Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [104]
Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, pray, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, just let go, just be.
All this advice comes flying in Mrs. Flett’s direction, but she’s too distracted to hear.
You’d think she’d be scared to death by the state she’s in, but she’s not. Her hair’s matted, her fingernails broken, her houseplants withered, her day-to-day life smashed, but sleeping inside her like a small burrowing creature is the certainty that she’ll recover. For one thing, she distrusts the sincerity of her own salt tears, and, another thing, she remembers how, years ago, she and Fraidy loved to quote poor old William Blake: "Weep, weep, in notes of woe" and how the word woe made them fall over laughing, such a blind little bug of a word.
Now, at the age of fifty-nine, sadness flows through every cell of her body, yet leaves her curiously untouched. She knows how memory gets smoothed down with time, everything flattened by the iron of acceptance and rejection—it comes to the same thing, she thinks. This sorrowing of hers has limits, just as there’s a limit to how tangled she’ll let her hair get or how much dust she’ll allow to pile up on her dressing table. That’s Daisy for you. Daisy’s resignation belongs to the phylum of exhaustion, the problem of how to get through a thousand ordinary days. Or, to be more accurate, ten thousand such days. In a sense I see her as one of life’s fortunates, a woman born with a voice that lacks a tragic register. Someone who’s learned to dig a hole in her own life story.
But she’s tired of being sad, and tired of not even minding being sad, of not even in a sense knowing. And in the thin bony box of her head she understands, and accepts, the fact that her immense unhappiness is doomed to irrelevance anyway. Already, right this minute, I feel a part of her wanting to go back to the things she used to like, the feel of a new toothbrush against her gums, for instance. Such a little thing. She’d like to tie a crisp clean apron around her waist once again, peel a pound of potatoes in three minutes flat and put them soaking in cold water. Polish a jelly jar and set it on the top shelf with its mates. Lick an envelope, stick a stamp in its corner, drop it in the mail box. She’d like to clean her body out with a hoot of laughter and give way to the pull of gravity. It’s going to happen. All this suffering will be washed away. Any day now.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ease, 1977
Victoria Louise Flett is only twenty-two years old, a student at the University of Toronto, a tall stringbean of a woman with large hands and feet and straight blond unyielding hair that she bends carelessly behind her ears. So much for her coiffeur. She favors jeans and sweaters and an old denim jacket—as a matter of fact, she owns no other clothing. These clothes are dark in color and dense in weave, as though she’s trying to keep the bad dreams of modern life out. To correct her nearsightedness she wears glasses with round metal frames, and her eyes behind the rather spotty lenses appear cold and serious. It is 1977; she is no longer the tenderly sheltered child of a large household; her voice, an embarrassed voice, shunts between adult censoriousness and teenage perplexity. Her emotional rhythms are sometimes uneven, as you might expect, and yet she is capable of generous insight.
She’s confided to her Aunt Daisy, for instance, that she can understand the genealogical phenomenon that has burst forth all around her. She finds it moving, she says, to see men and women—though, oddly, they are mostly women—tramping through cemeteries or else huddled over library tables in the university’s records room, turning over the pages