The Stone Angel (32 page)

“Oh my God,” Marvin says. “I can’t win, can I?”

“I’ll move. I’ll move. Did I say I wouldn’t?”

“You’ll really like it, I’m sure,” Doris tries. “Once you’re there. It’s the new wing.”

“That’s all I need,” I say snappishly. “A new wing.”

“It’s no use, Marv,” she whispers. “You can see it’s not a bit of use. She’s rambling. We may as well go.”

But he stays.

“If you’d just say for sure what you want, Mother—”

I’m tired. I’m quite done in now. “I don’t care, Marvin. It doesn’t matter in the slightest.”

“Sure?” He frowns.

“Quite sure. Move me or not. It’s all the same to me.”

“Okay, then. It’s just that I’d feel like a fool, asking them to change the arrangements all over again, when I’d asked—”

“I know. You’d better go now, Marvin. I’m a little tired tonight.”

When he’s gone, I roll over and close my eyes. Elva Jardine stops beside my bed on her way past. I can feel her rough gown brushing against me. I keep my eyes tightly shut.

“She’s asleep,” Elva hisses. “It’ll do her a world of good.”

These are the last words I hear her say, for they come with a large trolley, and heave me onto it and trundle me away. Eva’s curtains are closed. She is closeted with the nurse for the performance of some mysterious rite, and doesn’t know I’ve left. Mrs. Reilly, lethargic as a giant slug, lies snoring. As the wheels spin down the corridor, I can hear Mrs. Dobereiner’s song like the high thin whining of a mosquito.

THE WORLD
is even smaller now. It’s shrinking so quickly. The next room will be the smallest of all.

The next room will be the smallest of the lot.”

“What?” the nurse says absent-mindedly, plumping my pillow.

“Just enough space for me.”

She looks shocked. “That’s no way to talk.”

How right she is. An embarrassing subject, better not mentioned. The way we used to feel, when I was a girl, about undergarments or the two-backed beast of love. But I want to take hold of her arm, force her attention.
Listen. You must listen. It’s important. It’s—quite an event
.

Only to me. Not to her. I don’t touch her arm, nor speak. It would only upset her. She wouldn’t know what to say.

This room is light and airy. The walls are primrose, and there’s a private bathroom. The curtains are printed with delphiniums on a pale yellow background. I always have like flowered material, provided it wasn’t gaudy. But such a room must cost a lot. And now that I’ve thought of it, it worries me terribly. Goodness knows what it costs. Marvin never said. I must ask him. I mustn’t forget. What
if I haven’t enough money? I can’t ask Marvin and Doris to pay for it. Marvin would do it—that I do know. But I wouldn’t ask. They’ll have to move me again. That’s all there is to it.

There’s another bed, but it’s empty. I’m alone. A nurse comes in again, not the same nurse. This one can’t be a day over twenty, and she’s so slight you’d wonder how such an insubstantial frame could support life at all. Her stomach is concave, and her breasts are no bigger than two damson plums. Fashionable, I suppose. Quite likely she’s pleased to look that way. Her hips are so narrow, I wonder what she’ll ever do if she has children? Or even when she marries. She can’t be any wider than a peashooter inside.

“You girls are so slim these days.”

She smiles. She’s used to the inane remarks of old women.

I’ll bet you were just as slim, when you were young, Mrs. Shipley.”

“Oh—you know my name.” Then I remember it’s on a card at the foot of my bed, and I feel a fool. “Yes, I was quite slender at your age. I had black hair, long, halfway down my back. Some people thought me quite pretty. You’d never think so to look at me now.”

“Yes, you would,” she says, standing back a little and regarding me. “I wouldn’t say you’d been exactly
pretty—
handsome is what I’d say. You’ve got such strong features. Good bones don’t change. You’re still handsome.”

I’m quite well aware that she’s flattering me, but I’m pleased all the same. She’s a friendly girl. She seems to do it out of friendliness, not pity.

“That’s kind of you. You’re a nice girl. You’re lucky, to be young.”

I wish I hadn’t added that. I never used to say whatever popped into my head. How slipshod I’m growing.

“I guess so.” She smiles, but differently, aloofly. “Maybe you’re the lucky one.”

“How so, for mercy’s sake?”

“Oh well—” she says evasively, “you’ve had those years. Nothing can take them away.”

“That’s a mixed blessing, surely,” I say dryly, but of course she doesn’t see what I mean. We were talking so nicely, and now it’s gone. Something lurks behind her eyes, but I don’t know what it is. What troubles her? What could possibly trouble anyone as young and attractive as she is, with her health, and with training so she need never worry about getting a job? Yet, even as I think this, I know it’s daft. The plagues go on from generation to generation.

“You settle down now,” she says. “I’ll drop by in a little while to see if you’re all right.”

But when the long night is upon me, she doesn’t come. There are no voices, I cannot hear a living soul. I sleep and waken, sleep and waken, until I no longer know whether I’m asleep and dreaming I’m awake, or wakeful and imagining that I sleep.

The floor is cold, and I don’t know where my slippers have got to. Thank heavens at least Doris has moved the mat beside my bed. It was a real hazard, that mat. A person couldn’t help but slip on it. Breathing seems so slow, and each breath hurts. How peculiar. It used to be so easy one never considered it at all. The light is on beyond that open door. If I reach it, someone will speak. Will the voice be the one I have been listening for?

What keeps him? He could surely say something. It wouldn’t hurt him, just to say a word.
Hagar
. He was the
only one who ever called me by my name. It wouldn’t hurt him to speak. It’s not so much to ask.

“Mrs. Shipley—”

A high alarmed voice, a girl’s. And I, a sleepwalker wakened, can only stand stiffly, paralyzed with the impact of her cry. Then a hand grasps my arm.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Shipley. Everything’s all right. You just come along with me.”

Oh. I’m here, am I? And I’ve been wandering around, and the girl is frightened, for she’s responsible. She leads me back to bed. Then she does something else, and at first I don’t understand.

“It’s like a little bed-jacket, really. It’s nothing. It’s just to keep you from harm. It’s for your own protection.”

Coarse linen, it feels like. She slides my arms in, and ties the harness firmly to the bed. I pull, and find I’m knotted and held like a trussed fowl.

“I won’t have this. I won’t stand for it. It’s not right. Oh, it’s mean—”

The nurse’s voice is low, as though she were half ashamed of what she’d done. “I’m sorry. But you might fall, you see, and—”

“Do you think I’m crazy, that I have to be put into this rig?”

“Of course not. You might hurt yourself, that’s all. Please—”

I hear the desperation in her voice. Now that I think of it, what else can she do? She can’t sit here by my bed all night.

“I have to do it,” she says, “Don’t be angry.”

She has to do it. Quite right. It’s not her fault. Even I can see that.

“All right.” I can barely hear my own voice, but I hear her slight answering sigh.

“I’m sorry,” she says helplessly, apologizing needlessly, perhaps on behalf of God, who never apologizes. Then I’m the one who’s sorry.

“I’ve caused you so much trouble—”

“No, you haven’t. I’m going to give you a hypo now. Then you’ll be more comfortable, and probably you’ll sleep.”

And incredibly, despite my canvas cage, I do.

When I waken, the other bed has an inhabitant. She is sitting up in bed, reading a magazine, or pretending to. Sometimes she cries a little, putting a hand to her abdomen. She is about sixteen, I’d say, and her face is delicately boned, olive-skinned. Her eyes, as she glances hesitantly at me, are dark and only slightly slanted. Her hair is thick and black and straight, and it shines. She’s a celestial, as we used to call them.

“Good morning.” I don’t know if I should speak or not, but she doesn’t take it amiss. She lays the magazine down and smiles at me. Grins, rather—it’s the bold half-hoydenish smile the youngsters all seem to wear these days.

“Hi,” she says. “You’re Mrs. Shipley. I saw it on your card. I’m Sandra Wong.”

She speaks just like Tina. Obviously she was born in this country.

“How do you do?”

My absurd formality with this child is caused by my sudden certainty that she is the granddaughter of one of the small foot-bound women whom Mr. Oatley smuggled in, when Oriental wives were frowned upon, in the hazardous hold of his false-bottomed boats. Maybe
I owe my house to her grandmother’s passage money. There’s a thought. Mr. Oatley showed me one of their shoes once. It was no bigger than a child’s, although it had belonged to a full-grown woman. A silk embroidered case, emerald and gold, where the foot fitted, and beneath, a crescent platform of rope and plaster, so they must have walked as though upon two miniature rockers. I don’t say any of this. To her, it would be ancient history.

“I have to have my appendix out,” she says. “They’re going to get me ready soon. It’s an emergency. I was really bad last night. I was real scared and so was my mom. Have you ever had your appendix out? Is it bad?”

“I had mine out years ago,” I say, although in fact I’ve never even had my tonsils out. “It’s not a serious operation.”

“Yeh?” she says. “Is that right? I’ve never had an operation before. You don’t know what to expect, if it’s your first time.”

“Well, you needn’t worry,” I say. “It’s just routine these days. You’ll be up before you know it.”

“Do you really think so? Gee, I don’t know. I was pretty scared last night. I don’t like the thought of the anesthetic.”

“Bosh. That’s nothing. You’ll feel a bit uncomfortable afterward, but that’s all.”

“Is that right? You really think so?”

“Of course.”

“Well, you oughta know,” she says. “I guess you’ve had lots of operations, eh?”

I can hardly keep from laughing aloud. But she’d be offended, so I restrain myself.

“What makes you think so?”

“Oh well—I just meant, a person who’s—you know—not so young—”

“Yes. Of course. Well, I’ve not had all that many operations. Perhaps I’ve been lucky.”

“I guess so. My mom had a hysterectomy year before last.”

At her age I wouldn’t have known what a hysterectomy was.

“Dear me. That’s too bad.”

“Yeh. That’s a tough one, all right. It’s not so much the operation, you know—it’s the emotional upheaval afterward.”

“Really?”

“Yeh,” she says knowledgeably. “My mom was all on edge for months. It got her down, you know, that she couldn’t have any more kids. I don’t know why she wanted any more. She’s got five already counting me. I’m the second oldest.”

“That’s a good-sized family, all right. What does your father do?”

“He has a store.”

“Well, well. So did mine.”

But that’s the wrong thing to say. So much distance lies between us, she doesn’t want any such similarity.

“Oh?” she says, uninterested. She looks at her watch. “They said they’d be along in a minute. 1 wonder what’s holding them up? A person could get forgotten in a big place like this, I bet.”

“They’ll be here soon.”

“Gee, not too soon, I hope,” she says.

Her eyes change, widen, spread until they’re shaped like two peach stones. The amber centers glisten.

They wouldn’t let my mom stay.” Then, defiantly, “Not that I need her. But it would’ve been company.”

A nurse trots briskly in, pulls the curtains around her bed.

“Oh—is it time?” Her voice is querulous, uncertain. “Will it hurt?”

“You won’t feel a thing,” the nurse says.

“Will it take long? Will my mom be able to come in afterward? Where do you have to take me? Oh—what’re you going to do? You’re not going to shave me
there?”

What a lot of questions, and how appalled she sounds. Fancy being alarmed at such a trifling thing. I lie here smug and fat, thinking—
She’ll learn
.

They don’t bring her back for hours, and when they do, she’s very quiet. The curtains are drawn around her bed. Sometimes she moans a little in the half sleep of the receding anesthetic. The day goes slowly. Trays are brought me, and I make some effort to eat, but I seem to have lost interest in my meals. I look at the ceiling, where the sun patterns it with slivers of light. Someone puts a needle in my flesh. Have I cried out, then? What does it matter if I did? But I’d rather not.

I liked that forest. I recall the ferns, cool and lacy. But I was thirsty, so I had to come here. The man’s name was Ferney, and he spoke about his wife. She was never the same. That wasn’t fair to him. She just didn’t know. But he didn’t know, either. He never said how she took the child’s death. I drift like kelp. Nothing seems to be around me at all.