by Lynn Coady
Hilary looks pained. “Sister,” she appeals. “Catherine comes from a very devout family. Who am I to assail her faith?”
So off I go to talk to the little fanatic.
“So here we are,” I say. “I’m supposed to sit here and talk to you about God.”
“Whoop-de-shit,” says the girl.
“Oh goodness the language,” I say. “I’m certainly appalled.”
She laughs a bit. Isn’t this going well.
“So what do you want to starve yourself for?” I say. “Who told you to do that?”
“Nobody,” says Catherine.
I’m surprised because I was sure she was going to tell me God did. “Well? What’s the good of it then?”
“Well, that is what religious people do, isn’t it?” says Catherine, reasonably enough.“Don’t nuns fast?”
“You’re not a nun.”
“Jesus fasted.”
“Well, you’re not him either now, are you?”
“I’m devout,” insists Catherine. “I’m just being devout.”
“But you’re hurting yourself, dear, just look at the size of you.”
“Well, I don’t care, I want to be the empty vessel. I want to be filled with God. I want him to fill me.” She gets this look on her face. She rubs her concave stomach.
“Stop it,” I say. “Smarten up. Where did you hear this nonsense?”
“It’s in the Bible,” says Catherine.
“Well, don’t read the Bible,” I tell her. “That’s what Protestants do and look at them.”
I did a poor job with Catherine, I know it. I didn’t like to be there in the room with her.
Dr. Pat is waiting to talk to me.
“How’d it go?” he asks.
“Well, I’m no psychiatrist, I’ve discovered.” I’m embarrassed. I peek around him, into the waiting room, where people sit wearing identical looks of annoyance.
“Will you keep trying?” he asks.
“I suppose.”
He stands in front of me and gazes around. That glazed look the doctors sometimes get in moments of stillness. He sighs.
“I’m going to release her. If the parents won’t let us send her up to Halifax there’s not much we can do. Next week she’ll faint in school again, we’ll put her on IV and on and on it goes.” Dr. Pat’s eyes do a lazy sweep across the corridor and then land on me again. “Maybe you’ll talk to her parents?”
I’m starting to wish he’d leave me alone. What I do is, I sit with old ladies and pat their hands.
Dr. Pat heads into Catherine’s room to give the girl a final once-over before setting her free. I stand by the door. I see her lie there as he picks up her hand, turns her arm around to check the IV. She watches him take the stethoscope from his pocket, uses her free hand to pull aside her gown, offer him what’s left of her chest.
SYLVIA’S HUSBAND IS called Ducky. They’d like me to call him Ducky. I try calling him Mr. Embree a couple of times but they won’t let me get away with it.
“He’s just old Ducky, Sister — that’s what he answers to.”
“Just call me Ducky,” says Ducky, head bobbing.
I didn’t know about Ducky, am surprised by Ducky. He works in the sawmills, and so disappears into the woods for most of the summer. Now it’s fall and therefore he’s back.
Sylvia wears a ring, but I assumed her husband was dead. I don’t know why I assumed that. I think I must have believed that Sylvia is older than she is because of the way she looks. But look at Ducky — a woodsman, a good six feet to him, grey but nowhere near retirement. He infects us with his good health. Sylvia glows in his presence, and I keep ducking, flinching, imagining he’s going to knock me over somehow.
He tries to dance with Sylvia, who is bedridden. “No, just watch,” he says over our protests. He picks up her flaccid, see-through hands in his. My instinct is to call on Dr. Pat or someone.
But Ducky just begins to dance by himself, holding Sylvia’s hands. He hums “In the Mood,” closing his eyes. Manages to raise one of Sylvia’s arms high enough so that he can even twirl himself underneath it, crouching low, almost going down on his knees and looking foolish. Sylvia wheezes laughter. Ducky lets one of her hands drop, and reaches his out toward me.
“How about it, Sister?”
Size of a baseball mitt.
Now that it’s fall, Ducky visits every day. He’s there during visiting hours, when I am. I still poke my head in the door, but there’s only one chair in Sylvia’s room. Or maybe there’s two or three but with Ducky in there it hardly matters. He takes everything up. Sylvia waves to me, like a girl from a car window.
FALL GIVES ME the worst kind of dreams. All colour and sick sunlight. Crabapples rotting under trees, being reclaimed. I wait for Catherine to come back. Two weeks is all it takes.
She’s grey. “You look like death,” I tell her.
“I feel beatific,” she says.
“Well, that’s a hundred-dollar word.”
“That’s how I feel. I am shining my love out into the world.”
“My goodness.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” she says.
I’m startled. I have been imagining this whole time that she was making fun of me. I assumed we were speaking to each other in the same way my sisters and I always did — the hostility frothing up around the edges of our every sentence like scum on soup. We could spend entire holidays in a single house together, talking to each other like that, without a second thought, like picking and picking at your cuticles and being surprised when they start to ache and bleed.
We sit in dull silence for a moment or two.
“Can you bring me communion sometime?” Catherine asks.
“Would you take it?” I say, surprised again.
“Of course I would take it. It’s all I would take. The Body. I will have the Body.”
Well, I’m thinking, maybe we could sneak some peanut butter on there or some such thing.
“There’s a priest who makes the rounds,” I tell her. “I can bring him this week.”
Catherine makes a face and writhes bonily under her sheet. “He’s old!” she protests. “I don’t want him.”
It’s difficult to hide my exasperation but I do because won’t Hilary eat her hat if I’m the one to get this girl to swallow something of her own accord. Dr. Pat will wonder what they’re paying her for.
“Well, you know I can’t do it, Catherine,” I say.
“Will you be there at least?”
My. I blink down at her. Am I touched?
“Of course,” I tell her.
“Will the doctor be there?”
What to say about that? I suppose he will, if I tell him what’s happening.
“What do you need the doctor for, to check your pulse?” I joke. “You plan on keeling over?”
“Don’t make fun of me!” she yells.
I hurry down the hallway to find him, but run into Hilary instead. She stops dead in her tracks because, I realize, I’m smiling at her. Differently than I did in the office, I assume. She unruffles herself and cocks her head at me like a bird.
“She’s going to eat something,” I blurt.
Hilary blinks and blinks.
“She’s going to take communion.”
“Kah,” says Hilary.
“Communion. The sacrament.”
She keeps her bird-expression for a while. Bird-flown-into-a-window. Finally: “Oh,” and exhales. “It’s not much,” she adds.
“Well, I was thinking we could …” I look down and witness my hands darting around in front of me. “Bulk it up somehow.”
Hilary nods slowly, the fluorescent lighting playing across her wiry red hair. “Sister,” she begins. No more blinking. “It’s a very good start. But of course you see the problem. Again, it’s all about religion for her. It’s symbolic. It’s not about eating.”
“Well, it is, because she’ll actually be eating something.”
“Yes of course, but
we’re, we’re, what we’re trying to do is break down some of these psychological barriers. It has to mean something when she takes a bite — to Catherine. It has to mean she wants to eat. Do you see what I mean? It can’t just mean more of the same thing — I want God, I want God, I don’t want food. She has to want food, you see? For food’s sake.”
“For food’s sake,” I repeat, hands still.
She nods, smiles. I smile as well.
“Well, I think we should ask the doctor,” I say as I move around Hilary. She follows me to his office without a word.
In a moment of what I am certain must have been boredom, Catherine once asked me why I became a nun. I asked did she want the long version or the short version.
“Short version,” the thing replied. Not a moment’s hesitation.
The short version was this. I was nineteen and sitting having a beer in the sun with my friend Dell Mercer. She was not my best friend or even a particularly good friend, but more one of those inevitable friends — someone you’ve known since preschool who is as much of a fixture in your life as a parent or a pet. In fact I remember it was Grade two when Dell decided she wanted people to call her Dell instead of Adela. I was the reason. She thought it sounded too much like my name. But was she sorry by Grade Three, because everyone started chanting “The Farmer in the Dell” at her in the playground, and I think she blamed me for it right up until Grade Seven or so.
But since this was the short version, I didn’t tell Catherine all that.
I just told her I was nineteen and sitting having a beer in the sun with my friend Dell Mercer. It was summer and we were both home from school — she nursing, me teaching. We were in her parents’ backyard overlooking the wharf, watching tourists bob around in their sailboats, and she announced she was getting married. I squealed and pretended to fumble my beer and did and said all the things girls are supposed to on these occasions. Of course I asked to see her ring.
Dell told me, “We haven’t got it yet. Terry’s got to save up for a while. I want a real rock. I’ve always had nice things, and you only get married once, so I feel like I deserve a real rock. I’ve waited a long time to get married. So I told him, Terry, I want a rock. Nothing else will stand.”
She kept saying, rock. A real rock, over and over. Beer in the sun, sun on the water, water under sailboats. I thought I think I’ll be a nun after that.
Catherine of course could be counted upon to find this story idiotic.
I didn’t tell her my secret reason. The other, the story of the rock, was my official reason, and it’s true that Dell going on and on like that very much clinched the deal for me. But there was another story I’d never tell Catherine. It happened when I was her age, wandering around in the fields at my grandparents’ place in Margaree. It was summer then also, but late, long-shadowed and hot. No ocean nearby with a breeze off the water to cool things off. The high grass had turned gold, dead from heat. I was listening to the silence, the strange hot buzz of nothing — just sky and dry grass. I bumped against a stinking willie, which nodded at me, and as I passed I glimpsed an enormous bumblebee nodding along with it. I jumped — I’d had a terror of bees ever since one of my stupider brothers took to a hive with a rake. But the big bee wasn’t perturbed. It just rode the nodding flower, not budging or moving its wings. I bent over and nudged the stinking willy again, ready to run. The bee still didn’t move. I must have watched it forever before finally extending a finger and actually poking the bee. Nothing. It was frozen, somehow.
And then, panic. Like the world had stopped, and the hot buzz of nothing in every direction.
Something like, Help me i’m alone.
“BODY OF CHRIST.”
Dr. Pat just stands there. I catch his eye over the priest’s shoulder and mouth a big amen.
“Oh!” exclaims Dr. Pat. “Amen.” The priest gazes at him with indulgence, raises the host mouth-level. Dr. Pat stares at it. Oh, I am going to start laughing if someone doesn’t do something.
“Open your mouth to receive the host,” encourages the priest in church tones.
Dr. Pat appears horrified, and I must say it unnerves me as well, the idea of him standing before the priest just opening his mouth like the rest of us, waiting. Him not even Catholic, but a doctor. We didn’t tell the priest because Catherine was so insistent — Dr. Pat had to receive too, or else she wouldn’t. Guilt. My fingertips tingle, my palms seep with it. And I keep wanting to laugh.
I only wish Catherine had insisted on Hilary receiving as well. Hilary is the one who needs to be here with her mouth hanging open. She would know the responses, the amens, when to stand and when to kneel. She would know it like a baby knows to suck, and be infuriated. Thanks be to God. The words would fly from her mouth, her mouth would hang open, her tongue would pop out of its own accord, welcoming the host. Not a thing the social worker could do about it. She knows, and that’s why she hasn’t come. “I want nothing to do with this,” she said in Dr. Pat’s office. Her face went red to match her hair. She’s very cool, Hilary, but her face betrays her. If it weren’t for that fair complexion and those telltale blotches that say I would like to choke you, Sister Anita, you’d suppose butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
Dr. Pat kept yanking on his telephone cord in the face of Hilary’s reproach. He held it with both hands and kept pulling the curls apart and then gently letting them sproing together again. For a moment I thought he was going to start chewing on the thing.
“I just want to make sure we’re doing everything we can,” he said to the cord. “I want to leave no stone unturned — for Catherine’s sake.”
“Then have her committed,” said Hilary. “Send her to Halifax. Get her the professional care that she needs, don’t participate in this fantasy.”
“Pardon me?” I said.
“Her fantasy,” repeated Hilary. “The thing that is making her sick.”
I decided I didn’t need to answer. I just sat back in my chair, relaxing.
“Catherine is running this,” said Hilary. “She’s — she’s in the director’s chair.”
I tittered then, Hilary’s blotches deepening. I don’t know why. Catherine in her nightdress shouting Action!
“Body of Christ,” to me. Open your mouth and close your eyes.
Then he turns to Catherine. She gets to stay in bed.
“Body of Christ.”
“Amen.” Catherine sticks her tongue out. It’s as white as the host itself. White as the blood of the lamb and all that.
And it’s over already. As the priest blows out the communion candle, we all watch Catherine close her mouth and swallow. I suppose it’s a bit anticlimactic. He turns to shake hands with Dr. Pat, and then there is a noise — a big one. We all twitch and look at each other for explanation before we think to look at Catherine again. She’s sitting there with a face of mild surprise, hands lightly resting on her stomach. It makes the noise again, but louder.
“There’s a demon down there,” she remarks.
“It certainly sounds like it,” admits Dr. Pat. He moves toward her, reaching for his stethoscope. But she grabs his hand before it gets to his pocket. She grabs it and places it on her belly.
“Feel,” she tells him.
And he does, he stands there feeling. I want to snap at him to cut it out, and I look around for the priest, who is mumbling dazedly to himself in the corner, packing away his communion things. Old. As Catherine has already pointed out.
“I’m going to be sick,” she announces, and starts to clamber out of bed. Whereupon of course she collapses. Dr. Pat must pick her up. Dr. Pat gathers her into his arms like kindling.
And for God’s sake, her gown has not been tied in the back and now it slips right off the creature, skin melting off bones. The poor priest is a white-robed dervish, whirling from the darkened room.
IT OCCURS TO me that I haven’t visited Sylvia in a while and she is probably wondering what’s gotten into me. Well, Sylvia, I will tell her. I just got so w
rapped up in that little girl down the hall. Yes — the one who doesn’t eat. Wouldn’t swallow her own spit if she had her druthers. Would want to know how many calories it had in it. Well, baby steps, Sylvia. We got her to take the host, and that’s a beginning, now, isn’t it? You could do a lot worse now, couldn’t you, Sylvia, than the Body of Christ? I’ll say.
And we will laugh quietly — Sylvia wheezily — at my near-irreverence. Sylvia enjoys those kind of jokes, the ones that take a run at blasphemy, swerving away at the last dangerous moment, like kids playing chicken.
Sylvia’s room is darkened too — maybe everyone on the floor is taking communion today, the traumatized priest shambling from room to room: B-b-b-body of Christ. B-body. Body. Stuffing the wafer distractedly down everyone’s throat. Take this and eat it.
I will tell the story to Sylvia sometime. Not today, but when I’m feeling a bit more collected and can joke about the hapless Dr. Pat and the muttering priest. Sylvia will enjoy hearing me make fun of the priest and the doctor, the men she depends on to such an unthinkable extent. I imagine you have to hate them a little. Need to see them ridiculed at times — it brings relief. I can do that for Sylvia.
But Ducky’s in there and the room is hazy, rank. His flannelled back is to me, a third wall, and from behind it come low, private giggles. Surreptitious wheezings. Snatches of song from Ducky.
Yooooo doooooo
something
to me
He is hamming up the Yooooo dooooo’s, drawing them out forever. Sylvia coughs voluptuously and Ducky turns his head in a deliberate, aristocratic sort of gesture. A gesture that plays at luxury and indulgence. I see his blunt woodsman’s profile outlined in the dark — the scar that dents his cheek.
Yoooooooo doooooooo.
Here is what he’s doing. He’s inhaling, and then letting the smoke pour out as he sings. It cascades from his face and swirls heavenward, enveloping them both as he extends the cigarette to his wife. A more honest gesture, now, a gesture like the nurses when they feed her, only loving.
And then of course he takes a look around, a guilty boy. As he has probably been doing intermittently throughout this performance.