Exit Lines
Page 27
Even so, even so. Was she seduced by words and the night, until suddenly it was too late to say, Go ahead, now? If she’d remembered in time how very often in life, and apparently also in death, expectations and plans are thrown entirely off course by unanticipated event, if she’d been quicker, and they’d obeyed, she wouldn’t know any of this today; there’d be no red balloonings in the throat, no graceful shapes, no merry hellooos, and nothing would matter because nothing would be.
There’s no knowing, without knowing the future, what exactly a person may come to regret—down the road, maybe last night. But that doubt alone must put her, for now, on the side of being alive, she supposes.
So given that she’s here, which isn’t nothing, she can reasonably say to Greta in this birthday-cake moment that yes, for want of a more suitable word, she is glad. She likes this new dress, likes that Bernard would have liked it, likes the airy, fly-away feel of the fabric. She supposes it’s nice that it isn’t set to go up in flames before she’s had some use out of it. The banana cake with its white icing tastes extraordinarily sweet, and is a pleasant gesture by Annabel Walker and the Idyll Inn. And while respect and regard aren’t so hard to come by, it’s like gold—like redemption, like consolation—that she has friends who would travel to her room at three o’clock in the morning, armed to attempt her wishes, and determined not to.
It must matter, then, that if, for instance, things still were to go wrong for Sylvia’s Nancy, Sylvia would need at least a hand on her shoulder, and not that proudly successful mother Greta’s hand, either. Sylvia is not necessarily the insouciant person she makes herself out to be. Insouciant, as Ruth explained once to Greta: carefree, unconcerned. Or if George took another tumble, whose walker would they use to help him upright? Who would help Greta feel safe here, and who would insist on bringing word, bad and good, from the outside, so they don’t forget there’s a world, for better or worse, beyond Idyll Inn windows?
“I’ve been so lonely,” Ruth hears herself say, and no words could sound sadder.
Although she can see, now she’s said them, that they mean much the same as what she has been insisting: that she is empty of longing.
Are they the same? One seems to contain a hint of hope; the other not.
Another thought for another day. They pile up.
“Oh, Ruth.” Greta frowns across the table. “Oh, Ruth, I have been often lonely too. It is I think one more state of being we are to learn.” Perhaps she means learn from; although maybe not. “We do many things for loneliness, I think, but we do not die for it. We do other things that are brave or not brave, but not that.”
That sounds…tragically companionable.
Outdoors the light may be grey, but around Sylvia, Greta and George there’s such a golden-ambery shimmer right now.
Light, colour and shape—those too remain gifts.
“You know,” Sylvia says, “some mornings I wake up and think, Ah, not dead yet, and just realizing that makes the world look sharper. Do you know what I mean?”
Ruth does. Of course, she had a sharp view yesterday, too. Just a different one. “Life getting in the way of death, apparently.”
“Which,” Sylvia says, “makes a pleasant change, don’t you think?”
Still, “As you’ve pointed out any number of times, Ruth, it’s a choice.” Meaning, she repeats—can she be serious, then?—that if they wonder how any occupation can be as compelling as plotting Ruth’s death, now they can while away hours plotting more widely an even more deliciously, morbidly sinister trick.
How monstrously interesting.
Or mad.
Or a hoax. Ha ha ha, as George would say.
The real test isn’t today. Ruth’s today is vivid, all refreshed, brilliant vision. It’ll be tomorrow and the days after when the grind will begin of learning what’s sustainable and what is not.
Speaking of sustainability, though, she’s going to have to adjust her budget to account for being alive. Bad news for the children, here and elsewhere—now she herself needs what she has, but here she still is, so what else can she do?
There the children still are too, of course.
“Shall I get us more cake?” Greta asks.
“Not for me, but it’s my party. Help yourself.”
“Sylvia? And George, would you care for some also?”
“Dutdutdut,” he says. This doesn’t sound good.
And it is not good. After he was returned to his bed hours ago, George had one tiny stroke, then another. These were little ripples that didn’t even wake him, not an avalanching like before, but today he weighed more heavily on the girl who made him get up, not that she noticed, and his tongue feels thick and will not work right. Something uneasy went on, to do with darkness, to do with the women, he thinks. It’s good to be here with them now in the daylight. Not alone.
“No more cake for me either, thanks, Greta,” Sylvia says, “I’m twitchy enough without adding more sugar. But let me get it for you. You should be taking it easy.” She doesn’t mention that unless Greta’s inclined to live dangerously, after last night she shouldn’t be loading herself down with cake.
They are all looking at George, who hasn’t answered. “Don’t worry,” Sylvia says, “the day’s all upside down, and we’re bound to be discombobulated. He’ll come around.”
He’d better, hadn’t he? Didn’t he agree to something big? What use is he to a promise, though, or a promise to him? “Miss,” he blurts, or attempts to.
And suddenly, ravenous Greta could weep.
Perhaps she has never had heart attacks, does not live at the Idyll Inn, never knew George before, has never met anyone named Sylvia or Ruth, and is still young, with her little girls and with Dolph, who will not die, and neither will she.
No. But some other things are sharp and true: that life comes and goes in a minute of time. That George is and is not who he once was, which was someone beautiful who in a certain fashion, briefly, she loved, and in that way he means her life as well as his own. Change and so much time—when they fold tight together like this, they make another gripping in the chest, they make again a little of what happened inside her last night. Twitchy, Sylvia says: experiencing a physical or mental pang. This is harsher than that.
A weakness, one that can come at any moment, can frighten at any moment. Cake soothes, but Greta wants more of much else, as well. Love. Comfort too, although there is already much in being right here, right now, with these people, at this table, under this roof. And always mercy—mercy: the quality of compassion; an action committed out of compassion, or performed out of pity for a suffering person. One of her girls—which?—had a schoolfriend named Mercy, a name with a strange sound to Greta’s ears, but she did not think then of what the girl’s parents might have hoped and intended. Not like Sally, or Emily, or Patricia, with no meanings beyond hope for belonging; a grand enough desire to Greta and Dolph.
What will her girls see when next they see her? She has come very near, with Ruth, to a place they could not dream of, or believe. Does she look different for the long weeks of deciding?
She should want, perhaps, the quiet cultivation of a taste for less, rather than more.
Sylvia raises her glass. “To you, Ruth. You’re a tough little cookie, and a useful one, too.” Little cookie Greta does not quite understand, but tough, yes. Who would have imagined all this on that first day, when Greta rounded a corner too fast and nearly ran over a small woman on her way to becoming a friend? “And to you too, Greta.”
Sylvia hands George his glass, holding it until his grip forms around it. “Come on, George, drink up. We’re toasting ourselves. For God’s sake.”
For God’s sake what? That time keeps running, and running out; that an embracing affection might yet occur, even forty years or so late—interesting what may equally alter and shift when something does not happen as when it does; and that every word Ruth has said and read to them in these months has been true. The encompassing word doom comes to S
ylvia’s mind, along with its less succinct, more nuanced companion decline. Really, life in a nutshell, human or planet.
And yet how clear-headed and even clear-hearted Sylvia feels, how very buoyant, if no longer quite joyous, after some sleep and a hit of sugary cake. Of course a good part of today’s bounce and uplift must be relief. There are some occasions a person can be just as glad not to have risen to.
At least to have bought time before needing to rise to it. Or to two, three or four such occasions. It depends. Her new notion is still tilted more toward engagement than execution. As it were.
How very enlivening it is, though. Also as it were.
It’s a good sign that George understands the day well enough to lift his glass, carefully, between his useful hand and his useless one. He sips first slightly sideways, more or less missing his mouth; misses again; but when he guides his hand a bit to the left, it ends up in roughly the right place. Still hard to see the attractive, tall shoestore man bent over feet, complimenting ankles and calves, but he appears to be in there. Safe for the moment.
Last night they were Ruth’s witnesses, they were the people she had. It would be impossibly lonely to be the only witness remaining. Therefore, schemes, bound to be more entertaining than reading newspapers aloud and massaging George’s limbs, although there’s no reason to stop doing that, and definitely more riveting than playing bridge, watching TV or turning needles and wool, click, click, click. “It’s funny,” Sylvia says, although it’s not, really. “I had in mind when I moved in that in ten years or so I would probably run out of enough money to live as comfortably as I do now, and that would be it. So reassuringly far-off, barring catastrophe in the interim. So much more suspenseful now.”
She smiles her wicked Sylvia smile. “Poor Annabel. She has no idea.”
Already the late-afternoon lineups of the eager and bored are forming outside the dining room—another Idyll Inn suppertime. “I’m hungry,” says Ruth, unwilling to give Sylvia’s whimsies more time. Not today. “I need something to tamp down that cake. Shall we?”
Greta stows a partly finished crimson sleeve in her knitting bag and takes the handgrips of George’s wheelchair. As she turns him, his right hand smacks hard on the armrest, and Yes, yes, yes, he calls out, just as if nothing has changed.
What gumption he must have, for all his shortcomings. The women, Ruth included, find themselves stepping smartly to the rhythm of his contentious, stubborn right hand banging out his persistent Yes, yes, yeses. And good—he always wants to hear from Ruth at least one story that’s good. Where does it come from, this insistence of his?
In the huge dining-room windows that in daylight look out over river and snow, they see themselves reflected across the room, a ghostly, shadowy portrait of four. They can be proud of the number: not three, and not two either—a triumph. This is not a happy, easy ending. The other way—that’s the one that might have been easy.
George thinks the faint figures in the glass could be daughters; or maybe only women he’s cared for.
Ruth is pleased with the faraway outline of her silky silvery dress, the swirl of its skirt, and thinks that from this distance, for all their lines, stoopings and other incapacities, the four of them look rather graceful together.
Sylvia repeats to them what she remembers remarking to herself when the Idyll Inn opened nearly four seasons ago: that the camouflagings of age provide some happy invisibilities, not only unhappy ones; that this is how secrets are kept, as well as some kinds of freedom. “Old harpies disguised as old boots,” she says. Greta wonders exactly what harpies are, although she can guess they’re not anything pleasant; while George is diverted by pictures of well-crafted, strong, go-anywhere, do-anything boots. They had a good heft, those kinds of boots. That was back in the days when craftsmen, and he too, took pride in what they could do with their hands, which doesn’t happen so much any more.
For the time being enters his head. For the time being, he tries to say, but the words come out as something like Yes, which is pitiful, but judging from the jaunty—there’s a word coming back—way the women are moving again, it seems to make them as happy as anything else. How surrounded he is, and how bright and jolly—another J word—the dining room is. How lucky, all in all. Tilted and bent, maybe, but beautiful as angels, brave as soldiers. For the time being, yes.
“Look at us go,” Sylvia says, and they’re off.
JOAN BARFOOT is the author of ten previous novels, including Critical Injuries, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and Luck, which was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Joan Barfoot lives in London, Ontario.
Also by JOAN BARFOOT
Abra
Dancing in the Dark
Duet for Three
Family News
Plain Jane
Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch
Some Things about Flying
Getting Over Edgar
Critical Injuries
Luck
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2008 Joan Barfoot
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.Published in 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Barfoot, Joan
Exit lines / Joan Barfoot.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37172-0
I. Title.
PS8553.A7624E95 2008 C813'.54 C2008-901228-3
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