Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [137]
Her initial vision was theatrical, the usual pastel coffin, droning scripture, and shuddering pipe organ—all the stirred confetti of grief floating loose in a vividly inhabited room, loud with trashy weeping and tribute. But this was preposterous.
The brilliant room collapses, leaving a solid block of darkness.
Only her body survives, and the problem of what to do with it. It has not turned to dust. A bright, droll, clarifying knowledge comes over her at the thought of her limbs and organs transformed to biblical dust or even funereal ashes. Laughable.
Stone is how she finally sees herself, her living cells replaced by the insentience of mineral deposition. It’s easy enough to let it claim her. She lies, in her last dreams, flat on her back on a thick slab, as hugely imposing as the bishops and saints she’d seen years earlier in the great pink cathedral of Kirkwall. It wasn’t good enough for them, and it isn’t for her either, but the image is, at the very least, contained; she loves it, in fact, and feels herself merge with, and become, finally, the still body of her dead mother.
She’s miles away now from her clavicle, her fat cells, her genital flesh, from her toenails and back gums, from her nostrils and eyebrows, and the bony nameless place behind her ears. Her brain is purest mica; you can hold it up to the window and the light shines through. Empty, though, that’s the catch.
With polite bemusement she lingers over each detail of her frozen state, adding and subtracting, refining, polishing. The folds of her dress, so primitive and stiff, are softened by a decorative edge, a calcium border of seashells of the kind sometimes seen on the edges of birthday cakes. A stone scroll dips gracefully across her slippered feet, the date worn away, illegible, and a stone pillow props up her head, the rigid frizz combed smooth at last. Her hands with their gentled knuckles curve inward at her sides, greatly simplified, the fingers melded together, ringless, unmarked by age, but gesturing (that minutely angled thumb) toward the large, hushed, immutable territory that stands beyond her hearing. From out of her impassive face the eyes stare icy as marbles, wide open but seeing nothing, nothing, that is, but the deep, shared common distress of men and women, and how little they are allowed, finally, to say.
Her final posture, then, is Grecian. Quiet. Timeless. Classic.
She has always suspected she had this potential.
Only minimal energy is required to call up her stone self and hold it in place. Deaf to all but the loudest echoes, it flourishes on its own declining curve—the whiteness, the impermeable surface—and fills the hemisphere of her vision so completely that previous strategies and arrangements are cast aside. The blameless teeth, hair, and bones of Daisy Goodwill embrace this final form, or rather, it embraces her, allowing her access, at last, to a trance of solitude, attaching its weight to her faltering pendulum heart, her stiffened coral lungs. It grows harder and colder, and will soon take over altogether. Next week. Tomorrow. Tonight.
14 Grange Road, Tyndall, Manitoba (demolished 1922)
166 Simcoe Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba (demolished 1947)
Apt. 12,144 East Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 6 Hawthorne Drive, Vinegar Hill, Bloomington, Indiana (Heritage designation 1975)
Alpha Zeta House, Long College for Women, Hanover, Indiana (converted to Alumni Offices 1957)
583 The Driveway, Ottawa, Ontario (subdivided into condominiums 1981)
419 East Bayside Towers, Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Florida (condemned: failure to meet fire code 1986)
Canary Palms Convalescent Home, Marine Drive, Colmann, Florida (bought by ICW Meditation and Cognitive Study Center 1990)
Canary Palms Care Facility, 1267 Fauna Avenue, Colmann, Florida "I am not at peace."
Daisy Goodwill’s final (unspoken) words "Daisy Goodwill