Fiction by Marilyn Gear Pilling - Room Magazine
Fiction by Marilyn Gear Pilling - Room Magazine
Fiction by Marilyn Gear Pilling - Room Magazine
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Honest Work<br />
MARILYN GEAR PILLING<br />
Your husband has the car for the weekend. You need a car to visit your<br />
friend in the hospital tomorrow morning and Sunday morning. The<br />
hospital is eight kilometres away. Should you rent a car, call a taxi, take two<br />
buses, or walk?<br />
You decide to ride your bicycle.<br />
There is no question of staying home. This is no ordinary friend. You<br />
met this man three years ago, when he became a consultant at the college<br />
where you’re an administrator. That very first afternoon—the three-hour<br />
meeting, coffee afterwards—you knew. All <strong>by</strong> themselves, every one of your<br />
candles with a pointed fire on top.<br />
By morning, it’s cloudy and cold for May. To hell with riding your bike.<br />
After all, the complex land form known as the Niagara Escarpment is<br />
between you and the hospital.<br />
You can hardly read the small print in the phone book anymore, even<br />
wearing glasses, so you call the company with the brilliant idea of giving<br />
itself the number 777-7777.<br />
What luck, every light but one is green for the cab. You tell the driver<br />
that you are going to walk home. This is when you learn that the hospital is<br />
eight kilometres from where you live. The driver says he could not walk that<br />
distance. You tell him you are fifty-nine, and you can walk that far. How old is<br />
he?<br />
“Thirty,” he says.<br />
(You had hoped he would reply <strong>by</strong> saying that you don’t look fifty-nine.)<br />
He tells you that last summer he walked up the stairs of the Niagara Escarpment<br />
three times a week for exercise. He says he hasn’t started yet this<br />
year. You tell him it’s time. As the cab mounts the cut in the escarpment, you<br />
wonder whether you could really have ridden your bike.<br />
When you reach the hospital, it’s forty-five minutes until visiting hours.<br />
You go up to the room your friend shares with three others anyway. No one<br />
notices, or maybe no one cares. You spray the germs off your hands before<br />
you go through his door.<br />
Your friend beams at you from his bed. He is five days post-op. The only<br />
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way you could tell, this past month of April, that he was facing surgery for a<br />
cancer that was “almost certain” to have spread, was that the sun had gone<br />
out in his eyes. But you can feel his warmth today, even through the clouds.<br />
You comment on his right arm. Black and blue and yellow from wrist to<br />
elbow. He says he must be sure to hide it from his two young grandchildren,<br />
who’ll be visiting tomorrow afternoon. You ask what you can get for him and<br />
which part of him is uncomfortable. He asks for ice water, tells you about his<br />
haemorrhoid.<br />
He wants to know what you’ve been doing and you reply that you are<br />
digging, planting, letting your head fill with lilac panicles and bleeding<br />
hearts and lime green heuchera petals. You say that the conversation you<br />
had with him a year ago about your driven nature took time to have its<br />
effect, but that this spring, for the first time in your life, you’ve been able to<br />
stop pushing yourself to accomplish things and just wallow in May as a pig<br />
wallows in the sty.<br />
He laughs.<br />
You tell him that you go out every morning in your bare feet and housecoat,<br />
and fill the birdbath to the brim. You describe the robin who bathed<br />
herself so thoroughly that she looked like a ruffed grouse, the pair of<br />
mourning doves who descend squeakily to the rim and finally step clumsily<br />
into the water. The cat who looks exactly like the stone—the stone this<br />
friend let you take from his beachfront last summer—that now sits in the<br />
circle of soil that surrounds your birdbath. The cat is the same shade of<br />
silver-grey, the same size, and it folds its ears in such a way that their shape<br />
is the shape of two bumps at the top of the stone. The cat nests in the warm<br />
soil beneath the birdbath and turns itself into a sculpture that echoes the<br />
stone.<br />
Your friend’s feet are cold. You tuck your tomato-red woollen cardigan<br />
above and around the thin blue sheet that covers them.<br />
“You are so sympathetic,” he says.<br />
This is not spoken with the intention of flattering you. It is intended as<br />
a simple statement of fact. A simple mirroring of your behaviour. And it is<br />
accurate. You are sympathetic. You are sympathetic because you love this<br />
man.<br />
You don’t say this aloud, the way you’d probably say it aloud to one of<br />
your woman friends. It’s a potent word, love, especially when spoken. You<br />
have to be careful. This is a married man, devoted to his wife. You don’t want<br />
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GEAR PILLING | Honest Work<br />
to scare him away. You say instead that you are sympathetic because you’ve<br />
been where he is. This too is true.<br />
The woman who hooks up the televisions comes in to do her job. Your<br />
friend tries to help her, though moving is difficult for him. As she untangles<br />
a cord from his bed railing, you see him turn his head slightly to read the<br />
name on her wrist tag. He knows the name of everyone who comes into the<br />
room to help him, and he uses it. Later, he mentions to Hilda, his nurse of<br />
the day, that the staff work as a team. Earlier, there’d been a spill; others<br />
hurried into the room to help Hilda clean it up. More accurate noticing. The<br />
nurse is pleased that he has seen and commented on the working habits of<br />
her colleagues. She smiles, and moves to the next patient, extra bustle in<br />
her step.<br />
Part of your pleasure in this man is in being aware of him noticing things,<br />
the seeing that goes on no matter what else he is doing. There is no mote<br />
in his eye. As you watch Hilda gather her equipment and leave the room,<br />
still with that extra spring in her step, you remember that Simone Weil once<br />
defined love as close attention.<br />
You ask if he’d like to walk down the hall.<br />
“Not like,” he says, with that cloudy smile. “But I’ll do it.”<br />
You ask if he needs help getting up.<br />
“I can do it myself today if I take it slowly,” he says.<br />
You skim through the first section of The Globe and Mail as he sits up<br />
with great care, inches to the edge of his bed, untangles the tubes that exit<br />
his body and lead to his IV, to the drainage bag, and to the bag that holds his<br />
urine, which, you note, is bloodier today than yesterday. He slips feet into<br />
slippers and looks around for his housecoat. You unfold and hold it ready.<br />
Yesterday, he didn’t care, did the walk in the flappy hospital gown. The niceties<br />
are reasserting themselves. A good sign.<br />
The pair of you shuffle down the hall. A middle-aged woman holding onto<br />
a walker comes towards you. All her being is concentrated on each step. Her<br />
brown hair is white at the roots, flat on one side, sticking out on the other. As<br />
you pass the big windows of the lounge, you glimpse islands of blue in the<br />
cloud-dark sea above.<br />
Once, you said to your friend that when you think of him, the sentence<br />
that comes most often to your mind is And Mary kept these things and pondered<br />
them in her heart. “You notice things, you say nothing, and later you<br />
ponder them in your heart.”<br />
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He turned to you that day and beamed from brown eyes in which the<br />
sun was still out. “But that’s exactly what I do.” Yes, this noticing and silent<br />
pondering is the heart of his essential life.<br />
You are reading Jude the Obscure aloud to him when the doctor comes<br />
in. Both of you have been taking pleasure in the compound-complex sentences,<br />
the nineteenth-century diction, the space Thomas Hardy allows<br />
himself to develop a story. The doctor says he has the pathology results.<br />
You get up and leave, walk to the end of the hall, look at your watch, stand<br />
where you can see the door of his room. Far below, on the sidewalk, people<br />
are going about their Saturday errands. When you are in the world of this<br />
corridor, that world recedes further than the blue islands in the dark sky.<br />
The doctor emerges seven minutes later. You walk back down the hall.<br />
Your heart squeaks like a mourning dove that flies towards the birdbath<br />
under which sits a suspicious sculpture. When you get to the door, your<br />
friend is already on the phone. You hear him say his wife’s name and you<br />
back away.<br />
You don’t think that he would call his wife one second after hearing bad<br />
news. You don’t think the doctor would come in on a Saturday morning to<br />
deliver bad news. Yet, the surgeon’s “almost certain to have spread,” rings in<br />
your ears so loudly that it almost drowns out your squeaky heart.<br />
You wait a while, then return to the room. Aggressive, nasty tumour<br />
though it was, the cancer was confined to its original site. The surgeon was<br />
surprised and pleased. This is the news your friend gives you when you sit<br />
down on the bed and take his hand.<br />
Both of you develop a smile that goes from sea to shining sea. Your face<br />
turns hot which means red, and one tear rolls over your smile. Your friend is<br />
composed as always. He holds your gaze, as always.<br />
Partway through the next chapter of Jude the Obscure, your friend’s wife<br />
arrives, a medley of spring colour—her clothes, the bouquet of flowers she<br />
holds. She hugs her husband, hugs you. All of you rejoice. All of you drink the<br />
banana smoothies she has brought.<br />
Your sister has warned you. You can’t be friends with a married man if<br />
his wife doesn’t want you to be. Luckily, you are mad for banana smoothies.<br />
Luckily, your friend’s wife has chosen a smoothie with only one hundred and<br />
seventy-two calories. The two of you agree that this makes a fine lunch. She<br />
likes to keep her weight down too.<br />
Smoothie down the hatch, you air-kiss them both and leave.<br />
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GEAR PILLING | Honest Work<br />
One of the pleasures of these visits has been walking through the unfamiliar<br />
neighbourhood around the hospital. Today, you enter a shop of<br />
Indian saris. The graceful lines and sparkling designs, the sheen of fuchsia,<br />
turquoise, saffron, orange, emerald green—an inundation of beauty so<br />
intense it turns painful and you have to leave.<br />
On the way to your car the other day, you explored the wooded area of a<br />
small park on the edge of the escarpment. You happened on a place where<br />
the rock face dropped sheer to the expressway. You went right to the edge,<br />
held onto a sapling with your left hand and leaned out to see the drop. You<br />
wondered whether your friend’s pathology would knock him over or keep<br />
him here with his family and friends.<br />
It turns out that you, like the thirty-year-old cab driver, cannot walk to<br />
your home from the cancer hospital. The distance was shorter in your mind.<br />
By the time you are two thirds of the way home, you feel like your long-gone<br />
uncle’s knackered old mare.<br />
You are on a street with little shops. As you drag yourself along, you see,<br />
miraculously, an old friend coming toward you, coffee in hand. You tell him<br />
where you started walking, where you’re headed. You show him your weary<br />
bones, almost ready for the soup pot. “I will not suffer thy foot to walk<br />
another step,” he says. “Stay here while I get my car.”<br />
After a bagel to supplement the banana smoothie, which now seems<br />
sparse fare as lunch, you edge beds in your front yard, then beat with your<br />
shovel clumps of dirt bound with the roots of wayward grass. When most of<br />
the precious topsoil has fallen back into the bed, you bend over and toss the<br />
grass onto a pile.<br />
It’s early evening when you finish. You pour a glass of red wine, scoop<br />
up a handful of pretzels, and slump onto the wooden bench behind your<br />
house. Your back is against warm brick, for the sun has come out. You suck<br />
a pretzel into mush. You feel as contented as you assume a cow would feel,<br />
she who knows only this lick of salt, this green, this chewing.<br />
A silver car pulls up beside your hedge. A woman of about fifty gets out,<br />
locks the car, and walks away. She is wearing a dowdy black suit. How can<br />
anyone wear a dowdy black suit when all creation is ruffing out like a robin in<br />
the throes of transformative grooming?<br />
Your feet throb from walking; your hands throb from shovelling. Your<br />
mother would have said that today you did “a stroke of honest work.” Her<br />
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sentence would have ended with “for a change,” but never mind that right<br />
now. You suppose that honest work, in the way she meant it, is work that you<br />
can see or smell or taste or feel with your body.<br />
You watch a sparrow flitter and rattle into a neighbour’s eavestrough,<br />
where it has its nest. It occurs to you that love—the kind that goes from self<br />
to other—is really honest work. It exercises the muscles of your mind. It<br />
feeds blood to your heart. It fills you with a pulsing warmth that allows you<br />
to sit in the sun with no jumping in your belly and no need to get up and do<br />
the boring jobs on your to-do list.<br />
You finish your snack, stand up and stretch, knuckle your itchy orbs; no<br />
one ever saw every little miracle of May with a mote in her eye. The radio<br />
has said that frost is possible tonight. You’d better cover your newly-planted<br />
annuals with newspaper. You’d better tote bricks to hold the newspapers<br />
down. More honest work.<br />
All week, the ostrich ferns have been unscrolling. Tonight, you see that<br />
their tender green necks are almost erect. One round temporary eye at the<br />
tip. You kneel beside the shed, lift bricks onto the garden walk. By the time<br />
the ferns have unscrolled completely, they won’t need the eye. They’ll see<br />
the world that surrounds them with every cell of themselves.<br />
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