Dance of the Happy Shades

bronchial condition.” Head hung, like an animal chained to her side, I fed her clothespins. Outdoors, in the cold March air, she lost some of her bulk and her smell. In the house I could always smell her, even in the rooms she seldom entered. What was her smell like? It was like metal and like some dark spice (cloves—she did suffer from toothache) and like the preparation rubbed on my chest when I had a cold. I mentioned it once to my mother, who said, “Don’t be silly,
I
don’t smell anything.” So I never told about the taste, and there was a taste too. It was in all the food Mary McQuade prepared and perhaps in all food eaten in her presence—in my porridge at breakfast and my fried potatoes at noon and the slice of bread and butter and brown sugar she gave me to eat in the yard—something foreign, gritty, depressing. How could my parents not know about it? But for reasons of their own they would pretend. This was something I had not known a year ago.
    After she had hung out the wash she had to soak her feet. Her legs came straight up, round as drainpipes, from the steaming basin. One hand on each knee, she bent into the steam and gave grunts of pain and satisfaction.
    “Are you a nurse?” I said, greatly daring, though my mother had said she was.
    “Yes I am and I wish I wasn’t.”
    “Are you my aunt too?”
    “If I was your Aunt you would call me Aunt Mary, wouldn’t you? Well you don’t, do you? I’m your cousin, I’m your father’s cousin. That’s why they get me instead of getting an ordinary nurse. I’m a practical nurse. And there is always somebody sick in this family and I got to go to them. I never get a rest.”
    I doubted this. I doubted that she was asked to come. She came, and cooked what she liked and rearranged things to suit herself, complaining about draughts, and let her power loosein the house. If she had never come my mother would never have taken to her bed.
    My mother’s bed was set up in the dining room, to spare Mary McQuade climbing the stairs. My mother’s hair was done in two little thin dark braids, her cheeks were sallow, her neck warm and smelling of raisins as it always did, but the rest of her under the covers had changed into some large, fragile and mysterious object, difficult to move. She spoke of herself gloomily in the third person, saying, “Be careful, don’t hurt Mother, don’t sit on Mother’s legs.” Every time she said Mother I felt chilled, and a kind of wretchedness and shame spread through me as it did at the name of Jesus. This
Mother
that my own real, warm-necked, irascible and comforting human mother set up between us was an everlastingly wounded phantom, sorrowing like Him over all the wickedness I did not yet know I would commit.
    My mother crocheted squares for an afghan, in all shades of purple. They fell among the bedclothes and she did not care. Once they were finished she forgot about them. She had forgotten all her stories which were about Princes in the Tower and a queen getting her head chopped off while a little dog was hiding under her dress and another queen sucking poison out of her husband’s wound; and also about her own childhood, a time as legendary to me as any other. Given over to Mary’s care she whimpered childishly, “Mary, I’m dying for you to rub my back.” “Mary, could you make me a cup of tea? I feel if I drink any more tea I’m going to bob up to the ceiling, just like a big balloon, but you know it’s all I want.” Mary laughed shortly. “You,” she said, “You’re not going to bob up anywhere. Take a derrick to
move you
. Come on now, raise up, you’ll be worse before you’re better!” She shooed me off the bed and began to pull the sheets about with not very gentle jerks. “You been tiring your Momma out? What do you want to bother your Momma for on this nice a day?” “I think she’s lonesome,” my mother said, a weak and insincere defence.“She can be lonesome in the yard just as well as here,” said Mary, with her grand, vague, menacing air. “You put your things on, out you go!”
    My father, too, had altered since her coming. When he came in for his meals she was always waiting for him, some joke swelling her up like a bullfrog, making her ferocious-looking and red in the face. She put uncooked white beans in his soup, hard as pebbles, and waited to see if good manners would make him eat them. She stuck something to the bottom of his water glass to look like a fly. She