View From a Kite Page 5

  CHAPTER 10

  It’s a beautiful sunny morning. Aunt Edith is making me buttermilk pancakes slathered with her homemade blueberry preserves, and if that pales, I can drown them in the maple syrup George makes every March from the sugar bush out behind his house. There’s freshly ground coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice. Real food, that’s two meals in a row. How will I ever choke anything down when I get back to the San? You look so thin, says Edith. You’ve lost so much weight, says Elizabeth. Put a little butter on that, says George, of everything I bring to my mouth, chocolate macaroons included.

  I must admit that when I first started losing weight I was pleased. I dropped from a pudgy hundred and twenty-five down to one-eighteen in a month, and kept on going, down, down. My clothes hung off me, there were elegant bones everywhere. One hundred and five, and my breasts disappeared. They hadn’t been that big to begin with, but they were mine and I was fond of them. By the time they hauled me off to the San, a feverish, weepy, ninety-pound weakling, I was out of love with elegant bones and scared that I was coming out through my skin. They weigh you there every Saturday morning, roll a big scale up and down the ward, weighing you and marking your fate on a chart. If you’ve lost weight, you lose privileges. You have to go back to bedrest for the next week, and certainly you will not be issued a weekend pass to go home. As the scale rumbles closer and closer to my room, I suck in extra air and try to think fat. The first month I kept losing. I didn’t stir out of bed the whole time, but I lost three more pounds. Then for two weeks—nothing—while I choked down vile, inedible mush and hoped it would stick somewhere inside. Finally, a sudden two-pound gain. They let me up for an hour a day. The exercise, I told them, makes me hungry. Now I’m a porky one hundred and one pounds, fat enough not to blow away in the outside world. I scarf down pancakes until an explosion is imminent. If you’ve gained weight during a weekend home, they put it down on your chart with a green asterisk and the next month Dr. Robichaud is much more inclined to let you out again.

  After breakfast, I lie on the porch swing while Edith does up the dishes.

  “Let me do those,” I’d said, but she’d chased me away with the dishtowel. “Get out in the sun,” she’d said, so here I am, sorting through the pile of junk mail that has arrived for me in the past month. A record club is threatening to take my firstborn. Another one wants to give me five thousand free tapes for one dollar each plus shipping and handling. The spring Eaton’s catalogue is about to expire, still in its plastic bag. It seems pink and lime green are in. If I had to pick a season to live in pyjamas, this was a good one.

  Aunt Edith brings me out the ubiquitous cup of tea, and bundles me up in a purple, green, royal blue, and mauve afghan. I match the lilacs.

  “What’s this?” I wave a business card that has fallen out of the paper pile. Edith looks perplexed, reads the card, turns it over.

  “A man,” she says. “A salesman. He’s gone.”

  It doesn’t look like the business card of a salesman. He’s some kind of rep for a magazine Susan and Clara and I used to read at the check-out counter and make fun of:

  ALIEN BABY EATS PARENTS

  SIX-YEAR-OLD BOY GIVES BIRTH TO GRANDMOTHER

  107-YEAR-OLD MAN MARRIES 20-YEAR-OLD BRIDE; TRUE LOVE AT LAST

  “What did he want?” I ask her.

  Her face clouds, brightens, clouds. She surfaces somewhere a few decades back. Time is a river to Aunt Edith, and she is a fish. She rises and falls with invisible currents.

  “He wanted to speak to Robert. I told him Robert was away in town.”

  “Are you sure that’s what he said?”

  “He had the wrong house. He wanted to speak to my niece. I told him my niece was a baby.” She stares at me, confused. Rises higher in the river, recognizes me, and blinks.

  “Do you want some tea, dear?’

  “No thanks, Aunt Edith,” I say, and she goes indoors. I pick the card up from where she has dropped it. Melvin Holyoke is his name. I put him in the discard pile.

  At ten o’clock, Elizabeth drives up to collect Edith. She is taking her to the dentist.

  “Don’t you move from this porch,” she says. “We’ll be back in time for lunch, and we’re bringing you a big pizza from Nick’s.” She beams; she re-tucks my afghan.

  “I promise,” I say, and wave them off. I’ve every intention of staying right where I am, but half an hour later there’s all that tea and coffee and orange juice to unload. When I come back downstairs there’s a man standing in the back porch.

  “Good morning.” He smiles, confidingly, as if we’ve been up to something together. “The door was open, I hope you don’t mind. Melvin Holyoke’s the name, I left my card with your aunt, Miss…MacIntyre? Gwen, is it?”

  By now he’s oozed into the kitchen, he has put his hat down on the table and pulled himself out a chair.

  “Mind if I take a seat?” He hands me a second card. He lowers his backside onto the crocheted cushion that eases Edith’s bad hip when she sits down to eat, and pulls up the knees of his polyester-blend pants so they won’t stretch out of shape over his bent knees. I stand with my back to the wood stove, pick up a cup of lukewarm tea (Edith’s, I think) from a trivet and sip from it to steady my hand.

  “We would like to do an exclusive interview with you—with pictures, of course—to tell your story. We are prepared to offer you a considerable sum of money, to help with your future education costs, and so on. Perhaps,” he looks around at the faded wallpaper (teapots and kettles full of daisies) and the chipped green woodwork, “you might like to finance a few renovations for your aunt? Or take her on a trip to Florida next winter? My own dear mother minds the cold dreadfully; she loves to get away to play a little golf in February.”

  I smile at the image of Edith whacking a ball on a green in Florida.

  He smiles back, a vast expanse of capped teeth.

  I want to kill him.

  “My story…” My lips are dry and I stop to lick them. “As in, Tragic Tubercular Teenager Locked Up In Sanatorium After Father Blows Hole In Mother’s Brain? Something like that?”

  “I can assure you we will tell your story with the utmost delicacy and sensitivity.” He’s so eager the badly trimmed hairs in his nose are quivering. “We think you should have some recompense for your pain, and a chance to talk—to share your burden.”

  “How much money?” I ask. I am calm. Composed. My mother’s manners are a smooth surface over black rage.

  He doesn’t blink. “I should think in the neighbourhood of twenty thousand dollars.”

  “That’s all?” I ask, sloshing tea on my knuckles. Calm and composed is beginning to crack.

  “Well, that’s just an opening offer, of course. We may be able to go a bit higher, but we’ll need pictures of you and your parents.”

  “Bastard,” I mutter.

  “Excuse me?” he says.

  I fling the cup and the rest of the tea in his face.

  “Bastard!” I yell it, so he can’t mistake me. I throw the pot at him, the potholder, the trivet, and the wet dish towels hanging from the line above the stove.

  I scream, “Bastard! Bastard!” I can’t think of another word, but this one seems to sum up everything I have to say. I want more things to throw at him.

  He’s on his hands and knees in the porch, scrabbling at the door handle. I dump the coal scuttle and the coal on his head as he dives down the back steps. He’s bleeding a bit, which rouses me to further effort.

  “Bastard, bastard, bastard!” I howl, and throw wood from the woodbox and an armload of boots and shoes. He’s running for his car and finally manages to get inside and lock the door. Not before I get him with a nice chunk of birch. I pitch the two pots of pink geraniums on the bottom step at him and take out a headlamp before he gets the car into gear.

  Then there’s nothing big left to throw, so I heave fistfuls of gravel from the drive, trying to scratch and chip the paint on his car as he fishtails down the lane and
out onto the highway.

  I have a brief screaming fit. Maybe it’s brief, I don’t remember. At some point I stop, burnt out and exhausted. I hate losing control like this. My throat hurts, my lungs hurt, my head hurts, but it’s better than crying. Anything’s better than useless, stupid crying. I wipe my nose on my bathrobe sleeve, retie my belt, and stumble back to the house. When I get to the kitchen I lift the stove lid and drop his hat into the firebox. I clean up and make a fresh pot of tea in the freshly chipped teapot, then I curl up on the porch swing and tuck myself back into Edith’s afghan. I sip tea and pretend I am vacationing in Majorca before heading off on my next book tour.

  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, dozi
ng. 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.