Sylvie: Short Story (4 page)

The next day, Wednesday, it’s mostly doctors who keep coming into her room. They don’t have to put on any acts. They pull up her hospital gown and take good looks, and if a couple of them arrive at the same time, they talk with each other about her little womb and menstrual cycles and bowel movements. Sometimes they ask her questions, sometimes they don’t even say hello. Off and on John pops in to see how she is. He isn’t as keyed-up as he was the day before, but he has meetings and can’t stay for long.

When she is wheeled out on a stretcher to have X-rays, patients are lined along the corridors, waiting for her. She feels like a float in a parade. When she returns to her room, John is at the desk having his dinner, but there’s no meal for her because she isn’t allowed to eat now until after the operation. “Am I allowed sleeping pills?” she asks anxiously, afraid of what she might start thinking, and remembering, if she lies awake. John pulls out a bottle from his coat pocket. “How many do you think you’ll need?” he asks.

A nurse wakes her before dawn to wash her and to shave the pubic hair from herself and from Sue. Several minutes later John and another nurse and an intern come in.

“This is it,” John says.

He keeps her calm by holding her hand as she is wheeled down the corridors and into the operating theatre. She is
brought to the centre of what seems like a stage. John scans the rows of doctors seated behind glass in the encircling tiers. “There are some big names here,” he says quietly.

“John?” she says.

He bends toward her. “Yes?”

She gazes at his beautiful face. She can’t remember what she was going to say.

“Are you ready, darling?” he asks.

She nods.

A doctor places the ether mask over her mouth and starts the countdown. Still holding her hand, John leans to look into her eyes. The doctor says nine. John’s eyes bore into her. The doctor says eight, seven. Sylvie’s eyelids drop.

Light hits glass and magnifies something. A polyphemus moth! she thinks excitedly. The light and the magnification grow stronger and stronger until she realizes that what she is looking at is even more infinitesimal than the moth’s atoms.

It resembles a vast pine forest. A needle on one of the trees is magnified and becomes a million exotic fish, then one of the fish’s scales is magnified and becomes a galaxy of fireflies.

The magnification stops there. The fireflies are lit. “They must be alive,” she thinks, and later, weeks later, John will try to cheer her up by telling her how she said this in a loud voice just before going under, and how it drew a laugh from the doctors seated in the gallery.

If you enjoyed “Sylvie” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection
We So Seldom Look on Love
.
E-book:
9781443402484
Print:
9780006475231

B
ARBARA
G
OWDY
was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.

Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.

Her first book,
Through the Green Valley
(a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published
Falling Angels
to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection,
We So Seldom Look on Love,
was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into
Kissed,
a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich.
Falling Angels
was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.

Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—
Mister Sandman
(1995),
The White Bone
(1998) and
The Romantic
(2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including
Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English
and the
Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.

Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The Romantic
earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in
Harper’s Magazine,
singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”

Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel,
Helpless,
was published by HarperCollins in 2007.

She lives in Toronto.

THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY
FALLING ANGELS
MISTER SANDMAN
THE WHITE BONE
THE ROMANTIC
HELPLESS

“Sylvie” © 1992 by Barbara Gowdy.

All rights reserved.

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

This short story was originally published in
We So Seldom Look on Love
by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in print form in 2001, and in an ePub edition in 2011.

Original epub edition (in
We So Seldom Look on Love
) April 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40248-4.

This ePub edition DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-42183-6.

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