Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [129]
Where are bedjackets manufactured? New York? San Francisco? Maybe some little town in the middle of Iowa has cornered the market: the bedjacket capital of the nation. Of the world. But who designs this curious apparel? The lace borders, the little quilted sleeves, the grosgrain ribbons that tie under your chin?
Maybe no one designs them. Maybe they simply multiply like dandelion cotton on the back shelves of lingerie factories. Another thing—why and when should a person wear a bedjacket? Is a bedjacket a private or public garment? Do you sleep in it, or take it off before retiring? Does it come with an instructions manual?
"You seem a thousand miles away, Mother."
"I was just thinking how sweet of Judy to remember me."
"She adores you, you know."
"I’ve never owned a bedjacket before."
"You look lovely in it. Wait till Dr. Riccia sees you. He’ll be flowing with compliments."
"That man."
"He’s not so bad. Come on, now. Those eyelashes, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed his eyelashes? He’s really a perfectly lovely man. Admit it, now."
"Well."
"Well water! Personally, I find him ravishing. And, secretly, I think you do too."
"Hmmmm."
Alice does not find Reverend Rick ravishing; she knows the type.
She greets him coldly, almost rudely when he turns up one day at Canary Palms, and then she makes a point of disappearing, leaving him alone to chat with her mother.
Mrs. Flett understands, without being told, that Alice wants only to protect her from evangelical coercion, from this room-to-room peddler of guilt-wrapped wares. Alice, from her middle-age perspective, believes her mother to have a soul already spotless—spotless enough anyway—and is outraged to see the spectre of sin visited upon one so old and ill and vulnerable.
However, the conversation between Mrs. Flett and Reverend Rick today takes a sharp turn away from elderly souls and the dream of redemption.
"I’m gay, you see," Reverend Rick tells Mrs. Flett. "Homosexual. I didn’t know it when I studied for the ministry but then, well, I discovered my true orientation. For a long time I stayed, you know, in the closet. Then one or two people knew, then, gradually, half a dozen, now almost everyone knows—except for my mother.
That’s my problem. Do I tell her or not? And I was wondering, you’re about the same age as my mom. Well, actually my mom is only about sixty, but for some reason you remind me of her. I don’t know what to do. She keeps asking me when I’m going to find a nice girl and settle down. It’s got so I hate to go home, I just know she’s going to ask me."
There’s a part of Mrs. Flett that longs to close her eyes at this moment and drift into sleep. And she knows perfectly well she could get away with it; her age gives her the privilege.
This is too bothersome. Too painful.
She feels a tearing sound behind her eyes, and understands that she is flattered by this confidence and also resentful. For one thing, it wounds her to be put, thoughtlessly, into the same box with Reverend Rick’s mother, who is a woman she senses she might not like. As a matter of fact, she does not really like Reverend Rick, has never liked him; there’s something greedy about his zeal, and then there are his slumped shoulders and his shirt collars which look oddly chewed. On the other hand, this young man has driven all the way across town, all the way out to Canary Palms—and on a murderously hot day—in order to consult with her, to seek her wisdom. This has not happened often in Mrs.
Flett’s life. Never, in fact. It almost certainly will not happen again.
"Have you tried," she says at last, "not being gay."
"What?" He shakes a dangling lock of hair out of his eyes.
"You know. Finding yourself a girlfriend and seeing