View From a Kite (18 page)

When I wake up it's dark and quiet, but everything is all right. I remember how to behave. I can tell my friends, I can be glad. I want to drink champagne and find Mark and kiss him and dance with Denise, I want to tell Mama and Edith and George and Elizabeth. I tiptoe quietly along the dark hallway, sneak past the nurses dozing at the desk and scamper down the stairwell and out into the starry night. I sit in the parking lot, eating the date squares I squashed into my pockets and watching the sky until the sun comes up like a big red kite, bobbing and floating above the horizon.

Somehow I have escaped, and I can't think of anything I've done to deserve it.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 36

Evvie weighs ninety-nine and one-half pounds and Grass won't let her out. At first, Evvie cries and cries. She cries away a couple of her precious pounds, then she gets really furious and calls Grass a wicked, wicked, slimy old witch-bitch, and threatens to get Nelson to bring her in a gun so she can shoot her. Then she just collapses into misery and rolls over in a defeated lump in her bed. She literally turns her face to the wall—in books, that's where they give up and die.

“Evvie,” I say, giving her a good shake and rolling her back to face me, “this is never going to happen again. You're going to get up and be calm, eat a couple or ten date squares and drink a glass of milk, and tonight I'm going to phone George and get him to send me some little lead weights to stash in my locker so that next week and every week thereafter, when they come to weigh you, you're going to weigh at least a hundred and five pounds. I'll sew the weights into your bathrobe and your slippers, and we'll braid some into your hair. We'll stick them up your bum if we have to, to make you heavy enough. Next month you'll get home for sure.”

“Next month is so far away,” she whispers. “My babies won't hardly remember who I am.”

“Don't be such a birdbrain, Evvie, of course they'll remember who you are. Babies aren't stupid.” I'm hoping this is true. I don't know anything about babies and their level of intelligence or their powers of recall. Evvie sits up, sniffs deeply and juicily, and is about to launch into anecdote number 364 of Little Nelson's Clever Sayings when Denise saunters in, waving her scissors.

“Let's cut your hair,” she says to Evvie.

“No! No!” squeals Evvie, trying to cover her head with her hands. “Nelson'd kill me if I was to go and cut my hair. Elaine'll kill you for sure if you come near me with them scissors, she ain't over you cuttin' Gwen's yet. You get away from me, Denise, you get them scissors away from me!”

Between one thing and another we manage to distract Evvie long enough for her natural spunk to reassert itself. That's what she's got, and the word sounds exactly right when applied to Evvie. Spunk. Sort of like a spicy bit of self-possession that keeps her afloat in a perplexing and condescending world. She only seemed brainless and biddable when she first came in because she was so sick.

She can be unbelievably pig-headed, and she's as prim as your Pentecostal grandmother. She won't take part in any of our escapades, won't touch cigarettes or liquor, and she shakes her head and tells us how bad we are whenever we plan an expedition in her hearing. However, we early on discovered that we can trust her absolutely; anybody who tries to pry information out of her hits the wall of her dumb-as-dogpatch defense. She just looks blank and says, “I don't know, Nurse. I been asleep. I don't know where them girls got to.” They could pull out her fingernails and she wouldn't tell them where we are or what we're up to. She might not approve, but Evvie is loyal to the bone.

CHAPTER 37

I'm back after a quiet weekend with George and Elizabeth. There isn't much time at home when I've only got three days of freedom and the travel eats up half a day at both ends. The weather is getting colder and the leaves are beginning to change colour. The maples will turn as red as arterial blood and then bleed away across the fields. It's mostly birch around the Alex, so the air turns golden with their leaves. The leaves fall off and collect in the ditches and rot away to brown mush.

I slept all Saturday morning, and then we went for a long drive that afternoon around to the institutions to visit. Mama was sleeping, so I gave her a kiss and we left. Edith's disease is progressing faster than anyone expected. She's got galloping senility, I guess. She's quit being so violent and sits all day in whatever chair they put her in. If you speak to her, she answers slowly, pulling the words out one by one. If you take her arm, she walks with you. In many ways she's similar to Mama. She doesn't have bird-hands, though, she seems to have forgotten she's got hands at all, she never uses them. It's as though she's forgetting all of her body, and if her gaze falls on any part of it, she doesn't recognize it as having anything to do with her. If she forgets her eyes, forgets she can look out of them, she's going to fall back into her empty mind and freeze there.

Late one fall I went with Robert while he shut down his cabin on the lake. Not the Bras d'Or Lakes, which are salt and have a harder time freezing, but a smaller lake, freshwater, tucked back behind the Mira where he had a camp and sometimes went fishing with his cousins. I forget what its real name is, we just called it The Lake. The cabin was small, not much more than a lean-to with some bunks built into one wall and a small stove at the far end. Shutting down the cabin consisted of putting out poison for the mice, nailing down the one window, and gathering up the empty beer bottles. It had turned cold early that year, really cold, and the lake was like glass. Water molecules were slowing down, slowing, quivering, and suddenly, as I watched, they seemed to snap into place and the lake skimmed over, instantly, everywhere at once. One second it was super-cold water and the next second it had locked down into ice. I broke the cellophane-thin surface with a rock and watched as it skimmed over again. The temperature kept dropping and I kept tossing rocks until everywhere within my reach was a slushy mass, and beyond that was smooth, silver ice, getting thicker moment by moment. There was no stopping it. As soon as I left, it would freeze over my patch and that would be that. Talking to Edith, walking her around, is like throwing rocks and trying to keep a slushy patch open. No matter what I do to delay it, she is eventually going to freeze to the bottom and that will be that. By the time Robert remembered to come and get me, I was hypothermic. He turned the truck heater on full blast and drove like a bat out of hell to the nearest restaurant where he bought me two large hot chocolates and made me drink them while he rubbed my feet.

“Don't tell your mother,” he said. Of course not. I never did.

PREVENTATIVES

Reduction of mental stress:

“It is most important to delay the mental education of Delicate Children. Too early exposure to the concepts of grammer and the rigors of mathematics will lead to an undermining of frail constitutions and the fatal development of a consumptive condition.”

—“Delicate Children,” pamphlet dated 1892

Fresh Air:

This concept was crucial to the rise of the sanatoriums in the Alps and the Adirondacks in the last part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century.

In support of the fresh-air movement, the Minnesota Society for the Prevention of Consumption mounted a crusade against nailed-on storm windows. They made everyone alter their storm windows so they could be easily opened. Those who failed to comply were fined— either that or the committee had windows changed and sent the owner a bill.

Education:

A plethora of organizations and committees and leagues and societies arose once it was realized that tuberculosis was caused by a germ and could be battled into submission. The organizations distributed literature and funded lectures, all aimed at preventing the spread of the disease with good food, good air, good housing—conditions which should have been universal, but which had become the prerogative of the wealthy and the rising middle class, especially once the industrial revolution was in full swing.

Travelling exhibitions were sent on tour, setting up in beer saloons, taverns, public halls—anywhere public space was available. On exhibit were big jars of formaldehyde-preserved tubercular lungs. Flashing lights on a display represented another death somewhere in the country, another victim fallen to tuberculosis.

CHAPTER 38

Mark's middle name is Elton and he looks very much like the photographs of Chekhov I've seen, Chekhov when he was young, all fine bones and dark hair. I've told Mark he should change Elton to Anton, but he doesn't know Chekhov from a hole in the ground, and says if he did his grandmother would kill him because he was named after her husband, Mark's grandfather. Only his eyebrows are different, much bushier than Chekhov's. Really, they're very bushy, almost too bushy, but not quite. They give his face character, they keep him from looking aimlessly handsome, like a limp Romantic Poet. I asked him if he has ever written anything and he said his driver's test. Well, one writer's enough in a relationship, I guess—not that there's anything going on. Basically we're just friends and I've asked him to help me deflect Denise in her attempts to fix me up with any or all of the candidates on her A list. Not that I told him about her hidden agenda, which is to get me relieved of my virginity. I just told him she's trying to find me a boyfriend and she's driving me crazy with her meddling. So we hang around together sometimes and Denise has eased up on her matchmaking, although she disapproves of Mark, says he's too skinny and probably hasn't got any staying power.

“Just shut up,” I tell her. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

Sometimes I read Mark some of my research.

“I was a delicate child,” I tell him. “Can my invalidity be all the fault of a too-early introduction to
The Little Engine That
Could
and
I Can Count To Ten
?”

“Maybe,” he says. “They're still big on fresh air, you notice?”

At the San, and here at the Alex, all the windows are fitted with boards that slant up from the bottom of the window ledge to deflect drafts up and over your head when the wind blows; the windows are always kept wide open when we nap or sleep. It doesn't matter how frigid it is outside, they crank up the rads and throw up the sashes and give you extra blankets if you whine and shiver a lot. At first I was too backward to demand more blankets, and so was Evvie, but we got over that after the first really cold night. We complained and moaned and whimpered until they buried us under our very own wads o' wool.

In the end it was the drugs that finished tuberculosis off as a major threat. The San is slated to close next year, and then the Alex will be the only tuberculosis hospital left in three provinces. For every new patient who comes in here, two or three get sent home cured. Only those like cranky Mrs. Cyr—who had nowhere else to go and was too old to be relocated—and Colum and Rudy—trapped in rehab by a cruel drug resistance—will be left.

Third-world countries, that's where it is now. Don't think it's gone, don't think that for a minute. Tuberculosis likes war and poverty and malnutrition and lousy, crowded living conditions. Millions of people still have it, and millions are dying of it, just not here.

All the romance goes out of it when you think about the suffering. Keats wrote, “I have been half in love with easeful death,”—and I knew just what he meant when I reread it after the misery of my first month at the San, when I couldn't sit up straight in a wheelchair for half an hour and couldn't stagger to the bathroom for weakness—but I suggest you read
The
Rack
by A. E. Ellis, as an antidote to any lingering nineteenth-century sentimentalism you might still be harbouring. It's not so pretty—
The Rack
—but then neither is tuberculosis.

CHAPTER 39

We are a dozen miles from the Bay of Fundy, but I'm sure I can hear a foghorn today. I can feel damp drizzly air blowing in through the windows and if I move an inch it will slide down under the bedclothes and cling to my backbone like a leech. There is no point in getting up. There will be nothing to look at, and the sad drip of rain will make me wallow in self-pity. Evvie must be gone to breakfast, thank goodness. The damp makes her sniff, she kept it up all last night in her sleep. Denise is pre-menstrual and cranky as all get out. Mark is away on a three-day pass. It's better to be asleep on a day like this, better to be unconscious. I pull my head down further into my shoulders, clench my eyes, and try to imagine a tropical beach: yellow-and-white-striped beach umbrellas; brilliant aquamarine water; an orange lounge chair and me on it, slightly perspiring, tanned and golden, in a tiny black bikini. My boobs are bigger. Gorgeous mounds, spilling out. I'm really trusting Elizabeth here. As a precaution, in case Miz-etc. gives in to her pathological nosiness and starts leafing though my locker when I'm off meditating in the graveyard, I've taken to mailing my journals home. Elizabeth has promised to store them for me, unopened and unread, until I get home for good and can take possession of them again. I trust Elizabeth not to peek, I do. Gave up on the code thing a while ago, so they're all in my own inimitable, incriminating prose.

Anyway, back to my boobs. Luscious, golden peaches. Offshore, coming closer, a sailboat, flying. At the tiller, Mark…

“Shake a leg, Gwen. Breakfast.”

“I'm sick.”

“Oh, really? I thought you were just in here for a cheap vacation.”

“I think I have a fever. I didn't get any sleep last night.”

“According to the nurses' log you were snoring at two a.m., at four a.m., and again at six a.m.” MacConnell jams a thermometer into my indignant, open mouth. She pulls the windows down until they're open just a few inches, adjusts a valve on the radiator, retrieves the thermometer.