Stephen King: Dolores Claiborne

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 then I might be in for it. The only times I absolutely knew I was in for it were the times when I hadn’t gotten a clinker out of her Wednesday noon, either.

I see you tryin not to laugh, Andy, but that’s all right—you let it out if you have to. It wasn’t no laughing matter then, but it’s over now, and what you’re thinkin ain’t nothin but the truth. The dirty old bag had her a shit savings account, and it was like some weeks she banked it in order to collect the interest… only I was the one who got all the withdrawals. I got em whether I wanted em or not.

I spent most of my Thursday afternoons runnin upstairs, tryin to catch her in time, and sometimes I even did. But whatever the state of her eyes might be, there was nothing wrong with her ears, and she knew I never let any of the town girls vacuum the Aubusson rug in the parlor. And when she heard the vacuum cleaner start up in there, she’d crank up her tired old fudge factory and that Shit Account of hers’d start payin dividends.

Then I thought up a way of catchin her. I’d yell to one of the girls that I guessed I’d vacuum the parlor next. I’d yell that even if they was both right next door in the dinin room. I’d turn on the vacuum, all right, but instead of usin it, I’d go to the foot of the stairs and stand there with one foot on the bottom step and my hand on the knob of the newel post, like one of those track fellows all hunkered down waitin for the starter to shoot off his gun and let them go.

Once or twice I went up too soon. That wa’ant no good. It was like a racer gettin disqualified for jumpin the gun. You had to get up there after she had her motor runnin too fast to shut down, but before she’d actually popped her clutch and dumped a load into those big old continence pants she wore. I got pretty good at it. You would, too, if you knew you’d end up hossin a hundred and ninety pounds of old lady around if you timed it wrong. It was like tryin to deal with a hand grenade loaded with shit instead of high explosives.

I’d get up there and she’d be layin in that hospital bed of hers, face all red, her mouth all screwed up, her elbows diggin into the mattress and her hands balled up in fists, and she’d be goin “Unnh! Unnnnnhhhh! UNNNNNNNNNHHHH!” I tell you something—all she needed was a coupla rolls of flypaper danglin down from the ceilin and a Sears catalogue in her lap to look right at home.