View From a Kite (19 page)

“Dead normal. Get up, lazybones. If you still feel sick after breakfast, we'll send you up to see Dr. Grass.” She whisks out of the room to roust out any other malingerers on the ward. There isn't any way to convince her to let me stay; if I don't show up for breakfast she'll have to account for it to her supervisor. I can pretend to be sick and get sent to Grass, or I can admit to being depressed and have them sic Miz-etc. on me, or I can drag myself down to the dining room and endure.

I heave myself up, kick off my blankets, and dig around under the bed for my slippers. I'm not going to wash my face, I decide, because as soon as I've put in an appearance at the breakfast table and had a coffee and picked some toast to crumbs, I'm coming straight back to bed to try to sleep.

“Get your head caught in a blender?” asks Denise.

“I'm ill,” I say.

“Ill-natured? Ill-favoured? Ill-tempered?”

I ignore her and spoon brown sugar on top of porridge until it melts into syrup, add cream, and then swirl the whole thing into a spiral pattern. I poke holes in the surface and fill them with jam, then I swirl once again, mixing red with grey, white, and brown.

“It's the rain,” sighs Elaine. “It always makes me so blue. One thinks, what's the use? Why try?” And indeed, she seems to have stopped short of the full six coats of mascara.

The dining room is full of meaningless, useless noise: clanking cutlery; dropped plates; chair legs screeching in and out from tables; babble, babble.

“I wish something would happen. Nothing ever happens. Why can't we have a riot? A bomb scare? An earthquake? Strip poker in the stairwell?”

Elaine titters and slaps my hand.

“You arrange it and I'll sell tickets,” says Denise.

I savage a piece of toast and then slip-slop back to my room. They've made up my bed in my absence and all the warm crumple has gone out of it. I yank back the blankets and prepare to fold myself in for the rest of my pathetic life.

A daffodil.

In a bud vase on my side table. Pale yellow petals spiral around a golden trumpet with a ruffled orange rim. A smooth green stem rises in a graceful curve. A sweet old-fashioned daffodil with a sweet old-fashioned fragrance and a small card that says: To Gwen From M. Where on earth did he get a daffodil this time of year?

I grab my gear and run to the bathroom to wash my face, brush my teeth, comb my hair. I run back to my room and fish a box from the top of my locker and get out my pens and pencils and paper. I stare at the daffodil for a long time before I start to draw. Its petals are cool and waxy to touch. There is a tiny bead of moisture just inside the trumpet. Stamen and pistils are a perfect velvet star in the bottom. When the shape of each petal glows clear in my mind I begin to draw: the crêpe sides fanning outward, the trumpet's ruffled edge. I draw it seven times, then take water colours to try to wash the colours in. I use a brush with three hairs to edge the orange.

He's mine.

CHAPTER 40

It's getting harder and harder to sneak off the ward. Miz-etc. has given up trying to get any useful information out of Denise and is no longer interested in encouraging our long walks together. The umbrella of her protection collapsed at just about the same time that MacConnell launched a fresh campaign to make us all stick to the rules. She's been riding her nurses, and they've been riding us. Seems too many patients have been sneaking out of the hospital, and now that the weather's turning colder there's some concern that we'll all get the flu. It's been my impression that we get the flu from the nurses who bring it from home and share it around.

Also, the town has an uneasy relationship with this place. Most of the staff is local, so the hospital puts money into their pockets, and thus taxes into the municipal coffers, and patients and their visitors buy stuff—at least one gift shop in town owes its existence to visitor-guilt. Half the older houses in town have sleeping porches built on, from back in the thirties and forties when released patients, frail and still dependent on the Alex for check-ups and medications, would stay in town for a year or more, renting rooms from the locals. Some of them never left. But, still, the town doesn't want to see us in the streets, and it counts on Grass and MacConnell to keep us quiet, docile, and confined to our wards.

It takes three tries before I manage to slide, unobserved, into the stairwell. Patrick and Denise are sharing a jam jar just off the third floor. She must have said something snarky about Elaine and Bernard because he is lecturing her on the shallowness of physical attraction.

“You're like the little ones who grab at the toffees in gold paper and ignore the plain ones. Underneath, it's all of it candy—sweet and sticky on the tongue, warm and lovely in the belly.”

He expands the lecture to include me, beckoning me forward with nicotine-blackened fingers. “You don't want to waste your time grabbing at the shiny wrappers when you're looking for love. Underneath it's all the same, all the same. Sweet and succulent. The pretty wrappers get thrown away, or time steals them and turns them dull and grey with age.”

Denise is bored and skeptical.

He's absolutely right, of course, but are we to dismiss Mark merely because the curve of his lower lip is the most beautiful thing on the planet? Because his fingers are slender and agile like those of a pianist? It is not merely the fact that his jawline disturbs the flow of liquid in my belly or that the slow slide of his grin and the warmth of his hand lightly pressed to the small of my back draw me helplessly to him. It is that he thought to send one daffodil on a rainy day. Patrick, however, is not interested in a discussion of the merits of one admittedly physically attractive guy; he merely wants an audience for his blather. After he's finished I take over the speaker's chair (step) and make them listen to my most recent research on cures. Turnabout is fair play.

“Physicians and the upper classes in the eighteenth century believed that horseback riding—for days on end if you could hang on that long—was a sure cure for consumption. All that fresh air and being jounced about and—doubtless—the bracing aroma of the stable were bound to improve your condition. The underclasses, who couldn't afford horses of their own, were encouraged to seek employment as coachmen.”

“I won five hundred bucks at the track, my last leave,” said Patrick.

“We know,” said Denise, “and then you drank it.”

“Pay attention,” I said. “Globetrotting: nineteenth-century medical advice promoted travel in general instead of merely leaping over the brooks, hedgerows and cowering farm labourers of one's own estate. Patients were urged to undertake voyages to the South Pacific, trips to the Swiss Alps, expeditions to the Egyptian pyramids, sojourns by the Mediterranean—anywhere, so long as it wasn't home. Mountaintop or seacoast, desert or ocean, just so you pack your bags and get out of town.”

“Sounds lovely,” said Patrick. “Loan me bus fare?”

Denise snorts.

“Sorry,” I say. “I'm broke. This is the best bit and I have saved it for last because it is lovely and it is still true:

‘Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want, of wounds, of cares, of great men's oppressions, of captivity, while he sleepth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings. Can we therefore surfeit on this delicate ambrosia? Can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam?' Thomas Dekker, 1609.”

Patrick has nodded off, and Denise is yawning.

SIMPLE RULES TO PREVENT TUBERCULOSIS (CIRCA 1920)

1. Do not put pencils in your mouth.

2. Do not hold money in your mouth.

3. Do not put pins in your mouth.

4. Do not put anything in your mouth except food and drink.

5. Do not kiss anyone on the mouth or allow anybody to do so to you. It should be unnecessary to state that kissing should be avoided by the consumptive.

CHAPTER 41

We are hanging around the sunroom, Denise and Evvie and Christine and I. We're waiting for it to be suppertime, so we can wander down to the dining room and amuse ourselves with utensils and mystery meat and Jell-O cubes for an hour. To stave off our hunger pangs, and our boredom, Christine has brought in a half-ton bag of Cheesies and we are all a dusty orange colour around the mouth and fingers. We have been trying to teach Evvie to toss them up in the air and catch them with her open mouth, but she is completely lacking in talent and has very many orange blotches down the front of her chenille bathrobe.

When Mrs. Oikle was released, bacilli-free, Evvie inherited her abandoned stacks of
True Love Conquers
, so we have taken to reading the juicy bits to each other. They go well with Cheesies. We score each story for technical merit and artistic impression: one to six purple points. The young women in the stories—they are always young, usually underage, and hopelessly naïve—appear to suffer a kind of delirium and loss of common sense whenever some guy with a sculpted body, a tangled mop of greasy curls, and a surly lower lip gets his hands under their shirt and his tongue in their mouth. This usually leads to some confused steamy sex (quite often the dumb clucks aren't altogether sure “it” has occurred—you wouldn't notice?), quickly followed by abandonment by the surly cad, then a maudlin reconciliation when he discovers he really, truly does love her and can't live without her and is willing to give up his evil, selfish ways for her, or—if he doesn't reform—rescue and reclamation by the really good guy she ignored at the beginning of the story who is not quite as built but turns out to have better hair and a job and to be better in bed than the cad and who, moreover, is willing to adopt the cad's illegitimate child because, of course, she got pregnant, being too dumb to use birth control. The whole thing ends with a wedding and more steamy sex, this time morally sanctioned, and she gets to wear a negligee in a honeymoon hotel and have it slowly, legally, peeled off instead of having her skirt yoinked up in the cab of a rusty pickup.

It's a lot to swallow.

Purple point number six is for originality and, since we started this game, over two weeks ago, it has yet to be awarded. We live in hope.

“My heart was beatin' so fast I thought I would faint.” It's Evvie's turn to read. “His hands tenderly car-essed my breasts, and my breath was comin' in ragged gasps. I wanted… somethin'…”

Except Evvie reads the dots. “I wanted dot dot dot somethin' dot dot dot.”

“I'd like a little dot dot dot, myself,” Christine sighs and stuffs her face with Cheesies in an attempt to sublimate.

“How about you, Gwenniekins?” Denise is always needling me these days. She's miffed that I turned down her entire A list of select dates from the men's ward. “Getting any good dot dot dot from lover-boy lately?”

“Certainly not,” I take umbrage, with a handful of Cheesies. “I'm a good girl. I only go as far as dot dot. Maybe dot dot and a half. I have morals. I have scruples. I'm saving the final dot for my wedding night.”

“Sure you are,” says Denise.

“His hands reached under my cheer leader's red and white silk skirt. ‘No,' I moaned, but he didn't hear me and I was help less to re-sist. I wanted him, so bad. I'd dreamed of him for weeks, holdin' me and dot dot dot.” Evvie ploughed on, skipping over the longest words, breaking the compound ones into manageable bits, slightly ripping the pages in her enthusiasm.

“No wonder Mrs. Oikle had such a red face all the time,” says Denise. “She was feverish with terminal dot dot dottiness.”

“Four points,” says Evvie, a little breathless.

“Two,” is all I am willing to offer.

“One and a half,” sniffs Christine. “Not an original word in the whole piece of crap.”

“Two for technical merit and two point five for artistic impression,” says Denise. “I'm being generous, only because they spared us another stupid description of French kissing.”

“I really don't get this French kissing stuff,” I grumble. I really don't get it. If it's supposed to represent, hint, imply, mime the actual dirty deed, I'm heading for a huge disappointment on my wedding night (or sordid approximation thereof).

“What's to get?” says Christine. “He puts his tongue in your mouth, you put yours in his. Everybody gets a little worked up.”

“Having a wet sloppy tongue jammed down your throat is supposed to get you worked up? It's like having a live toad thumping around in your mouth.”

“Honey, if that's what it feels like, Mark is badly in need of some instruction.”

“You volunteering to teach him?” asks Denise. “A little hands-on training for lover-boy?”

“Don't be stupid, Denise. Gwen, French kissing can lay you out in lavender, but he's got to know how to do it right.”

“I thought that meant dead. Laying in lavender. Lying in lavender.”

“Not where I come from.”

“There are six ways to screw up French kissing, and most guys know five,” says Denise.

Evvie is agog. Literally agog. I can see Cheesie stain clear to her tonsils. I'm guessing Nelson knows a couple.

“First,” says Christine, “there's the guy who jumps down your throat and tries to excavate your tonsils.”

“As if you don't have a tongue and it don't matter anyway. He just dives in and cuts off your breathing,” confirms Denise. “Then there's the woodpecker.”

“Jams his tongue in and out and in and out,” says Christine, “with no juice whatsoever.”

“Then there's the guy who holds your head in place with both hands so you can't escape. This guy's a control freak and a potential wife-beater. You want to stay away from a guy like that.”