Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [52]
She is lying on her back in a hotel room in the middle of France.
The world is rolling over her, over and over. Her young husband, this stranger, has flung open the window, then pushed back the shutters, and now the sun shines brightly into the room.
And there he is, perched on the window sill, balanced there, a big fleshy shadow blocking the sunlight. In one hand he grasps a wine bottle from which he takes occasional gulps; in his other is a handful of centimes which he is tossing out the window to a group of children who have gathered on the cobbled square. He is laughing, a crazy cackling one-note sound.
She can hear the musical ringing of the coins as they strike the stone, and the children’s sharp singing cries. A part of her consciousness drifts toward sleep where she will be safe, but something else is pulling at her, a force she will later think of, rather grandly, as the obligation of tragedy and its insistence on moving in a forward direction. She stares sternly at the ceiling, the soiled plaster, waiting.
At that moment she feels a helpless sneeze coming on—her old allergy to feather pillows. The sneeze is loud, powerful, sudden, an explosion that closes her throat and forces her eyes shut for a fraction of a second. When she opens them again, Harold is no longer on the window sill. All she sees is an empty rectangle of glaring light. A splinter of time passes, too small and quiet to register in the brain; she blinks back her disbelief, and then hears a bang, a crashing sound like a melon splitting, a wet injurious noise followed by the screaming of children and the sound of people running in the street.
She remembers that she lay flat on the bed for at least a minute before she got up to investigate.
CHAPTER FOUR
Love, 1936
The real troubles in this world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women—that’s my opinion, my humble opinion, as I long ago learned to say.
But how we do love to brush these injustices aside. Our wont is to put up with things, with the notion that men behave in one manner, and women in another. You might say it’s a little sideshow we put on for ourselves, a way of squinting at human behavior, a form of complicity. Only think of how we go around grinning and winking and nodding resignedly or shrugging with frank wonderment!
Oh well, we say with a knowing lilt in our voice, that’s a man for you. Or, that’s just the way women are. We accept, as a cosmic joke, the separate ways of men and women, their different levels of foolishness. At least we did back in the year 1936, the summer I turned thirty-one.
Men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honored by the stories that erupted in their lives, whereas women were more likely to be smothered by theirs. Why? Why should this be? Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breastful of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs? The stories that happen to women blow themselves up as big as balloons and cover over the day-to-day measure of their lives, swelling and pressing with such fierceness that even the plain and simple separations of time—hours, weeks, months—get lost from view. Well, this particular irony haunts the existence of Daisy Goodwill Hoad, a young Bloomington widow, whose thirty-first birthday looms—she who’s still living in the hurt of her first story, a mother dead of childbirth, and then a ghastly second chapter, a husband killed on his honeymoon. Their honeymoon, I suppose I should say.
Her poor heart must be broken, people say, but it isn’t true.
Her heart was merely squeezed and wrung dry for a time, like an old rag.
Yet wherever she goes, her story marches ahead of her. Announces her. Declares and cancels her true self. Oh, she did so want to be happy, but what choice did she have, stepping to the beat of that ragbag history of hers?
Of course, the same might be said of the famous Dionne quintuplets, born