by Joan Barfoot
Even a child could tell that her own mother lacked certain of these qualities: that she was not a person with a tender heart, and had no real gift for sadness, regret, or sacrifice.
June would still like to go and see where her father grew up, visit his school and the house where the three of them lived together, walk through the tended gardens, touching the roses her grandmother grew with such care. That might be something she could do with freedom.
But they’ve been dead for so long, and by now everything must be changed and gone. It will all be in different hands.
And right now there are dishes to be done, and another evening just the same. She sighs, and stands, and says to Aggie, “I bought a plastic sheet today. I’ve put it on your bed.” She would have liked to be the kind of person her grandmother was, but circumstances have not, after all, permitted her to be gentle and tend roses.
SEVEN
Aggie wasn’t entirely teasing when she told June she doesn’t have hours to spare. So it is frustrating and infuriating to have gone through an entire day of wretchedness. Beginning with damp sheets, proceeding through maundering memories of a wedding and high hopes, then George’s visit and the unpleasantness with June — she does not have time to waste this way. She would like to be achieving grace, but finds herself stuck dealing instead with mere discomfort.
Fed up with the past and anticipating George, she at least hauled herself to the kitchen to bake. Still, she let George know when he turned up that he should have called first. It’s the sort of thing you have to put a stop to right away, this insulting business of being bypassed, ignored; something that can happen too easily if a person’s old or infirm in some way. People start talking over your head, making arrangements, not consulting or asking, as if you’re a thing to be shifted about, organized behind your back. You have to put your foot down firmly.
“I’m sorry, Aggie, you’re right.” She likes someone who can admit he’s wrong.
“Never mind. Just don’t do it again.”
“Fresh cookies! Can I have one? Then I guess we should have a little chat.”
A chat is one way of putting it. Settled in the front room, he begins an interrogation of sorts. At least it’s George, and not a stranger. She remembers the first time she went to him, after her old doctor, the one who delivered June and later Frances, died. “I guess your husband’s been gone quite a while, hasn’t he?” he’d asked, and she’d laughed.
“Gone? My husband was gone when he was alive. If you mean dead, yes, he’s been dead for years.” As she was leaving that first time, George told her, “You’re an interesting woman, you know. My most interesting patient, I think.”
She was pleased, proud to be interesting. It made her trust him more, and assume his support and possibly even his affection. So now it’s odd to be wondering what side he may come down on.
“This business, these accidents,” he begins, “how often have they happened?”
“Just twice.” Once was huge and appalling; twice is terrible, but perhaps can be made to sound trivial.
“Do you remember anything about it? Did it happen in your sleep, or were you aware at all?”
Oh dear. She takes a deep breath. “The first time, I remembered the next day that I’d had this thought that I was saving June and me both a lot of trouble. Not waking her, you see, to get me up. I can’t explain that at all. It was just being stupid in the middle of the night, you know how fuzzy things are then. I remember when I was little, dreaming I was falling and then waking with a thump because I’d rolled out of bed. I think it must have been something like that.”
“Is that what happened the second time, too?”
“No.” This is more difficult. “No, I don’t remember a thing.”
“Mmhmm,” and he frowns. It’s the sort of “mmhmm” she sometimes used with the teacher when he was explaining something about an event they had to go to, or people they had to entertain; or when June was telling her some event from school. That vague, busy-with-my-own-thoughts mmhmm.
“Do you have any ideas, George?”
“Not yet, but I’d like to check you out as thoroughly as I can today. The usual sorts of things, blood pressure and so forth, and some samples as well.”
It turns out he means both urine and blood samples. The first requires her to pee into a little jar he pulls from his bag. How awkward it is, in the bathroom, squatting over the thing, unable to see where she’s holding it, doing it all by touch and missing quite a bit, and keeping her balance, too.
“What next?” she asks brightly, handing it over.
“Do you have something else you could slip into that would make things easier? Or a sheet, could you wrap yourself in a sheet?”
“What on earth are you planning to do?”
“For one thing, an internal. It’s the same as in my office, except it saves you the trouble of coming in.”
It’s quite a struggle, getting out of her dress on her own. At one point she traps herself inside it, stuck with her arms up, pulling, with it wrapped around her head. A bit terrifying, until she gets free.
The moment of panic over, she wedges her arms under the straps of her brassiere, pulling the hooks around to the front to get it undone. She has to sit on the side of her bed to roll off her panties and stockings.
She pulls a spare white sheet around herself, although it seems to gape somewhat at the back. She can feel, sitting on the edge of the bed, air on the flesh there. It makes her uneasy, as if she’s open for anything: a knife coming up behind.
Funny, that. When did she go off nakedness? There was a time when she felt most invulnerable in her own skin, and now it doesn’t seem enough.
George, with his stethoscope, is leaning over her, listening, prodding, not speaking. She looks at her thighs spreading the sheet wide, and wiggles her toes, all gnarled — how did her toes get so old, without her noticing?
Oh, it’s a disgusting old body, sure enough. June keeps saying, “For heaven’s sake, Mother, have you no pride? Don’t you care?”
She might have once, but that was a good long time ago. Regarding her body as flesh, she can certainly see it is unattractive; quite gross, in fact. But looking at it from the inside, as its inhabitant, she finds it pleasing and comforting, cosy, like a warm house. There is a sharp Aggie like a needle safely embedded inside this rippling pincushion, and there is an imposing Aggie whose bulk is perfectly expressive.
And isn’t that thought pretty fancy for somebody who, when it comes down to it, just eats too much and weighs too much? She starts to laugh, and George straightens, removes the stethoscope. “Am I tickling?”
“No, just a private joke.”
Is that a doubtful or suspicious glance? Does he find it very odd, a patient laughing at her own thoughts?
Examining her body, does George agree with June that, after all, it is too much to manage? He may also find it repulsive, but then, he’s seen it before, and anyway, what need does she have to impress a young man with her eighty-year-old flesh?
“Your body is a temple,” June likes to say, and so it is in a way, but more of a monument, really.
His hands on her body are impersonal, as undesiring as the teacher’s ever were. But more intent. Also, he has more flesh to probe than the teacher did.
The internal is an interesting procedure. Not arousing, naturally, but speculative: how might this sort of thing have felt, in other circumstances?
“Am I hurting you?”
“No.” Her eyes are closed; more interesting to feel than to see.
A nudge in one direction, a shifting in another. What does George feel? Mere hidden bits of body, she supposes, a case in which hands do the work of the eyes. What he touches must mean something to him, but to her it’s vague and far away.
Surely she had more feeling down there once? Lucky Frances, who says, “I’m sorry, Grandma
, I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s kind of a heat that all gets concentrated in one place and everything’s just there. And then it fades.”
And Frances makes her living with words? Still, Aggie remembers dreams of young men coming to her bed.
“I can’t find,” George says, pulling away, “anything wrong there.” He strips off the glove and puts it in a plastic bag, which he tosses into his medical bag. She pushes the sheet back down over her thighs. Oh, those thighs! Tree stumps her father might have needed a team of horses for, to haul out of the earth. And her poor white wrinkled overburdened feet sticking out, all flat and, for some reason, sad.
“Now, I think, some blood samples.” She does not look away as the syringe draws her blood into a tube.
“You seem to have brought the full kit with you, George.”
“Well” — he smiles briefly, glancing up — “I thought it would save you some trouble.”
“More?”
“Just a couple. Temperature and reflexes.” He begins tapping at her knees.
“You’ll have to hammer harder than that for me to feel very much.”
Finished, he stands and packs his bag. “Can you get yourself dressed? I’ll wait downstairs, if you can manage.”
What is going to come of this? She is not used to being frightened. To lose control, to no longer be able to say, Now I shall stand, I want to go here, or there, eat this or that, watch such and such a program, or turn the TV off and read this book — to face losing that is a fear. Age and bulk, those are restricting enough. She can no longer say, “I’d like to run down the road,” or even “I feel like getting out of bed,” and then do it. But still, she has her preferences and routines.
And what would she do for food, living elsewhere? Who would offer plates of cookies and slices of cake throughout the day? She might go mad with the lust for sugar. Forbidden fruit, or, in her case, forbidden tarts and muffins and cakes. If there were a reward for getting old, it ought to be to have no cravings. Surely that’s not much: to have small desires filled.
Well, it’s all fear. And the fear, finally, is of dying, loss of control carried to the extreme, in an unchosen, inadvertent, unwilling moment of a whole life whirling away. So that what may happen is a startled, stubborn expression some undertaker has to work at, to mold into something more peaceful and accepting.
Should she bother putting her stockings back on? No point, really, for George. Except to prove she can. Sighing, she sits on the bed and begins to pull them up. So difficult, trying to reach her feet.
Speaking of undertakers, she ought to write down and make clear to June just what she has in mind, so there’s no misunderstanding. She has no wish to have people staring. She’s had quite enough of that, just walking down the street. A closed coffin and incineration will be fine. She would give away her organs to the needy, but they’d hardly be worth salvaging. Also, she doesn’t want some minister, particularly of June’s choice, speaking sanctimonious, irrelevant words over her. It would be nice if a few people wept. Probably she can count on Frances for that. June may shed some tears, but for more equivocal reasons.
Well, it’s human enough to want to be remembered, isn’t it? But she won’t be, not past June and Frances. So, then, something eye-catching in the way of a headstone, to make people think, “I wonder who she was, then?” Something arresting and succinct, with a little punch to it?
Something like,
IN THE WRONG PLACE
AT THE WRONG TIME
WITH THE WRONG PEOPLE
Of course, not everyone would see that as her final joke, her last laugh.
She is chuckling as she edges down the stairs, holding the banister firmly. Too late, she sees George below, watching her. He must think she spends all her time alone heaving with lunatic amusement.
“I was just making up tombstones,” she explains. “I always think the ones with just names and dates are so dull, don’t you?”
This does not seem to unwrinkle his little frown. Really, she must pull herself together. There are more ways than peeing the bed to dig a hole for yourself, it seems.
“So then,” she begins firmly in the front room, when they’ve gotten their tea and more cookies, “what do you think?”
“Your blood pressure’s a bit high, not bad considering your weight, but we’ll give you something for it. I’ll get the samples to the lab, and we should have the results in a few days, if there isn’t too much of a backlog. If something does show up, we may want to do more, because we do want to be sure about things, don’t we?”
“Speaking for myself,” she says drily, “certainly I do.” George, it occurs to her, may be losing his appeal. Speaking to her as we, as if she were some other, more malleable and meek old person. She bets a nursing home would be just like that, all the we’s and dear’s, condescension from the mouths of babes.
“At this point,” he goes on, not noticing, “I only have a couple of suggestions. The practical one is, don’t have anything to eat or drink after, say, eight o’clock at night. That ought to help. Can you manage that?”
“I expect so. Although, you know, I’m not used to being hungry.”
He smiles. “No, I don’t imagine you are.” It is disquieting to expect a comradely grin and get a professional smile.
“The other suggestion is a bit more vague, and I don’t know if it’ll help. But, you know, it’s an interesting thing about the mind, the way it sets up patterns. Usually that’s good, it’s how we learn things like typing or playing the piano, or a lot of surgery for that matter: doing the same movements over and over until the brain snaps into place and follows the right routes without your having to think. Unfortunately, it works the other way, too, I guess what we call bad habits. You do something — unfortunate — and that sets you up for a pattern, so it happens more easily a second time.”
“Well, that’s cheerful. What do I do, stay awake all night?”
“No, of course not, but maybe if you concentrate when you’re awake on not having it happen when you’re asleep, it’ll help. Somebody like you, with a sharp mind, it might work. Anyway, something may show up in the tests that’s perfectly simple to fix and we’ll have you right back as if none of this had happened.”
He credits her, and also June, it seems, with the quality of forgetting.
And now June pops glinting through the door, all hope and excitement. How depressing, that giving life is not just a matter of giving birth. Later comes this liveliness of June’s, emerging from Aggie’s decay.
But Aggie is no saint, to die on behalf of someone else. She tells June later, when George is gone, “You’ll have to save yourself, you know.”
June looks at her blankly. “What?”
“Never mind.” Stupid, speaking thoughts randomly like that. Maybe she really is losing her marbles. To redeem herself, she launches an argument about nursing homes, throwing in death as a bonus, and feels she acquits herself reasonably well.
“Concentrate,” George said, and so tonight in bed she tries. But her body, her comfort and her friend, has turned treacherous and mysterious, rebellious and strange. She saw her own blood today. If more tests are needed, she will go to hospital, where her insides will show up in pictures. She is used to thinking of her body from the outside. Inside, the parts are just supposed to work; or, if they’re not working, to make themselves known with pains or little aches. Muscles tighten and weaken with age, and bones become brittle, but what happens to organs? She pictures them losing their healthy pinkness, turning grey like liver left out in the sun. Or a brown heart, like the ones she used to stuff with breadcrumbs and onions and spices for supper.
Events are turned inside out. Her body is not quite listening to her any more. Even June may not be listening to her any more. It would be nice to still have the gift of crying. She hasn’t cried for years: the day Frances left for university
, and she had to turn back inside alone. And before that, when? Funerals of family, the grief of missing particular people. Now, when she should cry for herself, she lacks the required tenderness.
Self-pity, she thinks impatiently. Nothing is more irritating than self-pity. Irritation, although lacking the high healthy calibre of anger, is something. Some passion, keeping the heart beating.
And after all, isn’t it amusing that she, the advocate of change, is now suffering from an overdose? Not just the accidents, bad enough; but also the alteration in the power balance here. And heaven knows it’s dangerous. Someone like June, unused to power, is likely to mishandle it. Dictatorships result. Well, you see it all the time on the news, in countries where revolutions occur. New leaders may come to power with the purest motives, the greatest will for the greatest good, and turn into murderers and torturers. The cruelty of the righteous is quite a thing. At least Aggie recognizes her own corruptions: greed, pride, and maybe, at one time, lust; she feels she understands them reasonably well. And she enjoys her greed, is proud of her pride, and can still be furious that her desire was dismissed. But June — June fails to see the dangers of her righteousness. In the classroom, Aggie has heard, she can be arbitrary, harsh. That’s unfortunate enough for the children, but now Aggie also seems to be in the position of a pupil, in danger of being sent to the principal’s office to be punished for a transgression.
There was a time when Aggie had in mind a daughter with gumption. Should she be pleased that June is showing some, although perhaps in a somewhat sly and underhanded form?
Maybe, like a disgruntled old sow, Aggie should have rolled over on her unsatisfactory offspring at birth.
Frances had an abortion six years ago, telling Aggie about it, although not, of course, June. “There’s no way I could raise a baby on my own,” she said. “Maybe someday, but not now. And it isn’t as if I’d marry the guy the way people used to. He’s nice enough, I like him all right, but we’d have been terrible, married.”