Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [128]
"It’s a lovely name." Living so long in England has given Alice the right to use the word "lovely," and she uses it a lot.
"I’m glad you’re here, Alice. I appreciate you being here. I don’t mean to sound so out of sorts."
"You’re not. You’re—"
"It’s all right, you don’t have to say anything."
"I just meant—"
"Really, dear, I mean it, you don’t have to say anything."
"All right."
"What was that word again? What the nurse said?"
"Feisty."
"It sounds like slang. Is it in the dictionary?"
"I don’t think so. It could be."
"It sounds so terribly—I can’t think of the word, it’s on the tip of my tongue, it sounds—"
"Nasty?"
"No. More like superior."
"Condescending?"
"Yes. That’s it. Condescending."
"You’re right, you know. It is condescending. It’s reductive. Insolent, as a matter of fact."
"Yes."
"We pretend to admire feistiness in others," Alice muses, "but we’d hate like hell to be feisty ourselves. To have someone call us that."
"It’s got a bad smell."
"A bad what?"
"Overripe. Like strawberries past their prime."
"Exactly."
"He had a very long back, your father. I think that’s why he never learned to dance."
"Dancing’s not for everyone."
"I’m glad you’re here, Alice."
"I’m glad to be here."
"What did you say?"
"I said, I’m glad to be here."
"Forgive me, darling Alice, if I don’t believe you."
(Does Grandma Flett actually say this last aloud? She’s not sure.
She’s lost track of what’s real and what isn’t, and so, at this age, have I.)
When we say a thing or an event is real, never mind how suspect it sounds, we honor it. But when a thing is made up—regardless of how true and just it seems—we turn up our noses. That’s the age we live in. The documentary age. As if we can never, never get enough facts. We put on the television set and what we hear is the life cycles of birds. The replaying of wars. Interviews with mass murderers. And the newspapers know nothing else.
A Canadian journalist named Pinky Fulham was killed when a soft drinks vending machine overturned, crushing him. Apparently he had been rocking it back and forth, trying to dislodge a stuck quarter. Years ago Pinky Fulham did Mrs. Daisy Flett a grave injury, and so when she hears about his death she can’t very well pretend to any great sorrow.
"Good God," her daughter, Alice, said, "how did you hear about this?"
"Someone told me," Grandma Flett said mysteriously. "Or maybe it was in the paper."
"Really? That’s incredible."
"Actually eleven North Americans per year are killed by overturned vending machines. It was in the newspaper. I remember reading about it not long ago. Yesterday, I think. Or maybe it was this morning."
"And Pinky Fulham was one of them."
"So it seems."
"Incredible."
"I suppose it is."
Since her heart attack everything takes her by surprise, but nothing more so than her willingness to let it, as though a new sense of her own hollowness has made her a volunteer for replacement. Her body’s dead planet with its atoms and molecules and lumps of matter is blooming all of a sudden with headlines, nightmares, greeting cards, medicinal bitterness, crashes in the night, footsteps in the corridor, the odors of her own breath and blood, someone near her door humming a tune she comes close to recognizing.
A parcel arrives for Grandma Flett. A bedjacket from her granddaughter, Judy, in England.
Oh dear, dear!—you know you’re sick when someone sends you a bedjacket instead of bath powder or a nice travel book. A bedjacket is almost as antiquated as a bustle or a dress shield. A bedjacket speaks of desperation, and what it says is: toodle-oo.
Nevertheless, old Mrs. Flett understands that her granddaughter