Dolores Claiborne

    The weight wasn't all, either; she was halfway to hem blind, as well. The strokes done that. What eyesight she had left came and went. Some days she could see a little bit out 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 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. F-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 Nib's supper to get, a course. 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.