Oh, probably not. It could have begun long before she had even noticed it herself.
And still, she thought, I do not close my eyes, I do not look away, and wondered why she hadn’t the slightest urge to do either of these things no matter what she saw on the television set: a man being burned alive, a beheading, body parts from bombings spread across a café or a nightclub. It was perhaps that…she had to think. Could it be that such things didn’t matter when you thought about the long sweep of human history? But she had always hated to think of the long sweep of human history; in her own life – that was all she cared to think about – in her own life all the killing had never stopped. How could it matter?
When Mervin died, although she had had her doubts about him, and also about their very long marriage, she had wept copiously. But, she thought, it was a different kind of weeping than that which she suffered now as she sat and watched the television set. That kind had involved her gut and her muscles; it had made her nose run until so much effluent collected in the back of it that it dribbled down her trachea so that she couldn’t get breath past it and she choked and coughed. It was, she could recall, a horrible kind of weeping, although surprisingly satisfying at the time. As if the gallons of tears were reaching into every single cell in her body in order to wrestle out the poison of being alive; the stone that boy had thrown in second grade that had cut her forehead and made blood flow widely down her face so that everyone thought she must be dying and she couldn’t stop screaming until her mother slapped her; the day she realized that Mervin had had a silly affair right under her nose and, even though he had stopped by the time she found out, she had struck him hard in the centre of his chest with her closed fist and he had walked away, and they never spoke of it again. Those memories were being washed out of her cells, too. And more, a thousand, thousand more things about their marriage and before that, her childhood and her young womanhood, her middle age, her early old age, were being washed out by that violent crying, leaving her, as far as she could recall, feeling weak and warmish, as if she had a mild fever, and her muscles like fish flopping uselessly in too-shallow water.
The morning she had heard on the radio that not far from where she lived, an eighty-five-year-old husband had murdered his eighty-three-year-old wife, she was surprised enough that for a second the weeping stopped. What was that saying about all passion spent? Milton, was it? Must have been, everything that wasn’t Shakespeare was Milton. Was the weeping because all her passion was spent? Again she laughed inside: as if living, breathing humans could finally expend their way out of all passion. Not even Buddhist monks, she told herself, then wondered if that was true. Although there could be no doubt, at least in her experience, that passion too, faded year by year until there was only this weeping left. Maybe the old man had a brain tumour. Maybe he had dementia, and thought his wife was an intruder, like that too-handsome footless athlete in South Africa, or someone evil coming to kill him. Maybe he was evil. At this thought, she became aware again of the water leaking from her eyes. Not individual tears, but a gentle bath of warm water so near the same temperature as her skin and flesh that she could barely distinguish it from herself.
She wondered what possible use her weeping could be. Then she wondered if her weeping was real; then she wondered what real was. She knew if she ever told anyone, not that there was anyone to tell, they would think her an idiot and probably also a liar, or one so self-involved she couldn’t tell real from not real. Real: no intermediary between what she saw and what happened in her eyes. But what were her eyes connected to? Nerves. Muscles. What Schopenhauer – wasn’t it Schopenhauer? – called intellect, meaning the physical body, and said that women were only capable of sensation. She gave up on that line of thought as it told her nothing, and was probably nonsensical besides, although she did like her own idea: the lack of intermediary between herself and what she saw on the television set. No perfectly coiffed hair and made-up face with the constantly moving mouth, no husband’s opinion, no sons’ opinions, no friends’ opinions. No opinions of her own either, after so many years of working to have opinions – another of the things that used to matter – no thoughts about what she saw. Sometimes pictures came floating up of the years when she and her women friends, otherwise left alone in the world, had played at being bold and cheerful, travelling everywhere together, serving each other gourmet dinners, shopping, and going to movies, plays, and concerts together. Where had that all gone? Faded away with Parkinson’s diagnoses, Alzheimer’s, dropsies of various kinds, not to mention arthritis, heart problems, and brain aneurysms. Could it be that now, even her once-profound need for companionship had stopped mattering?
Since Alma had gone into hospital and not come out, Alma being the last of those people she had known for more than fifty years, no one dropped in for coffee now and then. Thus, even the morning after she had wakened in the middle of the night with a mild heart attack there had been no one to tell. It had become too difficult to get to a doctor, and anyway, no doctor would take that short-lived, moving pain from chest to arm to shoulder and then back to the centre of the chest with any degree of seriousness; she would only be shamed as a foolish old woman looking for attention. At the time, though, her heart attack hadn’t been what she had been led to believe it would be like: agony combined with terror, that sort of thing. It had been interesting, especially the part near the end where she began to feel the heavy pressure on her chest and had realized that if you examined that sensation carefully, you would see that it wasn’t really a heavy weight on her chest but something going on in her chest. This ability to locate and identify her bodily sensations, she recalled vaguely, must have come from the years she had done yoga and meditated. When was that? She couldn’t recall, or couldn’t be bothered to recall. Unfortunately, the sensation of weight hadn’t lasted long enough for her to get to the bottom of it, which had disappointed her. This thought made her laugh, not on the outside so anyone would notice, but inside, she was laughing. And still the water passed softly from her eyes down her cheeks.
Once she had been on the phone with an old friend of Mervin’s whom she had always liked, when a heart attack had struck him. She heard him fall, heard the phone hit the hardwood floor, heard his groans and gasps, and the footsteps of his daughter as she came running to him, and her cries of alarm before the phone went dead. Velma was left with the indelible memory of what such a death sounded like. Yet she could not feel fear for herself; it seemed she had passed beyond fear too, although water leaked steadily from her eyes.
Maybe she wept from loneliness. But she did not long anymore for anything; she no longer thought (and hadn’t for a long time) that she would die of grief, or of loneliness, or of longing. Something would kill her; she had only to wait to find out what it would be. Perhaps it would be the weeping itself. The old kind of weeping made her clearer about whatever it was she was weeping over; it dissolved the poisonous residue left in all her cells by her human relations, but this weeping – no, there could be no doubt about it – was making her smaller and smaller, as if things, the world, were simpler than she had ever thought they could be. Not clearer, but slowly fading together, the edges of each once separate thing blurring and smudging. Weeping here in front of the television set, day by day, she began to understand that she too melted a little; each day a little more of her dissolved.
At night, as she lay there in bed, the darkness relieved only by the glow of the radio’s dial, she began to wonder who had been paying the taxes on the house of that woman whose body had been found in Rotterdam; who had been paying the heat and light and water bills. Or, when the old woman had died, had her taxable-citizen self also died, been wiped from the city’s tax rolls by the invisible hand of that economist of ages past? It did not seem possible, because after all, Velma had seen how, as a social being – that is, as a part of her society – one could die utterly as she seemed herself to have done, and no one would notice, but she had never thought it possible that her legal se
lf would not live on, even ten years after her physical death.
Was it even in Rotterdam that it had happened? Maybe it was Raleigh or Richmond or – she found she couldn’t think of any other cities beginning with ‘R.’ Reykjavik, Ravenna. They all melted together into one city full of old women, grieving yet patient, weeping in front of television sets. Reims, Rouen. All those cities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East with names she couldn’t pronounce or spell and had never seen. Riyadh. Regina. Rivière-du-Loup. What would it matter, she began to wonder, if one died and one’s body was not found for ten years?
Her chest had begun to ache gently, and the water seeping from her eyes had grown even warmer so she could feel it now heating her face as it flowed bountifully down, sluicing gently off her cheeks and chin, flooding onto her chest where it was soaking her garments, its tide warming even her arms and hands and knees, legs and feet. It was dissolving her as always, but now, instead of finding herself growing smaller and smaller, she felt some fragile, surprising change swimming through her cells; she felt herself beginning to expand, filling the room, the house, spilling through the empty city streets, spreading onward out into the countryside, her now liquid self blending with rivers as she crossed them, sliding silently through the limbs and trunks of spruce and pine forests, on and on over the jagged blue mountaintops, the ice-filled crevasses, the shining glaciers until finally, the burden that was herself, the burden of being alive, now liquefied, melded peacefully into the sea.
GUILT: A DISCUSSION
Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, 1948 and
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, 1953
Barbara’s son Alan had placed her here a few years ago when it was agreed, even by her, that she could no longer handle the house she had been living in for the last twenty or so years. He had been tentative and presented his case carefully, pointing out that his sister Alana, who lived in Florida with her third husband (Meredith, his second sister was dead, and his half-sister Jessica was never mentioned), and Barbara’s younger brother George, who lived with his wife of more than fifty years in Vancouver, had come to this consensus as well. She had seen it coming though, maybe even five years earlier, but, recognizing the inevitable, was not of a mind to put up a fight even though she deeply dreaded such a move – who wouldn’t, it being the end of all autonomy, ninety-nine per cent of one’s dignity, and one hundred percent of anyone else’s respect for you?
“You’re so resilient, Mom,” Alan said, seeming genuinely admiring. How she loved that boy, if nowadays through a thin scrim consisting of what she couldn’t say: the distancing she knew she needed to survive his foreseeable (maybe even Nature or God-designed) indifference. Putting the useless and energy-consuming old out on the ice floe and all that. Reasonable, probably deserved.
“Four walls and a roof,” she told him, flipping one hand dismissively. “Why do people get so worked up about moving?” She knew perfectly well, if he didn’t: downsizing was saying the final good-bye to a full and rich life; it meant setting one foot out, tentatively, in profound grief, into one’s very grave. But no use saying that. Grimly, when he had gone, she muttered to herself, I deserve no better. The arrangements, she was certain, had already been made before he came to ask her about the move.
“I often think,” Sherry was saying now, as the four of them – Barbara, Sherry, Jessie-Marie and Sonya – sat around the table in the common room sipping tea and playing a desultory game of hearts, “that I must have been just about the worst mother you could possibly be.”
“Oh, no,” Jessie-Marie said, raising her index finger and her eyebrows, without lifting her eyes from her cards, “I reserve that title for myself. The things I did; the things I missed; the crazy ideas I had.”
“Ough!” Sonya declared. “We all had and thought and did; that’s how we were raised. At least we were better than our own crazy parents.”
“And yet,” Barbara said, “here we all are.” Snorts of laughter or disgust or maybe even despair went round the table. Sherry extracted a tissue from her sleeve and dabbed it briskly, once, against each eye. Sometimes they spoke of the pleasure they found in being together, but mostly they communicated this through meaningful glances and the occasional touching of hands.
“I offer as a prime example, my name,” she said. “I mean, I ask you: I’m ninety years old and answer to the child-name Sherry.”
“You could change your name,” Barbara suggested. The table fell silent; cards were set down, the women looking around at each other.
“What an extraordinary idea,” Jessie-Marie said. “I’ve changed my hair colour I don’t know how many times over the years. I’ve had everything – black as Paulette Goddard’s, blond as Marilyn Monroe’s, red as Rita Hayworth’s in Gilda. Why not your name?”
“Gilda was in black and white,” Sonya said. Before anybody could speak, she added, “I know, I know. Everybody knows – she was famous for her fabulous mane of dark-red hair. God she was beautiful.”
“I changed my last name three times,” Jessie-Marie said. “We all changed our last names at least once. Except for you, Sherry. Was it four times for you?”
“No bitchiness,” Barbara said.
“Why not?” Sonya asked.
“Don’t you want to go to your grave with as few blots on your record as possible? I mean, isn’t it time to try to be good?” Barbara didn’t mean this, but thought she would try it out on this recalcitrant and godless bunch of old babes, who were her only friends. Babes!
“Like we have a choice,” said Sonya, and it made them all laugh, the card game nobody had wanted to play in the first place, although they did so every late afternoon, forgotten.
“I would change it to…hmmm…maybe…Arabella? Jacinthe? Jasmine? No, maybe Rosalyn. I like that. Rosalyn.” Heads nodded around the table, along with murmurs of agreement. “It has some dignity,” Sherry-Rosalyn went on, “without being too complicated or unusual.”
“God forbid an old lady should be unusual.” Barbara again. “I am so effing bored,” she said, pushing away her cards, smacking her palm against the table-top. “I am so effing bored I could kill myself.”
“What happened to your famous resignation,” Jessie-Marie muttered, but loudly enough to be heard by all. “The one you are always counselling us.”
“I’ve tried it all,” Barbara said, restraining herself with red-faced effort from shouting. “All the philosophers, several of the religions, the occasional self-help guru. And I am still bored.”
She stated the latter so menacingly, through gritted teeth, that, Barbara noticed, the others seemed relieved when the attendant appeared at Sherry-Rosalyn’s elbow, and began to pull her wheelchair back from the table. Funny how at a certain point an attendant always showed up. When my face turns red, Barbara acknowledged. Just as well. She did not like the enforced seclusion, which only made her angrier, or the tranquillizers which upset her bowels. I have the right to be angry if I want to be. Lord knew there was no point in knowing that; she had acquiesced to having-no-right when she had agreed to Alan’s proposal of a move. Proposal, my foot – his thinly-disguised ultimatum.
The women took the attendant’s arrival as a sign that it was time for all of them to disperse.
“Don’t forget,” Sherry-Rosalyn called, “my room, eight tonight.” They sat at different tables at dinner, never knowing where the staff might put them, the idea being, evidently, that a change was as good as – what? Surely not a rest. A change might liven up their lives? Keep them alert? In Barbara’s opinion, what it led to was a desperate, often angry, silence. In fact, she had noticed that some were never moved as they seemed to get too upset, not angry, but frightened when they had to sit in a different chair – but the chairs were identical! – with strange faces around them. But, having thought of this so many times, her mind moving in grooves, which she tried with every single ounce of her being to grind herself out of, nonetheless, she found herself brought to i
t again, and she gave in and thought once more how it seemed that spending more money on a more expensive facility got you nowhere, just to fancier surroundings, everything else being the same.
Tonight it was Sherry-Rosalyn’s turn to choose the question. She lay stretched out on her neatly-made-up bed with the flowered quilt, her shoes off and her banged-up lumpy feet revealed in all their aged splendor, her back supported by several pillows. The rings on her gnarled fingers shot rainbows when she moved her hands. Jessie-Marie had seated herself carefully in Rosalyn’s wheelchair, checking first to make sure the brakes were on. Too often somebody forgot to put the brakes on the wheelchairs and the ‘guests,’ trying to get into them by themselves, fell and broke legs or hips. At their ages, broken hips were curtains, and everybody knew it. Barbara, observing Jessie-Marie, could feel herself getting angry again. She had begun to believe that certain staff members did it on purpose. For all she knew, maybe it was a company policy: when a resident got too old, or too difficult – she had better watch out – or too senile and didn’t want to move or the family didn’t want to move the resident, the staff just quietly figured out a way to get rid of them. Or was she merely paranoid, another characteristic of too many of the aged, as Alan had told her when she raised the possibility of a murderous conspiracy. Jessie-Marie had applied a touch of lipstick, a hint of blush, and wore her dangly gold earrings, which gleamed when she turned her head.
Barbara was stretched out comfortably in Rosalyn’s only armchair, the foot-rest out, her feet still encased in her shiny white slippers, relics from God knew where – those years in Florida, no doubt, which for reasons even she couldn’t name, she rather treasured –and Sonya sat on the straight-backed parlour chair. Her back was bad, she needed the support, but her position in her stiff white cotton blouse gave her a prim, private-schoolgirl look. Barbara noticed that Sonya had put on her good necklace, the garnet one that her first husband had bought her forty years ago on a holiday in Cancun, just before he left with the floozy, the bimbo – but they had agreed not to use such words – the younger woman. In this light the necklace looked opulent although truly, it was only a trinket.
Season of Fury and Wonder Page 8