View From a Kite (17 page)

“I never was no good at gaining weight,” she says. “I has nerves.”

“Keep eating,” I tell her. “Eat more butter. You need to coat those nerves in butter.” I give her half of the care packages Elizabeth sends me: date squares and shortbread and pork pies.

“Your cousin is some good cook,” sighs Evvie, shortbread crumbs falling down her turquoise front.

All those languorous, bug-eyed, ethereally pale pre-Raphaelite women with their massy clouds of hair were tubercular. The men really got off on the consumptive look because it was believed—and backed up by the doctors of the period—that tuberculosis was an aphrodisiac. Same thing was believed about the romantic courtesans in the operas of the day: fragile, feverish, with a touch of nymphomania. The patient was not held accountable because—after all—it was the disease that made her into a seductive, immoral man-trap. The fact that these women were miserable and sick doesn't seem to have interfered with anybody's sexual fantasies. Rossetti and Morris and those guys wrote about and painted and romanticized the hell out of their women. Their wives, Lizzie and Jane, were the quintessential pre-Raphaelite pin-ups.

Lizzie, like most tuberculars, took opiates, and she died of an overdose; there is some speculation that it was suicide. She probably just wanted the misery to stop. Rossetti, grief-stricken, buried a manuscript of his poems with her—the quintessential romantic gesture. Seven years later he had second thoughts and had them dug up, wiped off, and published.

I have gained another two pounds in the last month and the bug-eyed look is definitely no longer within my grasp. The massy cloud of hair is just too much trouble to look after and every time I roll over on my pillow I have to haul it out of my face and toss it to the other side. So I wait until Denise has done a couple of trims for the guys on the men's ward to warm up and then I get her to whack mine off. Snip, snip, and fourteen inches of carefully grown and tended hair lie on the floor. I look in the mirror.

“More,” I say, and she snips and clips until I look perky as all get out, a regular little pixie. Never needs combing and dries in five minutes. Elaine screams and wrings her hands when I show up, shorn, at lunch. She has been contemplating having her bridesmaids' hair all braided with flowers instead of covered with chiffon wagon wheels, and I've ruined everything.

“I should wring your neck,” she moans, both hands grasping her own throat.

“Elaine,” I say, “my heart is just so set on that hat, I thought it would fit better with my hair trimmed.”

“Trimmed! That wicked Denise has scalped you! How fast does your hair grow?”

“Real slow,” I sigh the heaviest sigh in my repertoire.

I will not consent to wear a wig and Elaine will not be consoled. It is an anguished lunch. Fraught.

Evvie, now promoted to “Ambulatory” and a spot at Table 15, Chair 3, is the only one admitting to relief. Evvie does long to wear a chiffon cartwheel on her head. She can braid her hair and stick field daisies in it any old time back home.

Denise refuses to take any of Elaine's guff and throws all the blame back on me.

“She wanted it that short,” she says. “I just do what the customer asks.”

Elaine is contemplating scratching Denise and me from the bridesmaid list, but I don't think we'll be that lucky. We're the only ones tall enough to stand in a cluster around her and not have her look like a beanpole in a pumpkin patch. Evvie barely made it onto the list, and only then because we told Elaine that Evvie is five foot six and a half, which is a lie, but there's no way Elaine could have checked because Evvie was under mandatory bedrest until just yesterday.

“Sort of stand up on your tippy-toes whenever Elaine's around,” advised Denise. “She'll never know the difference.”

The other thing is, Elaine's hair is a startling red henna and she wants her bridesmaids to be a blond, a brunette, and a brownette. Denise has been lemon-rinsing and lightening the heck out of Evvie's dish-water mop, and she has agreed to dye hers black for the event. All I have to do is nothing, stay brown. There are no other bridesmaids, after all. Budgetary considerations mean Elaine must waltz to the altar with a skeleton crew. Mrs. Driscoll, who has grey hair that is to be silver-tinted when Denise blackens her own, is to be the matron-of-honour, in royal blue. She has agreed to wear a cartwheel if that is necessary to Elaine's happiness. Mrs. Driscoll is a good sport.

CHAPTER 33

“You know,” says Denise, “men like long hair. You may just have blown your chances. We should have thought of that before I cut it all off.” She's spread a half-dozen photographs on my bed. Evvie comes over to look.

“I like this one,” she says. “He's real cute. Minds me of Nelson.”

“We'll save him for you,” I say, putting it in the reject pile.

Evvie giggles and pretends to be shocked. “I'm a married woman. Don't do no foolin' around.”

“You're young,” says Denise.

MacConnell has tracked down the missing blood-pressure machine and confiscated it from Denise's locker. Denise is reduced to taking my pulse instead, while I look at each picture.

“Nowhere near as good,” she frowns. I keep dozing off while she holds my wrist, watches the clock, and counts. “Are you queer or something?” she asks. “Your pulse never moves.”

“No, I'm not queer, I'm tired. It's rest time and I want to nap.”

“Tell you what,” says Denise. “We'll just set you up with them, one after the other, until you click with somebody.”

“Sounds peachy.” I yawn and kick the pictures off my bed.

“We'll start with Don,” says Denise, picking him off the floor. “He's got a car and he sneaks out for pizza and beer sometimes. You could go with him.”

“Oh goody,” I say, and roll over.

Denise swats me and leaves.

Evvie gathers up the pictures and puts them in a neat pile on my table. When her back is turned, I slide them into the wastepaper basket. I have noticed that Denise hasn't put the two guys she considers the cutest onto my A list. She swears she's going to Alberta to marry her Tommy the second she gets out of here, but she's a practical sort of girl, and if she feels in need of a little session in the stairwell she doesn't want her favourites off somewhere auditioning for me. Fortunately we have divergent ideas on what constitutes A-list material.

Yes, okay, I have an A list. Not that I mean to do anything. But I have been sort of paying attention—not to Denise's parade of photographs, but I do notice the guys in the dining room and in the sun room. There are only two on my A list and neither of them is on Denise's A list and they aren't her private stock, either. I am embarrassed to admit they both physically resemble the Romantic tubercular poets I have been making fun of—pale, dark-haired, with gorgeous big eyes. Well, hell, there's a reason everybody wants one. They're pretty. They're both quiet, sort of moody, and one of them smiles at me and holds open doors. The other, Mark, is frailer, taller, and sometimes doesn't come to meals, but I look for him every day and when I see him walk into the dining room, an entire chorus of butterflies in my stomach starts swooping around. I think if he touched me I'd faint. No, swoon. I've got TB, if I can't carry off a swoon, nobody can. I can't believe what an idiot I'm being. I haven't spoken to him yet, I just look out of the corner of my eye for him all day long. Then I pretend I haven't seen him. What if he doesn't like me back?

CHAPTER 34

George and Elizabeth come all the way down to the Royal Alex to visit me. Elizabeth brings about forty pounds of treats. I wink at Evvie—this stuff will put her over the top for sure. By the time she works her way though it the floor will vibrate when she walks and Grass will have to let her go home for a weekend. She's closing in on a hundred pounds. Me, I'm thinking of going on a diet. I'm up to one hundred and twelve and that's plenty. Any more and Elaine will have to stuff me into that chiffon dress like ground pork into sausage skin.

“Dear,” says Elizabeth, putting her hand on my arm, “Edith's in the home.”

“She started to get real mad all the time,” says George. “Hitting and biting. We just couldn't look after her, and the girl we had staying with her lit out when Edith punched her in the face and broke her nose.”

This isn't my Edith they're talking about—the woman who spoons spiders gently onto a plate and then turns them loose outside.

“She doesn't know us at all, anymore,” says Elizabeth. Her eyes are damp and sad, and she's limp with guilt.

There seems to be a trend with the women in my family— the mind disappears and the body stays behind. Trauma, or heredity, they just drop their marbles. If Elizabeth ever loses hers I'm going to set fire to something.

“It's all right,” I say, and we all know it isn't.

They don't stay long; it's a five-hour drive back home.

“Rhubarb juice,” whispers Elizabeth as she's hugging me goodbye.

“What?”

“That big patch of rhubarb by the barn? That I can so much of each year? That's almost too sour to drink? Cook the dates in that rhubarb juice with a little bit of maple syrup. Nobody's ever figured it out. Don't you tell, honey.”

The big secret. The secret ingredients. I hug her until I'm out of breath. There are all kinds of ways to tell somebody you love them.

CHAPTER 35

Everybody's tense and jittery at breakfast. Three cups have been dropped and chipped—one of them by me. Evvie had to run to the bathroom to puke, her nerves are so bad. Mrs. Oikle found a hair in her porridge and had a fit. Denise picked a fight with one of her tablemates who was teasing her, and dumped the sugar bowl on his head. The surgical list comes out today and the newest victims will be informed. Those not on this month's cut-and-scoop list will get an update on their condition. Dr. Grass will go round and deliver the latest results of the tests to all the patients confined to bed and then, one by one, the ambulatories will have their little interview in Grass's office. Denise will find out if her new drug regime is working. Evvie will find out if she can go home for a weekend. Mrs. Oikle will find out if she is going to be released. Mark will find out if he can come to the dining room for every meal. I have been dreaming of knives and black holes every time I shut my eyes. I just want this to be over.

Dr. Grass has a
REPUTATION
, they say she is as tough as an old boot, they say she eats orderlies on toast. She seldom comes to the wards—we usually only see her once a month when she makes her rounds to talk to the patients who are confined to bed. The first week I arrived at the Alex, I heard her voice in the hall, hectoring the nurses, and I was afraid to look out the door at her though I am not usually such a coward. She has chopped iron hair, even shorter than mine is now, and a German or Austrian accent. Patrick says she's an escaped Nazi, a war criminal, but that's just because she is not amused by his Irish scalawag charm and he is miffed about it. I have been waiting outside her office for twenty minutes, reading old
Time
magazines. Staring at the print, anyway. Her secretary types like a woodpecker, hammer-drills and pauses. Finally she motions me to go in.

I slip into the chair in front of the doctor's desk and she glares at me. She leans forward and asks, “Why are you here?”

The question spills like a sack of wet sand. I don't know what to say, or do. She doesn't like me. It shows in her angry eyes. Women usually like me—I am well-behaved and tidy, pretty but not too pretty. Polite, but not sucky. When I'm a brat, I keep it to my friends. I have to get to university, I have to get to Europe and be a writer, and if people don't like me it will be that much harder. Dr. Grass doesn't like me at all—she doesn't like my pretty, doesn't like my polite. She sees that I am vain and useless, she thinks that I perform for approval, to please people, to get my own way. It's there, it's in the twist of her mouth. I don't know how to reach her at all.

“Why?” she barks.

“I…we have an appointment.” (I'm not late, I know I'm not late.)

“I mean,” her words are quarried slabs now, they thud, “why are you in my hospital?”

“The lesion…I need…they said you would have to…to cut…my lung.” My words are getting so small, I'm sure I'm whispering. How cruel she is. I hate her.

“HAH!” She smacks the papers on her desk with the back of her hand. “Hah,” she says again. “They are incompetent, those doctors at the San. Your lesions are healing. You may go.”

“Go.” I am still whispering.

“Back to your room. Now. Go, go, I am busy. I have many people to see. All this work. Look at this.” She slaps another pile of papers, scatters them over the front of her desk and onto my slippers. “Endless paperwork. Never become an administrator.”

My lips are moving, my brain is not. “The operation…”

“You do not need an operation. Yes, yes, we will have to keep you for a few more months, it's pointless to send you back to that place to finish out your time, but we don't need to waste expensive OR time on you. Go, go.” She squints at my stunned face and in a rusty attempt at kindliness, tries, “Run along now,” and motions me up and out with little shakes of her fingers.

I stagger down tiled halls, up sharp, carbolic stairwells, past dazzling sunroom doorways, around stainless steel racks of trays. I recognize none of the faces, none of the bathrobes, none of the plaid shuffling slippers.

Here is my room, here is my bed. I sit quietly. I am waiting to feel something, but there is nothing yet. I'm waiting for a far-off curl and rush, a white wind on its way from heaven to blast apart the room. The cells in a two-foot line that runs from under my left breast, down around under my arm, and up my back to my shoulder blade unclench, uncross, soften for the first time in months, and then I am weeping and howling like a banshee. Evvie thinks I am going to be cut open at dawn and runs for help and I can't stop long enough to yell after her that it's all right. I fall into the pillow, fall unconscious, and sleep for hours.