything. Denise comes by when the nurses are having their coffee break at rest period, to take me rambling, and I leap up like a scalded cat, I'm that anxious to get out of the room and away from poor Evvie. Where I come from, seventeen is the most dangerous age. Almost a grown-up, almost finished high school. If you get knocked up before you're seventeen, they pack you off to a home and make you give the baby up for adoption. If you get knocked up when you're seventeen, chances are you'll be eighteen by the time it's born and finished high school and eighteen's supposed to be old enough to be married so unless your parents want you to go to university, or nursing school, or teacher's school, there will be massive familial pressure to get you and your terrified, stress-induced-zit-covered boyfriend to the church on time. Eighteen is considered young, but not too young, in a town where if you're twenty-three and unmarried the neighbours start dragging the backwoods bachelor cousins with the egg stains on their ties out, blinking, into the light of day to make your acquaintance. Your only escape from them is to get out of town, fast. Evvie's never been to town in the first place, metaphorically speaking. By the time she was seventeen she had one baby and was carrying the next.

Denise takes me to meet Mr. O'Brien. For a laugh, she says. Mr. O'Brien is sitting alone in a stairwell, his hands curled comfortably around a jar of rye.

“Where is she?” he whispers.

“She's gunning for you, Patrick,” says Denise. “Got a face on her like the Wrath of God. I told her you'd gone down to the kitchen for ice.”

“Ice! Holy Mother of God!” He is appalled. “Ice! When I've no mind left, perhaps! But thank you, sweetheart, for steering her away from me. You're as kind as you are beautiful. And who would your lovely companion be?”

“This is Gwen MacIntyre, from Cape Breton. She just got here last week. She spends all her time scribbling in her journal, so I'm giving her something to scribble about.”

“Patrick George Gordon Byron O'Brien at your service. My mother was a great reader. She meant for me to be a writer. I wrote a great deal of drivel to please her when I was about your age. My da always called me Patrick.”

“Did he want you to be a writer, too?”

“No, not at all, he expected me to be a miner like his da and his brothers. So I was, a miner and a poet. Well, to be truthful, I've pretty much whored away the gift. The right piece in the right tavern will get you a drink or two, there's always someone in this corner of the world who'll buy you a beer for a few lines. Listen now, this one's fetched enough free beer over the years to fill Lake Ainslie.”

Denise is digging me in the ribs. O'Brien puts his jar carefully on the step between his ankles, sits stiffly erect, puts one hand over his heart and declaims:

“Coal draws lines on a miner's skin,

tallies his days with the devil's dust—

so deep you'd think the blood in his veins

bled through the cracks to the blackened crust.

He measures grace between rockfall,

prays with muscle and sweat and groans—

balanced between one breath and disaster,

it's his black blood that warms your bones.”

“That's very nice,” I say, encouragingly.

“Don't interrupt, sweetheart,” he says, and continues:

“Coal carves lines on a miner's face,

eats out his joints and his wind and his mind.

The ocean prowls like a ravening beast

over the pit where the damp halls wind;

the rock overhead hangs down like fate,

gouged from the stone, the clay and the mud

and the sun is his lost, fair golden dream.

It's his black bones that warm your blood.”

The door slams open and there stands Supervisor MacConnell, vibrating with annoyance.

“You girls have no business being off your ward. Rest period is not a punishment; it is a necessary condition for the healing process. Go to your beds at once.”

We slither quietly under her outstretched arm and back to the Women's Ward, smothering giggles.

“As for you, Mr. O'Brien,” her voice booms down the hall, “have you forgotten Nurse Abrams is waiting in your room with your enema?”

“Darlin' girl,” he sighs, “does the fun never stop?”

“So what did you think?” asks Denise. “Crazy, eh?”

“I like him.”

“He's a crazy old drunk.”

“A lot of poets are.” This, from my extensive reading.

CHAPTER 27

They've decided to have a go at turning my lungs inside out to get a good look at what's happening in there. Dr. Grass isn't convinced I need surgery just yet. This is a surprise because she's got a reputation among the patients for being knife-happy. Denise says she just likes to quibble about Dr. Robichaud's assessments because she doesn't like him. According to Denise, Grass is just putting off the evil day so she can flex her muscles and annoy Robichaud. He treats her like his inferior because she's a woman, though technically she's his superior because she's the boss of the biggest hospital and he has to send his patients to her for further treatment and not vice versa. I'm all for putting off the surgery, for whatever reason; I still think I can make that hole close up. Every night I give my body strict orders, I imagine my lungs all pink and healthy, and then I tell my immune system to get off its lazy ass and do it.

But in the daytime, in the meantime, they torture me. Regular x-rays and blood work, of course, that's nothing new. Then they put me in front of a live x-ray machine, like an x-ray TV camera. When they are done mumbling and muttering and taking notes and pictures, they tilt it so I can peek over the edge and see my heart beating, and my lungs going up and down, and everything else in there squishing and squashing and filling and emptying and carrying on in the most remarkable way. It is amazing, if slightly creepy.

“Where's the hole?” I demand, and they point it out to me. “You're not that big,” I say to it. Now that I know exactly what it looks like, it's easier to imagine it shut. My heart keeps thudding away, and my lungs go in and out and I am so mesmerized by my insides I can't stop watching. Then my legs get so wobbly they have to sit me down and wheel me back to the ward in a wheelchair. But now, anytime, I can close my eyes and see what my insides are up to.