Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [121]
A double bypass was performed two days later at Sarasota Memorial Hospital (the possibility of such an operation had been discussed by Mrs. Flett’s cardiologist more than a year earlier, but for various reasons postponed). A week after the surgery, just as she was beginning to come around nicely, Grandma Flett suffered what appeared to be partial kidney failure, and one of her kidneys, the left, was removed and found to be cancerous. "But at least we got the goldarn thing out sweet and clean," her urologist said, in the muddied southern tones that Mrs. Flett’s family find so alarming.
Suddenly her body is all that matters. How it’s let her down.
And how fundamentally lonely it is to live inside a body year after year and carry it always in a forward direction, and how there is never any relief from the weight of it, even when sleeping, even when joined, briefly, to the body of another. An x-ray of her left knee reminds her just how insubstantial she is, has always been—an envelope of flesh, glassine. She lives now in the wide-open arena of pain, surrounded by row on row of spectators. The nights are endless, the morning sun a severity. Those hospital mornings!
A thermometer planted between her lips, her blood pressure roughly taken, and a cardiac monitor rolled into her room, heavy, masculine, with dials like a human face, ready to condemn her vascular weakness. Her ancient feet poking out at the side of the sheet have an oyster-like translucence and are always cold, though, oddly, no one notices this, no one says, "Why is it your feet are so cold, Mrs. Flett?" Urine passes from her body through a catheter stuck between her legs and disappears along with other cloudy fluids into the unknown. Into the universe. She spits into a basin, makes obscene gurgling sounds when brushing her strong old teeth, trying to remember a time when her body had been sealed and private.
After a few days the drainage tube is removed from her nose and the intravenous needle from her arm, and she is told—with a congratulatory salute—that she has earned the right once again to partake of food and liquids. "Some lemonade’ll do you good, sweetie-pie," the juice girl yells into her ear. "A person can never, never get enough fluids." This girl with her rolling cart of apple juice, milk, iced tea, and lukewarm cocoa is eighteen years old, black-faced, purple-lipped, with a high, tight, one-note laugh: oppressive.
In the early morning hours Mrs. Flett experiences nightmares that are uniquely invasive, reaching all the way to her heart’s core, and their subject, which she can never recollect afterward, is violent. "It’s just the drugs," her doctors tell her, "a common complaint."
In her much milder daytime dreams she drifts through scenes shabby like old backyards, dusty, with strewn trash in the flowerbeds and under piles of dead shrubbery, past streets where white-faced men and women are watering lawns choked with plantain, dandelions, and creeping charlie, lawns that because of ignorance and insufficient money are doomed never to flourish.
In the pleat of consciousness that falls between sleeping and waking she is capable of marching straight into the machinery of invention. Sketching vivid scenery. Laying out conversations, arguments. Certain phrases, remembered and invented, rattle in her afflicted head, taunting her with their rhythms and abraded meaning.
"The chaplain’s here to see you, sweetie-pie."
"What?" Out of a spiral of thin-colored sleep.
"The chaplain, Mrs. Flett. Y’all feel like talking to the chaplain?"
"Who?"
Louder this time. "The chaplain. Reverend Rick. You remember Reverend Rick."
"No."
"Hey, you do so. You had yourself a real nice prayer together just yesterday. And some Bible verses."
"No."
"Hey, Mrs. Flett,