Small Ceremonies (12 page)

“Eccentric. It's the sort of thing Furlong Eberhardt might dream up.”

“And I suppose you think that reference will guarantee instant dismissal of the whole idea.”

“Oh, Martin, for heaven's sake, do what you want. I just hate you to look ridiculous.”

“To whom? To you?”

“Forget it. I don't even know why we're discussing it.” I start picking up newspapers and gathering together the coffee cups. Lala springs to my side, but I tell her not to bother; I can manage.

I feel strange as I carry the cups into the kitchen. A nervy dancing fear is spinning in my stomach, and I lean on the sink for support. A minute ago I had been overjoyed that Martin's wool was to be put to so innocent a purpose. What has happened? What am I afraid of?

Guilt presses; I should have been more consoling when his paper was turned down. I should take greater interest in his work. Year after year he sweats out the required papers and what interest do I show? I proofread them, take out commas, put his footnotes in order. And that's it. No wonder he's developed a soft spot on the brain. To conceive of this bit of madness, actually to carry it through.

And to carry it out furtively, covertly. For I am certain he deliberately withheld the project from me. Perhaps from everyone else as well. He probably even pulls the curtains in his office and locks the door when he weaves. I try to picture it – Martin tugging at the wool, sorting his needles, tightening his frame, and then pluck, pluck, in and out, in and out. My husband, Martin Gill, weaving away his secret afternoons.

It might even be better if he did have a mistress. One could understand that. One could commiserate; one could forgive. But what can be done with a man who makes a fool of himself – what do you do then?

Martin is crazy. He's lost his grip. Or is it me? I try to think logically, but my stomach is seized by pain. I try to construct the past few months, to remember exactly when Martin last mentioned something about his work. I sit down on the kitchen stool and try to concentrate, but my head whirls. When did he last discuss the seventeenth century?
Paradise
Lost?
The Milton tradition? Or something temporal such as his lecture schedule. When? I can't remember.

And then I think with a stab of pain, when did we last make love with anything more than cordiality?

My head pounds. I open the cupboard and find a bottle of aspirin. And then, though it is just a little past noon, I creep upstairs and get into bed. The sheets are cool and deliciously flat. Below me in the family room I can hear the Rose Bowl Game beginning.

 

Hours later I awake in the darkened room. In the upstairs hall the light is burning brutally; long, startling El Greco shadows cut across the bedroom wall. Footsteps, whispers, the rattle of teacups. Someone reaches for my hand, places a cold cloth on my forehead.      

“Thank you, thank you,” I want to say, but my voice has disappeared, in its place a dry cracked nut of pain. My lips have split; I can taste blood. The inside of my mouth is unfamiliar, a clutch of cottonwool.

“Drink this,” someone says.

“No, no,” I rasp.

“Please, Judith. Try. It may help.”

Lala was sitting on the edge of my bed, a figurine, a blue-tinted shepherdess. She was pressing a teaspoon toward me. I opened my mouth. Aspirin. Aspirin crushed in strawberry jam; its peculiar bitter, slightly citrus flavor reaches me from the forest of childhood (my father crushing aspirin on the breadboard with the back of a teaspoon when my sister and I had measles, yes).

A drink of water, and I lay back exhausted. Again the cool, wet cloth. Again the mellifluous voice. “There, there. Now just sleep. Don't worry. Just rest, dear.”

What choice had I but to obey; the lack of choice, the total surrender of will enclosed me like a drug. I slept.

There followed another long blurred space.

Several times I woke up choking on the thick cactus growth in my throat. And to my inexplicable grief, every time I opened my eyes it was still dark. If only it were light, I remember thinking, I could bear it. If only this long night would end, I would be all right.

But when the light finally did come, milky through the frosted-over windows; I couldn't look at it without pain. It battered my stripped nerve ends, pierced me through with its harsh squares. Anguish. To be so helpless. The wet plush tongue of the facecloth descended again. Coolness. It was Meredith.

In all her sixteen years I had never heard such sadness in her voice. It curled in and out of her breath like a ballad.

“Mother. Oh, Mother. Are you any better?”

Was that my voice that squawked “yes”? I said it to comfort her, not because it was true.

“The doctor's coming. Dr. Barraclough is coming. Any minute, Mother. After his hospital rounds. He said as soon after ten as he could make it.”

I moaned faintly, involuntarily.

“Is there anything you'd like, Mother? A nice cup of tea?”

In my angle of pain I could only think of what a strange phrase that was for Meredith to use – a nice cup of tea. Did I ever say it? My mother certainly did. Lala did too. Even Martin did. But did I? Out of kindness or ritual or sympathy did I ever in all my life offer anyone such a thing as a “nice cup of tea”? If not, then how did I come to have a daughter who was able to utter, unselfconsciously, such a perfect and cottagy phrase
– a nice cup of tea?

Her voice rocked with such mourning that I felt I must accept. From the roof of my mouth a small scream escaped, saying “Yes please.”

She fled to the kitchen joyfully, only to be replaced by Martin. “My poor Judith. My poor little Judith.”

Again it was the phrase I perceived, not the situation. “My poor little Judith,” he had called me. Echoes of courtship, when he had used those exact words often. And I am not little. Tall and lanky then, I am tall and large now, not fat, of course, only what the world calls a fair-sized woman; my size has always defined my sense of myself, made me less serious, freer of vanity, for good or bad.

“My poor little Judith,” he had said. I reached out a hand and felt it taken.

“Poor Judith. My poor sick Judith.”

So that was it: I was sick.

“Just try to rest, love. You've got some kind of flu. And you've had a bugger of a night.”

I strangled with agreement.

“Mother and Dad had to leave. Early this morning. They were awfully worried, especially Mother.”

I thought of Lala sitting on the edge of my bed in some half-blocked fantasy. Aspirin and strawberry jam. We had met at that level. I clutched Martin's hand harder. I wanted him to stay and, miraculous, he didn't hurry away.

Richard poked his head around the doorway. I was shocked at his size, for viewed from this unfamiliar angle, he seemed suddenly much taller. A stranger. And miserably shy.

“Meredith says, do you want some toast?”

“No,” I croaked. Then I added, “No thank you.” Etiquette. My mother's thin etiquette surfacing.

I fell asleep again, woke momentarily to see the tea, cold and untouched in its pottery cup. Sleep, sleep.

The doctor comes. A provincial tennis champion, now barely thirty-five. Too young to wield such power. Permanently suntanned from all those holidays in the Bahamas, hands lean across the backs, a look of cash to his herringbone jacket. Money rolling in, but who cares, who cares?

“Well, well, what have we here?” he whistles good cheer.

Sullenly I refuse to answer or even listen to such heartiness.

He does the old routine, listens to heart – is my nightgown clean? – temperature, pulse, blood pressure. A searing little light with a cold metal tip pokes into throat, nostrils, ears. Eyelids rolled back.

“You're sick,” he says leaning back. “A real sick girl.”

And you're a fatuous ass,
I long to say; but how can I, for he and only he can deliver me from my width of wretchedness. Already he is writing something on a pad of paper. I can – I can be restored.

He speaks to Martin; perhaps he considers that I am too ill to comprehend. “I can only give her something to make her more comfortable. It's a virus, you know, a real tough baby, it looks like, and there's nothing we can give for a virus.”

“Nothing?” Martin asks unbelieving.

“Rest, plenty of liquids, that's about it.”

“But how about an antibiotic or something?”

“Won't work,” he says, brushing Martin off – how dare he! – picking up his overcoat, feeling in his pocket for his car keys.

Meredith sees him to the door, and Martin and I are left in immense quiet. The Baby Ben is ticking on the night table. In spite of my contagious condition, Martin lies down on his side of the rumpled bed. He lies carefully on top of the bedspread and in less than a minute he has fallen asleep. I am obscurely angered that he has violated my bed with his presence. The walls dissolve, the silence is enormous. I think,
I can't bear this.
And then I too fall asleep.

For days the fever laps away at me. My scalp, after a week, feels so tender that I can hardly comb my hair. My arms and legs ache, and my back is so sore that I keep an extra pillow under it.

The efforts of Martin and the children to comfort me are so great and so constant that I wish I could rouse myself to gratitude. But it is too tiring. I can do nothing but lie in bed and accept.

I have never in my adult life been so ill. I can hardly believe I am suffering from something as ubiquitous as flu, and it seems preposterous that I can be this ill and still not require hospitalization. The doctor comes once again, pats me roughly on the back and says, “Well, Judith, I think you're going to surprise us and weather this after all.”

My illness shocks me by giving me almost magical powers of perception; the restless, feverish days have sharpened my awareness to the point of pain. Phrases I hear every day acquire new meaning. I find myself analyzing for hours what is casually uttered. The way, for instance, that Dr. Barraclough calls me Judith now that I have become an author. All sorts of people, in fact, whom I know in a remote and professional way began using my first name the moment my first book came out, as though I had somehow come into the inheritance of it, as though I had entered into the public domain, had left behind that dumpy housewife, Mrs. Gill.
Judith.
I became Judith.

And Meredith who has called me Mother for years is suddenly calling me Mommy again. I lie here in bed, a sick doll, my limbs helpless, living on asparagus soup, and am called Mommy by my sixteen-year-old daughter.

Another observation. Richard doesn't call me anything. He pokes his head in, sometimes even sits for a minute on the edge of the bed. “Would you like the newspaper?” he will ask. Or “Do we have any postage stamps? Any airletters?” But these statements, requests, questions have, I notice, a bald quality. I analyze them. I have time to analyze them. What gives them their flat spare sound is the lack of any salutation, I ponder the reasons. Is he caught in that slot of growth where Mommy is too childish, Mother too severe and foreign? What did he use to call me? When he was little? Now that I think of it, did he ever call me anything? I can't remember. It's curious. And worrying in an obscure way which I am unable, because of my present weakness or because of a prime failing, to understand.

 

After ten days I began to stay awake longer. The nights lost their nightmare quality, and the joints in my body tormented me less. I was cheered by a letter from my sister and wryly amused by another from my mother. Martin had phoned to tell her I was sick; she was not to worry if she didn't get her weekly letter. Her letter to me was a harping scold from beginning to end. I did too much, she wrote. I wore myself out, wore my fingers to the bone. I should get Martin to take over more of the household chores. Meredith should be washing dishes at her age, and there was no reason she couldn't take over the ironing. Richard could be more helpful too. But basically, I was at fault. I had done too much Christmas entertaining, she accused. Too much shopping, sent too many cards. I shouldn't have invited Martin's parents for New Year's; they had a home of their own, didn't they? And very comfortable too. And why didn't Martin's sister in P.E.I. have them for a change. I should forget about my biographies until the children were older and off my hands.

I read it all, shaking my head. It had always been that way. My sister and I had been scolded for every scraped knee – “I told you you weren't watching.” There were no bright badges of mercurochrome for us – “Next time you'll be more careful.” For diarrhea we were rewarded with “Play with the Maddeson children and what do you expect?” Even our childhood illnesses were begrudged us. I thought of Lala spooning aspirin into me on New Year's night. And I recalled the first time I had met her. Martin had taken me home for a weekend to Montreal, and he had mentioned to his mother that he had a slight rash on the back of his hands. “Oh dear,” she had cried, “what a bother! That can be so irritating. Now let me see. I think I have just the thing. Just squeeze a little of this on, and if that doesn't work we'll just pop you over to the doctor.”

I had listened amazed; such acceptance, such outpouring concern. Such willingness to proffer cups of tea, cream soups, poached eggs on toast. Imagine!

And so, although I lie suffering in my arms, legs, stomach, sinus, throat, skin, ears, eyes and kidneys, I am, at least, free of guilt. It is incredible, but no one with the exception of my mother – and she is far away in her multihued bungalow in Scarborough – no one blames me for being sick. Indeed, they almost seem to believe that I am entitled to an illness; that I have earned the right to take to my bed.

I heard Meredith talking to Gwendolyn on the telephone, her voice arched with pride, saying that I had never been sick before. And when Roger dropped in one evening to bring me an armful of magazines, Martin told him in a somewhat self-congratulatory tone, “First time in her life that Judith's been hit like this.”