by Joan Barfoot
What would happen if she said, “Enough”? If she said, “Do it,” and pulled her hand free and closed her eyes and set her mouth in a firm, go-ahead line—would they obey? Ah, but there’s this spikiness in the atmosphere that needs flattening before she goes forward into—well, into nothing. Really, in its way that’s even funny. Would they laugh, or would it lose effect, as so much does, in the explaining?
Sylvia is fiddling with papers again. “You’ll never guess what else I’ve been looking up. Well, of course you won’t, so I’ll tell you: astrological signs. Which you won’t be surprised to hear I’ve never done before, but there you go, as we’ve just been pointing out, there’s always something new to be learned. And I find you’re a Sagittarius, so you’re, let’s see, full of enterprise, energy, versatility and adventurousness. Which I guess in the circumstances is fairly true.”
She has to be kidding. “Don’t make fun.” Ruth is angry. “This is my life.”
“I know it is, but it’s ours too, and it’s actually a compliment, how far we’re willing to go to keep you among us. Horoscopes, for heaven’s sake, that’s how far.” Sylvia does not point out that Ruth just referred to her life, not her death. It’s not a bad thing if Ruth’s angry, either. Even in this light they can see that her skin’s flushed, her eyes have narrowed, her jaw is tightened—she doesn’t look on the verge of saying, Go ahead, kill me now.
“This also says your mind is open to new thoughts, and you’re ambitious and optimistic even in unhappy times. You’re also honourable, trustworthy, truthful and sincere, and you fight for the underdog. You have foresight and you can be witty. You’re strong-willed and good at organizing—and we can certainly see that that’s true, too. You’re out-spoken but forgiving, and good at coming up with principles to explain the universe. It seems you also have a strong gambling instinct—that’s interesting, isn’t it? In which regard we might note that you can be impatient and overly hasty when you take on a project.”
If events had moved as intended, without this foolishness, the others could be headed back to their beds by now. Ruth would be lying here already dead. How…odd…to be not dead. To be present when she ought to be absent. This seems to make the margins between life and death somehow flimsy. Or perhaps she means flexible.
“You’re vulnerable to arthritis and rheumatism—well, there you go—and you like freedom and getting to the nub of things, but you may tend to feel disillusioned. Apparently you should try harder to think positive thoughts. I imagine we’d all agree about that.
“Then, since this is your birthday, I looked up the specifics, too. For the next year you’re to expect big positive changes. I realize that’s somewhat ambiguous, but I think we can assume it means you should be alive to appreciate them. It also says that in the next twelve months you’ll benefit from alliances with senior people, and you’re supposed to be sociable and take good care of friendships. On your birthday itself—today—you’re supposed to go slowly and guard against knee-jerk reactions, and cheer up because your troubles are minor and your life is about to be highly positive. Although again I realize there’s some ambiguity there. Still, you get the drift: good times ahead.”
The room’s getting warmer. There’s even a scorched scent, as if a hot iron’s been left flat on cotton. Maybe it’s anger, maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s coming from one of them, maybe from all, maybe it’s just a smell that regularly arises from the Idyll Inn during these sleeping hours. Sylvia lets her papers fall onto her lap. “All right, Ruth. We know you think you’ve had enough. All we want to do is tell you one more time that there can’t be enough—not time, affection, breath, anything. Not even horoscopes. Of course it’s hard knowing that once we’re born we’ll have to die, and at some stage—ours, obviously—we should be teaching ourselves how to do that, preferably with some grace. But in the meantime we hope. We always want more.”
George stirs again. “More,” he says.
“I don’t. I’ve told you, I have no longing.”
“Have you thought,” Greta suggests, “that this is perhaps only ordinary?” Only ordinary, to have no desire except a certain yearning for absence—how dare she?
“That this is not a time for longing,” Greta continues, “but for other matters. You talked once of a curve in the shape of a life. As when you and Sylvia have spoken of when you and your husbands were retired and free together, that time would be to you a nice part in a large curving. But for me, I see life in separate sections, and each portion with its own customs and purpose. So mine would be a section before Dolph and I came to this country, which was a part we had to leave behind, and forget. And then the first years here, and having the girls. There comes a new section after Dolph died, and another after my girls left home, and then after other things, too. Now I think this can be only another portion of life, to be old. Our bodies change, and sometimes our minds, but we can learn also now different affections. So that maybe our days are in some ways painful and difficult, but they can be as well new. There is grief when one part of life ends, but then there comes finally a courage, and we set ourselves to find what is next—what I have learned here already from you, Ruth, I cannot say it all. Do you not still learn? I think you do.”
How flushed—dangerously flushed?—Greta looks in this light. Ruth hasn’t heard so many words from her before, at least not like this, in a rush. “And if we search in the world like Sylvia, and George too, for what is good as well as what is wicked, then look at us. Because if we are not your good friends, we would not be here now, do you see?”
What Ruth sees is that Greta’s muddled, fierce words have their own sincere kind of entrancement.
Which is, as Greta would say, something new to be learned.
Entrancement must be a kind of longing; a puzzle of sorts. “What time is it?”
“Almost four.”
Seventy-five years ago this very moment Ruth was entirely new to the world: pink, wrinkly, full-heartedly adored by two people, and completely unknowing.
Now she’s pink, wrinkly, unadored, and knows far too much.
As well as, according to Greta and Sylvia, not yet enough.
Oh, and unexpectedly, she’s still alive, too. There’s always that kind of suspense, of plans delayed, or denied, which Sylvia didn’t mention when she was rhyming off curiosities. No one suggested that tempers and sharp tones might arise. Or hot, leftover, uneloquent, heartfelt debate.
Sylvia’s right that whenever death comes, it’s in the midst of something at least vaguely interesting: an election, a war, a toppling or a rising-up. But all these events, they fold over on themselves. They build, one by one, layers of history like rock. They bury themselves, much like humans, and much of the time this must be proper.
Say it now. Go ahead.
What does Ruth leave in her wake? Only lives saved and not saved. Love made and love put out of its misery.
Also whatever remains of her in the hearts of the people right here at her bedside.
Also perhaps other, more elusive, vapour trails of her Ruthness—words she has said and forgotten that have made a difference to some person or other. To Diane, possibly, or the many children, with and without their haphazard parents.
In these respects she must be splendidly unique, as well as merely one star in the multitudes of the sky, one minuscule grain of sand in the desert, a comfortingly insignificant one among billions, no gain and no loss.
“I think,” she begins.
A strange, surprised, quiet “Oh” interrupts. It is an Oh that causes everyone, even George, to look sharply at Greta; an Oh accompanied by a frown, and a look in the eyes that says Greta has suddenly gone to a remote place of her own, far away, or inside.
The hand holding Ruth’s painfully tightens. Greta’s other hand goes to rest on her cheek, as if something important and puzzling has cropped up that she needs to consider right now. In this light, to Ruth’s eyes, Greta has been instantly washed in very dark blue, like a storm sky, but touched a
t the edges by flares of brilliant yellow and red. “Oh,” Greta says.
Sylvia stands, papers falling from her lap to the floor. “Greta?” she asks, too loudly for the hour and place. “What is it, what’s wrong?”
“A pain. My medicine.” Greta’s voice is faint and echoey, as if she speaks from a cave.
“Where is it?”
The crisp question seems to draw Greta closer to the mouth of the cave. “Bedside,” she says as her hot hand leaves Ruth’s and moves to her chest.
“Your bedside table? Hold on then, I’ll go get it.” How swiftly Sylvia takes in new information, and acts. “Ruth, you get up. Greta, you lie down. George, get out of the way.”
That takes a moment of backing and forthing. He has set himself so firmly in the doorway, ready for action; but not this action. Between them, he and Sylvia finally wrestle his chair into the room, and she says, “Ruth, get a cool, damp cloth for Greta’s forehead,” and then she is gone. Where, what’s going on?
George sees the little one, Ruth, standing now beside her bed. She’s covered up in a soft-looking blue nightgown with little yellow flowers all over, and is clasping her hands. His big thick-skinned Greta is lying back on the bed. “Oh,” she says several times, in that same strange, surprised, quiet voice.
Her arms fold against herself, her hands at her ribs, pressing. Lying down, she is breathing shallowly but more evenly. Ruth, obeying Sylvia, makes her way to her bathroom by the reflected light from the bedroom and finds her facecloth, runs it under the cold-water tap, wrings it out, returns to Greta’s side as quickly as she can manage. It’s interesting, she thinks, noting also the irrelevance, that her own body seems to be liberated from pain by this urgency.
Greta looks grey, although Ruth can’t be sure any colour she sees is a true one. Greta winces as the cold cloth touches her forehead. “Does it hurt very badly?” Ruth asks. “We should get you sent straight to hospital, don’t you think?”
“There is the angina, yes, tight in my chest.” Greta takes a deeper, steadier breath. Cool drops of water run from the cloth, down her temples, into Ruth’s pillow. “But it should not get worse, I think, with the medicine. Sylvia has gone for it?”
“Sylvia’s back,” comes the voice from the doorway. “I’ve got it. You want one pill, two, what?”
“One. It goes under my tongue. Thank you. Now there is only to wait for a few minutes.”
In the silence, as Ruth and Sylvia watch Greta’s face ease, her hands relax, her eyes return from wherever they’ve been, Ruth finds herself wondering, could this be a trick? A planned-in-advance delaying tactic to keep her alive?
If they’d go as far as a horoscope, why not angina, even a heart attack?
But no, that’s mad, Greta couldn’t fake this, even if she would, and Ruth believes Greta would not. They have seen her once or twice before, discreetly taking the plastic container out of her knitting bag and putting a tablet into her mouth and resuming her listening and talking and knitting, but people’s medications are ordinary and personal, and she hasn’t said why, and they haven’t asked. They haven’t seen her on a journey quite like this one, though, travelling away from them so fast and so far. No, no chance of a ruse.
Sylvia, now—she’s a different story. There’s no telling what lengths she’ll go to in order to get something she wants. Or not get something she doesn’t want.
Maybe it’s odd, when people all over the world are dying cruelly, or sometimes gently, every second of each day and every night, when death is so often random although on occasion deliberate—maybe it’s odd how relieved Ruth is that Greta is, right this moment, alive.
She can’t tell how she feels about herself still being alive.
Except it’s bewildering.
Greta is making a move to get up from Ruth’s bed. “I am better now. I am so sorry.”
“What,” and Sylvia laughs in that sharp way she has, “for interrupting the evening? It wasn’t one of our better nights anyway. Now just lie still, don’t stir yourself. Ruth, you might as well sit down while we wait another couple of minutes. We still might decide to call on somebody for help.”
Sylvia, the natural chair of their four-person board.
While Ruth was staring at Greta, slow on the uptake, noting Greta’s warning new colours but failing to realize what a drastic disruption they’d mean, Sylvia sprang into action. She may have saved Greta’s life. Give the woman a badge. Briefly, Ruth feels an acidic churn of bitterness; but who is there to blame? Hardly Greta or Sylvia. Certainly not George. Possibly only herself.
“I do not think more help is needed,” Greta says finally. “I already feel not so much tightness or pain. It is why there is the medicine, to act before there can be again a true heart attack. But I am sorry. There was much to think about, but it should be all the time with me, and I should not have forgotten.”
That’s so. Ruth’s very bad luck to have her moment preempted by so small an omission: a little plastic container of pills.
“Lucky you did, though,” Sylvia says. “In a way. As it turns out.”
Is it too late, then?
Sylvia turns to Ruth. “You were starting to say something just when Greta took her spell, what was it?”
Yes, she must have been on the very verge of making a move, time running out, time up. She remembers that. But now she isn’t sure how the sentence was going to unfold. Whatever it was going to be, she should have spoken it sooner, she shouldn’t have let them go on and on, shouldn’t have assumed there was time to be as gracious, as well as graceful, as the occasion suggested.
She should have known, as she does know, as they all must, that something unexpected can leap anytime out of the night, or for that matter the day, blindsiding, bushwhacking. She gestures slightly in Sylvia’s direction, not answering, but asking instead, “What time is it now?”
“Just about five.”
The first kitchen staff start arriving at five, the Idyll Inn begins stirring, and then there’s only a couple of hours till dawn. Sylvia thought Ruth should wonder what the sun’s first pink light would land on, but if Ruth wasn’t alive she wouldn’t wonder and wouldn’t care. That was the point.
George is dozing again. Sylvia reaches out, shakes his knee. “George, wake up. Greta should rest, but we need to get moving. We still don’t especially want to get caught.”
Why, what has happened, and why won’t this bloody woman let him alone? Why is Ruth standing while his Greta is over there on the bed, and why is he not in the doorway—has he somehow failed in his purpose?
No, because it’s still just the four of them in the room. No outsiders.
“Do you feel up to helping me get George back to his suite, Ruth?” Sylvia asks. “Then maybe he’d let us borrow his wheelchair to come back here and get Greta.”
She’s very good at logistics; would do well on a battlefield. “I guess so,” Ruth says. She’s having some trouble collecting her wits. Abrupt reversal is disorienting, as well as deflating: like being all geared up to go over the top with guns blazing, and being ordered instead into retreat.
While George nods at Sylvia. Whatever they want, he supposes.
“I can walk, I am better,” Greta offers, but her voice is half-hearted. She sounds exhausted. Well, at this hour and stage of the night they’re all likely exhausted, Greta just in a different, pale and palpitating way.
“Not a chance. You wait here and gather your strength,” Sylvia tells her, “and we’ll be back in a few minutes. I could probably manage George myself, Ruth, but two are always better than one, and we need to be as quick and efficient as we can be.”
Suddenly that is the urgent and very practical problem to be overcome. Matters of life and death evidently get left in its dust.
Ruth pushes George’s wheelchair, leaning into it for support, keeping up with a striding Sylvia as best she can. “Up and over, George,” Sylvia instructs once they’re at his bedside, and he manages to rise from the chair and more or less tu
mble onto his bed. Sylvia lifts his legs, tips him back, and Ruth covers him with his blankets. Now he looks wide awake, not sleepy at all. “There,” Sylvia says. “As if you’d never been up. We’ll have the chair back here as soon as we get Greta tucked up in her room too, so don’t worry about that, just go to sleep. Come on, Ruth, let’s go.”
Again too much hurry, too much change of purpose and plans all at once. Ruth can’t catch her breath, or catch up. Sylvia, framed in bright yellow like a lantern ahead, is again moving too fast. Everything is too fast. “Sorry,” Sylvia says at Ruth’s doorway. “We’ve made a mess of your night, but I don’t see we had any choice.”
In Ruth’s room Greta is still taking up much of the space in Ruth’s bed, and seems barely awake. “Oh dear,” Ruth whispers.
“No, no, do not worry, I am better, I am well.” Greta turns in the bed, propels herself to a sitting position. If better, she is clearly not yet well. Even in the glowing light of Ruth’s bedside lamp, she remains grey-tinged, although Ruth notes that the deep blue around her has paled, and the red flashes are gone.
“If you shift into George’s chair,” Sylvia says, “Ruth can get back to bed, and I’ll take you down to your suite. Then we can decide what to do next.”
“I will be fine. This has happened before, but not at a time this…difficult. I am sorry, Ruth, I did not understand how I would be so upset. And I should not have forgotten the medicine. Now I have caused us to fail you.”
“That’s all right.” Well, what else can Ruth say? There’s no undoing the night, its rhythms so disrupted and its tones so jangled, its time so lost—it cannot be salvaged. “Now Sylvia’s right, you should get to bed, but only if you’re really sure about not getting checked out at the hospital.”
That would be a much earlier than expected and quite different whisking away from the Idyll Inn. Such careful plans they had, such particular pictures. All eventualities they could think of contemplated, deliberated—at their age utterly foolish, imagining any such thing.