Household Words
Page 28
Rhoda opened her eyes and she saw, making his way toward her with his slow, shuffling gait, her father. How had they gotten him here on the plane? She raised her hand slightly to wave to him. By the time he reached her she had closed her eyes again but she could hear his labored wheezing mingling with the murmurous hissing of the machines in the room, as he brought his bristled face against hers to kiss her. His kiss felt dry, which startled her; she remembered his mouth as always being unpleasantly wet.
“Rest is what you need,” he was saying. “It’s good you’re resting.”
Rhoda said, “I am not”—as soon as she said it, it struck her that obviously she was resting, what else was she doing lying flat on her back?—and she started to laugh.
“Look, she’s laughing,” her father said to Claire.
“Are you cold?” Claire said. “You’re shaking. I’m putting the blanket over you.” Claire was at the side of the bed; in a deft motion she must have copied from the nurses she was unfolding the blanket while reaching over Rhoda so that it furled out in its own breeze and settled around her. Rhoda lay under the waffle-like fabric, designed to trap warmth in its empty thermal pockets. She did not feel warm from it, but she felt lighter: a sudden airy lightness in her own body.
She shook then—violently—her shoulders rose in a suddenly strong, involuntary fit, trying to shake off, once and for all, all the long series of conditions she couldn’t stand and wouldn’t stand for. The great buckling of her body subsided, but she continued shivering, in a sort of outrage. Her fingers pulled at the neck of her nightgown—it wasn’t her own ruffled flannel, it was the laundered muslin of the hospital—and she was fretful at not having her own things around her, until she remembered that the hospital gown would, by her use, take on her own scent, and from her dampness get some vaporous essence of her in its fibers, as things did.
It made her quite happy to think of her personality rubbing off into the objects around her. Her own unremitting force of character—her one unmistakable attribute—seemed splendid to her then. Her body shook once more, sank down again, and then she saw a rectangle of glistening dark. She was seeing her kitchen again, the window over the dinette table. It was night outside and against the pane of glass she could see both the outlines of bushes in the backyard and the reflections of the yellow light-fixture overhead and of people eating. Inside it was very bright. They were eating with the cutlery they used to have, cheap stainless with red plastic handles, and when they lifted it, the strong light came through the translucent handles and left thin rosy shadows on their palms, as though the living heat of their hands had changed the material to something purer and barely visible.
Claire was talking to her father, or to Andy, who seemed to be in the room now. Rhoda was breathing with a heavy rattle. “I’m noisy,” she said. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, she was making too much noise. Under their voices she thought she heard Leonard—he always insisted on speaking so softly—his tones were so level and even that when her breathing rose and crackled she drowned him out entirely. “Stop mumbling,” she said. There was a blur of sound inside her own head—at the end of each breath she could almost hear what she wanted to hear—she tried to hold down the hissing in her throat in an effort to still the wrong noises, but the trailing murmur seemed attached to the whistling rush of air and faded when it faded, until she could no longer hear even that.