Her feet were cold, sunk in mud at the edge of the duck pond. Her little feet were tucked in the folds of her flannel nightgown. There were crickets.
“But perhaps I’m being presumptuous,” he said. He paused. “Tell me, did … did what I think happened, happen?”
She turned her head to look at him. “Did what happen?”
He kept his eyes on the ceiling. “Did you experience orgasm with your …”
She looked down at his left hand. He was rubbing his thumb and forefinger together so hard, he was making the noise that, for a second, she had thought she was hearing in her memory spell, a noise at the pond. “Two,” she said quietly. “I had two, I think. I mean, I know I did.”
“Two?”
“One in each place.”
He reached for her hand and squeezed it but kept his eyes on the ceiling. After a moment he said, “We can pretend it never happened, you know. You see, technically speaking, you have not had intercourse. By you I mean you the autosite, the host body.”
“Nothing has changed,” she said, but it was a question.
“No, no,” he said. “Not as far as you’re concerned.”
Back at the hotel, he is waiting for her on the sidewalk. He pays the taxi and takes her up to their room. He is very excited. The amputation (he uses this word for the first time) is set for three weeks today, here in New York. Wonderful, she says. He reaches for her hand and brings it to his lips. He won’t deceive her: the first operation isn’t entirely without risk, and there will be a long and not altogether comfortable recovery. But the follow-up operations will be less strenuous and will contain almost no risk. When the bandages come off, she is not to be frightened. The scarring will eventually be reduced by plastic surgery.
“I won’t be frightened,” she promises.
During the next three weeks, whenever she is with him, she has no doubts. But alone at night, in her bedroom, she starts to worry. Her little legs kick and fret. They know, she thinks, horrified. They know. They are licentious. Between her own legs, there is nothing, but between her little legs the urge for him is almost past bearing. She is overcome by terrible memories—her mother burning her scrapbooks, burning the picture of her father’s mother in its filigreed frame … burns on her father’s hands. She doesn’t know why, maybe it was Merry Mary’s offer of the burial plot, but baby Sue’s perfect face keeps appearing to her. Will she forget baby Sue’s face? What if her freak memory is connected with her freak legs? What if she becomes somebody else for whom nothing that happened to the person she was will be worth preserving?
The mornings after these nights she can’t believe what went through her mind only a few hours before. “You’re a candidate for the loony bin,” she tells herself. The housekeeper brings in her tea, that bitter tea she’s starting to acquire a taste for. John pours it. If he has any misgivings about the operation, he never shows them. He talks about the future. They are going to have four children. They are going to visit her father’s village in Portugal.
Two days before the operation they return with the surgeon to New York City. Blood tests have to be done, more X-rays need to be taken, and John and the surgeon are giving a news conference. The surgeon wants Sylvie at the conference, but John is afraid that some of the questions might upset her, so she’s not attending, which is fine with her.
As the conference is scheduled for the afternoon of their arrival, John has time only to take her up to her hospital room. After he’s gone she lies on her bed and listens to “Vic and Sade” on the radio.
About ten minutes go by, and then a nurse barges into the room and hands her a hospital gown to change into. Throwing open the curtains, the nurse says that Thursday is the big day. She pretends not to be dying of curiosity, but Sylvie isn’t fooled and she undresses facing her, letting her catch a glimpse.
Throughout the rest of the afternoon nurses and interns arrive to take blood and her temperature or just to plump her pillow, and cleaners keep coming in to mop the floor and to empty the empty wastepaper basket. Sylvie sits on her bed with her skirt hiked above her little knees. Why not give them a thrill? she thinks wistfully.
Around six o’clock John returns with their dinner on a tray, and they eat at the desk. “The news conference went very, very well,” he says. Pushing away his half-eaten meal, he gets up and prowls the room. “This is a very, very important operation in terms of certain precedents,” he says. He reminds her of Mr. Bean on opening night in a big city. Before he leaves for the hotel, he fills her coffee cup with water and has her take two sleeping pills.
The next day, Wednesday, it’s mostly doctors who keep coming into her room. They don’t have to put on any acts. They pull up her hospital gown and take good looks, and if a couple of them arrive at the same time, they talk with each other about her little womb and menstrual cycles and bowel movements. Sometimes they ask her questions, sometimes they don’t even say hello. Off and on John pops in to see how she is. He isn’t as keyed-up as he was the day before, but he has meetings and can’t stay for long.
When she is wheeled out on a stretcher to have X-rays, patients are lined along the corridors, waiting for her. She feels like a float in a parade. When she returns to her room, John is at the desk having his dinner, but there’s no meal for her because she isn’t allowed to eat now until after the operation. “Am I allowed sleeping pills?” she asks anxiously, afraid of what she might start thinking, and remembering, if she lies awake. John pulls out a bottle from his coat pocket. “How many do you think you’ll need?” he asks.
A nurse wakes her before dawn to wash her and to shave the pubic hair from herself and from Sue. Several minutes later John and another nurse and an intern come in.
“This is it,” John says.
He keeps her calm by holding her hand as she is wheeled down the corridors and into the operating theatre. She is brought to the centre of what seems like a stage. John scans the rows of doctors seated behind glass in the encircling tiers. “There are some big names here,” he says quietly.
“John?” she says.
He bends toward her. “Yes?”
She gazes at his beautiful face. She can’t remember what she was going to say.
“Are you ready, darling?” he asks.
She nods.
A doctor places the ether mask over her mouth and starts the countdown. Still holding her hand, John leans to look into her eyes. The doctor says nine. John’s eyes bore into her. The doctor says eight, seven. Sylvie’s eyelids drop.
Light hits glass and magnifies something. A polyphemus moth! she thinks excitedly. The light and the magnification grow stronger and stronger until she realizes that what she is looking at is even more infinitesimal than the moth’s atoms.
It resembles a vast pine forest. A needle on one of the trees is magnified and becomes a million exotic fish, then one of the fish’s scales is magnified and becomes a galaxy of fireflies.
The magnification stops there. The fireflies are lit. “They must be alive,” she thinks, and later, weeks later, John will try to cheer her up by telling her how she said this in a loud voice just before going under, and how it drew a laugh from the doctors seated in the gallery.
If you enjoyed “Sylvie” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love.
E-book: 9781443402484
Print: 9780006475231
About the Author
BARBARA GOWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.
Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.
Her first book, Through the Green Valley (a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; th
e following year she published Falling Angels to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Falling Angels was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.
Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—Mister Sandman (1995), The White Bone (1998) and The Romantic (2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.
Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Romantic earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in Harper’s Magazine, singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”
Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel, Helpless, was published by HarperCollins in 2007.
She lives in Toronto.
Also by Barbara Gowdy
THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY
FALLING ANGELS
MISTER SANDMAN
THE WHITE BONE
THE ROMANTIC
HELPLESS
Copyright
“Sylvie” © 1992 by Barbara Gowdy.
All rights reserved.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
This short story was originally published in We So Seldom Look on Love by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in print form in 2001, and in an ePub edition in 2011.
Original epub edition (in We So Seldom Look on Love) April 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40248-4.
This ePub edition DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-42183-6.
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Sylvie: Short Story Page 3