View From a Kite (16 page)

“Hold your nose and marry a man with big slow hands, a senile mother, and lots of money.”

“Amen!” They hoot and cackle. “Sounds real good to me!”

Christine and Jeannie don't have conversations, they just exchange, invent, and embroider gossip. I pretend to be shocked, because the more I'm shocked, the more pleased they are and the more they try to outdo each other. Actually, it's pretty good stuff—if you want to be a writer, I mean. There seems to be a lot of fooling around going on in this place, according to Christine and Jeannie.

“What about the saltpetre?” I ask.

“Grass don't believe in it,” says Jeannie. “She believes in the Moral Power of Rules, Regulations, and the Exempl'ry Conduct of the Staff.”

Christine has just finished telling me how one of the male orderlies is simultaneously romancing a kitchen worker, a nurse's aid, and one of the patients in Room 12 down the hall.

“Why,” I want to know, “is there so much of this stuff going on?”

Christine rolls her eyes.

“You got about two hundred patients in here, half of them well enough to be wandering around, bored out of their skulls, and TB makes you horny, anyway.”

“That's just a stupid myth left over from the Romantic Era,” I say, “the idea that tuberculosis makes you all feverish and sexy. It's not true.”

“Sex is good for you, helps you to heal quicker.”

“Another dumb myth.”

I can't believe they're still floating these ideas around. Just like I can't believe they let us smoke, because they think the stress of quitting is more harmful than the actual poisonous smoke. Well, they let the “adults” smoke. The rest of us have to sneak around like twelve-year-olds.

“Well, maybe it's the boredom that does it,” says Jeannie. “All I know's lots of people who wouldn't say shit if their mouths was full of it are makin' out like bandits in the dark.”

“Not only after dark.” Christine nudges me. “That friend of yours, Denise, was in the laundry room this morning making out with Stan. MacConnell almost caught them.”

Dumb, dumb, dumb. I go have lunch, and Mrs. Driscoll's calm washes over me like waves in the Bras d'Or Lakes in August. Cool, and a little salty. We look at more colour samples, and photos of six million tiaras meant to stick veiling to your head and let you pretend you're Royalty-for-a-Day. Elaine can't decide if she's too old to wear a veil or not.

“It's your wedding,” I say. “Wear a cake rack and antlers on your head if you want.”

Elaine frowns, and then smiles and pats my hand. “Something's got you worried, honeybunch,” she says. “Tell Elaine what's wrong.”

Surprisingly, I do.

“It's Denise,” I say, nodding to where she sits, three tables away. Since our fight she's moved so she doesn't have to look at my bratty face while she eats. All heads swivel to where she sits, picking at her plate. She is pale, and everything about her droops: her mouth, her eyes, even the lapels on her robe.

“Have you tried talking to her?” asks Mrs. Driscoll.

“We aren't exactly on speaking terms,” I confess. “We had a fight.” It isn't like they don't know. Nothing goes unnoticed in this place.

“It's up to you to make the first move,” they chorus, like a Dear Abby column. “She's your friend and she needs you.”

“Tell her to stop acting like a slut,” says Mrs. Oikle.

“Hush, now.” says Mrs. Driscoll.

Elaine nails Mrs. Oikle to the wall with a look that could take down a Crusader—armour, horse, plumes, and all. This pretty much confirms what we all suspect, that Bernard and Elaine are doing it. Mrs. Oikle, realizing that she's about to be dumped from the wedding invite list, backtracks.

“I don't mean she's a slut, I just mean she shouldn't be carrying around with a married man, especially when she's engaged, I mean, he's just taking advantage of her, and you know what some people will think, and she's so young, and she doesn't want to get a reputation and it's not even her fiancé, it would be different if it were her fiancé, that Stan's not to be trusted, look at the shape of his eyebrows, a man like that will always cheat on his wife…” She runs out of steam.

Elaine gives an elaborate, bangle-clanging shrug and turns to me. “You go talk to her, sweetie, she needs some good advice from a good friend. She needs you now, more than ever.”

Mrs. Driscoll nods in agreement as Mrs. Oikle rakes the bottom of her soup bowl for hairs.

“I guess so,” I say. I'm not altogether sure Denise will give me the time of day. I sort of did call her a stool-pigeon and a traitor and a bitch.

I'm such a coward. I walk by Denise's room, back and forth, back and forth. Every time I say to myself that I'll knock and go in and if she throws me out, well, she throws me out. Then when I get up to the door, my feet just keep on going. When she tried to make up to me, the day after we fought, I told her to go to hell. So, I guess she owes me one go-to-hell. I should just go and take it. How did I get to be such a coward? As soon as I have a smoke, I decide, I'll just barge right in. First, I'm going to have that smoke. I silently push open the bathroom door and tiptoe around the corner to the far window. The bathroom is L-shaped, and around the corner is where the underage smokers hang out the window, blow smoke, and whistle and yell at the delivery boys. Christine's got a wolf whistle that carries for miles.

Somebody's sniffing in one of the stalls, quietly. I bend over and check out the slippers. It's Denise.
Here goes
, I think, and mentally cinch my belt.

“Denise,” I say, “I'm sorry I called you a bitch and everything else. I don't blame you for being mad at me and I'll understand if you never want to forgive me, but please, please forgive me. Please don't cry over that jerk, Stan. You're worth a million of him and everybody knows it.”

“Stan's an idiot. Stan can go to hell.”

Well, better him than me.

“Um, that's the spirit,” I say, trying to sound as wise as Mrs. Driscoll.

“I dumped Stan two days ago,” says Denise. “The man was stuck on himself. All hands.”

“You need a man with slow hands,” I say.

“What the hell would you know about that?”

“Nothing, really. Only, Mrs. Oikle said…”

“Oikle is a stupid old cow.”

“Okay.”

“And you are a baby.”

I remain silent. I am not a baby. Inexperienced, maybe. Not a baby.

Denise slams open the stall door.

“Don't you go around telling everyone I've been crying over that asshole Stan because it's a goddamn lie.”

“I would never do that,” I say. “What are you crying about?”

Denise looks like she wants to hit me. I get ready to duck. But she grabs my cigarettes instead, taps one out, and lights it. She blows a big cloud of smoke out the window and turns back to me.

“The drugs aren't working. I've developed resistance to strep and they aren't going to let me out next month. Going to keep me until they find another combination that works. Grass won't say how long it will take.”

It's the worst news in the world. I feel it like a punch to the stomach, the horrible, heavy shock of it. I put my arms around her, and then we both cry a bit.

“Knock it off,” she pulls back, “you're setting my hair on fire,” and we collapse into hysterical giggles as I beat out her hair. She shakes me a couple of times, calls me an idiot and a fool, then gives me a hug and says, “Come on.”

We sneak down the hall, down the stairwell, and out the service entrance.

“Where are we going?” I am running out of breath as we sprint across the parking lot and down over an embankment.

“The graveyard,” says Denise.

“Okay,” I say.

The graveyard is surrounded by tall maples and birch. It is quiet and dim and a little weedy. There are a lot of markers from the twenties and thirties, from when the Royal Alex was in full swing and the survival rate wasn't so good. Denise drags me past these, to where it adjoins an older cemetery. The stones here are really old and the inscriptions are worn down. Some of the stones look like they were made by hand, in poor light, with an axe, by Quasimodo.

“Look at this one,” says Denise.

It stands tall and thin, rising from a bunch of dwarf stones, and is carved all over. There is a coffin—in case you don't get the point—and some pointing hands, meant to show the way to heaven, and a lot of squiggly lines going nowhere.

Smack in the middle, the stonemason has carved:

JW Sculptor

HERE

Rest a clod of earth

brighten into a star, shin-

ing with all the radient love

of the Deity James

Robertson. who

died Feb. 7th 1837

AEtatis 76

Life is uncertain

Tyrant death approaches

The Judge is at the door.

Prepare to meet your
GOD

“There's a better one over here,” says Denise, and she drags me off to contemplate another of J. W. Sculptor's oeuvre, this time a double stone. It looks like this:

“Who is this J. W. Sculptor, and why does he get top billing?”

“Not a clue,” she says. “There's more of them, and his initials are always the biggest thing on the stone. Something, isn't it?”

She pulls out a joint, licks it and lights it.

“I don't smoke that stuff,” I say. “It makes me cough. Where did you get it?”

“Stan,” she says.

“I wonder where J. W. is buried,” I muse, “and who carved his stone?”

“He probably had one in his shop, ready for the date to be chiselled in,” says Denise. “This guy wouldn't have let them bury him under anyone else's work.”

“Couldn't do much about it if he was dead, could he?”

“He could come back and haunt them.” She passed me the joint. “I don't believe in ghosts.”

“Me neither.”

“When you're dead, you're dead.”

“Completely dead.”

“Dead as a doornail.”

“Dead's a churchmouse.”

“ ‘s poor as a churchmouse.”

“S'it?”

“Yeah…poor's a churchmouse…not dead as.”

“Churchmouse?”

“Yeah.”

“ ‘S hard to say.”

“Yeah.”

CHAPTER 32

Denise has a new project. She has decided I need to be unburdened of my virginity. It's the only thing, she says, that will heal up the hole in my lung. There's no talking to her; once she gets an idea in her head, you might as well forget it. Not that I plan to surrender my virginity, but I've given up arguing with her about it because one, it's a waste of my energy, and two, it gives her something to do to keep her mind off her drug resistance.

She's going about the whole thing in a very organized fashion and has catalogued every available male in the place. She's divided them into categories and sub-categories. Chemistry, she says, is everything. She stole a blood-pressure machine and has taken to flashing strips of paper with guys' names on them and taking my blood pressure immediately afterwards to see if the sight of any particular name causes a rise in pressure. My arms are getting sore from being squished numb twenty times a day.

“It would be better if we could have the guys come in one by one,” she complains. “This isn't really the best way. Or pictures—even pictures would be better.”

“You're right,” I agree. “There's too much margin for error with this method. For instance, when I read ‘Jimmy MacKin non,' I immediately thought of this guy called Jimmy in grade two who used to pick his nose and eat it. I almost threw up, and I'm sure that skewed the results.”

“I'm going to have to get pictures of them all. Or at least the A list.” She frowns.

“Probably the B list, too,” I say, hoping the project will bog down while she's trying to gather pictures from these guys.

“We'll start with the A list for now.” She folds up her blood-pressure kit and heads for the men's ward to start soliciting photographs.

“I really think we need the B list,” I yell after her.

“I didn't need no blood-pressure machine with Nelson,” says Evvie, somewhat smugly, I think.

“Well, some of us are just lucky and some of us just aren't,” I say.

“I guess so.” She nods her head.

Evvie's looking better and better every day. It's amazing what three meals a day and a chance to rest has done for her. Her only problem is that she misses Nelson and the babies. Can't wait to get back to them. Nelson and his sister-in-law, Faith, brought the babies as far as the parking lot last Sunday. They held them up below our window and waved their little arms at Evvie and Evvie hung out the window and blew kisses and called out baby talk until she got hoarse and started a coughing fit. Then she sobbed and snivelled for an hour after they left. She's determined to gain five more pounds, Dr. Grass's ultimatum, so she can go home for a weekend visit. She eats her head off, she scrapes the pattern right off the plates.