Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [131]
She keeps her ten buffed beauties carefully under the top sheet, but withdraws them every half hour or so for inspection, spreading them out in the sunshine. She looks at them first thing in the morning and last thing at night, but the fact is, she is almost continuously aware of them. They flutter lightly at her sides, and their lightness travels up to her wrists and flows into her arms and body.
They look elegant; they do! They look brand new. When you think of the slippage her body has undergone, the spoilage, you can perhaps understand her latest foolishness. But this concentration on fingernails is close to being obsessive, a distortion of normal powder-and-lipstick vanity. It shames her to think about what it means. How thin and unrewarding her life must have been, that such a little thing should give her so much pleasure. If she’s not careful she’ll turn into one of those pathetic old fruitcakes who are forever counting their blessings.
"Have you ever thought of having a pedicure?" Alice asks her.
Pictures fly into her head, brighter by far than those she sees on the big TV screen in the patients’ lounge. A sparkling subversion.
Murmurings in her ears. She can tune in any time she likes.
She is seven years old, standing in her Aunt Clarentine’s garden, stooping over the snapdragons, pinching them with her fingers so that their mouths open and close. They possess teeth and tiny tongues. Do other people know about this? She picks a spear of chive and sucks it. "Daisy," she hears. She’s being called in to supper. Aunt Clarentine’s promised to make pancakes tonight. All this: the thought of pancakes, the hot bite of chives, the hidden throats of flowers, the sun, the sound of her own name—she is suddenly dizzy with the press of sensation, afraid she will die of it.
Snow fell on the neighborhood houses and at once they, and their small fenced yards, became whitened with soft fur, with what used to be called in those days spring sherbet. She scooped a handful from her bedroom window sill, held it against her forehead until she could bear it no longer. A test of some kind. A test of courage. The moonlight was cold and clear.
She found something beautiful. A dazzling iridescence on the road. A rainbow pressed into the paving. No one else knew it was there, this marvellous thing she had discovered. But she made the mistake of showing it to one of the older girls in the neighborhood who said, calm as can be, "Why it’s only oil, just a little oil spilled on the roadway, nothing to make a fuss over."
Summer again. She took a blade of grass, split it with her fingernail, held it between her thumbs and blew. Someone showed her how to do this, she can’t remember who. It was easy—making this wailing sound, like a loon screeching. You got better and better at it. You learned, and you never forgot. You were like other people, you could do the same things other people did.
The brown leaves had been raked into a pile ready to burn, and she longed to lie down on top of them for just a minute, flat on her back in the rustling leaves, staring upward. She let herself fall backward, her arms straight out, trustingly, and at once the complications of branches, fences, sheds and houses, so dense and tangled together, burst with a cartoon pop into the spare singularity of sky, the primary abruptness of blue. That’s all there was.
Herself suspended in a glass sphere. You could go back and back to that true and steadfast picture, hold it in your head for the rest of your life.
What is your name?
Daisy.
Daisy what?