Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [125]
A secret rises up in Grandma Flett’s body, gathering neatly at her wrist bone where the light strikes the white plastic of the hospital bracelet, which reads: Daisy Goodwill.
That’s all—just Daisy Goodwill. Someone in Admissions bungled, abbreviating her name, cutting off the Flett and leaving the old name—her maiden name—hanging in space, naked as a tulip.
Fortunately this error does not appear on her hospital chart and has so far gone undiscovered by the staff and by Mrs. Flett’s many visitors. A secret known only to her.
She cherishes it. More and more she thinks of it as the outward sign of her soul.
Not that she’s ever paid much attention to her soul; in her long life she’s been far too preoccupied for metaphysics—her husband, her children, the many things a woman has to do—and shyly embarrassed about the carpenter from Nazareth, unwilling to look him in the eye or call him by his first name, knowing she would be powerless to draw him into an interesting conversation, worrying how in two minutes flat he would be on to the cramping poverty of her mind. Mrs. Flett, who attended Sunday School as a child and later church, has never been able to shake the notion that these activities are a kind of children’s slide show, wholesome and uplifting, but not to be taken seriously—though you did have to put on a hat and fix your face in a serious gaze for the required hour or so as you drifted off into little reveries about whether or not you had enough leftover roast beef to make a nice hash for supper, which you could serve with that chili sauce you’d made last fall, there were still two or three jars left on the pantry shelf, at least there were last time you looked. Committees and bazaars, weddings and baptisms, yes, yes, but never for Mrs. Flett the queasy hills and valleys of guilt and salvation. The literal-minded Mrs. Flett has never thought deeply about such matters, and why should she? The Czechoslovakian crèche she sets up at Christmas does not for her represent the Holy Family, it is the Holy Family—miniature wooden figures, nicely carved in a stiff folkloric way and brightly painted, though the baby in the manger is little more than a polished clothes peg. Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. It was all rather baffling, but not in the least troubling.
Do people speak of such things? She isn’t sure.
But then Reverend Rick commenced his visits in the early days after her surgery and began to mention, cautiously at first, then with amplified feeling, the existence of her soul, the state of her soul, the radiance of her soul, et cetera, et cetera, and now, in her eighty-first year, the rebirth of her soul through the grace of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Needless to say, Mrs. Flett doesn’t mention to Reverend Rick the fact that her soul’s compacted essence is embraced by those two words on her hospital bracelet:
Daisy Goodwill.
And behind that name, but closely attached to it, lies something else, something nameless. Something whose form she sees only when she turns her head quickly to the side or perceives in the rhythm of her outgoing breath. These glimpses arrive usually in the early morning hours, taking her by surprise. She has almost forgotten the small primal piece of herself that came unshaped into the world, innocent of the least thought, on whose surface, in fact, no thought had ever shone. Nevertheless (it can’t be helped) whatever comes later, even the richest of our experiences, we put before the judgment of that little squeaking bit of original matter.
Or maybe it’s not matter at all, but something else. Something holy. Torn from God’s great forehead.
"I’m still in here," she thinks, rocking herself to consciousness in the lonely, air-conditioned, rubber-smelling discomfort of the hospital,