Dolores Claiborne

edges of some lilies. By the time you finish, your hands are really just claws. The worst thing, though, is you know what’s gonna happen when you finally get back inside with that empty laundry basket and the heat hits your hands. They start to tingle, and then they start to throb in the joints—only it’s a feelin so deep it’s really more like cryin than throbbin; I wish I could describe it to you so you’d know, Andy, but I can’t. Nancy Bannister there looks like she knows, a little bit, anyway, but there is a world of difference between hangin out your warsh on the mainland in winter and hangin it out on the island. When your fingers start to warm up again, it feels like there’s a hive of bugs in em. So you rub em all over with some kind of hand lotion and wait for the itch to go away, and you know it don’t matter how much store lotion or plain old sheep-dip you rub into your hands; by the end of February the skin is still going to be cracked so bad that it’ll break open and bleed if you clench a hard fist. And sometimes, even after you’ve gotten warm again and maybe even gone to bed, your hands will wake you up in the middle of the night, sobbin with the memory of that pain. You think I’m jokin? You can laugh if you want to, but I ain’t, not a bit. You can almost hear em, like little children who can’t find their mammas. It comes from deep inside, and you lie there and listen to it, knowin all the time that you’ll be goin back outside again just the same, nothin can stop it, and it’s all a part of woman’s work no man knows about or wants to know about.

And while you were goin through that, hands numb, fingers purple, shoulders achin, snot leakin off the end of y’nose and freezin tight as a tick to your upper lip, she’d more often than not be standin or sittin there in her bedroom window, lookin out at you. Her forehead’d be furrowed and her lips drawed down and her hands workin on each other—all tensed up, she’d be, like it was some kind of complicated hospital operation instead of just hangin sheets out to dry in the winter wind. You could see her tryin to hold herself back, to keep her big trap shut this time, but after awhile she wouldn’t be able to no more and she’d throw up the window and lean out so that cold east wind streamed her hair back, and she’d howl down, “Six pins! Remember to use six pins! Don’t you let the wind blow my good sheets down to the corner of the yard! Mind me, now! You better, because I’m watching, and I’m counting!”

By the time March came, I’d be dreamin of gettin the hatchet me n the hunky used to chop up kindling for the kitchen stove (until he died, that is; after that I had the job all to myself, lucky me) and hittin that loudmouth bitch a good lick with it right between the eyes. Sometimes I could actually see myself doin it, that’s how mad she made me, but I guess I always knew there was a part of her that hated yellin down that way as much as I hated hearin it.

That was the first way she had of bein a bitch —not bein able to help it. It was really worse for her than it was for me, specially after she’d had her bad strokes. There was a lot less warshin to hang out by then, but she was just as crazy on the subject as she’d been before most of the rooms in the house were shut off and most of the guest-beds stripped and the sheets wrapped in plastic and put away in the linen closet.

What made it hard for her was that by 1985 or so, her days of surprisin folks was through—she had to depend on me just to get around. If I wa‘ant there to lift her out of bed and set her in her wheelchair, in bed she stayed. She’d porked up a lot, you see—went from a hundred and thirty or so in the early sixties to a hundred and ninety, and most of the gain was that yellowish, blubbery fat you see on some old people. It hung off her arms and legs and butt like bread-dough on a stick. Some people get thin as jerky in their sundown years, but not Vera Donovan. Dr. Freneau said it was because her kidneys weren’t doin their job. I s’pose so, but I had plenty of days when I thought she put on that weight just to spite me.

The weight wasn’t all, either; she was halfway to bein blind, as well. The strokes done that. What eyesight she had left came and went. Some days she could see a little bit out of her left eye and pretty damned good out of the right one, but most times she said it was like lookin through a heavy gray curtain. I guess you can understand why it drove her crazy, her that was such a one to always keep her eye on everythin. A few times she even cried over it, and you want to believe that it took a lot to make a hard baby like her to cry… and even after the years had beat her to her knees, she was still a hard baby.

What, Frank?

Senile?

I dunno for sure, and that’s the truth. I don’t think so. And if she was, it sure wasn’t in the ordinary way old folks go senile. And I’m not just sayin that because if it turns out she was, the judge in charge of probatin her will’s apt to use it to blow his nose with. He can wipe his ass with it, for all of me; all I want’s to get outta this friggin mess she’s landed me in. But I still gotta say she probably wa’ant completely vacant upstairs, not even at the end. A few rooms to rent, maybe, but not completely vacant.

The main reason I say so was she had days when she was almost as sharp as ever. They were usually the same days when she could see a little, and help you to sit her up in bed, or maybe even take those two steps from the bed to the wheelchair instead of having to be hoisted across like a bag of grain. I’d put her in the wheelchair so I could change her bed, and she wanted to be in it so she could go over to her window—the one that looked out on the side yard and the harbor view beyond that. She told me once that she’d go out of her mind for good if she had to lay in bed all day and all night, with nothing but the ceiling and the walls to look at, and I believed her.

She had her confused days, yes—days when she didn’t know who I was, and hardly even who she was. On those days she was like a boat that’s come loose from its moorins, except the ocean she was adrift on was time—she was apt to think it was 1947 in the mornin and 1974 in the afternoon. But she had good days, too. There were less of them as time went on and she kept havin those little strokes— shocks, the old folks call em—but she did have em. Her good days was often my bad ones, though, because she’d get up to all her old bitchery if I let her.

She’d get mean. That was the second way she had of bein a bitch. That woman could be as mean as cat-dirt when she wanted to. Even stuck in a bed most of the time, wearin diapers and rubber pants, she could be a real stinker. The messes she made on cleanin days is as good an example of what I mean as anything. She didn’t make em every week, but by God I’ll tell you that she made em on Thursdays too often for it to be just a coincidence.

Thursdays was cleanin day at the Donovans’. It’s a huge house—you don’t have any idear until you’re actually wanderin around inside it—but most of it’s closed off. The days when there might be half a dozen girls with their hair done up in kerchiefs, polishin here and warshin windows there and dustin cobwebs outta the ceiling corners somewhere else, are twenty years or more in the past. I have walked through those gloomy rooms sometimes, lookin at the furniture swaddled up in dust-sheets, and thought of how the place used to look back in the fifties, when they had their summer parties—there was always different-colored Japanese lanterns on the lawn, how well I remember that!—and I get the funniest chill. In the end the bright colors always go out of life, have you ever noticed that? In the end things always look gray, like a dress that’s been warshed too many times.

For the last four years, the open part of the house has been the kitchen, the main parlor, the dinin room, the sun-room that looks out on the pool and the patio, and four bedrooms upstairs—hers, mine, and the two guest- rooms. The guest-rooms weren’t heated much in wintertime, but they were kept nice in case her children did come to spend some time.

Even in these last few years I always had two girls from town who helped me on cleanin days. There’s always been a pretty lively turnover there, but since 1990 or so it’s been Shawna Wyndham and Frank’s sister Susy. I couldn’t do it without em, but I still do a lot of it m‘self, and by the time the girls go home at four on Thursday afternoons, I’m ’bout dead on my feet. There’s still a lot to do, though—the last of the ironin, Friday’s shoppin list to write out, and Her Nibs’ supper to get, accourse. No rest for the wicked, as they say.

Only before any of those things, like as not, there’d be some of her bitchery to sort out.

She was regular about her calls of nature most of the time. I’d slip the bedpan under her every three hours, and she’d do a tinkle for me. And on most days there was apt to be a clinker in the pan along with the pee after the noon call.

Except on Thursdays, that is.

Not every Thursday, but on the Thursdays when she was bright, I could count on trouble more often than not… and on a backache that’d keep me awake until midnight. Even Anacin-3 wouldn’t ease it at the end. I’ve been healthy as a horse most of my life and I’m still healthy as a horse, but sixty-five is sixty-five. You can’t shake things off the way you once could.

On Thursday, instead of gettin half a bedpan filled with pee at six in the morning, I’d get just a dribble. The same thing at nine. And at noon, instead of some pee and a clinker, there was apt to be nothing at all. I’d know