by Joan Barfoot
Greta steps forward. Oh no.
“Emily,” she says firmly, “do not fuss. You are a grown woman, you need not take such a mistake so seriously, and I know,” her voice turning cold, and even at the end she was never frozen to him, “nothing like this will happen again. Will it, George?” He shakes his head. He cannot meet eyes. To her daughter Greta says, “Wait for me in the dining room.” To Adele she says, “I shall take him there, you do not need to wait. Do not to anyone mention this, please.”
She’s eliminating witnesses to whatever punishment she intends.
When the others have gone, reluctantly and not without glances back, Greta sighs heavily. “George. That was very bad.”
“Mistake,” he says hopefully, plucking her own word from the air.
“I did not think otherwise. You had a moment of forgetting, did you not?”
He was always lucky with Greta, who any number of times could have done him great harm, and did not. “Very sorry,” he says.
“I know. I shall do what I can about Emily, and Adele also, but you must pay attention, you must be more careful. You must think, always think.” That’s another thing about Greta: she often used to say more than she needed to, although maybe only because she wasn’t so good with the language and wanted to make sure she was clear. Still, he feels as if he has fallen down and been picked up again.
She’s right, he must think. He must pay attention to forgetting what his hand felt sliding upwards; what his affectionately twiddling fingers were able to touch, soft and sweet.
A stranger’s softness. That’s what he has to remember: a stranger. He must hope Greta can keep him out of trouble, and also will not bar him from the exercise and conversation and company of their little group. Because what would he be here without them? His mind goes white with the thought. How he longs to wheel back into his room, back into his bed, back into a time before this.
“Do not worry,” Greta says. “Only remember. In all our lives we make mistakes that are only our own business, yes? And we all keep our secrets.”
How good she is; has always been. Mercy. “Thank you.” Although it begins to grate, being humble like this. That can’t be right, but it’s so. She takes the handgrips of his wheelchair and pushes him roughly—is she angry?—to his table in the dining room, and leaves him.
But now here comes Ruth, and she has committed a far bigger, worse crime than his, and nobody has told.
At the table he stares mainly at his plate, turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, peas and turnip too much, all the clatter of plates and cutlery, and the unfamiliar volume of high and low voices too much—even Ruth too much, although she too isn’t making much effort to talk as she slowly and painstakingly, as she does everything, takes a bite or two of each food on her plate. “It’s a lot, isn’t it?” she asks finally, and so it is. The whole day.
Across the room they can see Sylvia and Nancy sharing a table with an upstairs resident and two middle-aged strangers. Sylvia and Nancy look to be talking brightly with the others, and everyone is laughing. Well, they’re smart-tongued, cutting women, bound to be entertaining as long as they’re not turned on each other. “Mothers and daughters,” Ruth says, following the half of George’s gaze that is followable. “They’re a funny pair, aren’t they?”
George does not want to talk about mothers and daughters, does not want even to think about them; but of course they’re everywhere in this busy, crowded room, an unfurling of generations like flags. There’s Greta, with two of her Amazons and the granddaughter, still a young woman unfleshed. She has Greta’s broad shoulders, though. Maybe she’s how Greta looked at her age, before she came to this country, and years before him.
They are a whole raft of people he knows nothing about. How do they feel about vengeance?
Greta is in earnest, head-bent, private conversation with one of her daughters, while the other one and the granddaughter eat and talk with each other. He can’t tell the daughters apart at this distance, or perhaps at all, but the one with Greta’s hand on her arm must be the one. The daughter’s expression goes from angry to, he thinks, resigned finally. He glimpses her nodding, although also frowning. She has a sister, as well as a daughter or niece, right there to tell. Still, they seem to be girls who are generous toward Greta’s desires. The daughter Emily might care for her mother more than she cares to hurt him. “George, are you all right, are you ill?” Ruth is asking. Why, what does he look like, is he pale, is he weeping?
What if Greta, because they’re used to telling things, tells Ruth and Sylvia? It doesn’t take much, or long, for a man to be ruined. “Fine,” he says. “Thanks.”
“All the noise, it’s exhausting in a way, but it’s nice too, hearing so many happy voices.”
Happy? There’s an H-word a fellow doesn’t much hear around here. “Yes,” he says doubtfully. “Nice.”
When the meal finally ends, and as Ruth rises and leans into his wheelchair to push him out of the dining room, people are rising from other tables as well. Greta looks across at him and smiles slightly and nods slightly and lifts her hand slightly; it looks as if she’s saying that he’s okay. But oh, what a stupid, stupid thing to do. She was right, he has to think, he has to try hard and be on his toes. Bad things happen when a fellow caves in. “Thanks,” he says to Ruth again, as she leaves him at his door. Because it is Thanksgiving, and he is grateful that the day, for him, is more or less safely over at last.
Even so, wasn’t that a sweet blunder? Greta can’t mind if he lets himself remember now and then, just a little bit, can she? And nobody can stop a man’s dreams. It would be warm and even exciting to have a sweet dream or two. Big, bad things happen in the night, leaving a fellow sprawled on the floor helpless as a sack of grain, so tender and delicious things should be allowed too, and if they can’t get him in trouble, or ever even be known—just his own private, dreaming secrets, asleep or awake—where’s the harm?
26
ALL THE MORAL BUSYBODIES…
NANCY IS INDEED MORE GAUNT than the last time she visited, and for good reason. “You should know I’m having a hysterectomy next month,” she told Sylvia at Thanksgiving. “I’m just mentioning it because I figured if I was going to be mad at you for not telling me important things you were doing, I shouldn’t turn around and do the same thing myself. If I’d remembered to have kids my insides would probably be fine, but oops, I forgot, and they’re not, so it’s best to ditch the whole shebang now.”
Sylvia recognized the brittle tone. Other mothers might chip at it till it crumbled—might speak the word cancer, for one—but, expert herself in the maintenance of useful walls, she recognized one when she saw it. “Thank you. I’m glad you told me.” Because whatever Nancy said, she wouldn’t have revealed any weakness, including sickness and surgery, if she didn’t need comfort. Which left Sylvia to gauge the precise amount of comfort desired against the precise amount that would offend. She put an arm around Nancy and tugged gently, stepping away as soon as she felt Nancy’s shoulder tense, which was quite soon.
“Can you tell me what’s involved and what you’re setting out to get fixed?” Get fixed was an unfortunate turn of phrase, in the context. She might have hoped Nancy wouldn’t notice, but of course Nancy did. “Myself. I’ll be getting myself fixed. Spayed. Whatever. But seriously, it’s mainly pre-emptive. One or two things are out of whack, so this’ll catch them before they maybe get dangerous.” And that’s all she would say.
“Who will look after you? Do you have someone?” What a thing not to know—who cares for Nancy?
“A bunch of friends will take turns and I’ll have a little home care, but the surgeon says I’m in better shape than most patients my age, so I should bounce back fast.”
Nancy has promised to phone after surgery the first moment she can, and so for the first time in her life Sylvia has equipped herself with a cellphone, which she now takes with her everywhere, practising its use, no easy matter with her cramped, lumpy hands. More myst
erious by far than any tiny mobile, though, is this new, electrical fear for her child. The one Jackson cradled under his chin, cherished infant. Her happy little pre-sorrow child performing somersaults off the porch, diving into the deep end, doing cartwheels over the lawn. The one, too, with an unknown, unheard-of band of friends prepared to take care of her—oh, for heaven’s sake, she’s getting as maudlin as George.
When George goes to his GP he comes back with not only the standard blood-thinners for survivors of strokes, but batches of little pink pills, one for morning, one for nightfall, for raising his spirits. Sometimes he takes them, sometimes he doesn’t. Maybe they work, maybe they don’t. Hard to say how downhearted he’d be if he skipped them entirely. Would he share them if Sylvia asked? Not that she would. She needs to be alert, not open to misunderstanding bad news or to taking mistaken delight either.
Greta says, “It would be a hard thing to have a child become ill. I too would be very frightened.” Presumably this is her version of solace. “I have not thought often before of such things coming the wrong way around.” By which she means, Sylvia assumes, backwards. That in the right order of things, children are not supposed to suffer, and definitely not die, in advance of their parents. People bury wives and husbands, sisters and brothers. They bury their parents—Sylvia has been known to imagine Nancy erupting at her funeral in great grieving regrets, she has taken a gleeful motherly pleasure, in a ha-bet-you’re-sorry-now sort of way. But it must be a permanently broken-hearted business to bury a child.
The fault of Nancy’s father? Some dubious medical inheritance from his side of the family bringing Nancy to grief? Perhaps someone should warn Annabel Walker, but it’s not going to be Sylvia.
Ruth lightly touches Sylvia’s hand. “Don’t worry. Or, sorry, that’s stupid, you’re bound to worry. I mean, be strong. She is, and she’ll be fine.” But having a child does, as Greta contends, make a difference. Any number of differences. Lucky Ruth, in her way.
Nobody needs to advise Sylvia Lodge to be strong, but she finds she does, after all, have a regret or two although, as she expects is the way with regrets, there’s not much to be done about them. So what she’s stuck with is this uniquely frantic concern for a vulnerable, out-of-reach daughter. What if Nancy died? Then Sylvia might be tempted to feel she’d lived on for too long herself. This comes as part of the surprise.
They’re used, almost, to the falterings of their own bodies, toppling in interesting and dull ways like dominoes, one ailment or pain leading to a medication that threatens to create another kind of ailment or pain and—on and on it goes, in careful kill-or-cure calibrations. Sylvia’s specialist measures dicey bones and swollen joints, and while doling out anti-inflammatories and supplements and pain meds, may or may not recommend trying a newly authorized drug, fresh from the lab, that may or may not cascade into happy or unhappy long-term effects. Tough decisions.
Greta’s cardiologist listens for fluctuating, wavering heartbeats, and encourages her mild exercising and prescribes this and that and otherwise says, “Just be careful, you know the routine.” In Sylvia’s view, “If you were younger, he’d have operated, I bet. Done a bypass, or even a transplant. When you’re old, they figure it’s a waste of resources.”
Even Greta acknowledges the possible harsh truth of that. Still, “I would not myself care for such surgery. It would be hard, and for my girls also.” Because they would be at her bedside through a long convalescence? Not likely, not on the evidence here, where apparently they’re happy to phone Greta often enough, and chip in for her rent, but really don’t all that often show up. Sylvia doesn’t say that. There doesn’t seem much harm, at this stage, to illusions that comfort.
It looks as if Greta, who’s already produced enough scarves for an army in winter, is moving up in the world, attempting more ambitious creations. At the moment her sweater du jour, as Sylvia calls it, involves the knitting of fifteen red rows followed by the purling of seven green ones—exceedingly festive, coming up to the seasonal, but who does she imagine would wear such a thing? She is working on the broad back section of a simple-patterned, wide-sleeved number—her girls are not small women, so her task is not minor. Each is to receive one for Christmas, partly because Greta is weary of scarves but also in aid of reassuring them, after George’s bad act, that she is in a good place sympathetic to her busy new interests. She expects Emily has told her sisters about George’s error. She imagines that all their lives, they have told each other things they do not mention to her. As she has not told them why George could make such a mistake.
It is most important to be kind to each other, to be not a burden. Let them go, and they will return. As they will do soon for Christmas, although not, except for Patricia, on the very day. Meanwhile it is best to be busy. Darkness matters. Snow falls and thaws, turning the world white and then muddy brown, dawn arrives late and dusk early and, as Annabel Walker has remarked, “I understand how it can take special effort to be cheerful at this time of year.” Yes, it does. “We’re planning a great celebration of our own, though,” she has said, and already there is a big piney-plastic wreath with a red-ribbon bow and little golden bells hanging in the front entrance. “Much more to come,” promises Annabel Walker.
The fact remains that the world closes in. This is a season when it is easy to lapse into too much gloomy thinking. Also too much feeling. It takes particular determination even to go outside, a cumbersome effort of coats, boots, scarves, time. Therefore the busyness and the brilliant colours of wools. Greta is illustrating lively memory with these clashing colours of Christmas: of excited, high-pitched, laughing, bickering girls; the heat of baking in the small kitchen; the secret handmaking of gifts—bookmarks, pot-holders, drawings of her and each other—such careful, poor days, always worrisome, but recalled cheerily now in the green and red of warm, heavy sweater.
Soon also: Ruth. The bright entranceway wreath a burning hoop yet to be leapt through, or not.
Ruth continues to keep her medical appointments, partly because she enjoys the Idyll Inn van’s high, slow vantage point as it traverses the city, streets lined with maples gone stark. This won’t be a bountiful time in which to die, but it’s a truthful, uncamouflaged, bare-to-the-world one.
Flashing feet bear people, click, click, click like Greta’s needles, toward their mysterious, dreaded or ordinary or anticipated destinations, all of this movement familiar, and most of it piercingly lovely for reasons that do not have to do with familiarity. Ruth’s attentiveness, she supposes, is a kind of grief for herself; a premature mourning.
A scruffy young blond-bearded, unwashed-looking fellow has recently been catching her eye. She sees him standing at a downtown street corner with a panhandler’s sign—Please give, it says bluntly in big black-marker print—and with a shiny-eyed golden retriever. There was a time when people here kept their troubles hidden indoors. Or, if need be, in parks, or under bridges. They’re more blatant and unashamed about their needs and desires these days, which may or may not be progress. At any rate the dog looks cared for and healthy. An unconditionally warm creature to love, Ruth imagines. Sometimes, rescuing children, she had to call the Humane Society to get animals rescued as well. Matted, thin dogs, cats collapsed in their own waste—people’s careless cruelties cross all sorts of boundaries. The young panhandler may be a boy she once triumphantly carried to safety. She rarely had high hopes for those children, but at least some of them might have learned a thing or two about mute affection.
She could add that to a tentative plus column when she’s making her totals.
Besides the grand tour through town, Ruth visits her doctor to request sedatives along with her usual pain and osteo meds. “I don’t sleep well any more. I’d give anything to get through the night.”
Sedatives will help on the night she doesn’t intend to get through. She wants to be calm but awake. Maybe she can’t expect revelation, come the time, but something—who knows what interesting information may arise? Not that
it could be particularly useful information by then.
Thoughts of last moments are becoming nearly obsessive, but how could they not be? Of course she tries to place herself in the dimness of night with the slippery sound of plastic descending. Naturally she wonders what her last clear and then last blurring view will be of, how readily the true blackness will descend, and if there will be, after all, a terrible moment of suffering. The removal of Ruth, the process of creating the absence of her particular Ruthness—that’s surely a large effort, a major extraction. She’s afraid, she supposes; but if she has no anticipation of ecstasy, she does not conjure dread, either. Fear is different from dread. Fear is spiky and quick and these days frequent enough, but dread would be a deep, dark, continuous drumming.
To feel dread, she would probably have to be able to feel its opposite, which would have to be hope.
The pictures are haunting but unavoidable, part of the necessary adding-up preparation. Still, some questions won’t be answerable, at least not until the point and moment of no return, precisely when it’s too late for answers.
“I’m bound to be anxious,” she tells Sylvia, Greta and George. Anxious at best. “Don’t be surprised, and please don’t mistake nervousness for changing my mind.” Speaking as if events are inevitably in train helps set a tone, and not only for them. Time is ticking along. Bare tree limbs and wreaths mark its very slow, very quick passage, and still there are points on all sides that evidently need to be made.
Please give is Ruth’s.
She was born at 2:19 on the sixteenth morning of December nearly, very nearly, seventy-five years ago. She was a little creature and caused only about eight hours of labour, a small trouble, her mother said, compared with what other mothers went through with their burlier, more recalcitrant infants. “Right from your first moment you were a sweetheart,” said her father.