Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [99]
Aunt Daisy in Ottawa took me in. I was one of the family. She let me paint the storeroom in the attic pink and white and put up curtains—my own private bedroom, no one to muck things up, and later, after Victoria was born, she said, "Why don’t you fix up the downstairs sunroom for the baby?" and I did.
Victoria Louise weighed eight and a half pounds at birth which is amazing when you think I only weigh ninety-eight myself, being skinny like the Flett side of the family and also short like my mom’s side. She was a real good baby after she got through the colicky period. She was born with this gorgeous soft yellow hair. Now she’s nine years old and what a doll! Thank God, I didn’t put her out for adoption the way I planned. I look after her, make her clothes myself, go to the school meetings and talk to her teacher, all that stuff, and make her pipe down at home so she won’t get on Aunt Daisy’s nerves. I also take care of the housework here, do most of the family cooking, and earn a little extra on the side typing insurance policies. And lately I’ve been nursing Aunt Daisy who’s suffering from nervous prostration.
Myself, I don’t think it’s her change of life that’s done it, or her allergies either. I think it’s the kids who’ve got her down. Being a widow she feels extra responsible, I can understand that, and then again some people are just natural worriers. She used to worry about her daughter Alice who has this way of coming on strong—whew, does she ever! Then she worried for a time about Warren, who was a nice kid but sort of a drip. He had this real bad acne growing up and that made him kind of shy and drippy, but the thing is, after a certain age, no one’s really a drip any more, they’re just kind of sweet or else "individualistic." That’s something I’ve noticed. Nowadays Warren’s a regular young man—his skin’s a whole lot improved too—and he’s down there in Rochester, New York, getting his master’s degree in music theory, first in his class, the Gold Medal. Aunt Daisy was planning to go down for the graduation, she even bought herself a darling little pillbox hat, kelly green, but now that’s out. She can hardly lug herself out of bed, she just lays there in the dark and cries a whole lot and scrunches up the sheet in her hands, just wrings those sheets like she’s wringing someone’s neck. I think it’s Joan she’s worried about now, little Joanie, the family princess, spoiled rotten, but smart as a whip, only now she’s smoking dope and doing I don’t know what, whatever hippies get up to. She says she’s selling jewelry down there in New Mexico, but I bet my bottom dollar she’s selling more than that. Well, it’s breaking her mother’s heart. It kills me to see it.
Aunt Daisy saved my life, that’s no exaggeration, giving Victoria and me a home, and now I want to save hers, only she’s the only one who can do that. A person can make herself sick and that same person has to will herself to get well again, that’s my personal theory.
Warren’s Theory
My mother’s an educated woman but you’d never know it. She has a degree in Liberal Arts from Long College for Women, class of 1926, but ask her where her diploma is and she’ll just give a shrug.
Once I came across a cardboard box up in the storeroom—this was when we were cleaning up so Cousin Beverly could move in—and in the box was a thick pile of essays my mother wrote back when she was a student. One of the essays was titled: "Camillo Cavour:
Statesman and Visionary." I couldn’t believe that my mother had ever heard of Camillo Cavour (I certainly hadn’t) or that she could write earnestly, even passionately, about an obscure period of nineteenth-century Italian history. The ink after all these years was still clear and bright—those were her loops and dashes, her paragraphs and soaring conclusion. Italians everywhere owe a huge debt to this