View From a Kite (10 page)

“Here you can see, this lesion is healing well. Some calcification occurring in the lower right lobe.” He purses his lips, points with his pen. “Here is the problem.”

“Hasn't it shrunk at all?”

I am desperate. These are my lungs and I need them back. I need them out of the files, off the light board, pink and healthy, not grey and shadowed ghosts. The evil smudge sits, unmoving, in film after film, like cigarette ash that won't brush off. For months now I've been entering this room, fingers crossed, dickering with God. He isn't playing. It isn't mending, I feel it in my chest, the ache that never goes away. I've pored over colour illustrations in medical texts—it's a crater, a rotted-out, bombed-out hole.
Grow
, I beg the healthy cells around it.
Stretch, move, cover, heal
. But it won't, it isn't, and I've been so good. I eat horrible mush every day. I've porked up to the point where I've ruined my career as a lyric poet and resigned myself to writing military poems. Quatrains that rhyme: a,b,c,b. (March, arch. Fight, right. Brave, save, rave, enslave, deprave, grave.)

“I'm afraid,” he says, “we will have to send you to the Royal Alexandra.”

“Now?” I am whispering because the sides of my throat are sticking together.

“I think we will send you home, first. A little home-cooking to fatten you up. I am trusting you to rest, no going out with the boys. No dancing.” He shakes his finger at me. He becomes brisk, he does not like the tears leaking down my face.

“A nurse will come to your home to give you your shots and we will send your pills with you. Get lots of rest; the more rest you get, the easier the operation will be for you.”

He told me at the beginning, what does not heal must be cut out. I've never met a doctor who told me the truth like this before. Before, they always talked to my parents, patted me on the head and told me I'd be fine. I'm trying not to cry because I am practically an adult, but it's not working very well. They're going to send me to the Royal Alexandra, slice me open like a fish, and take out half of my lung. I didn't think it was going to happen. I really didn't believe it would.

Theo Mackie has a scar. The men like to show off their scars. He came back from the Alex last month and displayed his at the weekly card party.

“Stop that,” said the night nurse. “There are young girls here. Stop your foolishness.”

He pulled his shirt down, but not before we'd seen a long raw snake, a red swollen wound from nipple to shoulder blade, and the stitch marks—each a separate wound and so many of them. I played cards, and drank tea, and smiled at silly comments, but inside I couldn't stop shuddering. I shook and shook and if I stopped adding clubs and diamonds for a minute a cruel raw future slid into my belly and flipped it over. I am so afraid. I am scared of the pain. I don't want to be scarred and ugly. I can't do this.

George comes into town to take me home to Edith's. He puts my suitcases in the car and waits until I have said goodbye to twenty or thirty people. Mary is already gone, discharged two days ago. She's gone back to real life, whatever her real life is going to be. She says she'll write. John Malcolm and Bobby and Trevor are still waiting for their x-rays to be discovered.

“Let me know what happens,” I tell them, and they promise they will phone me wherever I am and tell me all about it. OFN gives me a long hug that tells me to be brave, which makes me cry. I can hardly wait to get away after that. George drops me off at Mama's hospital and goes to get the muffler on his truck fixed.

“I'll be back for you in an hour, Gwennie.”

“I'll be here,” I say. “Or in Majorca.”

She's in the sunroom, sitting at a card table with three other patients. There is Minnie, who is terminally nervous—she babbles and babbles about nothing. Jacob is a quiet man in a red quilted robe and—I swear—false eye
-
lashes. He plays his cards from left to right, regardless of suit or number, and never, ever says a word. They sort of even out, Minnie and Jacob. Minnie's a killer player and Jacob's terrible. Then there's Ralphie, who bosses everyone and tells them what to play and when. He does all the shuffling so no one will stack the deck and he deals for Mama, who is always his partner, and Jacob, who isn't. He'd like to deal for Minnie, but she won't play if he does so he jitters and wiggles the table and mutters whenever it's her turn, but he has to let her deal. He grabs Mama's hands, looks over the cards and then plays for her. He thinks everyone is trying to steal his cards and everyone is trying to cheat him, so if he has to go to the bathroom or if he gets called away to the phone—if he has to leave the room for any reason at all—he scoops up all the cards, puts them in his pocket, and takes them with him. The others just sit there, waiting for him to return. If he doesn't come back, the cards don't either. Whenever the game room is short of cards, the nurses go raid his bottom drawer (he says the nurses steal from him). The grabbier Ralphie gets, the more Minnie babbles, the quieter Jacob gets, and the more my mother gets confused. She wasn't too good at cards before the bullet and now all she ever says, when any of them talk to her, is, “What's trump? What's trump, Robert?”

Once she put down a card without waiting for Ralphie to do it and it wasn't the right suit and he called her a brain-dead moron. I threw my coke in his lap and told him if he ever called her a name like that again I would sneak into his room when he was asleep, cut his snarbles off, and stuff them down his throat. He's been pretty cautious around me ever since and if he calls her names it's not where I can hear. Now whenever I come to visit I insist on playing Mama's cards and dealing for her myself. I love to watch Ralphie get redder and hotter and jerkier. If I want to end the card game and just sit quietly with Mama, I deliberately drop the deck on the floor and then he's in a huge panic because one of us might pick up a card and keep it. He has to gather them up all by himself and count them over and over and over to make sure he has all fifty-two. Once I slipped in an extra card, for a joke, and he kept getting fifty-three no matter how many times he counted. I thought he was going to have a stroke. I didn't do that again, it was kind of mean, although I admit I've been awfully tempted.

On Mama's good days, when she can respond to your questions, she's trapped somewhere in the past, when she was young, before there was me. If you don't talk to her, she can't say anything at all. She doesn't move much, either, unless you get her started. If you take her arm and start walking she'll walk with you. By herself, she sits all day and doesn't move a muscle, except for her fluttering hands, which don't seem to belong to her at all.

I used to obsess about her last few minutes. What did she see? What did she think? Did she know? Did she see him coming, see the raised gun? Was terror her last state of mind before grey limbo? I've run the scene over and over in my head. I have him come up behind her, so she knows nothing, so she is walking down the hall, thinking about folding laundry, or weeding the petunias, or making pork roast for Sunday dinner, and then there is nothing. My version has to be what happened.

Nothing, is where she is.

Nowhere, is where she is.

I believe, someday, somehow, brain cells will grow, or a new drug will resurrect her lost memory, or a clever surgical twist of a knife will switch on a light and her mind will click back into focus.

She'll open her eyes, a little perplexed by her medical surroundings, but only peripherally distracted. She'll open her eyes wide and she'll see me, she'll see her Gwen. She'll give her head a little shake.

“Gwennie,” she'll say, reaching for me with steady hands, “when was the last time you combed your hair?”

PART TWO

CHAPTER 18

All my mail this week, except for record club offers and threats, comes from the residents, past and present, of the San. Whiny Mrs. Charmichael sent me a huge photograph of herself holding her new grandson at his christening. She's crocheted an elaborate gown and stuffed him into it. It's hard to tell what he looks like, there's sort of a little blob that might be his face buried under a heap of lace. He's probably passed out with the weight of it. Mrs. Charmichael, a bolster of lime green brocade with a tea tray of fuchsia blossoms on her head, is the proverbial cat with the proverbial canary. If she hadn't got sick and ended up in the San, Perfect Leander would never have had the time or the nerve to mess around with a girl and there would be no perfect grandbaby for her to rhapsodize about (with the photograph came a seven-page letter detailing the infant's virtues; evidently it's the Second Coming).

OFN scribbled me a note to say Sister Clare is now so depressed they are talking of moving her to a home for the genteelly disturbed. Cranky old Mrs. Cyr is dead, choked on a pickle. Joe Paul, who got out for good a month ago, came back to visit in a brand new pick-up. He's got new teeth, lost them at his coming-home party but found them again the next day. OFN says he looks just grand.

Mary wrote to say she's completely redecorated her bed
-
room and has enrolled in a secretarial course, but has yet to meet a man suitable for framing. She sounds all right.

I suppose I am too. This is not exactly the Left Bank or a beach in Majorca, but it is an experience and all experiences are of value to a writer. That's what I tell myself.

I still hold out some hope that I can plug the hole in my lung before they cart me off to the butcher shop at the Royal Alex. To this end, I am being wonderfully good. No late nights, lots of good healthy food. I sleep with the window open, even in the driving rain and blowing wind, although there hasn't been much of that lately. A good snowfall, sprinkled on a great heap of blankets, with me in the middle like a sausage folded in pastry, would be good for my health, according to the old texts from the days of the sanatoriums at Lake Sarnac. But it's summer, so I'm shit out of luck.

I've been continuing my research into tuberculosis cures through the ages in hopes of finding some long-forgotten nugget of medical wisdom, but it's hard going, I tell you. I've just recently read that in the last century they encouraged tubercular young ladies to get married or even go so far as to have illicit love affairs because sex was supposed to be beneficial. It could save your life, they thought. They assumed the men wouldn't need any encouragement to screw for the good of their lungs, I guess, because there's no mention of any necessity to prod them along (take two harlots and call me in the morning?). This century they've changed their minds and sex-as-a-cure has gone out of fashion—hence the saltpetre and prim rules about open doors.

CURES AND THERAPIES, 1750–1950

1.Joseph Priestly (1733–1804, discoverer of oxygen) attributed the cure of his daughter-in-law to the fumes of a cow barn. It is uncertain what the recommended number of inhalations per minute were, and how long it took to effect a cure. Priestly does not specify dairy barn, but one can assume.

2. Drink the blood of slaughtered animals.

3. From the neighbourhood pharmacy: Piso's Cure For Consumption; Schenck's Pulmonic Syrup; Hembold's Buchu Extract; Radam's Extract.
   These brightly coloured jewels-in-a-bottle contained herbs to stimulate the lungs, and a handsome shot of narcotics and/or alcohol to make the patient feel better and to promote a healing sleep.

4. Hydrogen sulfide gas and medicated oxygen as inhalation therapy while the patient sat in a glass cabinet. The inexpensive version (see Anna Karenina) was to breathe noxious chemicals from a bottle with a paper cover with pin holes in it. The peasants, one supposes, smashed rotten eggs under their nostrils.

CHAPTER 19

Edith is definitely getting worse. She's troubled more easily, more often. Some days she's quiet for hours at a time, but when she's not she comes after me, plucking at my arm, her face all crumpled up and scared.

“He won't stop crying,” she says. “Please help me. I can't make him stop crying.”

“It's okay,” I tell her. “I'll take care of it.”

I make her tea and soothe and distract her. An hour later she's pulling at my clothes again. “Robert's crying. I can't make him stop crying and Papa is so angry.”

That's when I call for help and Elizabeth comes over. Sometimes she stays all night. George says it's near time to put Edith into a home, but I won't talk about it, I just leave the room. I think it will kill her. She won't stay next door with them, either. When they tried it she got up in the night and wandered around the fields until she found her way back here. I know they're just waiting until I go to the Royal Alex before they cart her off. They know I know. I want to scream at these people, tell them they can't, they can't, they can't. But they look so upset all the time—so I can't. I hate the way the world is. I hate the way things change and get old and fall apart and leave you.

Elizabeth has got Edith to take a pill, and Edith is snoring in the downstairs bedroom. Elizabeth and I are having a cup of tea and some shortbread and not talking about Edith. Elizabeth's making a little blue sweater.

“Donna's having a baby this fall,” she says, knitting little eyelets into the border for ribbon to run through. Donna is my second cousin, or first, once removed. Something like that. She lives a mile down the road in a trailer in her in-laws' backyard.

“She's having a baby already?” I know for a fact she got married in June.

“Well, you know, first babies come anytime. The rest take nine months.”

Country attitudes, I think, are so sensible, so civilized. So unlike my mother and her friend Mae, over tea, scandalized because Cathy—two streets over and barely eighteen—had had a huge wedding, wearing a long white gown with a sheaf of wheat and daisies resting unabashedly on her ballooning belly. They thought Cathy should have got married in a dark hole somewhere, dressed in a navy blue suit, with a dour judge to preside, and a small corsage of ditch weeds pinned to her lapel. What bullshit, I'd thought.