Excessive Joy Injures the Heart Read Online Free Page A

smelling of ancient damp, at its head a hard pillow covered with a stiff pillowslip that was a dirty gold taffeta, behind it a poster with a picture of two feet turned away from each other, each foot a kind of Europe of the foot, like those cross-sections of beef cattle that used to hang on a wall of her schoolroom — the organs turned into maps that were always in the same three colours: caramel, clear red, and tan — but now he was handing her a maroon nylon hospital gown and she was asking him if she could change in the washroom, he said it was to her left, but there was a piercing grit under her feet as she walked, a kind of painful glitter, what could it be, she called back over a shoulder to ask how much she should take off, then heard his voice: “Just whatever you’re comfortable with! But the more the better! The better to work with you …!”
    God, she should have eaten something, even if only a banana, her blood sugar was too low, this must be why she was feeling so dizzy, the washroom was awful too, like a toilet in a bus depot. Then she was back in the room again, carrying her clothes with her, and after she’d hung them over the back of a chair and climbed up onto the hard bed Ekstrand said, “Hopefully you’ll be feeling a lot better real soon,” then he was rubbing what smelled like a blend of lavender oil and lanolin into her hair and she remembered that lavender was a sedative or at the very least a relaxant and she warned herself to keep alert, but now she could already feel him drawing her hair up into oiled peaks, then she could feel his hands moving downthe length of her back while his voice was asking her if she had any friends at all here, people she could talk to if they got into emotional material that was too “heavy,” and she said, “Yes, a few.” But now she was beginning to feel drowsy, her thoughts came and went, disconnected, she wondered if she should buy carrots on the way home, but not from the health-food store because half the time the health-food-store carrots tasted as if they’d been peed on, there must be mice down with all the sacks of rice and nuts in the basement, but then she had to remind herself that she too was down in a basement, and no one (not Dr. Tenniswood, not her best friend Libi, not anyone) knew she was here, and where
were
the three daughters, did they even exist, then she was half-dreaming again, thinking of Mormons and were they still polygamous, at least were they polygamous when they lived far out in back country, and she thought of the Hutterites too, the stories she’d heard about young Hutterite men going into bars in Saskatoon and picking out good-looking college boys and offering them money to come out to their farms and have sex with their women, all with the aim of bringing variety to the Hutterite gene pool. But now Ekstrand’s voice was dropping to an experimental low sing-song, the voice of someone reading out of a textbook: “You are a precious person. You are precious to me …,” and so this was not going to be a person she could trust, but she must take care not to let him know it, just let him finish the treatment and let her not seem to be distrustful, the minute it was over she’d look at her watch, say she’d have to run. No, that carefree little word wouldn’t sound carefree, not under the circumstances, it would be so much better to say, “Look, I should be on my way …” But now she could hear his sing-song voiceswinging out with more words, his voice sounding hypnotized, even more false: “I have a wonderful wife … she’s a wonderful mother and a wonderful cook and wonderful at playing the piano and a wonderful housekeeper …” and to her continued silence he finally said, “Well, not down
here
, of course, this is
my
territory …” then there was more massaging and as he was moving lower down he was asking her how long she was married, and now his voice was sounding voyeuristic and cold, but still she