|
|
 |
Link Details for: | Taken |
|
| Link ID# | 28 |
| Link URL | http:// |
| Submited By | E. Kelsey |
| Added On | Thu_Oct__2__2003 |
Description:
Vivi fantasized that she would die during the most beautiful sunset of the year. In Barbados the sunsets were often beautiful, but she most desired blazing fuscia, which would warm her corpse with flattering light. She could imagined her death to be befittingly tragic, lying on a bed of white sheets, wooden shutters open, the palms whispering the news of her passing to the angels who would carry her away. At age 73, Vivi had reached a point in her life where she admired the dignity of death, since her instinct for life had begun dimming in her fifties, along with her eyesight. A surgeon’s talent had cut the nasty, sagging skin from her jowls, hoisted her chest, and opened her eyes wide to see the change, but Vivi could rarely look into the mirror without frothing at the sight. She felt her surgery was akin to giving an elbow back to an armless man. What she regained merely served to remind her of all that she had lost. She was old. As someone who had sighed through life and taken youth and beauty for granted, Vivi did not grow wise or contemplative as she aged. Vivi decided that this evening’s sunset would be appropriate for her ascent to heaven, because the late afternoon rain had left moisture in the air for a rainbow, and Vivi was quite enchanted with it, as she sat in her enclosed patio, drinking a pineapple and rum punch. She prepared herself another pineapple rum, a much heavier one, and stirred noisily with the spoon, her heart beating faster than it had in years. In her closet she removed the only dress that still looked good on her. It was floor-length, iced blue, with a sharp collar that exposed little of her purple neck. The third pineapple rum was finished as she swept her white hair away from her face, and pinned large orange lilies from her garden. From the cabinet she pulled out a bottle of morphine pills and deflated for a moment while cupped them in her hand. Her memory’s eyes rested on Edward’s dying body and her shaking hand that had fed him the hallucinogens. He chased imaginary flies with his eyes, and Vivi was consoled that he was at least distracted from his cancer. Edward, her deceased husband, died seven years ago, but his money continued to support the lifestyle she enjoyed in Barbados. After he died, a commercial inspired her to grieve in a happier place, where her bones could moisten in the humidity, instead of hardening and breaking in the cold Canadian winters. Much to Zachary’s protest, his mother packed several garment bags and flew to the islands that first fall, leaving her family to shovel snow with the heaviness of death on their shoulders. Vivi had hosted few visitors over the past several years, even though she added an invitation in post-script in the singular Christmas card she sent addressed to Zachary Balantry and family. Elaine, Zachary’s wife, had accepted the invitation four years ago when she needed to decompress after her daughter, Vivi’s grand-daughter, Paula, left her first husband and moved in with a man who lived in a tent. Paula had left Bruce, a man Elaine herself despised, after a five-month marriage, even though they had rushed the wedding plans with the determination of young mules. But when Paula discovered her new husband’s domestic filth, she was slowly drawn into a friendship with Joel, a man twelve years her senior who lived in the outskirts of Toronto. He “rented” a patch by the river, on the back forty of his friend’s farm. He worked on the farm for his keep, and by night read his communist papers and wrote ideological crap, or so said Elaine. Vivi had served as Elaine’s sanctuary, away from the shame she felt from her daughter’s failed marriage (at age twenty-three!). They had shared many quiet evenings, Vivi sipping her rum punch with impartial delight as Elaine walked slowly up and down the beach. But aside from Elaine’s visit, Vivi had very little company through the years, which had rusted her already salty social skills. When she was young her curtness was tolerated only by men, especially those who could commit the time to coax pleasantries from the pretty lady. However, once they realized that pleasantries were elusive at best, some retreated like ambushed hunters, and only a few appreciated her evil slices, and self-appreciating humour. Edward was one of those that stayed. Vivi closed her eyes as she placed at least a dozen morphine pills in her palm, tilted her head back and opened her mouth like a baby bird. The pills sat on her tongue, pressed into her cheeks, almost spilling out of her lips. She spat half of them out, and took them a few at a time, an act that pitifully contrasted her image of an impassioned suicide attempt. She had spent most of her life trying to capture the essence of glamour, and soon her suicide would be piled onto the already heaping pile of failed attempts. Suicide was the only way she could guarantee a controlled performance, and she took solace in the power of self-determination, instead of dreading what ugly spectacle chance and natural order had planned for her. She fixed herself another rum punch, light on the pineapple, and returned to her bedroom. The top drawer of her chestnut armoire had her will and all relevant papers bundled together, and fastened with a blue silky ribbon. She cleared her face cream and brush from the top of her dresser, her hands shaking with age and nerves. Her hand looked deflated she noted, and lifted it closer to her face. It looked as if someone had extracted the soft tissue and fat from it, and left the old skin clinging to veins and bone with weary desperation. Thankfully she could barely see the spots and discoloration without her glasses, she thought to herself, and quickly dropped her arm to her side with a sharp breath. A picture of Edward, young, handsome, stood in a glass frame, peering down from her. She swayed in her shoes for no reason. The rum warmed her cheeks, and the pills began to make her eyes soft and glow gold. A smile crept on her lips, and suddenly she felt pretty again. Edward had been one who had stayed. She had met him slightly less than fifty years ago, in Montreal, 1952. Vivi’s father, Hannes, had been a moderately successful fisherman on the Pacific coast until an inheritance inspired him to open up a fish and chip shop in Montreal. Edward had come in one day when Vivi, Vivian then, was working behind the counter with gold-brown hair up in curls pinned near her sharp cheekbones. Vivi had served him his lunch with tight lips and no smiles, but Edward had come back every lunch for at least three months. The familiarity of seeing him, combined with his generous tips, warmed her frost slowly but not completely, until Edward invited her to his father’s post-production party in the film district. Vivi dropped both of her diamond earrings on the ground, teetered on the high heels she hadn’t worn in twelve years as she picked them up from the wood floor. She giggled slightly as she watched the shimmer of the gems as reflected from the glow of the setting sun. Her gold chain necklace hung around her neck, her and Edward’s wedding bands bounced against her chest, tinkling in delightful sound. When Edward’s hallucinated image appeared in the mirror, Vivi wasn’t frightened, but smiled at it flirtatiously, her first smile in a very long time. The outside edges of her vision crept in with white and grey light, causing waves she could see in her peripheral until she looked straight at them, at which point they raced again to the corners of her eyes. But Edward looked handsome, and she was much more interested in him, suited in the tan suit they had worn to the production party that first night. His hair had been slicked back, although not as severe as was en vogue. His face tanned, due in part to his leisurely life, grinned widely at her as she flipped a dollar to the taxi driver, more brazenly than a fisherman’s daughter should. Edward told her that she should feather her snobbery with the money to back it up, and promised her that he would provide her that life, if she promised to let him smell her curls for the next eighty years. She had blushed for the first time in her twenty-two years, which made Edward smile wider, and he offered her a glass of champagne. As Vivi continued to hallucinate that night in the bedroom, the Barbadian decor faded, and was replaced by the harder walls of that party in Montreal. She was happier at the party than at her home dying, so she welcomed the sounds of glasses tinking and women laughing, the vague rumble of voices that peaked so often in sharp consonants. The room spun, as it had that night, the first night she was drunk, and she felt the same warmth through her body, and hazy vision. Edward was so handsome that night, and her affection for him was enhanced by the blissfulness of the champagne. She stared at him that night under the stars, happy only with him, and pulled him into the backyard, away from everyone else inside. Vivi had misplaced her despair somewhere during her twirling dances in her morphine induced euphoria, and was not performing the dramatically morbid death she had rehearsed to Zachary during late night phone calls. He had hung up one her, more than once, and told her he’d rather her die than endure the manipulation. But now Vivi, swept up in chemical exhilaration, was enjoying her suicide more than her life, and if she had been lucid, would have snarled with cynical delight, “it bloody well figures”. Vivi slipped further in her wakeful illusions and found herself singing opera on a stage, facing a theatre full of people. Her voice strong and trill, she sung Chilean words in notes accompanied by the orchestra below. White mopped wigs of curly queues swayed with delight, and watched her with puckered red lips that bled from their powdered white faces. Edward sang the man’s part, and she giggled when she saw him in a dark costume and bronze chest plate. She turned to run out one of the many doors on stage but found them locked. She fell onto the bed, strangled by what she imagined to be her tight corset. Her lungs seized until her heart started to die, and she fell asleep, lost in delightful dreams as the visions faded from swarms of colour to murky clouds. The sky was fading as well, and Vivi would have been happy at least, that the setting sun was a gloriously pink scene that night. The orange dusk settled a flattering light over her aged body as she took her final breaths. Vivi could no longer see, but her face tilted towards the window, and used her last breath to draw in the aroma of orange lilies, as her arm fell easily off the side of the bed, in an image of graceful death. |
|
