This story
is a continuation of Doris Lessing's 'To Room Nineteen'. Lessing's powerful
story is about a woman, Susan, who feels trapped in her family life. Susan's
dissatisfaction prompts her to travel and to hire a nanny. When those things
don't work, she rents a room in which she does, well, nothing but stare into
space. When she discovers her husband is having an affair, she goes to room 19
and commits suicide by blowing out the pilot light to the fireplace and turning
the gas on high. My story asks the question, 'What if Susan had been rescued
instead?'
Winnie Mccloskey sat up in her bed with
much protest from her aching bones and studied her roommate, Susan Rawlings.
The poor woman had been saved from some sort of accident in her hotel room. She
listened carefully to the conversations in the hallway between the nurses and
doctors but couldn’t get the full story. All she knew was the accident involved
gas and that the hotel was inspecting the meter to make sure it wasn’t
malfunctioning. Susan had been very sick when they brought her in a week ago
but the blue tint, be it real or imagined, faded and she had begun to recover.
Her
darling children came to visit every day after school with their lively nanny,
Sophie. Winnie took great joy in sneaking them some hard candies that she kept
hidden away in her nightstand. One had to carefully watch hard candies.
Everyone loved them, from hard-faced nurses to rosy-cheeked children, and if
left in the open the little sugary delights were wont to disappear. Winnie dug
one out and held it out to Susan. “Candy, dear?”
Susan
didn’t even turn her head to look; just kept staring out the window or rather
at the curtains. Winnie frowned and dropped her hand. Susan was much worse off
than she first thought. Her old bones knew there was more to Susan’s story,
insisted it was no accident. “Too right. We mustn’t spoil our lunch.”
Winnie
painfully pushed herself out of bed and stood still until the snapping and
popping subsided and her bones settled into place. She hobbled over to the
window and drew open the curtains. “There now. Isn’t that better?”
Susan
blinked in the sunlight but didn’t otherwise react.
“You
know, you might as well talk to me because if you don’t, I’m liable to start
answering myself. I’ll either drive you mad with all my jabbering or the peckerwood
police will drag me off to the loony bin. Then what will you do? One of us will
be in the nut house and the other will be in here all alone.”
Winnie
smiled and waved to an aide walking past their door. The woman barely paused
long enough to say “Good morning, Ms. Winnie.” The staff were always so busy,
dashing here and there. How any person managed to heal in such a place was
beyond her. She pressed a hand to her lower back. As soon as her daughter got
back from her trip, Winnie would get out of here. She had places to be, things
to do. Hard candy to buy.
Winnie
sank into a chair near the window. Technically, the chair was meant for Susan’s
guests but Winnie had been here long enough to appropriate it as her reading
chair. Her daughter was on a very long trip. She picked up an old textbook full
of poetry. She hated poetry but beggars couldn’t be choosy.
She
read aloud a poem by a young man named Rupert Brooke. The Solider it was
called. She smiled at his sweet words about laughter and the beauty of nature.
“If that ain’t worth living for, then I don’t know what is. Isn’t that just
great? ‘…laughter learnt of friends.’” She sighed into the long silence that
followed. “You know, I’ve learned more these past weeks than I did in all of my
schooling. Amazing what a little reading can do for a person. Did you know that
this sweet boy died just a year later? Tis a shame.”
Susan
shifted in her bed. Progress. Winnie’s goal for today was to get her to eat.
The pitiful thing was wasting away.
“This
book says that Brooke saw the start of World War One. Hard times those were.”
She flipped through the pages of the book. “There’s a lot of poetry about it.”
A kindly nurse had leant her the old textbook
from her English class. Winnie didn’t much care for the heavy reading, but
there had been nothing better to do before Susan showed up. “I never got to go
beyond high school. My folks couldn’t afford it. I ended up with a passel of
kids instead.”
Susan
looked at Winnie for the first time. “I went to school,” she whispered.
“Well!
Blow me over with a feather! How about that.” Winnie hummed a tuneless song and
flipped through the book some more. She didn’t want to push Susan too hard.
She’d open up when she was ready.
Winnie
came across a poem titled “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan
Thomas and read it to herself. Did she dare? ‘Rage, rage against the dying of
the light’ was all well and good but it was too much; maybe later. She hunted through
the book for some spark and found an older poem called “The Goblin Market” by
Christina Rossetti and read it aloud instead.
“You
know what I like about that one?” Winnie didn’t wait for the answer that was unlikely
to come. “Laura was fixin’ to die but her sister saved her. Sometimes only another
woman can help.”
Susan’s
eyes flickered. “Saved her from what? Sickness?”
“Naw,
from men, of course.” Winnie snickered. “Don’t you think her idea of men is
just right? Goblins. Ha!”
A
shadow crossed over Susan’s face. There it was. Man trouble. Maybe Susan’s
goblin was more of a demon. And where was that demon anyway? Not coming in to
visit with the children, that’s for sure. If he ever showed up, she wouldn’t
offer him a piece of candy.
“You
know, we are so lucky to live nowadays. Back when that goblin poem was written,
according to this here book, women and children had no rights. They worked and
died and weren’t too happy about it. Took a lot of people fightin’ hard to
change things. We’re resting on their shoulders.” Winnie put the book aside.
“It’s good to remember how good we have it.”
Susan
seemed to shrink. Winnie had said the wrong thing. She smoothed her hair down
and thought for a moment. Susan didn’t talk much--that was most likely half her
problem. “But on second thought, just because we have all the freedoms and
rights in the world doesn’t mean we don’t have to fight… doesn’t mean that life
isn’t hard and that we don’t have pain.”
“You
know, I heard someone say once that we’re all working to find where we truly
belong.” Winnie stretched with a groan. “Heh. Looks like I’m right where I
should be. Besides, you and I are quite the pair. I have all the physical pain
and you have all the heartache.”
Susan
clenched her fists. Tears glistened in her eyes before she turned her face
away. Winnie wished she’d scream or do something. Anything.
Winnie
stood shakily. “Mine can’t be fixed. I’m old and that’s my lot. But you? Well
now, that’s a little different.” She walked toward her bed. Lunch would be
coming soon and she wanted to have her little table ready.
“I
am empty.” Susan didn’t face her. “I have everything and yet it means nothing.
People think they want to have what I do, that I’m lucky. Beautiful children,
successful husband, great house, housekeeper. But I’m not lucky.” Her voice was
flat. “I was lost and when I found myself again it was too late. I had no
choice. I’m trapped.” She finally met Winnie’s eyes. “A golden cage is still a
cage.”
Winnie
froze. She didn’t expect the dam to break so soon. “And who holds the key to
your cage?”
Susan
struggled to sit up a little. The nurse knocked on their door, brought in their
lunch trays, and bustled back out with nary a word. Winnie shook her head but
called out a ‘thank you’ at the nurse’s back nonetheless. She’d need to do the
real nursing around here, but she already knew that.
“The
real question we all face is ‘who am I? How can I make myself happy?’ Some of
us never have the push we need to wake up enough to even ask that question.”
Winnie rested a hand on her hip. “We don’t have to fight for our rights like
the women back in the day did, but we still have to figure out what it means to
be a woman and what it will take for us to be free enough to be happy.” Winnie
studied Susan to see if her words were getting through. “I don’t know what
trouble brought you here, but this is your chance to break that cage wide open.”
Susan eyed the tray and reached out her hand
to push around the sandwich with her thin finger. Winnie hid a small smile. She
got a candy out of her drawer and passed it to Susan. “For dessert.”
Susan
took the hard candy and without protest popped it into her mouth.
So it starts.