Joy Williams - State of Grace

The candy striper was very tiny although not young. She had a tiny pocket in her apron from which she took a miniature snapshot, the type that is responsible, if you ask me, for all the cataracts going around. It was a photo of her cat which had since been smashed flat. She also offered me a tiny piece of gum. It was not the real thing. Lewis Carrol, who as you well know, was as well not the real thing, once invented a substitute for gum. I believe that this was that.

This place is not at all favorable to health. The pitcher beside my Grady’s tape-wrapped hand is only one half full with gray water. Their excuse is that the water table is down. There is a bureau in which there is a mirror (this discourages me, but when I make inquiries, I am told that it’s for the patients’ primping), three wash rags, a pencil upon which is stamped VOTE FOR PARIS SHAY LEVER 2, a half-gone sponge cake and a bedpan. All these things belong to the hospital. Nothing here belongs to Grady but me.

He is so tiny. Everything here is so small. The white bed made of skinny noodles of iron. The sheets with their tiny mends folded just so across his chest. On the window ledge are tiny rods which one uses to open the windows. One inserts them in a tiny hole and cranks. The protozoans in this room! The energy! It is difficult to remain calm. Around my Grady’s eyes are hundreds of bruises. And tiny lines, all across his lips, his pale cheeks, visible for the first time. In the hall there is a little cart laden with tiny plates of food. Tiny Foo-Yung. Tiny breaded veals. And for the less able, cups of broth, 1- by 1-inch squares of Jell-O. Let me tell you about Jell-O. Any new mother (of one or two days) could but you do not have any new mother. You have me. I will tell you about Jell-O. The secret of it. The Cult. Its importance to healing and the rhythm of life. In remote communities, families often worship Jell-O in lieu of anything else. There has even been buggering of Jell-O. It is a protean item. Its true importance, however, lies in its presence at our hour of birth. For you are aware, I’m sure, of the passages in literature and in films when the woman is in labor and the order goes, bring clean towels and heat a pot of water. The water is for Jell-O.

The wheels of a hospital are greased with Jell-O. It mends a man. It comforts the nurses who administer it for they feel that they are truly doing their part. No one gives my Grady Jell-O. They bring his lunch in a soft plastic pouch which resembles the bags of fresh livers you buy in groceries. It takes a little over an hour and a half for him to eat. I wait. Down the hall, someone is playing the greyhound scores on a radio. A nurse comes in and looks at me, sitting on the floor by the molding. There is no room for chairs in this ward and thus no need for visitors. Nevertheless, I am one and, crouched by the molding, am trying to be careful. The nurse can’t help but see me, I am so gigantic. She goes to the bed and moves it out a bit from the wall. Behind it is a nickel and a few hairpins. She picks up the nickel and leaves. Grady has finished eating. I am trying so hard to be still. I am making such an effort to not be disruptive in here. Everything is so small. I could hold the whole place in my hand, even on the tip of my finger. There is a light which has been on ever since I arrived even though the room is naturally bright with noon. I get up and lean over Grady. The floor creaks. The tubes and hoses swing in my wake. I crawl into bed beside him. There is sweat on his temples. There is a hole beneath his jaw. It is covered with bandages but the hole’s presence remains. Nothing fills it properly. It glows through the most professional and cleverly wrought wrappings. I place my lips lightly on his pillow which is clean, crisply ironed but blotchy, with small colorless spots. I pull the sheet up over us. I can hear the radio. It announces the Big Perfecta. Through the wall a woman’s voice is coming.

“… thought the roast would be good for ten …” and close by, maybe directly over us, someone says,

“That poor young man. Doesn’t he have anyone?”

“I guess not. No mail either.”

“That poor young man.”

Beneath the sheets, I whisper to my Grady. His hair moves with my breath. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Don’t die, Grady. I love you and I’m sorry.”

No one answers.

“He’d be about the age of my Randy, I should think,” the woman says.

“Who could tell?”

“My rat Randy, my own son. Isn’t it nasty the way life turns on you?”

“Just be grateful he has all his faculties, not like this poor devil here.”

“He’s his faculties all right and uses them for nothing but tearing around and breaking his mother’s heart.”

I whisper to my Grady, “Don’t go, Grady.”

No one answers. The women leave. Beneath the sheet it is blue and rocking like the sea. “I could go with you,” I say. He is growing smaller still. I am so clumsy. My neck bangs against the ceiling. My kneecaps shoulder the door shut. This will alert them, I know. Doors are only shut after you here. “If we’re lucky we could be like radiolaria,” I say, “and become something really beautiful. They’re plankton and when they die, the cells disintegrate and they form pretty shells which almost always become fossils. Wouldn’t that be something nice to happen after we’re dead?”

No one answers. “Oh, Grady,” I say, “I don’t mean that. You musn’t believe what I mean. We don’t want anything to do with that oceanic ooze. Listen, Grady,” I say brightly. “Remember the river fog, the way it would come in the middle of the day and make things so bright and sharp, not at all like New England fog which hushes everything up. Remember how pretty everything was?”

I never cared for it myself but I am host to Grady’s loves. It is his world that is lacking in this ward, not mine. You’ve done the same I’m sure. For love. For the lingering. “You always loved me up so well, Grady,” I say.

No one says anything. My words are cumbersome as my sprawling body. I try to pull myself away from him but I am so monstrous now, I am so vast, and my words lie with us beneath the sheets, resting on Grady, pushing my Grady down. Between the bandages he is naked. In his prick is a long plastic rod, flat on the end like a golf tee. I kiss him. So lightly. And yet … a crust of flesh returns on my lips. I embrace him. So slightly. And yet my arms return coated with something like natural shinola. His hair is cold as though he had come out of the snow.

“Oh, love,” I say, “let’s begin again. Let’s be good to each other and careful with each other.”

Grady is deciding what to do … “if left my mind, I’ve life in a way; it would be worth the pain” … that’s the bun they try to peddle here. Baking in their brain pans daily. “Nothing’s too hard to endure but Death,” they shout over the racket of the machine shop as they discreate a hand, a foot, a nostril or perhaps a neck even though who knows it was just a mole that itched a bit, nothing that couldn’t have been helped by scratching. But Life’s the dish served here. As for drama, there’s not much. After all, if you won’t have that, there’s not a soul, licensed or what, who can help you. They wheel it in and drop it off. There it is. You regard it slowly. Oh, of course take your time, they say (and there’s little else to take at that point, they’ve got you at that point). And you say, May I take it into my privacies and look it over? May I have it and return it if displeased with no loss to me? Well, there’s a charge for that, they say. Well.

But my Grady will decide what to do. Watching him, my breasts ache as though I was in the days of weaning all my children. Even though I have none. Even though I am swollen with waiting. My head and stomach are tight as a drum and pounding with the waiting.