View From a Kite (21 page)

“What is she goin' on about, now?” asks Evvie.

“We don't get enough champagne,” shrugs Denise.

“We don't get no champagne,” says Evvie.

“My point exactly!” I pound the table. “We get no champagne! We get no oysters and lobster! No Belgian chocolates on our pillows when we retire at night! No sable wraps tucked around us when we go for troika rides across the canals in St. Petersburg to the Royal Christmas Ball!”

“I went to a Christmas dance in Truro once,” said Evvie. “Me and Nelson went in the truck. The heater didn't work too good, and we took all the quilts in the house to wrap up in. Left the baby with Mama—we only had the one then. We got home at five in the morning and the water pipes had bust. I had such a good time. Nelson's sister lent me a dress, red silky material with lace on the sleeves and the collar, and black velvet buttons all down the front of it. Took all the next day to get the pipes fixed and the house warmed up and all the water mopped up. I hated to give that dress back. It never even fit her no more, but she likes to see it hangin' in her closet. Figures to be that small again some day, but I don't know, the women in Nelson's family tend toward fat. I don't know one ever got small again except Aunt Delly who got cancer in her ovaries and died last year. She give me a brooch when I got married to Nelson with sparkly blue stones on it. Gwen, find these stitches for me 'fore I have a fit and pitch the whole thing out the window.”

“I can't find them, Evvie, you've mashed them all together into a furry lump and lost them.”

“Well, good riddance then. Time I get this figured out my babies will be startin' school and they won't need no booties.”

“Evvie, if you don't let me teach you how to knit booties, I'll have to go back to studying history.”

“Well, all right then, but how about you knit and I'll just watch real close.”

“Deal.”

Elaine knows how to knit, it seems. She has knit Bernard three sweaters during their engagement, and she has made a shawl for his mother and twenty-eight layettes in mint green or buttercup yellow, which she places in the gift shop in town on consignment. She takes over the teaching of Evvie. Within a week, under Elaine's tutelage, Evvie completes a pair of booties and a bonnet for baby Sissie, who is Evvie's younger child, five months old, and whose real name is Carolyn. Evvie is now making a sweater in royal blue with yellow ducks marching across the back for baby Boo, who is eighteen months old and whose real name is Nelson Daniel, named after his father.

“Gwen,” says Evvie, “you should get Elaine to teach you knittin'. It's real easy when you know how.”

“Yeah, sure,” I say. “I have to study now.”

I never wore a sweater all the time I was a kid that wasn't hand knit. Between Edith and Elizabeth and Mama, I had sweaters, dresses, hats, mittens, and socks in every colour imaginable. I had a knitted sweater coat in butterscotch yellow with brass buttons and velvet lapels and pockets when I started grade primary and, when I grew out of it and had a tantrum because I couldn't wear it anymore, a replacement in my next favourite colour, purple. Silver buttons, this time, and silver lapels. Okay, it's true, I was a spoiled brat.

I had a pink-and-blue ruffled bedroom when I was small, with a fire truck under the bed that had lights, a real siren, and a hose that squirted real water. D-cell batteries to run it, a whole raft of them. And books, hundreds and hundreds of books, all in Edith's attic now. I learned to read when I was four. My parents only had the one child, in the end, so I played all the parts. I learned to put worms on a hook and bows in my hair. All the attention there was to be got, I got. But as he slowly sank into self-absorption, and she murmured and fretted into a tighter and tighter spiral of worry, I started slip-sliding though the gaps in their attention. Just about when I was wanting some freedom, I got as much as I could grab. As long as I was good and tidy at home, I could escape, reckless, into the dark night hours.

When I was very small, I could crawl Sunday mornings into their warm flannelette bed, snuggle down into the sleep-softened smell of nightgowns and pyjamas and sheets and the tickle of whisker stubble. No squirming, or you're out. Chilly toes wiggling in warm pockets of air. I was so safe, then. I've never felt that safe since.

I would like to sleep with Mark, not for sex, but to feel his fever flesh warm against my chilly backbone. I'd like to fall asleep, dream, with his long tangle-legs spidering mine, his arm around my chest, pale fingers curved around one breast. Breathing soft and slow into the same pillow. It's lonely and cold in this too-white, hospital-corner-sheeted, metallic-framed, rock-pillowed slab of unrepose. Mark and I could sleep our way to health, snooze and stir and cuddle and sleep again. A month, and we'd both be cured. Fit as fiddles. Healthy as horses. Right as rain.

CHAPTER 44

A stairwell is a good backdrop for anything—it's a vertical tunnel with grey painted cement walls, black-and-white tiles underfoot, metal stairs going up and around, down and around, solid steel featureless doors leading off each landing to another level of existence. If you stick your head over a railing and sing, your voice echoes down and soars up. If you whisper, it skitters around and down the well. The stairwell I dream about is lightless; I can barely make out the steps, which sometimes are wood and sometimes the grey-green carpet of our old house and sometimes tiled like in the Alex. The walls are fog on three sides and the fourth is black, and of course I know what is in the black, but I never look in the dreams because I'm too scared and in the daytime when I try, I can't remember what I saw. It's just a black, ugly hole.

Denise and I smoke in the stairwell, and escape using the stairwell, and Mark and I go there after midnight bed check to make out sometimes. It's a good place to make out because it's not so comfortable you get so carried away that you go too far, and you can hear the second a nurse or an orderly opens a door and sticks their nose in to see if anyone's up when they shouldn't be, and any patients who happen along will deliberately make some noise so you've got time to unglue your mouths and drag your hands out of places they shouldn't be.

God, I hope you are not reading this, Elizabeth.

Maybe I should go back to writing in code. But it takes so long, and I've mostly forgotten the code I used at the San; I could barely translate the stuff I'd written there the last time I was home.

I want to write about Mark's torso. How smooth and silky the skin is and the way it fits over the ivory knobs of his backbone. The curve of his ribs, like the ribs of a graceful sailboat. The way his stomach muscles flutter and leap when I slide my fingertips over them. The shape of his forearms, the strength of the slender muscles there, and how the tendons at his wrist flex and twist. The hair on his chest is black and looks like wire springs, but when I spread my fingers and run them through it, it feels like smoke. When I take possession of all these beautiful shapes I take possession of his mind. His eyes glaze and roll away. There is, besides the pleasure of throbbing nerve endings, the most delicious sense of power. It has occurred to me that he would probably do just about anything I asked, and that I can easily make him ecstatic or miserable. It seems like much too much power for one person to have over another, but it is wildly exciting, almost as exciting as almost-being-caught, almost as exciting as the reciprocal fire he sometimes lights in me.

“You reek like a goat,” Denise tells me, if I don't get to the bathroom to wash up before she sees me. “Don't think you're fooling anybody.”

“We're not doing anything,” I say, “and it's none of your business anyway.”

“You watch yourself,” she says. “Men are jerks. The younger they are, the worse they are.”

You can see why I try to avoid her. I know what she's trying to tell me. But I'm addicted to the stairwell, and stairwell fever, and the taste of his mouth and the silk of his skin and she should just mind her own business.

REALLY SILLY IDEAS

1.By 1900 the medical profession had banned pineapples, bananas, and all tropical fruit from the diet of the consumptive. Because the consumptive was believed to be already too feverish and hot-blooded, reckless and sensual, as a result of his or her disease, it was felt that tropical fruits could only have an incendiary effect on the patient's mind (and body) and were to be avoided at all costs.

2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, herself a consumptive, was overheard to ask, “Is it possible that genius is only scrofula?” Elizabeth—not the bacilli—wrote Songs From the Portuguese. Keats wrote “Ode To A Nightingale,” Hemingway wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls, Chekhov wrote The Seagull. Diseases do not write literature.

3. Shelley was convinced Keats's disease and death was the direct result of a bad review. A nasty attack directed at Keats's poetry in the Quarterly Review, according to Shelley, “produced the most violent affect on his susceptible mind. The agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued.”

The fact that Keats had spent years nursing first his dying tubercular mother and then, after her death, his dying tubercular brother was not thought to be of any consequence. While it's quite plausible that the nasty review upset Keats to the point that he blew a blood vessel, he'd undoubtedly been tubercular for years. As a precaution, however, one could avoid reading bad reviews.

CHAPTER 45

I miss Denise. It's not that we're fighting again, but I've been spending a lot of time with Mark, lately. When I moved from town to Edith's, I had to switch schools and lost contact with all my friends. I never did really make new ones, living at Edith's, going on the bus to that school in the middle of a hayfield. Besides, Edith's place is way out in the country and nobody lives close enough to visit except for George and Elizabeth, and anyway I didn't much feel like talking to anybody. So I've kind of got used to Denise, she's smart and funny and I like her a lot. Evvie's a hoot, and I like her too, but we're chalk and cheese and when she and I leave here we'll likely never see each other again.

So when I hear Denise snivelling in the can again, and I do recognize her snivel, I leap right in behind her and jam the door shut. Mark, yummy as he is, flies right out of my mind.

I hand her a wad of toilet paper and wait for her to say something.

“Men are pigs,” she says.

A clue. Which man?

“You mean Don? What's he done, the scum-bucket?” I ask. Denise decided to keep Don, of the car and pizza-fetching habit, to herself when I rejected the entire A list in favour of Mark.

“Not Don, you idiot.”

“Gerry? Shall I put out a contract on him for you?”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“Well, who then? Tell me who I have to have castrated to avenge your honour?”

“Fool. If you really have to know, it's that jerk-off, Tommy.” She sniffs and blows hard.

Uh-oh. This is serious. Tommy is her fiancé in Alberta.

“What's he done?”

“He broke our engagement. He's gone and knocked up some little slut in Calgary and he says he has to marry her. He says he still loves me, but he has to marry her.”

I'm a little uncomfortable. I'd like to call down Heaven's Wrath on the lying, cheating wayward piece of dogshit but…

“Denise, you know, you've sort of been messing around yourself. You know?”

“Yes, but it didn't mean anything. Tommy was my one true love and I was going to marry him as soon as I got out, the festering dickhead.”

“Denise, I'm so sorry.” Sympathy is all I have to offer. Maybe it's all that's needed.

“Now I don't know what I'm going to do when I get out of here. I had it all planned.”

“Denise,” I say firmly, “we have no problems, only opportunities. You can do anything you want when you get out of here. You don't have to depend on some man to arrange your life.”

“But I wanted to marry Tommy and go live out west.”

“Well,” I say, “you know you could go out to Calgary when you get out of here, and screw up their marriage and get him back, but is that what you really want?” I'm not sure that this is at all true, but it seems like the soothing sort of thing Denise's ego needs right about now.

“No,” she says, honking again. “Sometimes I hardly even remember what he looks like anymore. That's really why I'm upset. Because we used to be, you know, really in love, and then I got sick and he had to go out west and so much time went by. He probably doesn't even remember what I look like anymore.” She wails into my shoulder at this and we stand there in the stall until she's done crying.

“That's it,” she says. “The hell with him. It's his loss.”

“Damn right,” I say. “Denise, let's go find Patrick and borrow his jam jar and go party in the graveyard after lights out.”

“What about lover-boy?” She really does resent the time I spend with him.

“Friends come first,” I tell her, and then I feel guilty about Mark—who I swear I am crazy about—because it's true. First Denise, then Mark.

CHAPTER 46

“The adventurous physician goes on, and substitutes presumption for knowledge. From the scanty regions of what is known, he launches into the boundless region of what is unknown.”

—Thomas Jefferson

Now we are coming to some quite grisly bits. You may want to skip this altogether. Remember the stomach-sucking description? Consider yourself warned.

Horse dung and Hemboldt's Buchu Extract, sea voyages and opium, can only accomplish so much. Thoracic surgery— cutting into the patient's chest—was, for a long time, thought to be too dangerous, but the medical profession got over that by the late nineteenth century.