“It was different in your day. People were afraid to be open.
They lived their whole lives as if they were fairytales.”
“Terribly, terribly sleepy.” Her throat tingles, it really does. “If you’ll forgive me.”
“May God bless you, Mrs. Flett.”
How does one reply to God’s blessing? “Goodbye,” Mrs. Flett says firmly, shutting her eyes, pressing her head hard against her pillows, and then adding a motherly, grandmotherly, womanly, feminine tossed-coin of a benediction, “Drive carefully now.”
In the middle of writing a check she forgets the month, then the year. She’s gaga, a loon, she’s sprung a leak, her brain matter is falling out like the gray fluff from mailing envelopes, it’s getting all over the furniture. What she needs, she tells her daughter, is open-heart surgery on her head.
“Ha,” Alice says obligingly.
Everything makes her cross, the frowsiness of dead flowers in a vase, the smell of urine, her own urine. She’s turned into a bitter hag, but well, not really, you see. Inside she’s still a bowl of vibrating Jello, wise old Mrs. Green Thumb, remember her? Someone you can always call on, count on, phone in an emergency, etc.
It surprises Grandma Flett that there is so much humor hidden in the earth’s crevasses; it’s everywhere, like a thousand species of moss. Almost every day she sees an item or two in the paper or on Good Morning America that brings a smile to her lips. Or else something amusing will happen on the floor, the nurses kidding back and forth, some ongoing joke. Who would have thought that comedy could stretch all the way to infirm old age?
And vanity too. Vanity refuses to die, pushing the blandness of everyday life into little pleats, pockets, knobs of electric candy.
She looks into her bedside mirror, so cunningly hidden on the reverse side of the bed tray, and says, “There she is, my life’s companion. Once I sat in her heart. Now I crouch in a corner of her eye.” Nevertheless she applies a little lipstick in the morning before Dr. Riccia comes around, and a dusting of powder across her nose (she’s had to give up her favorite Woodbury). Just how is it she finds the energy to lift her powder puff, knowing what she knows?
And she inspects her nails. It was Alice who arranged for the manicurist to drop in last week. Naturally Mrs. Flett resisted at first — she has never in her life had a professional manicure, such an extravagance! — but Alice insisted; a little treat, she called it.
And so Mrs. Flett’s hands were lowered into various soapy solutions, then taken into this young woman’s lap and gently dried with a towel. Her cuticles were trimmed and the nails shaped into perfect ovals. “Moons or plain?” she was asked. “What do you suggest?” said Mrs. Flett. “Well, now,” the manicurist began, and it was clear that this decision would require some serious thought, some discussion. A French polish was finally decided on; “It gives a beautiful clean look, nice for summer.” As though Mrs. Flett would soon be attending a series of garden parties or dropping in at one of Sarasota’s finest dining establishments.
She keeps her ten buffed beauties carefully under the top sheet, but withdraws them every half hour or so for inspection, spreading them out in the sunshine. She looks at them first thing in the morning and last thing at night, but the fact is, she is almost continuously aware of them. They flutter lightly at her sides, and their lightness travels up to her wrists and flows into her arms and body.
They look elegant; they do! They look brand new. When you think of the slippage her body has undergone, the spoilage, you can perhaps understand her latest foolishness. But this concentration on fingernails is close to being obsessive, a distortion of normal powder-and-lipstick vanity. It shames her to think about what it means. How thin and unrewarding her life must have been, that such a little thing should give her so much pleasure. If she’s not careful she’ll turn into one of those pathetic old fruitcakes who are forever counting their blessings.
“Have you ever thought of having a pedicure?” Alice asks her.
Pictures fly into her head, brighter by far than those she sees on the big TV screen in the patients’ lounge. A sparkling subversion.
Murmurings in her ears. She can tune in any time she likes.
She is seven years old, standing in her Aunt Clarentine’s garden, stooping over the snapdragons, pinching them with her fingers so that their mouths open and close. They possess teeth and tiny tongues. Do other people know about this? She picks a spear of chive and sucks it. “Daisy,” she hears. She’s being called in to supper. Aunt Clarentine’s promised to make pancakes tonight. All this: the thought of pancakes, the hot bite of chives, the hidden throats of flowers, the sun, the sound of her own name — she is suddenly dizzy with the press of sensation, afraid she will die of it.
Snow fell on the neighborhood houses and at once they, and their small fenced yards, became whitened with soft fur, with what used to be called in those days spring sherbet. She scooped a handful from her bedroom window sill, held it against her forehead until she could bear it no longer. A test of some kind. A test of courage. The moonlight was cold and clear.
She found something beautiful. A dazzling iridescence on the road. A rainbow pressed into the paving. No one else knew it was there, this marvellous thing she had discovered. But she made the mistake of showing it to one of the older girls in the neighborhood who said, calm as can be, “Why it’s only oil, just a little oil spilled on the roadway, nothing to make a fuss over.”
Summer again. She took a blade of grass, split it with her fingernail, held it between her thumbs and blew. Someone showed her how to do this, she can’t remember who. It was easy — making this wailing sound, like a loon screeching. You got better and better at it. You learned, and you never forgot. You were like other people, you could do the same things other people did.
The brown leaves had been raked into a pile ready to burn, and she longed to lie down on top of them for just a minute, flat on her back in the rustling leaves, staring upward. She let herself fall backward, her arms straight out, trustingly, and at once the complications of branches, fences, sheds and houses, so dense and tangled together, burst with a cartoon pop into the spare singularity of sky, the primary abruptness of blue. That’s all there was.
Herself suspended in a glass sphere. You could go back and back to that true and steadfast picture, hold it in your head for the rest of your life.
What is your name?
Daisy.
Daisy what?
Daisy Goodwill.
Do you know what the word “Daisy” means? It means “Day’s Eye.”
That’s right. I used to know that. I’d forgotten.
A daisy really is a bit like an eye when you think about it, round and fringed with lashes, staring upward.
Opening, closing.
The odd thing about the pictures that fly into Daisy Goodwill’s head is that she is always alone. There are voices that reach her from a distance; there are shadows and suggestions — but still she is alone. And we require, it seems, in our moments of courage or shame, at least one witness, but Mrs. Flett has not had this privilege. This is what breaks her heart. What she can’t bear. Even now, eighty years old.
Grandma Flett knows she rambles, she knows she repeats herself, and Alice, bless her, never stops her, never says, “You’ve already told us about that, Mother.”
All she’s trying to do is keep things straight in her head. To keep the weight of her memories evenly distributed. To hold the chapters of her life in order. She feels a new tenderness growing for certain moments; they’re like beads on a string, and the string is wearing out. At the same time she knows that what lies ahead of her must be concluded by the efforts of her imagination and not by the straight-faced recital of a throttled and unlit history. Words are more and more required. And the question arises: what is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression?