A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [77]
She halts abruptly. When she begins again, her voice is different, subdued.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said any of that, should I? You think you’re not asking anything of someone, and then it appears you’re asking everything. To take over. I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s all right. I know.”
“I don’t know what I can say or offer to do. Nothing much, I guess. Except that I’m here, and you’ll know, yourself, what you need to ask.”
“Calla –”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know – I want to thank you, but –”
“Don’t bother,” she interrupts. “It’s for nothing. I’ve got a collection of motives like a kaleidoscope – click! and they all look different. Would you like a drink, child? I’ve got some wine. It’s foul, but it’s better than nothing.”
She doesn’t realize that she has called me child once more.
“No, thanks. I don’t think so.”
She looks at me, trying not to appear worried.
“Are you going to be all right, Rachel?”
If I’d been asked that, yesterday, I wouldn’t have known. Maybe even an hour ago I wouldn’t have known.
“Yes. I’m going to be all right.”
Maybe she’ll pray for me, and maybe, even, I could do with that. But she hasn’t said so, and she won’t, and that is an act of great tact and restraint on her part.
My mother’s tricky heart will just have to take its own chances.
The waiting room is full of people, and I sit edgily, tucking my cotton dress around my knees, edging away from the stout-skirted mother bidding a spectacled five-year-old to behave himself and shush. We are waiting to be called for examination, as though this were death’s immigration office and Doctor Raven some deputy angel allotted to the job of the initial sorting out of sheep and goats, the happy sheep permitted to colonize Heaven, the wayward goats sent to trample their cloven hoofprints all over Hell’s acres. What visa and verdict will he give to me? I know the country I’m bound for, but I don’t know its name unless it’s limbo.
Rachel, shut up. Shut up inside your skull. Yes, I am, that’s it. Oh, stop this nonsense.
Death’s immigration office indeed. You have to watch against this sort of thing. Is it madness, though? That bleak celestial sortinghouse, and the immigrants’ numb patience, all of us waiting with stupefied humbleness to have our fates announced to us, knowing there will never be any possibility of argument or appeal – it seems more actual than this deceptively seeable room with red leatherette chairs and a cornucopia of richly shiny magazines spilling out across the narrow table, and an aquarium of tropical fish, striped and silvered, fins fluttering like thin wet silks around the green and slowly salaaming reeds and weeds of this small sea.
“Miss Cameron – in here, please.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
And I’ve drawn together my tallness and loped through the waiting room, sidestepping chairs and outstretched feet, an ostrich walking with extreme care through some formal garden. Rachel, hush. Hush, child. Steady. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.
I can’t tell him. I can’t be examined. I have to leave, right now. I’ll just have to make some excuse. Say I’m not feeling well. That would be splendid, wouldn’t it? To rush out of a doctor’s office because you weren’t feeling well.
“Hello, Rachel. It’s for yourself, this time?”
We’ve had so many dealings, Doctor Raven and myself – mother’s heart, my persistent winter headcolds, the bowels and bones of both, the inability to sleep, the migraine and dyspepsia, all the admittable woes of the flesh. This is a new one I’m bringing now.
“Yes.”
“Sit down, my dear.” He looks at me from his old eyes, still competent and able to appraise. “What’s the trouble? Not the bronchitis again, I hope?”
“No. I – I’ve missed my period this month.”
I sit here, waiting once