Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [110]
He remembered buying the box at a local hardware store; it was the sort of container intended for fishing tackle, but stronger in its construction than such boxes usually are. It possessed, in addition, a well-fitted lid, and even a little lock and key. Fifteen dollars, he’d paid for it. Ungrumblingly.
Isabel, Jeanette, Katie, Lillian . . .
He remembered that he had put considerable thought into what should go into the box. This was a long time ago. Since that time much had slipped out of his mind. These last ten years had been a period of disintegration; he saw that now. He had imagined himself to be a man intent on making something, while all the while he was participating in a destructive and sorrowful narrowing of his energy. Still it would be a surprise to open the box and see what he had secreted there. But he would have to make sure it was not damaged. He would have to explain carefully to the driver of the bulldozer about there being a little box just beneath the foundation; this explanation would tax his energy terribly, but it was necessary if the treasure were to be saved.
But what treasure was this?
Something tugged at the hem of his thoughts. Something of value lay secreted in the box, something that had belonged to his young wife. (What was her name?) It was so long ago he’d buried the box in the earth, since he was a young man walking home from the quarry with his shirt slung over his shoulder and the sweat on his back drying; so much had happened, so many spoken words and collapsed hours, the rooms of his life filling and emptying and never guessing at the shape of their outer walls, their supporting beams and rough textured siding.
Now he knew from the position of the sun that it must be late afternoon. Evening, in fact. The stars were streaming across the sky, a visiting radiance, bringing with them the perfectly formed image of a wedding ring. Her wedding ring. And the flickering moment when he had eased it off her dead finger. (Not that this scene takes sensory form, not that it even materializes as thought; it is, in fact, undisclosable in its anguish; there are chambers, he knows, in the most ordinary lives that are never entered, let alone advertised, and yet they lie pressed against the consciousness like leaf specimens in an old book.) His wife’s wedding ring, his wife Mercy. Ah, Mercy. Mercy, hold me in your soft arms, cover me with your body, keep me warm.
The thought of his only daughter either did or did not occur to him in his final moments, a daughter who is now seventy-two years old and living in a luxury condominium in the sun-blessed state of Florida.
Victoria’s great-aunt has become a wearer of turquoise pant suits.
They’re comfortable, practical too, and they conceal the fissured broken flesh of her once presentable calves. Her lipsticked mouth—a crimped posy—snaps open, gapes, trembles, and draws tight. Her eyes have sunk into slits of marbled satin. She looks in the bathroom mirror and thinks how that pink-white frizz around her face cannot possibly be her hair (though it’s true she sometimes pats at it with deep satisfaction), or the appalling jowls or the slack upper arms that jiggle as she walks along the beach in the early evening, tossing chunks of stale bread to the seagulls. No one told her so much of life was spent being old. Or that, paradoxically, these long Florida years would scarcely press on her at all.
Everything she encounters feels lacking in weight. The hollow interior doors of her condo. The molded insubstantiality of the light switches. The dismaying lightness of her balcony furniture.
The rattling loose-jointed cabs she sometimes takes when visiting Labina and her husband out at Birds’ Key. Even her white plastic shoulder bag with its neat roll of cough drops, its mini-pack of tissues, and slim little case