Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [132]
Daisy Goodwill.
Do you know what the word "Daisy" means? It means "Day’s Eye."
That’s right. I used to know that. I’d forgotten.
A daisy really is a bit like an eye when you think about it, round and fringed with lashes, staring upward.
Opening, closing.
The odd thing about the pictures that fly into Daisy Goodwill’s head is that she is always alone. There are voices that reach her from a distance; there are shadows and suggestions—but still she is alone. And we require, it seems, in our moments of courage or shame, at least one witness, but Mrs. Flett has not had this privilege. This is what breaks her heart. What she can’t bear. Even now, eighty years old.
Grandma Flett knows she rambles, she knows she repeats herself, and Alice, bless her, never stops her, never says, "You’ve already told us about that, Mother."
All she’s trying to do is keep things straight in her head. To keep the weight of her memories evenly distributed. To hold the chapters of her life in order. She feels a new tenderness growing for certain moments; they’re like beads on a string, and the string is wearing out. At the same time she knows that what lies ahead of her must be concluded by the efforts of her imagination and not by the straight-faced recital of a throttled and unlit history. Words are more and more required. And the question arises: what is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression?
The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge? She needs a quiet place in which to think about this immensity. And she needs someone—anyone—to listen.
It’s an indulgence, though, the desire to return to currency all that’s been sampled and stored and dreamed into being. She oughtn’t to carry on the way she does, bending Alice’s ear, boring poor Dr. Riccia to death. She chastises herself; she’s getting as bad as Marian McHenry, always going on and on about her own concerns. Instead of thinking of others. Putting others first.
Little Emma is dead. Or perhaps she has been put into an institution with other Down’s syndrome children. Mongoloids they used to call them back in a crueller time.
No one says a single word to Grandma Flett about Emma for fear of upsetting her, but she knows anyway: here, coming into focus at her bedside, is her son, Warren, and his new wife—whose name Grandma Flett cannot at this moment recall. The room has slipped sideways. The window lies on an angle. Her own tongue is coiled upon itself. She asks for a glass of water, a simple request, a simple phrase, but she can’t get it right. "Mongoloid," she says instead. Alarm touches Warren’s face and spreads downward through the erect, elastic column of his neck. She would like to comfort him with a look or a tender word, but her body is weighed down with its own confusion. She doesn’t mean to be unkind. She shuts her eyes, concentrating, shutting out her son and his young wife, regarding something infinitely complex printed on the thin skin of her eyelids, a secret, a dream. A kind of movie.
Alice abruptly marries Dr. Riccia. She moves with him to Jamaica where they live in a beautiful bungalow by the ocean. They have a child, a little boy with long curling eyelashes and courtly manners.
No, none of this is true. Old Mrs. Flett is dreaming again.
How do these spurious versions arise?
Think, think, she tells herself. Be reasonable.
Dr. Riccia is already married and the father of two children; Grandma Flett has been shown snapshots of the Riccia family standing in front of their colonial-style house in Kensington Park.
Alice returns to England. The summer is over. Her teaching term begins next week, and she’s already planning a weekend party for a dozen or so friends: Moroccan music, something curried, cold beer, herself loud and ironic in swinging earrings. She’s found a buyer for the condo in Bayside Towers and she’s looked after a number of minor legal matters for her mother, having been granted power of attorney. Papers have been signed. Arrangements