View From a Kite (3 page)

Whiny Mrs. Charmichael lives with her son—he's old, close to forty—who is “a dear boy, a perfect son.” Perfect Leander comes to visit for three hours, almost every night, and any time he misses she snivels all night and all the next day. She worried for months that he wasn't eating properly, maybe even putting his shoes up on the chesterfield, God help us all.

Actually, perfect son Leander showed a little more imagination than his mother gave him credit for. Dizzy and reckless with unaccustomed freedom, he met a girl, knocked her up and got married in a rush. They came in the Saturday before last, Leander in his best blue suit, the bride in a lace maternity tent with embroidered lapels, lugging a three-tiered wedding cake. A couple of innocents bearding the lioness in her den. The lioness threw a fabulous tantrum—all the nursing staff was in attendance, half the visitors were hanging about the door eavesdropping. The bride came all over faint and had to lie down on one of the empty beds and Leander cried buckets. By the time they'd got Mrs. Charmichael calmed down (horse tranquilizers) and shooed the weeping bridal pair off to their honeymoon, it was long past lights out. Mary and I sat on the window ledge in one of the bathrooms and toasted marshmallows over a small fire we'd built in a metal ashtray.

“At least dear Leander has given her something new to think about,” we agreed.

Our conversation drifted, as it often does, in the direction of sex. Mary made cynical comments like, “Never met a man who wasn't an easy lay,” and I tried to wheedle details out of her. She's had at least four steady boyfriends and I'm sure she's had sex or something so close as makes no never
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mind. She says she's a virgin, but she's such a good liar, I never know when to believe her. She plans to get married as soon as she gets out of here and finds a suitable candidate. Not me, I want to write novels and plays and have tragic love affairs. She's decided to collect a husband, a split-level ranch, and two children. She's so smart and funny—how can she want such a pedestrian life?

Sometimes, the days get so long, I think the planet must have slowed down. Got stuck in space debris or something. I'm allowed up for most of the day now, which is better, but up or down, life just crawls. It's enough to make you crazy, this coasting in neutral.

The grass is starting to get green; after school the little kids are wild in it, rolling and screaming and playing scrub ball. The light is so bright and the sky so blue I feel if I don't get out of here soon the ache in my chest will crush my ribs and my lungs will be of no use, healed or not. I will die of boredom and misery. What kind of an idiot would perceive consumption as a romantic disease? Maybe it's only romantic when someone else has it, or after you've been dead a century or two and are nothing but an outdated hairstyle in volume six of the encyclopedia. It's just a damn disease. Families get splashed all over the map, lives get skewed and broken. Outside the window life goes on, seasons change, buildings go up and get torn down, kids get taller, flowers bloom and die. The visitors wash in and out, week after week, the smell of fresh air clinging to their clothes, small gift-wrapped condolences in their hands. Relief in their eyes when visiting hours are over. No wonder Sister Clare is a fruitcake. No wonder men go home on passes and stay drunk for three days. No wonder girls go home and stay out all night and get themselves knocked up—whatever it takes to pretend you are a normal person with a normal life. We're all just holding our breath until we can get out for good, not wanting one detail outside to change, so we won't have missed anything.

CHAPTER 3

It's too windy today for kites. The wind is from the southwest, and fierce. The clouds are flung across the sky and you expect to hear muffled thumps as they bump into each other and then merge. Yesterday two little boys were flying a delta-wing kite on the big, empty lawns between us and the sea. Red and black, with two blue-and-white painted eyes—kites need to see where they're going. The boys had quite a bit of trouble getting it up, it kept diving earthward and then they'd get their boots tangled in the string. Boots are no good for kite flying, you need sneakers so you can run with it. Finally it took a good bite of wind and reached for the sky, a “homesick angel,” as Robert would say when the kite would start to pull up so fast my fingers would get burned trying to hang on. Its longing for heaven thrumming back down the string.

On my sixth birthday he built me my first kite, in the garage, me watching, handing glue and the ball of string to him as needed. The kite was made of butcher paper, a shiny brownish-pink like old blood washed down a drain. There was no bridle, just the kite string poked through a tiny hole and tied to where the keel and spar crossed and were lashed together with twine and glue. The tail was string with bits of wrapping paper from my presents tied in bows along its length. It was like a rainbow, with fragments of flowers, and bunnies in bonnets, and candle-lit birthday cakes crinkling in the wind. We took it to Dominion Beach and he ran along the sand in his bare feet, stubbing his toes on rocks and cursing, glancing back over his shoulder to see if it had taken off yet. Eventually it went so high we had no more string and I couldn't hold it, we had to hang on to it together. It flew out over the hungry licking ocean. I was screaming with excitement, scared it would fall in the water and be eaten by the waves.

“Imagine the view!” he kept yelling. “Imagine what it looks like from up there, Gwennie! You could see for hundreds of miles!” Then he stumbled, and there was only me to hang on. It lifted me off my feet.

“Let go! Let go!” shrieked my mother from where she sat, sideways in the front passenger seat, feet on the ground, stockings rolled down and her dress lifted past her knees to let the air circulate. I let go, and the earth smacked me and the kite twisted out of sight.

“Gone to heaven,” he said, before I could think about crying. “It's taking all the bad luck away, Gwen. In China they have a special ceremony called Driving Away the Devil; they fly kites and then turn them loose so they carry away all the bad luck.”

“You shouldn't have made such a big kite,” my mother came puffing up, cross as blazes. “Gwen might have been dragged into the water and drowned!”

“Horse feathers,” he said. “She's too lucky for that. We'll make another one,” he added, sensing that I wasn't quite ready to trade good luck for my wonderful kite.

Gradually we acquired a shelf of kite makings: scraps of spinnaker cloth tightly woven, as brilliant as my favorite crayons; bamboo that he split into lath; softwood dowelling an eighth of an inch thick and as straight as could be found. Glue, X-acto knives, fine twine he got from a fishing supply outfit, an eyeleter and a box of silver eyelets I liked to stir up and trickle through my fingers. He made me a butterfly kite for my seventh birthday, and a bird with chimes for my eighth. He made box kites, double-bowed kites, a series of circles in a row to make a caterpillar. We sent payloads up the string: parachutes on a paper clip that popped off when they hit a knot close to the top and drifted back to the ground; bags of confetti that burst apart and scattered to the wind. I took pieces of paper with my birthday wish written in invisible ink and attached them with tiny pieces of Scotch tape, so the wind could pluck them off and send them to heaven.

That was Robert, that was him, back when he was my father.

A few months before my eleventh birthday we went to the Bell museum in Baddeck and gazed spellbound at the huge photographs and the tetrahedral bits and pieces hung from the ceiling. Then we went home, in a kite-making fever, and started making cells to have the best, biggest kite ever ready for my birthday. But his quiet sits in the dark got longer and longer and then he went into the hospital for a rest. I finished the kite myself, then hung it in my room. It took up too much space and collected dust. My mother nagged about it every time she came in to clean, but I wouldn't let her take it down. I guess I was waiting for him to come back. He came home after a month, with a lot of pills, and went to bed to rest some more. The man who flew kites never came back, and then the kite was too big and in the way and covered with dust and I needed the space to hang my mobile of beach glass and sand dollars. I took the kite down, I don't know where it went.

CHAPTER 4

Doctor Robichaud is sitting behind his desk, protected by walnut veneer, piles of papers, his white coat, and a rack of coloured pens. He clears his throat and says, “We think you originally contracted tuberculosis when you were a small child. We've got hold of the x-rays from when you were hospitalized for pneumonia—there's evidence of some tuberculosis activity. It wasn't picked up at that time, so of course you weren't treated with the appropriate drugs. You recovered and the disease went dormant for some years, but without proper drug therapy…” He spreads his hands and shrugs. “Reactivation was always a possibility. So. Here you are.”

Just one of those things.

They didn't pick it up? What does he mean—didn't pick it up? What kind of clueless fools were reading my x-rays? Who can I sue for gross incompetence? Who can I kick in the shins? Punch in the nose? I want names and addresses.

I was four years old when I was hospitalized with pneumonia. I'd been miserable and feverish for a week, and the doctor came by the house one night and suddenly they were packing my suitcase and bundling me into the car. I'd been a trouble, I thought. I'd been bad to get sick, and now they were punishing me by sending me away. They put me in a small white room, in my pyjamas, gave me new books and a pair of red velvet slippers with bells. Then they left me.

When I was alone I cried a little—softly, so no one would hear. I wasn't a baby and I wouldn't let them see me cry, even when they gave me monster needles full of milky white penicillin. There were lots of those, too. I thought I'd die. After a week of torture, they sent me home.

“What would have made it reactivate?” I ask Dr. Robichaud.

“Well, there are any number of causes. Primarily it's the result of a depressed immune system. You get run down, and the disease takes hold again. The bacilli are just waiting for an opportunity, a bad cold, fatigue, stress…” He pauses, then hurries on. “Any number of things.” He's uncomfortable, and well he should be. Stress—he didn't mean to say that, how indelicate of him. Yes, I've been under a hell of a lot of stress. The Family Tragedy. Poor Little Gwen MacIntyre. There, I've said it, but not to the indiscreet doctor. For all I know he could have been trying to trick me, to get me to “talk about it.”

CHAPTER 5

She comes for you at dawn.

She calls your name, taps you on the shoulder. Shakes a little harder when you don't respond, or try to shrink deeper into the mattress. Open your eyes, and she's standing there, all in white: white dress, white shoes, white stockings, white hat with a black band, white sweater draped over her shoulders because the windows have been open all night and it's cold, as usual, in your room. In China they wear white for funerals, I've read. The wheelchair is pulled up to the side of your bed. She's in a hurry; there will be others she must hunt down and haul off before breakfast.

Get up, slide into your robe and slippers, get in the chair. Pull the comb out of your robe pocket and drag it through your hair as she wheels you down the dim corridor. One quick pee stop. She and the chair wait outside the stall door—this is to prevent you from making a bolt for freedom or, more disastrously, drinking an unregulated and unapproved amount of water. Brushing your teeth is strictly forbidden. A stray swallow of minty foam will skew the results and—think about it—do you want to do this any oftener than you have to? You do not.

You're off to the elevator, a creaky beige enamel job that would be in a museum if the directors of the Museum of Elevators knew this model was still in existence. The doors lurch open, crash shut. The cables moan their little paean to senile dementia.

There are a few moments to ponder the irony of the fact that the more you heal, the more likely you are to require this procedure: gastric lavage. That's nurse talk for gastric washing. Gastric washing is patient talk for suck out your stomach.

We are all required to gather everything that comes out of our noses and mouths. Special containers with lids live in our rooms to contain all our paper tissues and their juicy contents. The tissues are burned in the basement. We all have little plastic jars with little plastic lids that we are supposed to carry around in our pockets whenever we leave our rooms. We are to spit everything into them. The nurses take the jars away every day and give us new ones. In
The Magic Mountain
, the patients have elegant little blue glass bottles to spit into, but there has been a serious decline in style since the nineteenth century. We are reduced to plastic screw-tops. This ward full of innocent-looking people in bathrobes and slippers—who would guess our pockets are loaded with enough TB germs to infect an entire city? Pray one of us doesn't escape. Pray one of us, escaped, doesn't trip getting on a bus in those stupid slippers and smash the tacky—but lethal— plastic vial. (Lack of breakfast combined with the vertical position before sunrise always makes me fanciful.)

Here we are at the Treatment Room, an oxymoron if I've ever heard one. They're going to mistreat me because I can't hawk up enough to suit them.

Once a month, a nurse brings you three specially marked vials. Before breakfast, before tooth brushing, for the next three mornings, you have to cough up what's accumulated in your throat and lungs overnight. The ward resounds with the echoes of this revolting chorus. Got a weak stomach? Skip this next bit. Feed the cat. Go for a walk.

If you can do this—hawk up—for the three mornings with results that please the nurses—I mean cloudy swirling things in the bottom of the jar—you're off the hook. They send your gunk off to be tested and you get the results back in a couple of weeks: positive, or negative. Positive, and you're depressed for days. Negative is encouraging: the drugs are winning, the germs are cornered, you aren't infectious. Three negatives in a row and they let you out for a weekend. You are officially Not a Public Menace.