“Huh?”
Joan came back, carrying a cut-glass vase full of water. He asked her, “Did I come at a bad time?”
“Oh, not really.”
“Well, did I or didn’t I?”
“It’s all right,” Joan told him. “Aunt Lou didn’t feel well this morning, but she’s upstairs now and everything’s all right.” She took the daisies from him. Her hands when they brushed his were cool and impersonal, and she didn’t look at him. “We have to go gradually,” she said. “I keep forgetting that. I don’t seem to have a light touch with anything.” Yet her fingers when she arranged the flowers were as light and gentle as butterflies, and the daisies stood up or bent gracefully over the minute she touched them. When she was done they had stopped looking draggled; James was glad now that he had brought them.
“You ought to work for a florist,” he told her.
But she set the vase down on a table without even noticing how they looked. She hadn’t glanced at them once, all the time she was arranging them. “Mrs. Hammond does,” she said. “Have a light touch, I mean. But I’m not sure that’s the kind I’m talking about right now.”
“I don’t know that I follow you,” James said.
She shook her head and sat down, as if she had given up on him. “Never mind,” she said.
“Mrs. Hammond has a light touch?”
“Never mind.” She looked suddenly at Simon. “Simon, do you want lunch?” she asked him.
“I just had breakfast.”
“Oh.”
“You have a light touch,” James said. “You have the lightest touch of anyone I know.”
“Oh, James, you don’t know.”
“Well, I’m trying—” He stopped and glanced toward Simon. It seemed to him Simon looked cold. “Don’t you want to sit down?” he asked.
“I’m okay.”
“Come on.”
Simon shrugged and sat down on the couch. Now that they were all seated here, facing each other and keeping their hands folded in their laps, it seemed more awkward than before. It seemed they should be having a conversation of some kind, something that made sense. Not these little jagged bits of words. He tried smiling at Joan but all she did was smile back, using only her mouth while her eyes stayed serious and maybe even angry; he didn’t know. “Would you rather I come back another time?” he asked.
“It’s all right.”
“Well.” He sat further forward and looked at his fingernails. “I guess your uncle’s working today,” he said.
“Didn’t Ansel tell you so?”
“In a way he did.”
“There’s nothing bad about it,” said Joan.
“Why, no, of course not.”
“You have to do something. You can’t sit around. It’s not fair to sit around, reminding people all the time—” She stopped, and James looked sideways at her while he kept his head bent over his fingernails. Her voice was so sharp-sounding it made him uneasy, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to say to her. But then she said, “Well. So you don’t have to work tobacco any more.”
“No,” James said.
“That’s good.”
He waited a minute, and then cleared his throat and said, “It’ll be a good season, they say.”
“Billy Brandon told me that,” Simon said suddenly.
“Barns are nearly full already.”
In his shirt pocket he found a plastic comb, with little pieces of lint sticking to it. By running his index finger across its teeth he made a sound like a tiny xylophone, flat and tinny. Joan and Simon both sat watching him. When he saw them watching he stopped and put the comb back in his pocket. “I guess I’ll be going,” he said helplessly. “I could come some other time.”
“All right,” said Joan.
“Do you want me to?”
“What?”
“Do you want me to come back?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Okay,” he said, but he still wasn’t sure. He stood up and went over to the door, with Joan and Simon following solemnly behind. Then he turned around and said, “I could take you to the movies, maybe, Thursday night. The two of you.”
“We’ll see,” Joan said.
“Do you want to come or don’t you?”
“I don’t know yet if we can,” she said.
“Well, I wouldn’t ask so far in advance, but tomorrow night I can’t go. I’m going to take Ansel playing cribbage. But Thursday—”
“We’ll see,” said Joan.
“I know I wasn’t going to chauffeur him around no more, but lately he’s been—Well. We don’t have to go into that.”
“I’m not going into anything,” Joan said.
“Yes, you are.”
“I wasn’t saying a word.”
“I could tell the way you were looking.”
“I wasn’t looking any way. I wasn’t even thinking about it.”
She sounded near tears. James stood there, trying to think of what to say next, but he figured anything he came up with would only make things worse. So he waited a minute, and then he said, “I think I’d better leave. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” Simon said.
He was down the porch steps and halfway across the yard when he heard their door close; Joan had never said goodbye. The only sounds now were from Ansel’s window—the birdlike sounds of women laughing, all clustered around his brother, their laughter pealing out in clear happy trills that drifted through the window and hung like a curtain across the empty porch.
10
That afternoon, Joan had a telephone call from her mother. She was upstairs when it came, getting Mrs. Pike out of bed for the second time and finding it a little easier now than it had been in the morning. “What do you want to wear?” she asked, and her aunt actually answered, with only a slight pause beforehand. “The beige, I guess,” she said. She waited while Joan lifted it off the hanger. “Can I wear the abalone pin with that?”
“Of course,” Joan said. She would have agreed if her aunt had wanted to wear the kitchen curtains. She picked the pin out of the bureau drawer and laid it beside the dress, and then the phone rang. Both of them stopped to listen.
“Hey, Joan!” Simon called.
“I’m up here.”
“Someone wants you on the telephone.”
“Well, I’ll be back,” Joan told her aunt, and she went down the stairs very fast, two steps at a time. She didn’t know who she was expecting, but when she heard only the ice-cold, nasal voice of the operator she was disappointed.
“Miss Joan Pike?” the operator asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you Miss Joan Pike.”
“Yes.”
“Long distance calling.”
“All right,” Joan said.
There was a pause, and then her mother said, “Is that Joan?”, formally, and waited for Joan to go through the whole business of identifying herself again.
“It’s me,” said Joan. “Hello, Mother.”
“Hello,” her mother said. “I called to see how Lou was. Your father said to ask.”
“She’s getting better,” said Joan. She heard her mother turn and murmur to her father, probably relaying Joan’s answer. In normal speech her mother had a very soft voice, held in as if there was somebody sick in the next room. But when she returned to the phone her tea-party voice came back, louder and more distinct, the voice of a plump woman who stood very straight and placed the points of her shoes outward when she walked.
“Your father feels bad we couldn’t make it to the funeral,” she was saying. “He says it’s only a sniffle he has, but I don’t like the sound of it. Is there anything we can do for Lou?”
“Not that I can think of. The flowers were very nice—Uncle Roy said to tell you.”
“Well. We weren’t quite sure. Some people have a dislike of gladioli.”
“No, they were fine,” said Joan.
“That’s good. How’s Simon?”
“He’s all right, I g
uess.”
“Tell him hello for us, now. Tell him—”
Her voice had grown almost as soft as it normally was. Joan could picture her, sitting on the edge of that rocker with the needlework seat, with Joan’s father standing behind her and bending cautiously forward to hear what was going on. He was a little afraid of telephones himself; he treated them as though they might explode. She saw how her mother would be smoothing down that little crease between her eyebrows with her index finger, and then letting the crease come back the minute she dropped her hand. The thought of that made Joan miss her; she said suddenly, “I’m tired.”
“What?”
“I’m just tired. I want to come home. I don’t want to stay here any more.”
“Why, Joan—” her mother said, and then let her voice trail off. Finally she said, “Don’t you think you should be with Lou now?”
“I’m not helping,” said Joan. “She just sits. Every place I look, Janie Rose is there, and I don’t feel like staying here. Nothing is right.”
“Doesn’t Simon need you?”
“Well—” Joan said, and then stopped because her father must have asked to know what was going on. The two of them murmured together a while, her mother’s voice sounding faintly impatient. Joan’s father was growing deaf; he had to be told twice. When her mother finally returned to Joan, she was sighing, and her voice was loud again.
“You know we’d love to have you,” she said. “As soon as you can come. When were you planning on?”
“I don’t know. A day or two, maybe. By bus.”
“Or maybe James could drive you,” said her mother. “We’d love to have him.”
“He won’t be coming.”
“Your father’s been asking about him.”
“He won’t be coming,” Joan said firmly.
There was another pause, and then her mother said, “Is something wrong?”
“What would be wrong?”
“Well, I don’t know. Shall we expect you when we see you, then?”
“All right. Don’t go to any trouble.”
“It’ll be no trouble. Goodbye, now.”
“Goodbye. And thank you for calling.”
She hung up, but she stayed in the same position, her hand on the receiver. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Simon. He was leaning against the frame of the kitchen door, eating another peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich. “Hey,” she said, but he only bit off a hunk of sandwich and chewed steadily, keeping his eyes on her face. “That was your Aunt Abby,” she told him.
“I know.”
“She called to see how everyone is.”
He straightened up from the doorframe and came over to her, planting his feet very carefully and straight in front of him. When he had reached her he said, “I hear how you’re going there,” and waited, with the sandwich raised halfway to his mouth.
“We’ll see,” said Joan.
“You going by bus?”
“I might not go at all. I don’t know yet.”
“How long would you go for?”
“Look,” said Joan. “I don’t know that I’m going. I just think it might be good to get away. So don’t tell anyone, all right?”
“Well, all right.”
“Not even James.”
“All right,” said Simon. He was good at keeping secrets; it was an insult to suggest he might tell somebody. “If you do go—” he said.
“I might not.”
“But if you do go, can I go with you?”
“Oh, Simon,” Joan began, and stopped there because she didn’t know what else to say. “Your parents need you here,” she said finally.
“They won’t notice.”
“Your daddy will. So will your mother, pretty soon.”
“No.”
“Yes. See, she’s coming downstairs now.”
He turned and looked toward the stairs. Mrs. Pike was coming down of her own accord, taking each step uncertainly but not asking for help. She had pinned the abalone pin at the neck of her dress, and it was bunching up the material a little. When she reached the bottom of the stairs she looked from Joan to Simon and back again, as if she were expecting them to tell her what to do next. Joan went over to her.
“I could fix you a bite to eat,” she said.
“I came to sew.”
“To sew?”
“I came to sew Connie’s dress together.”
“Oh,” Joan said. She looked around at the sewing machine, and was glad to see that the dress still lay there. (Mrs. Hammond had gone away all helter-skelter, talking to herself, leaving everything behind her.) “It’s all here,” Joan told her. “Is there anything else you need?”
“No. I just want to sew.”
“Shall we sit here and keep you company?”
“I just want to sew.”
“All right,” said Joan, but she waited a minute anyway, and so did Simon. Mrs. Pike didn’t look their way again. She went over to the chair at the sewing machine and lowered herself stiffly into it, and then she picked up the material and began sewing on it. She did it just that suddenly, without examining what she was about to do first or even looking at it—just jammed two pieces of cloth beneath the needle of the sewing machine and stepped hard on the treadle. Finally Joan turned away, because there was nothing more she could do. “Let’s go to the kitchen,” she told Simon. She steered him gently by one shoulder and he went, but he kept looking back over his shoulder at his mother. When they reached the kitchen he said, “See?” but she said, “Hush,” without even asking what he meant. “Maybe we could go for a walk,” she said.
“I found my ball.”
“What ball?”
“The one I lost. I found it.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said Joan. “Is it all beat up?”
“It’s fine. You want to play catch?”
“Not really.”
“Aw, come on, Joan.”
She frowned at him. “We should have taken you to a barber,” she said finally.
“Just for fifteen minutes or so? I won’t throw hard.”
“Oh, all right,” she said.
Simon went over to the door and picked up the baseball that lay beside it. It was grayer than before, and grass-stained, but lying out in the field for two weeks hadn’t hurt it any. He began throwing it up in the air and catching it, while he led the way through the kitchen and out the back door.
“If we had a big mowed lawn, we could play roll-a-bat,” Joan said.
“Roll-a-bat’s a baby game.”
They cut through the tall grass behind the house, parting the weeds ahead of them with swimming motions and advancing beyond the garbage cans and the rusted junk to a place where the grass was shorter. Janie Rose had set fire to this spot not a year ago, while trailing through here in her mother’s treasured wedding dress holding a lighted cigarette high in front of her with her little finger stuck out. James and Mr. Pike and Mr. Terry had had to fight the fire with their own shirts, their faces glistening with sweat and their voices hoarse from smoke, while Ansel leaned out the back window calling “Shame! Shame!” and Janie Rose sat perched in the tin can tree, crying and cleaning her glasses with the lace hem of the wedding dress. Now the weeds had grown up again, but they were shorter and sparser, with black scorched earth showing around them. Joan and Simon took up their positions, one at each end of the burned patch, and Simon scraped a standing-place for himself by kicking down the brittle weeds and scuffing at the charred surface of the soil. “Here goes,” he said, and wound up his arm so hard that Joan raised both hands in front of her to ward it off before he had even let go of the ball. Simon stopped winding up and pounded the ball into the palm of his other hand.
“Hey, now,” he said. “You going to play like a girl?”
“Not if you throw easy like you promised.”
He squinted across at her a minute, and then nodded and raised his throwing arm again. This time the ball came without any windup, cutti
ng in a straight clean arc through the blue of the sky. Joan caught it neatly, remembering not to close her eyes, and threw it back to him underhanded.
“Overhand,” said Simon.
“Sorry.”
Little prickles of sweat came out on her forehead. She tugged her blouse out of her bermudas, so as to make herself cooler, and almost missed the next ball when it whizzed low and straight toward her stomach.
“Watch it,” Simon said.
“You watch it. That one burned my hands.”
She threw it overhand this time, and it fell a little short, so that Simon had to run forward to catch it. While he was walking back to his place a screen door slammed behind them, and Joan automatically turned her head and listened to find out what end of the house it had come from. “Coming,” said Simon, and just then Joan saw, in the corner of her eye, someone tall in James’s plaid shirt, untangling his way through the field and toward Joan. She turned all the way. “Watch—!” Simon said, and something slammed into the side of her head and made everything green and smarting. She sat down, not because she had been knocked down but because she was so startled her knees were weak. Beside her, nestled in a clump of grass, was the baseball, looking whiter than she remembered. Her temple began throbbing and she lay all the way down on her back, with the scorched ground underneath her making little crisp brittle sounds. “Joan!” Simon was shouting, and whoever wore James’s plaid shirt was thudding closer and closer. It was Ansel. She saw that and closed her eyes. In the same moment Simon arrived, with his breath coming fast and loud. He thumped down beside her and said, “Joan, oh, shit, Joan,” which made her suddenly grin, even with her eyes closed and her head aching. She looked up at him and said, “Simon Pike—” and tried to sit up, but someone yanked her back by the shoulders. “Where did you—” she began, but then Ansel clapped his hand over her mouth. His hand smelled of Noxzema.
“You lie still,” he said. “Don’t you sit and don’t you talk. I’ll call a ambulance.”
“An ambulance?” And this time she out and out laughed, and sat up even with Ansel trying to press her back down again. “Ansel,” she said, “I really don’t need an ambulance. I just got surprised.”