View From a Kite (7 page)

CHAPTER 11

Sunday morning, I'm lying in bed, happily drowning in the scent of lilacs. One of the cottagers, down by the lake, is mowing his bit of lawn. How silly, I think, to have a lawn to look after at your cottage. But some people can't vacation, they have to think of things to do or the stillness drives them batty. George, now, he would have a hard time if he ever took a vacation. He'd have to be driving to the store for ice cream twice a day, and building docks, and painting his deck. He'd feel guilty and lost if he wasn't doing something useful. Someday I'm going to have a cottage at the end of a long dirt road, miles from the nearest neighbour, facing the ocean where the waves are wild and fierce in November. There won't be a lawn, just sand dunes and rocks and seaweed. There will be walls of weathered wood and a sleeping loft, windows with wavery green glass, and rough shelves covered with treasure: dried sea urchins, razor-clam shells, blue beach glass, bouquets of wildflowers in old pickle jars.

But for now, I don't mind the sound of the lawn mowing, it's the sound of peaceful Sundays, lilac-scented lazy Sundays. George and Elizabeth came and collected Edith half an hour ago and took her off to church. I have tea in my hand, and breakfast on a tray on the floor. Soft-boiled eggs in my favorite ceramic chicken egg cup. Toast on my favorite sky-blue plate with the goldfish swimming around the rim. Elizabeth brought it up and woke me before they left. Later I'll get up and go down and do up all the dishes before they get back, I'll baste the chicken and put the vegetables on and set the dining room table for dinner. Penance for pretending to be too sick to go to church with them.

I like the idea of church better than I like church. I like the dark polished wood, the dusty, lemon-polish, lily-of-the-valley-toilet-water smell. I like the coloured bars of light slanting down from the windows full of apostles, landing on the seats and the open pages of the hymnals. When I was small I got in trouble, squirming, trying to keep the bright jewels of light on my page as the sun moved slowly across the sky and dragged the coloured lights along the pew. I like to sing, depending, of course, on whether the organist plays or tortures the instrument.

What I don't like is the fact that I'm not allowed to argue with the minister. He stands up there, in long black robes with purple silk draped round his neck, and pontificates. I looked it up: pontificate: 1a. play the pontiff; pretend to be infallible. b. be pompously dogmatic. He can say whatever the hell he wants and you're not allowed to call him on it.

“Whoa there, Bud,” I want to stand up and say, “prove it!” I want to challenge his complacent little pronouncements. The older those guys are, the worse they are. Get them quoting St. Paul and I'm ready to tear my hair out.

Calm down, Gwen, breathe, and inhale lilacs—the scent of heaven, surely.

After Sunday dinner, it's time to go back to the San. I have to be there by four o'clock, in time to get back into pyjamas and propped up in bed for inedible supper. It only takes an hour to drive there, but we have a stop to make on the way.

I haven't been there in months, not since I got sick and was thrown into the Sanatorium. They wouldn't let me in until I tested negative. I can't argue with that. From the front, it looks like a judge's house from the last century: fake white marble columns, sun porches along the sides, a long tree-lined drive that sweeps past the entrance and back down the hill. In behind, where they've built on, it's not so pretty. In behind it looks like what it is, an institution. Patients here don't get better. Some part of what makes them human is lost: burnt, or dead, or blood-starved, or diseased, or never there in the first place. There are holes in their minds, like there are holes in my lungs.

I'm always amazed when I look at old pictures of my mother and Aunt Edith. They were skinny young women, farm girls with square shoulders and firm jaws—beautiful the way Katherine Hepburn was, although they didn't think so. They thought they were too tall, too thin. Nowadays they would be supermodels. In their twenties they ate like horses and burned it off, but my earliest memories of them both are soft and comforting: warm big breasts and solid stomachs to lean into; double chins and dimpled elbows. I disappeared into their hugs, their gingerbread and milky-tea embraces. Edith must be close to two hundred pounds. Girdles yellow in her bottom drawers; she never replaced them when they wouldn't fit anymore.

In the pictures of Mama she wears trim wool suits with tailored lines, cuffs and collars edged in velvet; perky little hats with feathers that sweep across her temples and flirt with her eyelashes; dark lipstick with a strong curved edge. The pictures of Edith, a generation earlier, show a sylph in summer muslins, sometimes a rope of pearls down her front, sometimes a nose
-
gay in her lap, and her hair scooped up in a soft roll to set off her dreamy eyes. But my memories are all of flowered aprons with crumpled Kleenex in the pockets, nylons stockings rolled to their ankles in the summer heat. They're like old hockey players who never changed their eating habits once they gave up the game, all that fried chicken and apple pie settling down to stay.

Edith is barrelled all over, but Mama has given in to gravity. Two years of sitting, the planet sucking at her weight, have caused her lost collarbones to surface and her shoulders are once again as hard and spare as ironwork. Her legs slide into her slippers and bury her ankles. Loose flesh wattles her arm bones, the long rods to the stuttering birds that are her hands. I want to scoop up the fallen flesh and pour it over her shoulders and arms. She's rising up though her flesh, her skull is pushing up through her haloed silver hair. She looks much older than she is now; she looks like she belongs to Edith's generation.

“She's an angel,” the nurses tell me each time they see me. “She's just a pet.”

They are grateful she's so easy to look after, they have too many difficult patients, too many crazies. Too often, her type of brain damage results in a violent re-ordering of the personality. They don't know why she's different, she is a gift they do not examine too closely. She sits where you put her, still, a stillness so profound she seems tranced but for her hands. They flutter, flutter, twist and smooth and pat. Unless you position yourself directly in front of her gaze she does not focus on your face. She might speak if you speak directly to her, but she doesn't know anybody. She doesn't remember her nurses from one day to the next. She doesn't remember me. I used to try so hard, I used to put my face six inches from her and tell her, over and over, “It's me, Gwen. It's Gwennie, Mama. Mama, it's me.”

She likes to have her hair brushed. It's the only thing that calms her hands. They settle down, to a slow smoothing of her cornflower-blue chenille lap. I brush her hair as gently as possible, counting strokes and telling her how things are at the farm. Her hair is more and more like dandelion silk, as if a breath would blow it away. She likes music, too; the nurses tell me they sing to her.

“Try it,” they say. “She loves it. She smiles, sometimes she tries to sing along.”

I brush her hair, but I don't sing. I tried once, but then I started to wail like a banshee; I scared the other patients so bad they started to howl in fright. I don't sing here. Some things are not possible.

CHAPTER 12

Yesterday I stayed in bed all day. Got up in the evening for a bit of a walk. Everyone who comes back from a weekend pass spends the next day in bed, even if they spent their whole weekend at home on a couch, dozing. Something about the outside world is exhausting. Mary and I, just before we left on our weekends, had persuaded Dr. Robichaud to let us room together, so we're in a four-bed dorm, just the two of us, and she spent the day in bed too. It was as quiet as a tomb, leading Dr. Robichaud, who looked in on us, to decide he'd made the right decision and that we would influence each other for the good. Mary hadn't spent her weekend sleeping and being stuffed with home cooking though. She went to a dance Saturday night and stayed out until three a.m. Sunday after church she went to the lake and drank stingers with a dentist named Borland.

What had me flat in bed was that all the real-world stimulation made me dream. All the long night, on and on. When I woke up in the morning I was drenched and exhausted, and my head was full of strange glimpses of whatever surreal plane I fall into when I close my eyes and lose my grip. Mostly it was about stairs. All night long I climbed stairs, up and down, story after story. Sometimes my mother would stand in a door
-
way and smile, but the stairs kept taking me away from her. Sometimes they went right down through my grade eleven classroom and I could look over people's shoulders and watch them struggle with exam questions.

“Get down off there and write this history exam,” Mr. MacDougall ordered, and I would have, though it was all about the Crusades and I hadn't studied and knew I would fail, but I couldn't find a way off the stairs. Up and down, up and down. Up to the attic, down to the cellar, past howling forests and piles of dusty, broken furniture. Past a black room that scared me so bad I couldn't look to see what was in it. Past rabid dogs. It was like the fever dreams I had the first month I was here, everything insane and twisted, like being in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. I'd wake up drenched three and four times a night and have to ring for the nurse to change the sheets and my pyjamas. Sometimes I was too exhausted and would just lie wet and shivering until someone found me. No wonder I couldn't gain any weight, I sweated pounds every night.

So I spent yesterday in bed, dozing and comforting myself with chocolates, a box of Laura Secord Miniatures that George gave me when he and Elizabeth dropped me off. When I complained about the dreams Mary offered to tell me their meanings—she's read some sort of book about it. I didn't want her messing around in my head, but I had to give her something, so I told her the teeth one, how, in my dream, I get a loose tooth. It gets looser, then suddenly falls out. Then another one. Then, like dominoes they all fall, one after the other as I frantically try to stick them back. I wake up—feel my teeth with my tongue. They're all stuck firmly in. Huge relief. She says it's because I want to tell people off but am afraid to because then they won't like me. She says I dream my teeth fall out so I can't bite people, which, metaphorically speaking, is what I want to do. How silly. I've already taken care of the student nurse, and done a bang-up job on Melvin Holyoke. Who else would I want to tell off? Well, The Witch, of course. Cranky old Mrs. Cyr, maybe. Definitely whiny Mrs. Charmichael. Mary Eileen and her do-gooder pals. Ralphie, the nutcake who torments my mother. The minister, Elisha, and God. Hardly anybody at all.

After lunch today, Mary and I summoned enough energy for a stroll down the long hall to the other end of the ward. We amused ourselves by gawking out the big windows at the guys hauling in the weekly grocery order, and Mary rated them.

“Too old. Stuck on himself. Mama's boy. That one's a brick short of a load.”

“How can you tell?”

“He's going to drop that case of peaches on his foot. Watch.”

Bingo! The box split and cans of heavy syrup clingstone halves rolled across the parking lot. Brickhead hopped on one foot, clutching the squished other with both hands, cursing.

“Told you,” she said. “Come on.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me along, slipper-shuffling back down the hall. It was almost rest time. She goosed me.

“Quit that!” I whipped the belt from my robe and snapped her one. She grabbed hold of the free end and started pulling me down the hall, snaking me from side to side. I bounced into a trolley that was parked, waiting quietly for afternoon tea. The cups rattled, upside down in their saucers. I grabbed a fistful of sugar packets and non-dairy creamers and started pelting her with them. She started flinging back and we were just getting into it when The Witch grabbed us from behind and started howling like the Wrath of God.

“Are you out of your minds, carrying on like this! You stupid imbecilic girls! Act your age, for a change! All this time and trouble and expense to treat your disease and you can think of nothing better to do than carry on like hooligans? Get to your rooms at once! No running, you hear? And no noise! Have a little consideration for the other patients—the ones wise enough to rest when they're supposed to rest. I want you flat on your backs for the next two hours, and not a peep out of either of you!”

She followed us into our room, threw open the window as wide as it could go, swept all the magazines off our bed tables and hauled them out of the room.

“Witch,” hissed Mary. “Miserable old dried-up cow!”

She'd made me want to cry, with all her yelling. I bit my cheek so I wouldn't. We heard a “Damn!” as she skidded on some sugar. Mary snickered.

“Shhhh,” I whispered, “she's still out there. I thought she was going to belt us.”

“We'd have taken her, easy.”

“Act your age, you hooligan,” I said. We stuffed our mouths with pillows to keep the giggles down. Tears streamed down our faces. Eventually Mary settled, and started to snore. There was no way I could sleep through that, so I hauled out my books and papers and added to my research.

BODY COUNT

1.Tuberculosis bone lesions have been found in Egyptian skeletons from about 1000 B.C. Evidence from Germany suggests the disease has been around even longer; skeletons found near Heidelberg, from about 4,500 B.C., show tuberculosis damage to their spines.

2. Franz Kafka, 1883–1924:
   His clammy apartment was believed to be the cause of his tuberculosis. No one suspected his consumption of large quantities of milk and his obsession with drinking it raw, unpasteurized, and unboiled, in a country where cattle inspection had been suspended because of the war. After his diagnosis he moved to the country and drank even more, in the belief that fresh milk was a cure for tuberculosis. His first encounter with the disease wasn't too severe, and his prognosis was good.
   Then he fell victim to the Spanish flu pandemic and his disease reactivated. In 1924, weighing less than a hundred pounds, he was taken to a sanatorium in Austria, where doctors confirmed that he had tuberculosis of the larynx. Tuberculosis of the larynx, secondary to long-standing tuberculosis of the lungs, was fairly common, and extremely painful. They injected alcohol into his laryngeal nerves to try to deaden them. He could barely speak, he could barely swallow. He was dying of starvation, craving liquids but unable to swallow more than a trickle of water. His doctors wouldn't give him enough painkiller, afraid they'd turn him into a drug addict. He demanded morphine.
   Finally they gave him two shots, but he thought they were trying to trick him and didn't believe it was really morphine. His last lucid words were: Kill me, or else you are a murderer.