by Joan Barfoot
“No, truly, I think this is as deep as it goes. Maybe what you’re missing are words that sound under the surface but really are exactly what we’ve been talking about. Only we’ve done it in two-syllable words rather than five-syllable ones. You’re wanting something that sounds more profound.”
“Profound, yes—au fond you’re probably right.” Ruth and Sylvia smile at each other, while Greta does not understand why they smile, and George keeps on not listening.
“It’s not that complicated, boiled down,” Ruth says. “There’s just yes or no. Only two options.”
She sounds tired; impatient, too. “Then,” Sylvia says, “I guess we should be getting around to fish or cut bait. Get down to brass tacks. Shit or get off the pot”—that last what Jackson used to say, waiting for a client to decide whether to sue a brother over a father’s will, or for a homeowners’ association to appeal a rezoning.
This, like one or two other things on her mind, is rather more vital.
“I do not know cut bait,” Greta says, “or brass tacks.” For heaven’s sake, how long has she been in this country? Sometimes she looks to be losing language rather than gaining it.
“I don’t know the origins either, but they all mean the same thing, and shit or get off the pot could hardly be clearer.” They’re into the earliest days of December now, and there’s mistletoe tacked up over the entrances to the dining room—an invitation to certain kinds of interpersonal mischief, a miscalculation on the part of Annabel Walker? In the fake library, the bushy fake Christmas tree is awaiting its tinsel and bulbs, and Linda Swain’s craft keeners are busy with the creation of crèches and wreaths.
Naturally, December’s main festivity for Ruth has always been her own birthday. “Our little saviour,” her father used to joke, back when he joked.
There’s not much funny about the month this year. Despite their dithering, there’s a new roll of duct tape in the top drawer of George’s bedside table, and Sylvia’s two freshly dry-cleaned winter coats already hang in her closet. As to Greta’s little scissors, they’re right here on the table, ready for wool-snipping as needed. Which is rather tactless; much as it would be tasteless if George brought the tape and whatever gift he’s sending off to his daughter here to the lounge to be wrapped up for mailing.
At least Sylvia has had the good grace not to go around wearing those coats, which hang still encased and untouched in their plastic.
The opposing way of regarding all this is, if Greta’s the only one who can stomach the tools, what hope is there that any of them will come through with the deed?
The answer is coming. Not only because of Sylvia’s “shit or get off the pot” but also because her cellphone should ring anytime, bringing a verdict on Nancy. Which in turn will affect the peculiarly superstitious bargain she proposed to Ruth in an I’ll chance anything moment last week. “I realize that on the face of it this doesn’t make sense,” she offered, “but if my hope comes true, I’ll try to do my best for yours, how about that?” Her hope being that Nancy will sail through her surgery, fit and cancer-and-any-other-disease-free.
Except for sounding unserious, it was an unlikely pledge coming from Sylvia: inexplicably irrational to suggest that Ruth’s death could be fair return for Nancy’s life. Then again, Sylvia has become strikingly solemn about Nancy, no doubt about that; which means that two of them are waiting for Sylvia’s phone to ring, two of them are relying on an unknown surgeon—young or old, thin or fat, deft or clumsy?—in a distant city to do his work well.
Maybe Sylvia just finds it comforting to have a companion in helplessness. She’s certainly tense. Now and then she sighs, and she keeps staring at the little blue phone on the table as if it already contains the answer but is refusing to tell. Apparently fierce maternity can kick in anytime; as in fact Ruth already knows, from her dealings over the years with lackadaisical, cruel or inept mothers transformed on the instant into ferocious defenders of family. Alert, suddenly, to the potential for loss.
Ruth wouldn’t mind borrowing one of Greta’s ghastly scarves. She is freezing.
Greta is learning the use of circular needles for manufacturing red sleeves with green cuffs. How intent she looks, but then, she has her gift deadline coming up fast. It’s a bit hard to comprehend that all these lives, with their various catastrophes and celebrations, events and non-events, even their bold sweaters and scarves, will go on whether Ruth’s a witness or not. The Idyll Inn will have its wreaths, its lights, its seasonal concerts and foods and morsels of nostalgia, with or without her. Even George, half-frowning in a world of his own, must have a sense of a future.
George is wondering if Colette is coming for Christmas. Probably she has told him, he’s not sure, but he’s not going to ask, unless he forgets and asks anyway. But if Colette doesn’t come, and Greta’s girls do, and who knows about Sylvia’s, who will he celebrate with? At Thanksgiving there was Ruth at his table, but apparently she doesn’t plan on sticking around.
There was also a terrible moment of shame that weekend, wasn’t there? And, he hasn’t forgotten, one of delicious delight. Words that maybe make it a D day.
Colette should be here. It used to be that nothing got in Christmas’s way, not shoes, or Greta for the years that she lasted, or anyone else. It was just Colette, him and Alice, dolls and sweaters and watches, swaths of wrapping paper and scraps of Scotch tape, pancakes in the morning, the smallest of turkeys at night—everything, all of it, to do with Colette.
At Alice’s nursing home, last time he checked, Christmas looked a lot the same as it seems it’s going to look here. Alice, still rousable by music from her vast bewilderment, was apt to weep along with the carols, which could only bring a guy down. Exactly when did the season turn sad? Cruel, phonying it up like this. And mistletoe! He’ll want to watch out for that.
When the blue cellphone on the table finally makes its jolting little trill, Sylvia almost drops it in her hurry to answer. Even George looks up. “Yes?” they hear. And then they wait, and wait, unable to read Sylvia’s expression, until they are astonished by a tear; and then another. Trembling-voiced, she says at last, “Oh, thank God. I’m so relieved. Yes, you rest now, but thank you for letting me know. We’ll talk again later. Sleep tight, dear. Be well.”
Sleep tight, dear? That’s Nancy she’s talking to?
Sylvia’s eyes close briefly, and when she opens them—what radiance! Ruth is dazzled by an unexpected explosion of silver. “Nancy says she’s fine, and they got everything that was wrong. Oh, but I wish I was with her. I’d like to see for myself.”
When Nancy was little, if she was sick, Sylvia took dry toast and ginger ale to her bedside, and read stories out loud. “Hospitals are tough places these days. She says they’re going to make her get up in a couple of hours and take a few steps. I hope she has somebody with her to lean on.”
“I’m sure she does. Hospitals may be brisk about getting people moving, but they’re careful.”
“Still, I’d like to be there.”
“Of course you would.” Greta reaches across, pats Sylvia’s hand.
What Sylvia would like to do is tell Nancy she’s sorry, although not exactly for what; and how likely is it that she’d say any such thing in Nancy’s actual, forbidding presence?
Some lies, whether of commission or omission, grow too old and deep for undoing. But can there not be such a thing as an apology, a regret—even, if she were so bold, an embrace, stubbornly and it now seems stupidly delayed for decades and decades?
Well, they’ll see, the two of them, although not till Nancy next comes to visit—by which time who knows what will be the same and what will be different?
“That is most wonderful news,” Greta says. Look at her—her hobby may strike Sylvia as in equal parts garish and dull, but she’s dependable and apparently loyal, if not by any means vastly amusing. She is generous toward George, when she must have had, at least years ago, every good reason not to be kind—for sure, even now, if Peter li
ved among them, Sylvia wouldn’t be wheeling him around or urging life-saving exercise—so the fact is, if Sylvia were in hard, genuine need, it’s Greta she would want to rely on, not Annabel Walker, or a nurse or an aide, or Nancy, or definitely, obviously, George.
Without Ruth, though, Sylvia really can’t see sitting here with just Greta and George. Of course, who Sylvia would choose to have a glass of wine with in the future is scarcely the crux of the matter, but it’s one crux. It matters to her.
Did she make a deal with Ruth, or just an airy suggestion? The former, she fears.
Still, if they were to do this thing, everyone involved would be changed in the doing—who knows what could emerge, for better or worse? George might discover good humour and benign gratitude, Greta bitter temper and rancour.
While Sylvia might find herself soft and pliable as a dishrag, which she wouldn’t care for at all.
Who was Ruth before she did what she did to—for—Bernard? She’s not exactly a gentle soul now, but she’s not a brute, either.
Jackson would have been frantic waiting for the news about Nancy. Parents should be together when their children have trouble. They would have talked, and understood silences, and held one another.
How ecstatic together they could have been now.
Help me, he whispered near the end. Help me, Ruth’s husband cried, and she did. “All right, then,” Sylvia hears herself say. “Still no guarantees, but I haven’t forgotten my bargain, so okay, I’ll give it a try. In a way I’m honoured you’ve asked me to try.”
Can she mean that?
Honour, trust, compassion, respect, regret, debt—big words. “You know, one behaves in certain ways for the most part, and perhaps one even is certain things, but one doesn’t often put words to them. Perhaps one should. Then one would know more precisely and be better prepared.”
What on earth is she talking about, and who calls herself one?
Ruth doesn’t care. She heard Sylvia’s conclusion well enough.
Greta assumes it must be her own fault that she couldn’t follow these words that sounded passionate and important. George, though, George has caught a glimmer of something at the edge of his vision—honour, trust, compassion, respect, regret, debt?—and slams his hand flat on the arm of his wheelchair again and again, and calls out loudly in rhythm, “Yes, yes, yes,” and if he’s not entirely sure what he’s saying yes to, he knows it’s some big deal of a thing.
“Thank you, Sylvia, thank you, George.” That leaves Greta: the one with the sure, strong, quick fingers.
All their public discussions and private deliberations about gods and eternities, punishments and rewards, sins as opposed to virtuous acts, the affections and obligations of friends, natural unfoldings versus Ruth’s forcible one, most of all the fundamental human drive, will and duty to keep breathing, keep being—and today it comes down to something irrelevant like Sylvia’s daughter coming safely through surgery; to George’s muddled pounding out of his yes, yes, yes. To what, with Greta? Capable thumb up, or efficient thumb down?
So: here Greta is, at this table in the Idyll Inn lounge, under the eyes of her new friends and George, needed and important and even desired. An old woman with other old people; differences that have wounded and mattered smoothed under blankets of common and uncommon experience, and of age—this is a moment, yes.
In his struggle Dolph must have watched, not a long, full past disappearing, but a long, impossible, glorious future. He would have seen her and their girls, and his heart must have burst.
That is nothing like Ruth. Nor did Greta choose to be shot through by heart attack, nor did George choose his stroke. Only Ruth has decided to decide. She wants to whip her own fate out from under herself. She is like the magician at the fair who left a whole set of unrattled china in place when in a single, swift, almost invisible motion he flicked the tablecloth out from beneath. The girls later tried that at home, and broke plates.
“I am like Sylvia,” she says finally. “I can also not promise for sure when the time comes, but if it is truly what you want, I shall try. If it is too hard”—because of course it seems impossible—“I hope you will forgive me. Us.”
Well. All right then. How abruptly frightened they are; like children who’ve lit a fire that spreads fast and far beyond anything they know how to put out—here it comes, flames roaring over grassland, leaping through treetops, racing toward them.
28
SO THIS IS HOW IT HAPPENS…
AND SO THIS IS HOW IT HAPPENS that at three o’clock of a mid-December morning, at that defenceless hour when anything feels possible and nothing human or inhuman out of the question, three Idyll Inn residents are joined in the main-floor corridor to make a journey under pinkish, translucent, ridged and uptilted wall sconces to the suite where their fourth is waiting.
The building itself is silent at this hour except for the hum and thrum made by its structural versions of breathing and blood. The people, too, are quiet as can be, and wary, even though this is the same plain-sailing corridor they’ve been navigating for months. How have they come to this? Not easily, not without objection and fuss, but all in all, remarkably swiftly. Now, although wearing robes, slippers, pyjamas and nightgowns, they’re as equipped for their mission as any soldiers heading for combat. One way and another, they come bearing weapons. The suspense is a killer, which in other circumstances might be a good joke. Instead it’s a wonder skin isn’t scorched, a miracle the whole place doesn’t burst into flames.
If not smoke, something murky does hang in the air. Busy hearts leap and bang, legs wobble, hands shake—easy to desire an event that would halt them, right now, in their tracks: a staff member’s patrol, an alarm going off.
How fragile flesh is. How warm, soft and vulnerable a body can be.
If it was a long, long way from the thought to the word, it’s now much farther still to the deed.
It’s also an excruciatingly short distance from a lithe little girl tumbling and vaulting through the air to a woman waiting in an Idyll Inn bed, springing around memory, flying through purpose. Only a moment on earth; only a moment to contain the entire story of Ruth.
She can’t—won’t—doubt her decision, but there are jolting, eye-opening moments when she disbelieves it. This is a form of being in shock, she expects. It wouldn’t be right to call her fearless, but shock, as in a catastrophe like a bombing or car crash, provides its own anaesthetic. Also she took two sedatives at midnight, and has completed her sums. The total appears to be that she is a woman turning seventy-five who is no longer loved and, empty of even the desire to desire, sees nothing to love.
So tonight is only the final hollowing step.
It would be nice to suppose that on the other side of the hour will be Bernard. That sort of belief must be a balm for others about to take final breaths, but instead she’ll be, like him, only the silence, the space.
The no-Ruth.
How can she do this? Does she have Bernard’s resolve, his desolation? Is the method she’s chosen truly merciful—how would anyone really know? This is not a new question. She has seen the plastic, she has regarded the tape. She has examined the eyes and moreover the hands of her friends. They must be very good friends. She can hear their slight stir and rustle out in the corridor. Her senses are terrifically keen; she can feel, too, the gentle touch on skin of her new flannel nightgown, light blue and scattered with small yellow flowers. She bought it last week, out shopping with Sylvia. This is the first time she’s worn it. Helping her into it hours ago, Diane remarked on its prettiness. “I wanted something cosy for winter,” Ruth told her. She is glad that Diane’s shift ended at midnight; that she won’t be the one coming through Ruth’s door in the morning.
There are no loose ends, as far as she knows. Her will, updated thanks to one of the lawyers who bought Sylvia’s husband Jackson’s practice (Sylvia’s lover Peter’s practice, as well) leaves half her remaining assets to the children’s agency she worked for, the other
half to an organization that helps children in even more dire need overseas. She has placed a copy of this will, and instructions for what’s to be done with her remains, her poor breathless body, in the top drawer of her dresser. She’d have left it all out in plain view, except that would look suspicious come morning. She has told Sylvia, Greta and George about it, though, in case it needs pointing out. “No service, and just cremation. But I’ve left a little budget to cover lots of wine and a few sandwiches, if anyone feels like raising a glass somewhere. Or nowhere. It’s hardly important.”
No casket, open or closed, no formal funeral, but besides this nightgown she has also, entirely irrationally, bought a dress: a silvery grey silky number, along with silvery grey silky stockings to match, a splurge she would, as she remarked to Sylvia, “never have made while I was alive.” It’s the luxury of the material, the soft swirl of the skirt—“Bernard would have liked me in this.”
She intends it to go up in smoke, unseen and irrelevant, right along with her, and where’s the sense in that? “Oh, go ahead, treat yourself. At least it’s virtually certain,” and Sylvia laughed, “to last you the rest of your life.”
There. Not many people are able to leave life to sounds of laughter.
To be sure, not many people probably want to.
“So far I haven’t imagined a cheery scenario,” Sylvia said, “but you never know.”
No, you don’t.
How much of this has been fanciful and what is going to be fact?
Fact arrives in the doorway on slippered feet. A pink nimbus from dim corridor lights shimmers, a pale radiance surrounding an awkward, three-headed silhouette. Is it that time already? Not too late to say, No, go away, but still a little too soon to say, Now. Idyll Inn bedrooms aren’t large. Suddenly Ruth’s is filled by one narrow body and a bulky one, both breathing as if the journey here has been long, hard and uphill, and a third arriving at the foot of Ruth’s bed on wheels and canting leftward. Obviously Ruth isn’t the only one for whom this is a difficult night, although just as obviously her claim is unique. Then these three will have the morning, as well. This too has been carefully planned, except for the amount of sleep anyone who’s not Ruth is likely to get.