The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence Page B

things? It’s mean—it’s mean of you—oh, what a thing to do.”
    “Hush, hush,” says Marvin.
    “There, there,” says Doris. “Don’t take on.”
    I see, recovering myself a little and peeking through the fingers fanned before my face, that I have frightenedthem. Good. It serves them right. I hope they’re scared to death.
    “We won’t say any more right now,” Marvin says. “We’ll see. Later on, well see. Now, don’t get all upset, Mother.”
    “I’d hoped to settle it,” Doris bleats.
    “It’s damn near midnight,” Marvin says. “I gotta go to work tomorrow.”
    She sees the moment has passed, so she makes the best of it, becomes attentive, plumps the pillows on my bed.
    “You get a good sleep, then,” she says to me. “We’ll discuss it when we’re none of us worked up.”
    Marvin goes. She helps me into my nightdress. How it irks me to have to take her hand, allow her to pull my dress over my head, undo my corsets and strip them off me, and have her see my blue-veined swollen flesh and the hairy triangle that still proclaims with lunatic insistence a non-existent womanhood.
    “Good night,” she says. “Sleep well.”
    Sleep well. Sleep at all, after this evening? I turn from one side to the other. Nowhere is right, and my eyes remain open wide. Finally I sink as though into layers and deeper layers of mist or delirium, into a half awakeness. Then I am jerked alert by one of the strutting shadows inhabiting the gray region where I lie drearily begging the mercy of sleep.
The soaking smelly sheets
, the shadow insinuates, in Doris’s voice.
    Then, just when I am afraid to sleep, for what may possibly occur, sleep wants to overcome me. I tussle with it, bid it begone, fidget and fuss so I may not yield. The result—my feet get cramps, and my toes are drawn up into knots. I must get out of bed. I cannot find the bedsidelamp. I explore cautiously with my fingers in the air beside my bed, but discover nothing. Frantic, I wave my hands in the dark, and then the lamp goes over and shatters like a dropped icicle.
    Doris comes running. She switches on the hall light, and I see, propped on an elbow, that she’s put her hair up in curlers and looks hideous.
    “What on earth’s the matter?”
    “Nothing. For mercy’s sake, don’t shriek so, Doris. You hurt my eardrums. That voice goes through me like a knife. It’s only the lamp.”
    “You’ve broken it,” she moans.
    “Well, buy another. Buy ten, for all I care. I’ll pay, I’ll pay—you needn’t fret. Here—I must stand—I’ve got cramped feet. Give me a hand up, for pity’s sake, can’t you? Can’t you see how it hurts? Oh—oh—there. That’s better.”
    We stand on the bedside mat like two portly wrestling ghosts, pink satin nightdresses shivering, as I stamp up and down to work the muscles straight. She tries to bundle me back to bed, and I resist, lurching against her in the gloom.
    “Good glory, what’s the matter now?” she sighs.
    “Go back to bed, for goodness’ sake. I’m only going to the bathroom.”
    “I’ll take you.”
    “You’ll do no such thing. Get away. Get away now. Leave me be,”
    In a huff she goes, ostentatiously turning on all the upstairs lights, as though I didn’t even know the way to the bathroom in my own house.
    When I return, I do not go to bed immediately. I leave the ceiling light on, and sit down at my dressing-table.Black walnut, it is, not solid, of course, but a good thick veneer, not like the plywood things they turn out these days. I reach for my cologne, dab a little on wrists and throat. I light a cigarette. I must take care to put it out properly.
    I give a sideways glance at the mirror, and see a puffed face purpled with veins as though someone had scribbled over the skin with an indelible pencil. The skin itself is the silverish white of the creatures one fancies must live under the sea where the sun never reaches. Below the eyes the shadows bloom as though two soft