Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [122]
"No."
"No what?"
"No, I don’t want to see him. Not today."
She has a private room at the end of the hall with a wide uncurtained window. In the days following her surgery she lies, wretchedly, in bed and during her brief waking moments stares out at the pale concrete Florida architecture, pink, green, lavender, like frosted petits fours shaped by a doughy hand and set out to stiffen and dry. The sun shines down on dented station wagons, glints on the heads of young mothers cooing at their children and banging car doors, and boils into whiteness the cracked cement fence that surrounds the parking lot. Doctors park their Mercedes and Lincolns in a reserved section close to the hospital doors, and the tops of these cars gleam with the hard brilliance of cheap candy, a rainbow of hues.
"No, I won’t see the chaplain today," she says with dignity, with what she believes is dignity.
"If that’s what you want, so okay." Shrugging.
"That’s what I want."
"It’s up to you."
"I know."
"It does a world of good, though, the words of Jesus, the sweetest words there are in this crazy mixed-up world of ours."
"I’m too tired today."
"It’d perk you up. Hey, I see it happen every day, that’s the honest truth. ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’ The best medicine there is and it’s free for the taking."
"No, really, I don’t think—"
"Whad’ya know, here’s Reverend Rick now. How ya doin’, Reverend? Why don’ya come on in for a minute or two. Cheer up our patient here, who’s all down in the dumps."
"Please, I’m—"
"So—feeling up to a little chat, Mrs. Flett?"
"Well, I—"
"I could always come back tomorrow."
"Well—"
"I’ll just stay a minute. Sure wouldn’t want to tire you out."
"Oh, no."
"Pardon? What’s that you say, Mrs. Flett?"
"Please sit down. Make yourself—"
"Afraid I didn’t quite hear—"
"Make yourself, make yourself"—here Grandma Flett comes to a halt, pushes her tongue across the ridge of her lower teeth, panics briefly, and then, thank goodness, finds the right word—"comfortable."
"I’ll just pull up a chair, Mrs. Flett, if that’s okay with you."
"So good of you to come."
God, the Son and the Holy Ghost; suddenly they’re here in Grandma Flett’s hospital room, ranged along the wall, a trio of paintings on velvet, dark, gilt-edged, their tender mouths unsmiling, but ready to speak of abiding love. Not a sparrow shall fall but they—what is it they do, these three? What do they actually do? I used to know, but now at the age of eighty I’ve forgotten. It seems too late, somehow, to ask, and it doesn’t seem likely that young Reverend Rick will put forth an explanation. The cleansing of sins, redemption. And somewhere, a long way back, the blood of a lamb.
Something barbarous. A wooded hillside. Spoiled.
"Afraid I didn’t quite catch what you said, Mrs. Flett."
"I said, it’s so good of you to come."
Is Mrs. Flett shouting?
No, it only seems that way; she’s really whispering, poor thing.
From her trough of sheets. From her pain and bewilderment. Her tubes and wires. Her constricted eighty-year-old throat. The drugs. The dreams. Her feet, so chilly and damp, so exposed, ignored, and doomed. The pastel scenery outside her expensive window, the car doors slamming in the parking lot, Jesus and God and the Holy Ghost peering down on her in their clubby, mannish way, knowing everything, seeing all, but not caring one way or the other, when you come right down to it, about the hurts and alarms of her body—at this time in her life. Now. This minute. Go away, please just go away.
"It’s so good of you to come."
Did you hear that, the exquisite manners this elderly person possesses? You don’t encounter that kind of old-fashioned courtesy often these days. And when you think it’s only two weeks since her bypass, six days since a kidney was seized from her body. And her knees, her poor smashed knees. Amazing, considering all this, that she can remember the appropriate phrase, amazing and also chilling, the persevering strictures of social discourse.
Never mind,