Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [72]
There’s a Decal transfer—a black swan swimming through green reeds—stuck to the top of the clothes hamper in the bathroom. She remembers watching her mother apply this decoration, first soaking the Decal in a sinkful of water, then peeling the transparent backing neatly away, centering the swan in the very middle of the hinged lid, and wiping it smooth with a wet cloth. Joan had thought the moment beautiful. Nevertheless, whenever she finds herself alone in the bathroom she scrapes away at the swan with her thumbnail. So far she’s managed to loosen the edges all the way around, and she expects any minute to be accused, though at the same time she knows herself to be full of power, able to slip out from under any danger.
Mrs. Flett’s Niece
Mrs. Flett’s three children always seem to be quarreling—that’s the impression she has anyway. It breaks her heart, she says, she who grew up without any brothers and sisters to play with.
But, in fact, Alice, Warren, and Joanie go through long harmonious periods, especially in the summertime when the other children in the neighborhood are away on vacation. The three of them engage in elaborate games and building projects—only last week they curtained the grape arbor with blankets and furnished the tented space with cardboard cartons and orange crates and lengths of old material from their mother’s sewing cupboard. Here, in the dim filtered light with the three of them kneeling around an orange-crate table, they consume graham crackers and cups of ice water and lapse into an amicable nostalgia.
This nostalgia of theirs is extraordinary, each of them feels the richness of it. On and on they’ll talk; a whole afternoon will disappear while they take turns comparing and repeating their separate and shared memories and shivering with pleasure every time a fresh fragment from the past is unearthed. Living among these old adventures is beautiful, they think. Remember swimming in Buffalo Lake, how sandy the bottom was and how the water was warm as bathtub water and how afterwards we went to a soda fountain for a root beer float. Remember going on the ferris wheel at the Exhibition, how Joanie turned green. ("Did I really?" she marvels, blissful at the thought.) Remember the time we went to visit Mr. Wrightman who was in the iron lung, the drool coming out of his mouth and he didn’t even notice. Remember Billy Raabe falling off his bike in the back lane and knocking out his front tooth and his mother driving him to the hospital, how he got blood all over the back seat of the car and they never got the stains out. Remember when we had a burr war with the Jacksons, and Jeannie Jackson’s mother had to cut the burrs out of her hair, her beautiful long golden hair, like a princess.
At the edge of every experience is the refracted light of recollection, snagged there like an image in a beveled mirror.
Alice, bossy, excited, takes the lead in these acts of retrieval, and Warren and Joan fill in, confirming, reinforcing, inventing too. They shudder with the heat of their own dramas, awestruck by the doubleness of memory, the hold it has on them, as mysterious as telephone wires or the halo around the head of the baby Jesus.
Memory could be poked with a stick, savored in the mouth like a popsicle, you could never get enough of it.
And remember when Cousin Beverly came to visit? In the end they always come around to Cousin Beverly’s visit,