Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [130]
"Being gay, Mrs. Flett, is not a question of attitude."
She has offended him. Without turning her head and looking directly at him, she can tell that his whole body has stiffened. This she cannot bear. To be the cause of injury. Her greatest weakness—she’s always known this—is her fear of giving injury, any more, that is, than she’s already given. And so, despite her irritation, despite what she’s read in the papers about Aids, she stretches out her hand to him, and feels it taken.
"Don’t tell your mother," she says after a minute.
"But I can’t go on living a lie."
"Why not?" Then she pauses. "Most people do."
"Not if we take our Christian faith seriously—"
"Your mother already knows." She says this crossly.
Suddenly it seems to Mrs. Flett that Reverend Rick’s mother is here in the room with them, and that she really is, after all, a rather nice woman. Full of bustle and go. Full of smiles.
"Let me put it this way. Your mother half-knows. Soon she will fully know. She’ll work it out. People do. It’s not something the two of you will ever have to discus if you don’t want to. Not ever." (She can’t help feeling just a little proud of this speech.)
"But to live with this barrier between us!" he says in a silly, whispery voice. He is weeping now. Weeping and sniffling.
"I’m afraid I’m feeling, all of a sudden, terribly tired. These pills they give me."
"It was different in your day. People were afraid to be open.
They lived their whole lives as if they were fairytales."
"Terribly, terribly sleepy." Her throat tingles, it really does. "If you’ll forgive me."
"May God bless you, Mrs. Flett."
How does one reply to God’s blessing? "Goodbye," Mrs. Flett says firmly, shutting her eyes, pressing her head hard against her pillows, and then adding a motherly, grandmotherly, womanly, feminine tossed-coin of a benediction, "Drive carefully now."
In the middle of writing a check she forgets the month, then the year. She’s gaga, a loon, she’s sprung a leak, her brain matter is falling out like the gray fluff from mailing envelopes, it’s getting all over the furniture. What she needs, she tells her daughter, is open-heart surgery on her head.
"Ha," Alice says obligingly.
Everything makes her cross, the frowsiness of dead flowers in a vase, the smell of urine, her own urine. She’s turned into a bitter hag, but well, not really, you see. Inside she’s still a bowl of vibrating Jello, wise old Mrs. Green Thumb, remember her? Someone you can always call on, count on, phone in an emergency, etc.
It surprises Grandma Flett that there is so much humor hidden in the earth’s crevasses; it’s everywhere, like a thousand species of moss. Almost every day she sees an item or two in the paper or on Good Morning America that brings a smile to her lips. Or else something amusing will happen on the floor, the nurses kidding back and forth, some ongoing joke. Who would have thought that comedy could stretch all the way to infirm old age?
And vanity too. Vanity refuses to die, pushing the blandness of everyday life into little pleats, pockets, knobs of electric candy.
She looks into her bedside mirror, so cunningly hidden on the reverse side of the bed tray, and says, "There she is, my life’s companion. Once I sat in her heart. Now I crouch in a corner of her eye." Nevertheless she applies a little lipstick in the morning before Dr. Riccia comes around, and a dusting of powder across her nose (she’s had to give up her favorite Woodbury). Just how is it she finds the energy to lift her powder puff, knowing what she knows?
And she inspects her nails. It was Alice who arranged for the manicurist to drop in last week. Naturally Mrs. Flett resisted at first—she has never in her life had a professional manicure, such an extravagance!—but Alice insisted; a little treat, she called it.
And so Mrs. Flett’s hands were lowered into various soapy solutions, then taken into this young woman’s lap