(1993) The Stone Diaries (3 page)
One day she’s persuaded her liver’s acting up, and the next day her kidneys—she’s only thirty years old, but kidney trouble can start early in life, especially for a woman of my mother’s unorthodox size. Or perhaps the problem stems from constipation. Mrs. Flett next door has suggested this possibility, recommending rhubarb tablets, or else, speaking confidentially, some woman’s trouble.
Excessive loss of blood, she tells Mercy, is the cause of discomfort for many young ladies—has Mercy spoken to Dr. Spears? Dr. Spears is known for his sensitivity to women’s complaints; he has a way of squeezing his eyes shut when he phrases his delicate inquiries, of speaking almost poetically of nature’s cycles and balances, of the tide of fertility or the consolation of fruit salts.
No, Mercy has not approached Dr. Spears, she would never speak to Dr. Spears of such a thing, she would speak to no one, not even her husband—especially not her husband. Her monthly blood has appeared only twice in her life, springing out of the soft cushions of her genital flesh, staining her underclothes with its appalling brightness, and mocking the small decencies and duties that steady her life: her needlework, her housekeeping, her skill with a flat iron, her preserves and pickles and fresh linens and the lamp chimneys she polishes every single morning.
The doses of Citrate of Magnesia help hardly at all. Fruit salts only make her suffering worse. Her abdominal walls have continued to cramp and heave all spring, and she’s wondered at times if her inner membranes might burst with the pressure. Bile rises often in her throat. Her skin itches all over. She experiences scalding attacks of flatulence, especially at night as she lies next to my father, who, out of love, out of delicacy, pretends deep sleep—she can tell from the way he keeps himself curled respectfully to his own side of the bed.
Only bread seems to ease her malaise, buttered bread, enormous slabs of it, what she’s heard people in this village refer to as doorsteps. She eats it fresh from the oven, slice after slice, sometimes not bothering with the knife, just tearing it off in handfuls.
One day, alone in this kitchen, she consumed an entire loaf between noon and supper. (One of the loaves burned, she explained to her husband, anxious to account for the missing bread—as though a man of my father’s dreamy disposition would notice so small an item, as though any man would notice such a thing.) Frequently she sprinkles sugar on top of the buttered bread. The surface winks with brilliance, its crystals working between her teeth, giving her strength. She imagines the soft dough entering the bin of her stomach, lining that bitter bloated vessel with a cottony warmth that absorbs and neutralizes the poisons of her own body.
Her inability to feel love has poisoned her, swallowed down along with the abasement of sugar, yeast, lard, and flour; she knows this for a fact. She tries, she pretends pleasure, as women are encouraged to do, but her efforts are punished by a hunger that attacks her when she’s alone, as she is on this hot July day, hidden away in a dusty, landlocked Manitoba village (half a dozen unpaved streets, a store, a hotel, a Methodist Church, the Canadian Pacific Railway Station, and a boarding house on the corner of Bishop Road for the unmarried men). She seems always to be waiting for something fresh to happen, but her view of this "something" is obscured by ignorance and the puffiness of her bodily tissue. At night, embarrassed, she gathers her nightdress close around her.
She never knows when she blows out the lamp what to expect or what to make of her husband’s cries, which are, thankfully, muffled by the walls of the wood-framed company house where she and my father live. Two rooms up, two down, a privy out back. She knows only that she stands apart from any coherent history, separated from the ordinary consolation of blood ties, and covered over and over again these last two years by Cuyler Goodwill’s immense, unfathomable ardor. Niagara in all its force is what she’s reminded of as he climbs on top of her each evening, a thundering let loose against the folded interior walls of her body.
It’s then she feels most profoundly buried, as though she, Mercy Goodwill, is no more than a beating of blood inside the vault of her flesh, her wide face, her thick doughy neck, her great loose breasts and solid boulder of a stomach.
Standing in her back kitchen, my mother’s thighs, like soft white meat (veal or chicken or fatty pork come to mind) rub together under her cotton drawers—which are wet, she suddenly realizes, soaked through and through. There are double and triple ruffles of fat around her ankles and wrists, and these ridged extremities are slick with perspiration. Her large swollen fingers press into the boards of the kitchen table, and her left hand, her wedding ring buried there in soft flesh, is throbbing with poison.
She seems to see a weak greenish light unfolding like a fan in front of her eyes. This is worse, far worse, than ever it’s been before. She wonders if her body will break apart, the bones drawn out from under the flesh, blood spilling on the floor and walls. She imagines her blood to be yellow rather than red, a thick honey-colored sludge slowing her down, keeping her from crying out to Mrs. Flett next door.
Mrs. Flett, as it happens, is within easy earshot, no more than forty feet away, pinning her rough sheets and pillowcases on to a clothesline. She would come running if she only knew of Mercy Goodwill’s distress; she would be there in a trice, exhorting the poor dear soul to be calm, begging her to lie down on the kitchen couch, bathing her broad, damp, blank face with a cool cloth, easing her clothing, pulling off the tightly laced shoes and heavy stockings. She loves Mercy, loves her ways, her solid concentration, though on the whole (it must be admitted) her love is churned from fascination, and also from pity—pity for that large, soft, slow-flowing body, the blurred flesh at the sides of Mercy’s young face, and a blinking prettiness that shows itself in certain lights, in the curve of her upper lip or the tender spilt panic of her hazel eyes. When she looks into Mercy’s calf eyes she does not think "childish," but "child." Poor thing, poor lost thing. Never a mother to call her own, and now, from the looks of it—though who could tell such things, who can read the future?—no little ones of her own to rock and sing to.
Mrs. Flett—her Christian name is Clarentine—has three grown sons, Simon, Andrew, and Barker, but no daughter. The eldest of these sons, Barker, has gone to Winnipeg to study at the College, and the other two work at the quarry alongside her husband Magnus, a master stonecutter, a cold, lean Orkneyman who immigrated to Canada at the age of nineteen. His Orkney ways have stayed with him. He prefers simple things. A plainly furnished house. A carefully tended garden. Ordinary food on the table, a supper of porridge or smoked fish or even a plate of bread and butter washed down by tea. The sight of a Malvern pudding unmolded on a glass plate and covered with cream would distress him deeply, particularly a pudding set out on what is, after all, an ordinary Monday evening in high summer in the year 1905 (the year of my birth, the day of my birth).
Mrs. Flett, Clarentine, a neat-bodied woman whose skin is the color of mushrooms and whose memory of her sons’ infancy has been washed clear by disappointment, dreams of taking Mercy’s large dry hand in hers and saying, "A woman’s life isn’t worth a plateful of cabbage if she hasn’t felt life stir under her heart. Taking a little one to nurse, watching him grow to manhood, that’s what love is. We say we love our husbands, we stand up in church saying as how we’ll love them forever and ever, till death do we part, but it’s our own blood and sinew we really love."
She likes giving Mercy things. Only last spring, while cleaning house, she came across an old tinware jelly mold, and this is the vessel Mercy uses today to provide shape for her Malvern pudding.
She gives Mercy flowers from her garden, sweet peas, nicotiana, dianthus, candytuft, snapdragons. Also lettuce when it’s in season, new radishes, carrots, broad beans. Also pots of berry jam or rhubarb pickle. Once a set of tea towels with embroidered corners, another time an appliqued sham with an open-work centre. Why, she’s even given Mercy the cookery book the girl’s so everlasting fond of and has nearly worn out with use. At Christmas she gave her a bar of heliotrope soap fresh in its paper wrapper, and once, out of the blue, a hairpin glass trimmed with ribbon. These objects, passing out of her hands into Mercy’s, seem momentarily ringed with light, though the phrases she employs along with her gift-giving are calculated to diminish her generosity. "I’ve no earthly use for this myself." Or "I’ve more here than would feed an army" or "Too fancy for us, but it’ll suit you" or "Mr. Flett don’t hold with sweet-smelling stuff, and I do hate to throw a thing away what’s perfectly good and useful."
Mercy’s softly focused gratitude, her slow-forming smile with its hint of bewilderment and her look of being unspotted by the world make Mrs. Flett long to take her in her arms. She can imagine Mercy’s compacted fullness pressing up against her own tidy dress front, heaving with emotion and surrender. "My dear," she would like to murmur into the pale bulk of Mercy’s neck, into Mercy’s soft shoulders and curling brown hair.
The moment lies in the future, it will come. This is what she thinks as she stands under the blazing sun, pegging her clean wash to the line—the linens first, then her aprons and shirt waists, then the men’s summer overalls. There is so little breeze that the clothes will dry stiff and hard—in two hours they’ll be dry, it’s that hot. She’s late with the wash today, and there’s still the garden to weed, and peas to pick for supper. She’s always running late, and always there’s a shrewish tune skirling away inside her head: now the stove to polish, now the mending, next the curtains to starch.
The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her. The men, her husband and sons, leave for the quarry at seven o’clock sharp and return at five. What do they imagine she does all day? It makes her shiver to think of it, how not one pair of eyes can see through the roof and walls of her house and regard her as she moves through her dreamlike days, bargaining from minute to minute with indolence, that tempter.
God sees her, of course. He must. God observes her at the window where she stares and stares at the shadows of the caragana blowing across the path, or sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, locked into paralysis over her mending basket, watching a fly creep across the table. The minutes tick by, become an hour, sometimes two. These segments of time are untied to any other time she recognizes. It happens more and more frequently, these collapsed hours, almost every day since the summer weather came on. She wakes up fresh enough, but as the hands of the clock move forward she feels a force beckoning, the teasing seduction of ease and secrecy, and then, with the next breath, she’s lost the battle. Whatever it is that encloses her is made up of tenderness. It rises around her like a cloud of scent. There’s no face or voice to it, only a soft, steady, pervasive fragrance, a kind of rapturous wave that enters her throat, then moves downward through her body, bringing tightness to her female parts and the muscles of her softened thighs. The silence is perfect, and yet a torment, and always a dry little thought plucks away at her—that God is not interested in her lapses. He has not spoken out to her in any way, has not given a sign, not even troubled Himself to betray her, even though she has baited Him with a scrap of embroidered linen on her kitchen wall:
Christ is the Head of the House
The Unseen Guest at every
Meal The Silent Listener to every Conversation
It is frightening, and also exhilarating, her ability to deceive those around her; this is something new, her lost hours, her vivid dreams and shreds of language, as though she’d been given two lives instead of one, the alternate life cloaked in secret.
Or does she deceive herself? Dr. Spears, when she met him by accident walking on the Quarry Road, did catch hold of her wrist and speak to her in a most curious and candid manner. "Women need the companionship of other women," he burst out after some polite talk about the weather. "A little laughter is a great comfort, a little harmless gossip. The Needlework Auxiliary or the Mothers’
Union—and I believe, Mrs. Flett, you were once a member of the Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club, that you used to find enjoyment in an afternoon of cheerful company. My own wife tells me the recent talk on the Chinese missions was diverting, as well as edifying."
"I’m very busy at home," Clarentine Flett told Dr. Spears.
"Of course, of course," he nodded quickly. "Or perhaps you’re thinking of a few days’ visiting in Winnipeg. I believe you spend a few days there every year with your son Barker. He is still there, is he not, engaged in his studies? Botany, if I remember, his field of endeavor."
"Yes," she answered. "Flowers. Plants."
"I’m sure he does you credit. A fine young fellow. If you remember, I was one of those who put his name forward for the Epworth Scholarship."
"I do remember, indeed I do, and—"
"Why not surprise him, then, with the pleasure of a visit? We all need a change of scene now and then, especially after a long hard winter. I could mention it to your husband, if you like—indirectly, of course. I could suggest the healthful benefits of a little holiday."
"Please," she’d said. She was thinking of the oval of silence she would enter as soon as she left Dr. Spears’s presence, the smooth pearl gloss of it. "There’s no need of that. I can speak to him myself."
The Mothers’ Union. A few days in Winnipeg. Only months ago these diversions would have held some attraction. She might actually have spoken to her husband, Magnus, about a week away in the city. The words would have come forward—while she was engaged in some ordinary task, drying the supper dishes or taking the dead leaves off the fuchsia that hung by the window. Her husband was not a man who wasted words, but the two of them had managed over the years the simple, necessary marital commerce required for the rearing of three sons, for the ordering of supplies, the discussions concerning weather, illness, what manner of vegetables should be planted in the garden. And she guessed—though how was she to know such a thing? Who in this world would tell her?—she guessed her husband was no rougher in his ways than other men.