When he returned to the terminal, Andrew was waiting meekly beside the suitcase. He touched Matthew’s shoulder. “Let’s go home, Matthew,” he said, and his voice was as gentle as a child’s after a scolding. “I wouldn’t let it bother me,” he said. “She looked kind of strange, anyway. Nobody we would have much to do with.”
6
Elizabeth had a nightmare which she couldn’t remember. She awoke and sat up, her heart thudding, while vague, malevolent spirits swooped over her head. But the room was warm and sunlit, and a breeze was ruffling the dotted swiss curtains. She lay down and went to sleep again. She dreamed she was mending a quantity of buttons—the finish to every nightmare she had had this month, as boring and comforting as hot milk. She was riffling through a cascade of chipped and broken buttons in a cardboard box. Plastic, glass, leather, gold, mother-of-pearl. She fitted together two halves of a tiny white button that belonged on a shirt collar. She rewove an intricate leather knot from a blazer. She glued a silver shank to a coat button, and a pearl disc back into its round metal frame; she found the missing piece of a pink plastic heart from a baby’s cardigan. Her hands moved surely and deftly, replacing the gagging horror of the nightmare with a quiet calm. More buttons appeared, in cigar boxes and coffee cans and Band-Aid tins. Sometimes she grew discouraged. Why mend things so fragile? Why couldn’t they let her throw them out and buy new ones? But there was some joy in doing her job so well. She worked on, plowing through a torrent of colored discs. She awoke feeling as exhausted as if she had been laboring all night long.
Her mother was out in the kitchen, running the Mix-master. “I hope you know what time it is,” she told Elizabeth.
“Eleven-fifteen,” Elizabeth said. She got herself a glass of orange juice and sat down on a stool.
“You never used to get up so late. Do you feel all right?”
Mrs. Abbott was pouring evaporated milk into the beater bowl. Her face from a distance was young and thin and bright, but up close you could see a network of lines like the creases in crumpled, smoothed-out tissue paper. She wore a gingham dress and canvas slip-ons, and she moved with a quick, definite energy that made Elizabeth feel all the more lumpish. In two swift motions she had scraped down the sides of the beater bowl, slapping the scraper sharply against the bowl’s rim. “Maybe you’re coming down with something,” she said.
“I feel all right.”
“You look a mite yellowish.”
“I’m fine.”
But she wasn’t. Her head ached, her throat was dry, her eyelids stung. Her joints seemed in need of oiling. She wondered if she were falling apart, like the machine Mrs. Emerson had talked about. Maybe, at twenty-three, she had passed her peak and started the long slope downhill. “Twenty-three,” Timothy said out of nowhere, “is a woman’s sexual prime, and you are going to be very very sorry you didn’t take advantage of it.” His voice brushed past her right ear. She flicked it away. Ghosts in the daytime were easily dealt with.
Her mother broke eggs into the beater bowl, and then dumped in an unmeasured amount of salt. Two or three times a year she spent a morning in the kitchen brewing up this mixture—chicken and rice in a pale cream sauce, a dozen portions at once, laid away in the freezer until some church member should sicken or die. The pans were aluminum foil, disposable, to save the bereaved the effort of washing and returning them. How thoughtful can you get? And what would old Mr. Bailey say, or that sickly Daphne Knight, if they knew that even now their funeral baked meats were lying in wait for them in the freezer? She watched her mother disjoint a row of stewed chickens on the counter, tossing the slippery gray skin to the collie who fidgeted at her feet. “This is what you were doing the last time I was here,” Elizabeth said. “They must have been dying off like flies.”
“Oh, they have,” said her mother. “I made another batch while you were gone.” She sounded cheerful and matter-of-fact. On the surface she was the perfect minister’s wife, tilting her head serenely beneath his pulpit on Sundays and offering the proper sympathy in the proper soft, hesitant voice; but underneath she was all bustle and practicality, and if she could have deep-frozen her sympathy ahead of time too she probably would have. She yanked a thighbone from a hen and tossed it toward the garbage bin, but Elizabeth reached out to catch it and offer it to the dog. “Oh no, Elizabeth,” her mother said, and grabbed it back without altering the rhythm of her work. “No bones for you, Hilary,” she told the dog. “They’ll give you splinters.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Elizabeth said.
“Do you want to pay the vet’s bills?”
“Nope, she’s not worth it.”
Elizabeth scowled at Hilary, who was beautiful but stupid. She had a white mane and a long sharp nose. Because she was untrustworthy around henhouses she was kept in the house like any city dog, and pent-up energy made her nervous and high-strung. She prowled restlessly around the linoleum with her toenails clicking. “I don’t like you,” Elizabeth told her. Hilary moaned and then zeroed in on a place to lie down.
“Your father’s having trouble over tomorrow’s sermon,” her mother said. “He’s working on it now, but when he’s through he wants to have a talk with you.”
“What about?”
“That’s for him to say.”
“Slothfulness,” said Elizabeth. “Aimlessness. Slobbishness.”
“Oh, Elizabeth.”
“Well, that is it, isn’t it?”
“If you know what it is,” her mother said, “why don’t you do something about it?”
Elizabeth stood up. “I believe I’ll walk the dog,” she said.
“Go ahead. The leash is on the doorknob.”
She stalked through the house, with Hilary leaping and panting and whimpering behind her. There was nothing about this place that made her feel comfortable. Until a few years ago they had lived in an old Victorian frame parsonage, but then the church ladies (always in a flutter over how to make life easier for Reverend Abbott) had arranged to have a brick ranch-house built. It was nearer the church, which was no advantage because the church sat in the middle of a tobacco field out on R.F.D. 1. The outline of the house was bland and shallow. Even the sounds there were shallow—wallboard thudding flimsily, carpets purring, water hissing into a low-slung modern tub. Mr. Abbott, who was subject to drafts, loved it. Mrs. Abbott hated it, although only Elizabeth guessed that. Mrs. Abbott was very much like Elizabeth; she liked wood and stone, she had enjoyed outwitting the bucking hot water heater and the back screen door that was forever sticking shut in the old house. Moving around her new streamlined kitchen, she sometimes stopped to throw a baffled look at the stove that timed its own meals. Then Elizabeth would say, “We could always move back again.”
“Move back? What would the congregation think? Besides, they’re tearing it down.”
Elizabeth clipped the leash to Hilary’s collar and stepped out the front door. Blazing heat poured down on her. It was only the beginning of June, but in this treeless yard it felt like August. She crossed the flat spread of grass and descended the clay bank to the highway. Just to her right sat the church, raw brick that matched the house, topped by a white steeple. Gravestones and parking space lay in back of it. The Sunday school bus sat beneath a pecan tree at one side. FAITH BAPTIST CHURCH, its sign read. “THE DIFFERENCE IS WORTH THE DISTANCE.” She never could get that phrase straight in her head. At night sometimes it came to her: The difference is worth the distance, the distance is worth the difference. Which was it? Either would do. She stopped to let the dog squat by the mailbox, and then moved on up the road.
Neat white farmhouses speckled the fields, as far as the eye could see. Each had its protective circling of henhouses and pigsties, barns and tobacco barns, toolsheds and whitewashed fences. Occasionally a little dot of a man would come into view, driving a mule or carrying a feedsack. Nobody seemed to notice Elizabeth. She imagined that the neighbors thought of her as a black sheep—the minister’s ne’er-do-well daughter who lay in bed till elev
en and then had no better occupation than walking the dog.
There in that green field, where nothing useful grew, a circus tent rose up every August and a traveling revivalist came. He stood behind a portable pulpit, sweating from all his flailing and shouting beneath the bug-filmed extension lamps. His message was death, and the hell to follow—all for people who failed to give in to God in this only, only life. Elizabeth’s father sat to one side of him in a folding wooden chair. “Wouldn’t you be jealous?” Elizabeth had asked him years ago. “Having someone else to come and save your own people?” “That’s a very peculiar notion you have there,” her father said. “As long as they arrive at the right destination, does it matter what road they come by?” She hadn’t taken his words at face value; she never did. She had watched, in her white puff-sleeved dress on a front row seat, and come to her own conclusion: the revivalist picked sinners like plums, and her father stood by with a bushel basket and smiled as they fell in with a thud. His smile was tender and knowing. Ordinary Baptist housewives, stricken for the moment with tears and fits of trembling, flocked to the front with their children while the choir sang, “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” and her father smiled down at them, mentally entering their names on a list that would last forever. What if they changed their minds in the morning? Maybe some did; for next year they were at the front once more as if they felt the need of being saved all over again. A girlfriend of Elizabeth’s had been saved three times before she was fourteen. Each time she cried, and vowed to love her mother more and stop telling lies. She gave Elizabeth her bangle bracelets and her bubble-bath, her movie magazines and her adjustable birthstone rings from Dick Tracy candyboxes and all other vain possessions. “Oh, how could you just sit there?” she said. “With that preacher’s voice so thundery and your father so quiet and shining? This has changed my whole life,” she said. Although it never did, for long. But Elizabeth was always stunned by those brief glimpses of Sue Ellen in her altered state, with her face flushed and intense and the centers of her eyes darker. And then at breakfast the next morning there would be her father and the revivalist calmly buttering buckwheat muffins, never giving a thought to what they had caused.
Hilary was begging to run, yelping and shaking with excitement. “Oh, all right,” Elizabeth told her. They took off across a field. Elizabeth’s moccasins sank deep into plowed orange earth. The collie in motion rippled like water, her tail a billowing plume, her white forepaws landing daintily together. But Elizabeth only felt heavy and out of breath, and an ache between her shoulderblades was spreading down her spine. “Stop, now,” she said. She drew the leash inward and Hilary slowed, still panting, and chose her way between clods of earth. From behind she was bulky-hipped and dignified. The long hair on her hindlegs looked like ruffled petticoats. That should have made Elizabeth smile; why did she want to cry? She studied the petticoats, and the stilt-like legs beneath them—old-lady legs. Mrs. Emerson’s legs. She saw Mrs. Emerson gingerly descending the veranda steps, slightly sideways, with her skirt swirling around her thin, elegant shins. Sun lit her hair and the discs on her bracelet. She was looking down, concentrating on the precise placement of her pointy-toed alligator shoes. Was it worry that puckered the inner corners of her eyebrows?
Pieces of Emersons were lodged within Elizabeth like shrapnel. Faces kept poking to the surface—Timothy, Mrs. Emerson, Margaret cheerfully sharing her sawdusty room. And Matthew. Always Matthew, with his dim eyes behind his glasses asking why she had been so curt with him when she left. Why had she? She wanted to do it all over again, take more time explaining to him even if it meant catching a later bus. Take the time to tell Mrs. Emerson goodbye, and to put away her tools properly. No one else would. But most of all, what she wanted was to change all those days with Timothy. “Whatever it was that happened,” Matthew had told her, “you can’t blame yourself for it.” Well, why not? Who else could she blame? She had done everything wrong with him from the very beginning, laughed off all he said to her right up to the moment when the gun went off, misread every word; and what she hadn’t misread she had pretended to. She thought of that snowy night when he worried that he had died, and she had acted as if she didn’t understand. If she couldn’t help him out, couldn’t she at least have admitted she couldn’t?
“Don’t mull it over,” Matthew had said. But he was under the impression that they were talking about a straightforward suicide. And he didn’t have the picture of death from a bullet wound to struggle against every night of his life.
She tapped Hilary with a loop of leash. “Let’s go,” she said. Then she set off toward the ranch-house, with Hilary trotting beside her casting helpful, anxious glances. Red dust had worked into the stitches of Elizabeth’s moccasins. A hot wind stiffened her face. Everywhere she looked seemed parched and bleak and glaring, but at least she was back where she was supposed to be.
When she got home Polly was in the kitchen with her baby, the smallest, fattest baby Elizabeth had ever known. Creases ringed her wrists like rubber bands; she not only had a double chin but double thighs, double knees, double ankles as well. Polly jostled her in her lap absentmindedly, speaking over her wispy head. “Look at you,” she said. “I wish I could just go tearing off with the dog any time I wanted.”
“Why don’t you?” Elizabeth said. “Leave Julie with Mother.”
“Oh, no,” said Polly. She sighed. She was smaller than Elizabeth, with a heart-shaped face and a tousle of yellow curls like a frilled nightcap. “You’re the one with the cute little sister,” people used to tell Elizabeth. In high school Polly had been Queen of May Day. She had kept to the style of the fifties ever since—spitcurls framing her forehead, her lipstick a pure bright pink. Her flower-sprigged shirtdress was immaculate, except where the baby had just spit down the front. “Hand me a Kleenex, will you?” she asked Elizabeth. “What did I take all that Good Grooming for, if this was what I’d come to?”
“If you wore a bibbed apron—” her mother said. “That’s what I always did.” She was laying sheets of foil across the casseroles, which lined one counter from end to end. Without looking around she said, “Polly brought the mail in with her. What’d you do with that letter, Polly?”
“Here it is.”
From the look Polly gave her as she handed her the envelope, Elizabeth guessed that they had been discussing it before she came in. She made a point of ripping it open in front of them, not even bothering to sit down. It was written in Matthew’s looped, rounded hand. Dear Elizabeth, Why don’t you ever answer my letters? Did your suitcase arrive safely? Why do you—She folded the sheets of paper and replaced them in the envelope. “What’s for lunch?” she asked her mother.
“One of these casseroles.”
“Funeral food?”
Polly settled her baby into a new position and studied Elizabeth’s face. “You certainly have been getting a lot of mail these days,” she said.
“Mmm.”
“All from Baltimore. You used to be the world’s worst letter-writer. Have you changed? Or is someone an optimist.”
“Oh, you know, these are just people I met,” Elizabeth said vaguely.
“People? They look like mostly one handwriting.”
“Now, Polly, leave her alone,” her mother said. “Elizabeth, honey, I wish you’d take these down to the freezer for me.”
She stacked foil pans into Elizabeth’s outstretched arms. They were still warm, almost hot. Elizabeth rested her chin on the uppermost pan and started for the basement. Behind her, a deep meaningful silence linked her mother and Polly.
Most of the basement was a recreation room, which smelled of asphalt tile. A phonograph sat in one corner. When she was still in secretarial school Polly used to bring her friends here, and they had danced and drunk Cokes and eaten endless bags of Fritos. Then Carl had proposed to her on that vinyl loveseat in front of the TV. Elizabeth remembered the night it happened—Polly making the announcement, smiling up at Carl as she spoke. She was still the younger si
ster then; it wasn’t until she was married that she somehow bypassed Elizabeth and began exchanging those knowing glances with her mother over Elizabeth’s head. She had hugged Elizabeth tightly and suggested they have a double wedding. A what? Elizabeth thought she had lost her mind. By then Elizabeth was in her junior year of college, living at home, and she had brought no boys back with her except the laundromat burglar once and you couldn’t count poor sweet Dommie. She had never used this recreation room. It affected her the way New Year’s Eve parties did: you were supposed to have fun there, you were pressured into it, and the obligation weighed her spirits down.
She crossed to the dark cubicle behind the record player, partitioned off by cinderblocks, containing only a furnace and a freezer. On the floor by the freezer a batch of orange wine was brewing up in a canning kettle. “What’s that stuff you have down there?” her mother had asked the day before. “It’s a new kind of preserves,” Elizabeth said. “Preserves? What on earth kind of preserves …” Elizabeth had cut all the oranges and lemons herself, regretting it before she was halfway done; every whiff of lemon reminded her of when she and Matthew had done this job together. She had a mind like a tape recorder, an audial version of a photographic memory, and each chop of knife blade against breadboard brought her bits of things that Matthew had said. “ ‘Two cups raisins, minced’—how, when they stick together so?” “Did you ever make pomander balls?” “When the wine has aged we’ll go on a picnic. I’ll bring a chicken, you bring the wine in some nice, round jug with a cork plugged in.…” Now the wine was probably rotting away on the sink, and she would never know how it came out. That was why she was brewing more now—that and sheer devilment. She liked the idea of strong spirits bubbling in Reverend Abbott’s basement. She had sent off this time for the special government permit, just so she would know that the parsonage was a licensed brewery even if no one else ever did.