A Canadian journalist named Pinky Fulham was killed when a soft drinks vending machine overturned, crushing him. Apparently he had been rocking it back and forth, trying to dislodge a stuck quarter. Years ago Pinky Fulham did Mrs. Daisy Flett a grave injury, and so when she hears about his death she can’t very well pretend to any great sorrow.
“Good God,” her daughter, Alice, said, “how did you hear about this?”
“Someone told me,” Grandma Flett said mysteriously. “Or maybe it was in the paper.”
“Really? That’s incredible.”
“Actually eleven North Americans per year are killed by overturned vending machines. It was in the newspaper. I remember reading about it not long ago. Yesterday, I think. Or maybe it was this morning.”
“And Pinky Fulham was one of them.”
“So it seems.”
“Incredible.”
“I suppose it is.”
Since her heart attack everything takes her by surprise, but nothing more so than her willingness to let it, as though a new sense of her own hollowness has made her a volunteer for replacement. Her body’s dead planet with its atoms and molecules and lumps of matter is blooming all of a sudden with headlines, nightmares, greeting cards, medicinal bitterness, crashes in the night, footsteps in the corridor, the odors of her own breath and blood, someone near her door humming a tune she comes close to recognizing.
A parcel arrives for Grandma Flett. A bedjacket from her granddaughter, Judy, in England.
Oh dear, dear! — you know you’re sick when someone sends you a bedjacket instead of bath powder or a nice travel book. A bedjacket is almost as antiquated as a bustle or a dress shield. A bedjacket speaks of desperation, and what it says is: toodle-oo.
Nevertheless, old Mrs. Flett understands that her granddaughter has gone to a good deal of trouble to find this bedjacket. A bedjacket, these days, is a hard-to-find item. Major department stores might stock a mere half-dozen or so, if at all, and the sales clerks, women in their forties or fifties, look up baffled when you lean over the counter and say, “I’m afraid I can’t seem to find where the bedjackets are located.”
Where are bedjackets manufactured? New York? San Francisco? Maybe some little town in the middle of Iowa has cornered the market: the bedjacket capital of the nation. Of the world. But who designs this curious apparel? The lace borders, the little quilted sleeves, the grosgrain ribbons that tie under your chin?
Maybe no one designs them. Maybe they simply multiply like dandelion cotton on the back shelves of lingerie factories. Another thing — why and when should a person wear a bedjacket? Is a bedjacket a private or public garment? Do you sleep in it, or take it off before retiring? Does it come with an instructions manual?
“You seem a thousand miles away, Mother.”
“I was just thinking how sweet of Judy to remember me.”
“She adores you, you know.”
“I’ve never owned a bedjacket before.”
“You look lovely in it. Wait till Dr. Riccia sees you. He’ll be flowing with compliments.”
“That man.”
“He’s not so bad. Come on, now. Those eyelashes, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed his eyelashes? He’s really a perfectly lovely man. Admit it, now.”
“Well.”
“Well water! Personally, I find him ravishing. And, secretly, I think you do too.”
“Hmmmm.”
Alice does not find Reverend Rick ravishing; she knows the type.
She greets him coldly, almost rudely when he turns up one day at Canary Palms, and then she makes a point of disappearing, leaving him alone to chat with her mother.
Mrs. Flett understands, without being told, that Alice wants only to protect her from evangelical coercion, from this room-to-room peddler of guilt-wrapped wares. Alice, from her middle-age perspective, believes her mother to have a soul already spotless — spotless enough anyway — and is outraged to see the spectre of sin visited upon one so old and ill and vulnerable.
However, the conversation between Mrs. Flett and Reverend Rick today takes a sharp turn away from elderly souls and the dream of redemption.
“I’m gay, you see,” Reverend Rick tells Mrs. Flett. “Homosexual. I didn’t know it when I studied for the ministry but then, well, I discovered my true orientation. For a long time I stayed, you know, in the closet. Then one or two people knew, then, gradually, half a dozen, now almost everyone knows — except for my mother.
That’s my problem. Do I tell her or not? And I was wondering, you’re about the same age as my mom. Well, actually my mom is only about sixty, but for some reason you remind me of her. I don’t know what to do. She keeps asking me when I’m going to find a nice girl and settle down. It’s got so I hate to go home, I just know she’s going to ask me.”
There’s a part of Mrs. Flett that longs to close her eyes at this moment and drift into sleep. And she knows perfectly well she could get away with it; her age gives her the privilege.
This is too bothersome. Too painful.
She feels a tearing sound behind her eyes, and understands that she is flattered by this confidence and also resentful. For one thing, it wounds her to be put, thoughtlessly, into the same box with Reverend Rick’s mother, who is a woman she senses she might not like. As a matter of fact, she does not really like Reverend Rick, has never liked him; there’s something greedy about his zeal, and then there are his slumped shoulders and his shirt collars which look oddly chewed. On the other hand, this young man has driven all the way across town, all the way out to Canary Palms — and on a murderously hot day — in order to consult with her, to seek her wisdom. This has not happened often in Mrs.
Flett’s life. Never, in fact. It almost certainly will not happen again.
“Have you tried,” she says at last, “not being gay.”
“What?” He shakes a dangling lock of hair out of his eyes.
“You know. Finding yourself a girlfriend and seeing if — well, you might surprise yourself, you may find that you really like having a girlfriend — what I mean is, it’s possible you might change your attitude.”
“Being gay, Mrs. Flett, is not a question of attitude.”
She has offended him. Without turning her head and looking directly at him, she can tell that his whole body has stiffened. This she cannot bear. To be the cause of injury. Her greatest weakness — she’s always known this — is her fear of giving injury, any more, that is, than she’s already given. And so, despite her irritation, despite what she’s read in the papers about Aids, she stretches out her hand to him, and feels it taken.
“Don’t tell your mother,” she says after a minute.
“But I can’t go on living a lie.”
“Why not?” Then she pauses. “Most people do.”
“Not if we take our Christian faith seriously—”
“Your mother already knows.” She says this crossly.
Suddenly it seems to Mrs. Flett that Reverend Rick’s mother is here in the room with them, and that she really is, after all, a rather nice woman. Full of bustle and go. Full of smiles.
“Let me put it this way. Your mother half-knows. Soon she will fully know. She’ll work it out. People do. It’s not something the two of you will ever have to discus if you don’t want to. Not ever.” (She can’t help feeling just a little proud of this speech.)
“But to live with this barrier between us!” he says in a silly, whispery voice. He is weeping now. Weeping and sniffling.
“I’m afraid I’m feeling, all of a sudden, terribly tired. These pills they give me.”