Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [123]
Grandma Flett’s room is filled with cards and flowers. The juice girl—it seems her name is Jubilee—makes a raucous joke of this abundance, shrieking disbelief, pretending horror—"Not anoth-ah bouquet! I swear, Mrs. Flett! Now, you tell me, how’m I supposed to find room to set down another bouquet in this here jungle you got?"
Mrs. Flett’s son, Warren, and his new wife, Peggy, have sent an inflatable giraffe, five feet tall, with curling vinyl eyelashes and a mouthful of soft teeth—it stands by the window, and wobbles slightly whenever a breeze passes through. A conversation piece, Mrs. Flett thinks, a little puzzled, wondering if giraffes hold special significance for the elderly, the infirm—or does it gesture toward some forgotten family joke? Her Oregon granddaughters—Rain, Beth, Lissa, and Jilly—have pooled their babysitting money and sent Grandma Flett a complicated battery-operated game called Self-Bridge. The thought of their generosity, their sacrifice, brings tears into her throat, though, in fact, she never once takes the mechanism from its box, never collects quite enough energy to read the tightly printed directions.
And at five o’clock every afternoon Grandma Flett receives an overseas phone call from her daughter, Alice, in Hampstead, England (ten p.m., Greenwich time). Alice used to joke that her mother, when the time came, would lift a hand gaily on her way out, rather like Queen Elizabeth in a motorcade, hatted, gloved, bidding farewell to everything, to life—this mystery, this little enterprise. But now she understands her picture will have to be reordered. Her mother is sick, helpless, and Alice, speaking on the transatlantic line, adopts a clear, quiet, unrushed voice, as though she were phoning from across the street, as though she were someone in a television drama.
"I’ve spoken to the doctor, Mother. He says you’re doing wonderfully well. He says you have the most remarkable strength, and if you only had, you know, just a little more patience. At the rate you’re going you’ll be able to go home in a couple of weeks, but why push it when you’re getting such wonderful care and attention, and luckily Blue Cross covers almost everything."
Alice also phones her sister Joan in Portland, Oregon, and says, plunging right in: "She can’t possibly go home, the doctor says it’s impossible. How would she manage? She’s helpless."
To her brother Warren in New York she says, the telephone wires taut: "I’ve talked to the orthopedic surgeon and he says she’ll never be able to walk again, not without a walker, and maybe not even that. I mean, Christ, we have to face it, this is the beginning of the end."
All three of Mrs. Flett’s children feel guilty that they are not at their mother’s bedside. Alice is planning to fly over at the end of her teaching term, another month. Warren’s new wife has recently given birth to a Down’s syndrome child—christened Emma—and he feels, rightly, that he can’t possibly abandon his family at a time like this, not even for a few days. Joan has actually made one quick trip—Portland, Chicago, Tampa, and back—but she has, after all, four teenaged daughters to look after and a husband who is prone to extra-marital involvements. Mrs. Flett’s niece, Victoria, writes a witty little note every second day, but for the moment her professional responsibilities, as well as her husband, Lewis, and the twins, keep her in Toronto. When Grandma Flett thinks of her scattered family, her children, her grandchildren, her grandniece, she is unable to form images in her mind of their separate and particular faces. The young girl, Jubilee, is more real to her now. And Dr. Aaronfeld and Dr. Scott on their daily rounds, their jokes, their loud, hearty, hospital laughter. And, in his way, Reverend Rick. And faithful Marian McHenry who has not missed a single evening’s visit, never mind that all she can talk about are her relations back in Cleveland. And the Flowers! Where would she be without the Flowers, who come by cab every