pillows imposed a kind of choking suffocation, the beginning of what was to be a lifelong allergy.
She must have slept a good deal—for how else could an active child have endured such a width of vacant time?—and whenever she woke it was with a stiff body and a head weakened by nameless anxiety. This had to do with the vacuum she sensed, suddenly, in the middle of her life. Something was missing, and it took weeks in that dim room, weeks of heavy blankets, and the image of that upside-down tree inside her chest to inform her of what it was.
What she lacked was the kernel of authenticity, that precious interior ore that everyone around her seemed to possess. Aunt Clarentine with her tapping footsteps in the upstairs hall, bustling and cheerful and breaking out in laughter over nothing at all and talking away in a larky voice about how grateful she was that "God who so loved the world" had chosen to let her go her own way. And Uncle Barker, as Daisy called him in those days, setting off for the College with his diamond-willow cane in hand and his old scuffed shoes striking the pavement, purposeful in his young manly intent even while he sighed out his reluctance. Other people were held erect by their ability to register and reflect the world—but not, for some reason, Daisy Goodwill.
She could only stare at this absence inside herself for a few minutes at a time. It was like looking at the sun.
Well, you might say, it was doubtless the fever that disoriented me, and it is true that I suffered strange delusions in that dark place, and that my swollen eyes in the twilight room invited frightening visions.
The long days of isolation, of silence, the torment of boredom—all these pressed down on me, on young Daisy Goodwill and emptied her out. Her autobiography, if such a thing were imaginable, would be, if such a thing were ever to be written, an assemblage of dark voids and unbridgable gaps.
Lying in her bed, she apprehended life going on around her—which only worsened her sense of mourning. She could hear dogs barking in the neighborhood, and bird song welling up, and the sound of the milkman going his rounds on Simcoe Street, his horse making a whinnying sound at the corner and stamping his heavy feet and dropping down his water and turds. Doors opened and closed, letters arrived, people came and went in the house, voices murmuring, the kettle coming to a boil, the hall clock ticking on and on.
In the solipsistic way of children, the girl was amazed that all this should continue without her. Aberdeen School would not recess—no, it would not—because of her illness; the schoolyard would remain as full of life as ever, and the bell ringing on and on with the same punctual ferocity. She knew, too, that Aunt Clarentine’s garden by midsummer would fill up with snapdragons, even if, by chance, she wasn’t there to pick off their heads and make the little blossoms "bite" at her fingers. That was what she kept coming back to as she lay in her hot, darkened room: the knowledge that here, this place, was where she would continue to live all her life, where she had, in fact, always lived—blinded, throttled, erased from the record of her own existence.
She understood that if she was going to hold on to her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplementing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections, conjuring the pastoral or heroic or whatever, even dreaming a limestone tower into existence, getting the details wrong occasionally, exaggerating or lying outright, inventing letters or conversations of impossible gentility, or casting conjecture in a pretty light. (When her beloved Aunt Clarentine died late in the month of June, after lying one solid week in a coma, Daisy floated her to heaven on a bed of pansies, and, at the same time, translated her uncle’s long brooding sexual stare, for that was what it was, into an attack of indigestion.)
She willed herself to be
She must have slept a good deal—for how else could an active child have endured such a width of vacant time?—and whenever she woke it was with a stiff body and a head weakened by nameless anxiety. This had to do with the vacuum she sensed, suddenly, in the middle of her life. Something was missing, and it took weeks in that dim room, weeks of heavy blankets, and the image of that upside-down tree inside her chest to inform her of what it was.
What she lacked was the kernel of authenticity, that precious interior ore that everyone around her seemed to possess. Aunt Clarentine with her tapping footsteps in the upstairs hall, bustling and cheerful and breaking out in laughter over nothing at all and talking away in a larky voice about how grateful she was that "God who so loved the world" had chosen to let her go her own way. And Uncle Barker, as Daisy called him in those days, setting off for the College with his diamond-willow cane in hand and his old scuffed shoes striking the pavement, purposeful in his young manly intent even while he sighed out his reluctance. Other people were held erect by their ability to register and reflect the world—but not, for some reason, Daisy Goodwill.
She could only stare at this absence inside herself for a few minutes at a time. It was like looking at the sun.
Well, you might say, it was doubtless the fever that disoriented me, and it is true that I suffered strange delusions in that dark place, and that my swollen eyes in the twilight room invited frightening visions.
The long days of isolation, of silence, the torment of boredom—all these pressed down on me, on young Daisy Goodwill and emptied her out. Her autobiography, if such a thing were imaginable, would be, if such a thing were ever to be written, an assemblage of dark voids and unbridgable gaps.
Lying in her bed, she apprehended life going on around her—which only worsened her sense of mourning. She could hear dogs barking in the neighborhood, and bird song welling up, and the sound of the milkman going his rounds on Simcoe Street, his horse making a whinnying sound at the corner and stamping his heavy feet and dropping down his water and turds. Doors opened and closed, letters arrived, people came and went in the house, voices murmuring, the kettle coming to a boil, the hall clock ticking on and on.
In the solipsistic way of children, the girl was amazed that all this should continue without her. Aberdeen School would not recess—no, it would not—because of her illness; the schoolyard would remain as full of life as ever, and the bell ringing on and on with the same punctual ferocity. She knew, too, that Aunt Clarentine’s garden by midsummer would fill up with snapdragons, even if, by chance, she wasn’t there to pick off their heads and make the little blossoms "bite" at her fingers. That was what she kept coming back to as she lay in her hot, darkened room: the knowledge that here, this place, was where she would continue to live all her life, where she had, in fact, always lived—blinded, throttled, erased from the record of her own existence.
She understood that if she was going to hold on to her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplementing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections, conjuring the pastoral or heroic or whatever, even dreaming a limestone tower into existence, getting the details wrong occasionally, exaggerating or lying outright, inventing letters or conversations of impossible gentility, or casting conjecture in a pretty light. (When her beloved Aunt Clarentine died late in the month of June, after lying one solid week in a coma, Daisy floated her to heaven on a bed of pansies, and, at the same time, translated her uncle’s long brooding sexual stare, for that was what it was, into an attack of indigestion.)
She willed herself to be
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