Read Online View From a Kite by Maureen Hull - Free Book Online

comforting: warm big breasts and solid stomachs to lean into; double chins and dimpled elbows. I disappeared into their hugs, their gingerbread and milky-tea embraces. Edith must be close to two hundred pounds. Girdles yellow in her bottom drawers; she never replaced them when they wouldn’t fit anymore.
    In the pictures of Mama she wears trim wool suits with tailored lines, cuffs and collars edged in velvet; perky little hats with feathers that sweep across her temples and flirt with her eyelashes; dark lipstick with a strong curved edge. The pictures of Edith, a generation earlier, show a sylph in summer muslins, sometimes a rope of pearls down her front, sometimes a nose - gay in her lap, and her hair scooped up in a soft roll to set off her dreamy eyes. But my memories are all of flowered aprons with crumpled Kleenex in the pockets, nylons stockings rolled to their ankles in the summer heat. They’re like old hockey players who never changed their eating habits once they gave up the game, all that fried chicken and apple pie settling down to stay.
    Edith is barrelled all over, but Mama has given in to gravity. Two years of sitting, the planet sucking at her weight, have caused her lost collarbones to surface and her shoulders are once again as hard and spare as ironwork. Her legs slide into her slippers and bury her ankles. Loose flesh wattles her arm bones, the long rods to the stuttering birds that are her hands. I want to scoop up the fallen flesh and pour it over her shoulders and arms. She’s rising up though her flesh, her skull is pushing up through her haloed silver hair. She looks much older than she is now; she looks like she belongs to Edith’s generation.
    â€œShe’s an angel,” the nurses tell me each time they see me. “She’s just a pet.”
    They are grateful she’s so easy to look after, they have too many difficult patients, too many crazies. Too often, her type of brain damage results in a violent re-ordering of the personality. They don’t know why she’s different, she is a gift they do not examine too closely. She sits where you put her, still, a stillness so profound she seems tranced but for her hands. They flutter, flutter, twist and smooth and pat. Unless you position yourself directly in front of her gaze she does not focus on your face. She might speak if you speak directly to her, but she doesn’t know anybody. She doesn’t remember her nurses from one day to the next. She doesn’t remember me. I used to try so hard, I used to put my face six inches from her and tell her, over and over, “It’s me, Gwen. It’s Gwennie, Mama. Mama, it’s me.”
    She likes to have her hair brushed. It’s the only thing that calms her hands. They settle down, to a slow smoothing of her cornflower-blue chenille lap. I brush her hair as gently as possible, counting strokes and telling her how things are at the farm. Her hair is more and more like dandelion silk, as if a breath would blow it away. She likes music, too; the nurses tell me they sing to her.
    â€œTry it,” they say. “She loves it. She smiles, sometimes she tries to sing along.”
    I brush her hair, but I don’t sing. I tried once, but then I started to wail like a banshee; I scared the other patients so bad they started to howl in fright. I don’t sing here. Some things are not possible.

CHAPTER 12
    Yesterday I stayed in bed all day. Got up in the evening for a bit of a walk. Everyone who comes back from a weekend pass spends the next day in bed, even if they spent their whole weekend at home on a couch, dozing. Something about the outside world is exhausting. Mary and I, just before we left on our weekends, had persuaded Dr. Robichaud to let us room together, so we’re in a four-bed dorm, just the two of us, and she spent the day in bed too. It was as quiet as a tomb, leading Dr. Robichaud, who looked in on us, to decide he’d made the