Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [71]
He and Alice and Joan are joined together like the little dolls Alice cuts out of newspaper, that’s how he thinks of himself and his sisters. He’s located there in the middle, always in the middle, the one who was born in the early days of the war, which is the thought he must try to hang on to. There’s something thrilling in this knowledge. And there’s tribute too, a place reserved for him, for Warren Magnus Flett, born in the blood-red dawn of the war.
He almost never thinks of the future, though he understands in an unformulated way that he will eventually grow up, will comb his hair back with water, and join the big boys in the back lane playing Piggy Move Up. And it occurs to him suddenly that there might be another baby born to his family, an after-the-war baby. He can’t imagine why he’s never thought of this possibility before, and he feels sick the way he does at the beginning of one of his stomach aches. He considers asking his mother about a new baby, but the question seems foolish. He can’t think how he would broach the subject, what words he could employ. She might laugh at him or else she might put down the towel she was folding and say, well yes, of course there will be a new baby, what did he expect!
A new baby would spoil things. Where would it sleep? What name could be given to it? It would be born weak, without muscles, too weak and sick and lost to survive.
His mother seems to be reading his mind. She’s done it before and today on this drowsy summer afternoon she’s doing it again.
"Your father and I are too old to have any more babies," she says.
Hearing this, he feels himself seized by happiness, not because of her assurance that there will be no after-the war baby, but because his mother has offered up this information in a quiet and serious manner he’s not heard from her before. Gone is her teasing voice, her usual scolding and cajoling, her singing and murmuring and chirruping tones. This new voice bursts through the others, an aberration, and yet he understands at once that he is hearing, perhaps for the first time, her real self speaking. "What?" he says.
"You mean ‘pardon?’ "
"Pardon."
She looks at him carefully, recognizes him, and says it again.
"Your father and I are too old to have any more babies."
Joan
Joan is so full of secrets that sometimes she thinks she’s going to burst. Her mother, putting her to bed at night, leans down and kisses her on each cheek and says, "My sweetie pie," and never dreams of all the secrets that lie packed in her little girl’s head.
Already, at the age of five, Joan understands that she is destined to live two lives, one existence that is visible to those around her and another that blooms secretly inside her head.
There are all kinds of facts she knows, facts that no one else can imagine.
The radio for one thing. She managed one day to squeeze into that narrow dusty place behind the Northern Electric console in the living room, a radio her father describes as pre-war, and glimpsed through the mesh backing the red humming lights of a hillside village. Naturally she has told nobody about this, except perhaps a whisper or two dropped to her mother.
She has discovered how she can fill up an empty moment should one occur. When there is nothing else to do she can always walk down to the corner where Torrington Crescent meets The Driveway and there in front of Mrs. Bregman’s big brown house she can roll down the grassy banked hill that runs across the front lawn. No one has said not to