Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [127]
On the plane coming over she had invented rich, thrilling dialogues for the two of them.
"Have you been happy in your life?" she’d planned to ask her mother. She pictured herself seated by the bedside, the sheet folded back in a neat fan, her mother’s hand in hers, the light from the window dim, churchy. "Have you found fulfillment?"—whatever the hell fulfillment is. "Have you had moments of genuine ecstasy? Has it been worth it? Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, at the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean?
Everything suddenly fits, everything’s in its place. Like in our Ottawa garden, that kind of thing. Has it been enough, your life, I mean? Are you ready for—? Are you frightened? Are you in there?
What can I do?"
Instead they speak of apple juice, gravy, screams in the corridor, the doctor, who is Jamaican—this Jamaican business they don’t actually mention.
When Alice reaches for her mother’s hand she is appalled by its translucence. She can’t help staring. Knuckles of pearl. Already dead. Mineralized. She reminds herself that what falls into most people’s lives becomes a duty they imagine: to be good, to be faithful to the idea of being good. A good daughter. A good mother.
Endlessly, heroically patient. These enlargements of the self can be terrifying.
"Just tell me how I’m supposed to live my life."
"What did you say, Alice?"
"Nothing. Go to sleep."
"It’s only nine o’clock."
"The light’s fading."
"It’s the curtains, you’ve closed the curtains."
"No, look. The curtains are open. Look."
Grandma Flett has good days, of course. Days when she puts on her glasses and reads the newspaper straight through. Days when she is praised by the staff for her extraordinary alertness. A nurse describes her, in her hearing, as being "feisty," a word Mrs. Flett doesn’t recognize. "It means tough," Alice tells her. "At least, I think so."
"I’ve never thought of myself as being tough."
"It’s meant as praise."
"I’m not really tough."
"You’re an old softie."
"No."
"No?"
"Don’t call me that. It reminds me of those soft-centered chocolates your father used to bring home from his trips. I could never bear them, biting into them."
"I’m sorry." Alice has heard about the soft-centered chocolates before. Many times before.
"Nougat. Butter creams. And those other ones."
"Turkish delight."
"They make me feel sick. Just thinking of them."
"Don’t think of them." Alice shuts her eyes, feeling sick herself: love’s faked ever-afterness.
"He traveled a lot. I don’t know if you remember, you were so young. Always going off. Montreal, Toronto."
"I know. I do remember."
"I could never understand what those trips were for."
"Meetings."
"Never understood just why they were necessary. I asked, of course, I took an interest, or at least I tried to. Women back then were encouraged to take an interest in their husbands’ careers—but it was never clear to me. Not clear. Just what those meetings were about, what they were for."
"Administrative blather probably."
"It worried me. Bothered me, I should say."
"Don’t think about it now."
"He’d bring a two-pound box sometimes. Oh, dear. Not that I ever let on I didn’t like them. I used to give them to Mr. Mannerly.
You remember Mr. Mannerly, Alice. He helped out in the garden.
With the heavy work."
"Of course I remember Mr. Mannerly." Alice knows that now her mother is about to remind her how Mr. Mannerly’s wife died of diabetes, how their son, Angus, went into politics.
"His poor wife died young. It was sugar diabetes,