Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [136]
"Remember Jay Dudley?"
"Who?"
"You know, that nerd who worked on the Ottawa Recorder. Jay Dudley his name was."
"Oh, sure, I remember. Hand-woven neckties? Ceramic cufflinks?"
"Do you think they ever, the two of them, do you think they ever—got together?"
"Naw."
"Too bad."
Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables, Freckles, Twice Told Tales, Beautiful Joe, Mill on the Floss, Pocahontas, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, Helen’s Babies, Our Mutual Friend, Nellie’s Memories, Jane Eyre, The Unification of Italy, Beowulf, The Romantic Poets, In His Steps, Wild Geese, Gone With the Wind, Claudia, The First Six Years, Grapes of Wrath, Forever Amber, The Egg and I, Cheaper by the Dozen, Lust for Life, The Web and the Rock, The Skutari Saga, A Brief History of the Orkney Isles, Chekhov’s Daughter, The Edible Woman, The Good Earth (large print edition), Murder in the Meantime (large print edition, half finished).
"What do you mean you don’t think anyone’s ever ready?"
"Christ, I’m ready right this minute."
"That’s because you’re feeling depressed about not having a job. You’re not really ready at all. And I’ll bet you she wasn’t either."
"I don’t know."
"Did you ever get a chance to talk to her about, you know—"
"Death? You couldn’t talk to her about things like that."
"She’d change the subject."
"She’d put on the baffled schoolgirl look."
"Blink her eyes."
"Her mouth in a little round circle."
"Her eyebrows."
"When it comes right down to it, I freeze, too, at the thought of dying."
"It runs in the family."
"Our genes are pure granite."
"Little pellets."
"Hailstones."
"I do remember that once she said she liked pansies at a funeral. Not those dumb pansies with faces. What she liked were the absolutely pure purple ones, those deep, deep velvety petals.
That’s the only thing I can remember her saying apropos to death."
"She just let her life happen to her."
"Well, why the hell not?"
"It was like—"
"Like?"
"Like she was always going after some stray little thought with a needle and thread."
"Afraid to look inside herself. In case there was nothing there."
"Isn’t that what Buddhists try so hard to get to?"
"The Buddhists?"
"Wanting to arrive at a state of nothingness?"
"Really?"
"What an awful thought."
"Why?"
"I don’t know. I mean, nothing isn’t, you know, much."
"Nothing’s nothing."
"Amen."
Must Do’s—Long Term summer curtains furs in storage touch up back steps, fence re-block wintry hats lavender—restock spray porch furniture Stretch?
Behind stove, under ice box cheque for Mr. M.
gas moth balls magazines to thrift shop furnace piano poison lamp fixtures Colic, chicken pox, measles, bronchial pneumonia, allergies, influenza, menstrual cramps, eczema, cystitis, childbirth, blood pressure, menopause, depression, angina, blocked arteries, broken bones, coronary bypass, kidney failure, cancer, bladder infection, stroke, bed sores, ulcerated leg, incontinence, stroke, memory loss, failing eyesight, inappropriate response, speech deficiency, depression, stroke, stroke.
Daisy Goodwill, in her final illness, the illness she is reputed to have borne with such patience, was left with only her death to contemplate—and she approached it with all the concerted weakness and failure of her body. Somewhere in the course of those final dreaming weeks, there had occurred a shifting of the tide. It arrived suddenly during one of her frequent comatose periods.
She entered sleep, as through a tunnel, still groping in the past, breathing in like a species of inferior oxygen the real and imagined episodes of her life, and then a kind of exhaustion took over, or perhaps boredom—in any case a rapid fading of color and of line, and a failure of the mechanism that had previously called up the earlier scenes.