by Larry Watson
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
A Novel
LARRY WATSON
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2020
For Susan
Contents
One
Edie Linderman
Two
Edie Dunn
Three
Edie Pritchard
One
Edie Linderman
1967–68
Sunlight glints off the slope of the hood like a snowdrift, and Roy Linderman puts on his sunglasses. Like a man born to drive, he lets one arm hang out the window of his Chevy Impala while the other rests on top of the steering wheel to keep the big car in line.
The air flowing through the car is as hot as the August wind blowing across the prairie, and to make himself heard above the rush and the steady rumble of the Chevy, Roy raises his voice. “How do you know it isn’t the flu?” he asks. “Maybe we’ll all get it.”
“My aunt in Bozeman is a nurse,” Edie says, “and she says it’s almost always something people ate.”
“And what makes you so sure it was the hot dog?”
“Please. Sitting all day in that greasy water? It was the hot dog.”
“And you didn’t eat one? So you’re safe.”
“That’s right,” Edie says. “I’m safe.”
“When we were kids, whatever was going around, he got. Measles. Mumps. Chicken pox. Like maybe with twins, only one of us had to get it. And Dean would be the one and it’d pass me by. Strep throat. Tonsillitis. He had his tonsils out and I still got mine.”
“I remember when he had strep.” She gives her head a rueful little shake. “I remember that very well.”
“I wondered if maybe you did,” Roy says.
On every side of them, nothing rises more than knee-high, and the wheatgrass, needlegrass, blue grama, and fescue—all the color of a sweat-stained straw hat—bend down lower in the direction they’re always bent, west to east.
“What are we going after again?” Edie asks.
“It’s a 1951 GMC half ton. Low miles.”
“How did you find out about it?”
“It’s Les Moore’s uncle’s. The uncle had to sell his ranch, so he doesn’t need the truck.”
“Doesn’t anyone else want it?”
“Hell yes. But we’ll get there first.”
Ahead a dust cloud, high and thick enough to tint a corner of the sky a darker blue, swirls, and well before they draw close, they can taste its dirt. “The hell,” Roy says. “Someone’s plowing something. Close the windows.”
They both crank up their windows, then Edie crawls over the seat to get to the rear windows. She has to swing one bare leg, then the other past Roy’s head, and he takes his eyes off the road to watch her make this climb.
“Stay back there,” he says. “You can roll them down again in a minute.”
As the windows close, the air changes pitch from a steady whoosh to a fast-paced thump, as if a propeller powered their vehicle. Then the interior suddenly quiets, and their voices lower as though they’ve entered a church.
“My God,” Edie says and draws a deep breath. “It’s like the inside of an oven.”
“I’m never getting a car again without air-conditioning,” Roy says. “I swear it.”
Edie keeps one hand on the window crank.
“Your place gets plenty warm, doesn’t it?” says Roy. “I told Dean anytime you two need a good night’s sleep, come on over and you can have my bedroom. Air-conditioned comfort. You can’t beat it for sleeping.”
“And turn you out of your bed? Where would you sleep?”
“I can always find someplace to bunk down.”
“I bet you can.”
“Or maybe you want your own unit? If the store has any left at the end of the season, they always put them on big sale. I could use my discount and get you an even better price.”
“We’ll let you know.”
“Talk it over with Dean,” Roy says, then twists his head as though he needs to know exactly where she is in the back seat.
“We’ll let you know.”
In another minute the sky clears back to its undifferentiated blue. Roy says, “You can roll them back down. And get back up here. I’m not your chauffeur.”
The truth is, Edie would rather remain in the back seat, out of Roy’s reach. These brothers . . . For some time now, Dean has acted as though he’s been warned to keep his hands off her. Even in bed, he sleeps on a narrow space away from her. Meanwhile, Roy has been . . . well, Roy. Could it be that desire is something like mumps or measles, one brother coming down with it while it passes the other by?
Edie points a finger straight ahead. “Take me to the thee-a-tah, my good man.”
“And I’m sure as hell not your good man.”
As Edie climbs over the seat again, Roy reaches out a hand, but whatever he was going to do, he must think better of it because he puts his hand back on the steering wheel. Once she settles back into her seat however, he takes his hat from where it’s been resting in the space between them and tosses it into the back.
Roy asks, “You ever been up to Bentrock?”
“When I was a little girl,” Edie says, “my dad took us up to Canada. Just drove across the border and turned around and came back again. So we could say we’d been there. Would we have gone through Bentrock then?”
“You might have.”
“Then I might have been there.”
“Well, whatever you remember, it hasn’t changed since.”
Edie slips off her flimsy rubber sandals and hooks her toes up on the lip of the dashboard.
“You’ll probably get your feet dirty today,” Roy says. “I don’t think Bentrock’s got but the one paved street.”
“I thought I’d wait in the car.”
“Hell no. I need you to keep him distracted during the negotiations.”
“Really? What was Dean’s job going to be?”
“Drive. That’s all. Just drive.”
Roy takes a pack of Camels from the pocket of his white shirt and shakes a cigarette up to his lips. He offers the pack to Edie, then pulls it back. “I forgot. You don’t smoke.”
He pushes in the lighter. A moment later it pops out, and he presses its glowing coils to his cigarette. He inhales deeply and when he exhales, the wind whips the stream of smoke out the window. “Don’t you have any vices, Edie?”
“You know better than to ask me that.”
Roy turns his head toward her and with his finger slowly traces in the air the length of Edie’s bare leg. “Tell me something,” he says. “How do you get so tan working in the bank all day?”
Edie quickly lowers both feet to the floor. She says, “We’ve got a folding chair we set up behind the building. During breaks and lunch hour, I sit back there. And I’m out on weekends of course.”
“I wouldn’t think you’d get much sun in that alley.” Roy pinches his cigarette between his lips and extends both arms. “Me? I’m like a steak cooked on just one side.”
The car floats over the centerline, and Edie starts to reach for the steering wheel, but then Roy takes hold of it once again.
“About the only time I get out of the store,” he says, “it’s in the car, and then one arm hangs out the window and the other doesn’t get any sun at all.”
The only other car visible on this stretch of highway is at least a couple miles ahead, and then it vanishes, curving its way into the first of a series of low hills, each stitched to the next with a narrow dark strip of cottonwood or bur oak.
“Now you,” Roy says, “you probably have to hike your skirt up plenty high to get so much sun.” He leans forward to look at her. “And maybe undo a button or
two.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Of course with those miniskirts you’ve taken to wearing . . .”
“For God’s sake, Roy. Can’t we have a normal conversation?”
Roy smiles the smile of a man confident of its power to heal or beguile. “Why sure, Edie. What did you want to talk about?”
But she says nothing and turns her head away from her brother-in-law. She knows women whose husbands would never let their wives get into a car with Roy Linderman. But not Dean. No, not Dean.
THE BIG OVENS in Flieder’s Family Bakery blaze all night long and into the day, turning out racks and trays of cakes, cookies, rolls, and loaves of bread, some of it trucked to stores around town. People might say they love the aroma of Flieder’s baked goods, but they don’t have it in their nostrils every day as Dean and Edie do in their apartment above the bakery.
Dean sits on the sofa in his underwear. A saucepan rests on the coffee table in front of him just in case he pukes. On his lap is the navy blue leatherette-bound Prairie Harvest, the 1961 yearbook of Gladstone High School, and it’s open to the page picturing the homecoming queen and her court: five pretty girls in formal dresses standing in the middle of a football field on a windy day. The girls’ carefully done-up hair-dos blow back from their faces, and the queen, Dorothy Bergstrom, holds up a white-gloved hand to keep her crown in place.
Dean stares at the page as if he’s studying for an exam. Why does Edie look like a woman and the others like schoolgirls? Her body could furnish the explanation, of course, but there has to be something else. Is it in her eyes? Is there some measure of self-knowledge there that the other girls don’t yet possess and perhaps never will? Or is Dean Linderman searching for something in the photograph that could provide the answer to the question that perpetually troubles him: Was Edie Pritchard a girl who could make a mistake among her suitors, believing she’d chosen one young man when she meant to choose another? Or is his uncertainty simply the kind that could trouble any twin: Do you mean me or my brother?
Someone knocks at the door, and Dean closes the annual and slides it under one of the pillows on the sofa. By this time his mother is already in the apartment, her blue-and-white floral-print housedress stretching as wide across her as it would billowing on a clothesline.
She’s breathing hard from exertion and has to wait a moment before speaking. “You feeling any better?” she asks.
“You didn’t walk here, did you?”
“Just from down the street. Your father and your uncle are at the Silver Dollar sampling the wares.”
“I’m doing all right.”
The apartment is not spacious, and its windows are high and narrow. The dim light makes the place feel even smaller, with every corner vanishing in shadow. Mrs. Linderman peers carefully at her son before bending down and pressing her palm against his forehead.
“Well, you don’t have a fever. How long since you been on the pot?”
“Three hours at least.”
“You’re probably done then.”
“I don’t think I have anything left in there.”
“You didn’t have much to begin with.” She points to his bare torso. “I believe I can count your ribs from here.”
“I haven’t had much appetite lately.”
“I should have your problem,” his mother says. “But you be careful. Just last year your father caught something, and he couldn’t stop throwing up. He was down to blood and bile, but he kept heaving.”
Dean says, “This was probably something I ate.”
“You can be sure,” she says and walks to the kitchen. She opens the refrigerator and surveys the interior. She closes the refrigerator and proceeds to open cupboard doors.
“Tonight you can have a couple soda crackers,” she calls out, “and a little 7Up.”
While his mother is conducting her kitchen inventory, Dean slips the annual out from under the pillow and carries it to the bedroom and puts it on the closet shelf. He takes a pair of Levi’s out of a laundry basket and pulls them on.
Dean sits back down on the sofa, but his mother keeps circling and sniffing the air as if she’s trying to separate the smell of white bread from wheat wafting up from the bakery below.
“Roy’s paying her for making the trip?” Mrs. Linderman asks.
“That’s what he said. Forty bucks.”
“How about you? Was he going to pay you?”
“I would have done it,” says Dean, “out of the goodness of my heart.”
“Huh.” Mrs. Linderman continues her circuit of the room. “I thought they’d be back by now,” she says. “It generally don’t take your brother long to close a deal.”
“Maybe it took some time to track the owner down.”
Mrs. Linderman walks over to the television set, a Motorola small enough to rest on a TV tray. Although the set is turned off, she adjusts its antenna anyway. “So I take it,” she says, “you ain’t concerned.”
Dean closes his eyes and lets his head loll back on the sofa cushions. “What would I be concerned about, Mom?”
“It’s not for me to say.”
“No, go ahead. What should I be worried about?”
She bends over and looks at the blank television screen, though of course the set gives back no image but hers—cheeks as round and pronounced as plums, heavy jowls, close-set eyes, and all framed by improbably black hair enclosed in tight mesh.
She says, “You can get color in a little portable like this now, you know. I seen the ads. You probably have too.”
Dean opens his eyes. “Stop changing the subject.”
“Roy could get you a good price on one.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
Mrs. Linderman rises back up to her full height. She adjusts her hairnet. “What the hell. If you ain’t worried, you ain’t worried.”
“That’s my wife you’re talking about,” Dean says.
Mrs. Linderman shakes her head and says cheerfully, “It’s not so much your wife as your brother. You know what your uncle says. Ice to Eskimos.” She pauses then adds, “Panties off a nun.”
Dean closes his eyes again. “Go ahead,” he says. “You want to watch, watch.”
His mother reaches eagerly for the knob and turns the television set on. “Lawrence Welk,” she says, by way of explanation, and turns the channel selector to 12. She backs toward an easy chair and lowers herself onto its sagging cushion.
“Are Dad and Uncle John coming here?” Dean asks. “Or are you meeting them back at the Silver Dollar?”
“I’m meeting them. Soon as this is over.”
From the television comes the wheezing, rollicking chords and notes of accordion music.
“That’s about the sound,” Dean says, “I made when I was heaving my guts out.”
“It’s only the one song,” his mother says. “You want me to change the channel?”
Dean pushes himself to his feet. “Leave it. I’m going to lie down awhile.”
As he walks barefoot toward the bedroom, Dean’s mother calls after him, “I’ll clear out soon as this is over.”
“Watch as long as you like.”
THE BEDROOM WALLS are painted a blue so pale that only in the faint light of late evening or early dawn do they look blue at all. At any other hour, the room passes for white. Edie received permission from the landlord to paint the apartment, and the color of the bedroom was her idea. Into a gallon of white paint she stirred in a little cerulean blue, a drizzle swallowed immediately by the white. But the blue was there. “Why bother?” Dean had asked her. “It’s not even noticeable. Why not leave it white?” “It’s private,” Edie said. “Only we’ll know. It’s romantic.” Dean didn’t understand, but he didn’t dare say so. The walls of every other room in the apartment remained white.
Dean lies down near the edge of the bed. He raises his knees up toward his waist. As his stomach and intestines flutter and pinch, his lips draw into a tight line, and he covers his eyes with his hand.
But nothing can keep those thoughts from seeping in. He’s never been what you’d call confident or self-assured—just one more way he and Roy are so very different—but lately almost anything at all can set off another wave of uncertainty about his life. This morning he had a bout of vomiting right after Edie left, and he couldn’t be sure what started it, the actual illness or the sound of a car door slamming as his wife climbed into a car with his brother.
From the living room comes the sound of his mother’s laughter. High-pitched but steady. Then her laughter stops, replaced by the heavy tread of her footsteps. After a moment her laughter starts up again. The antenna must have needed adjustment.
When he wakes up, his mother is standing in the bedroom doorway. “I’m heading out,” she says. “You want me to make you some soup before I go? Chicken noodle?”
Dean glances at the bedside clock. His mother has had time to watch more than a single episode of Lawrence Welk. “No,” he says. “That’s all right.”
Mrs. Linderman braces herself in the doorframe. “Maybe you should give me a call when they get back.”
“At home or the Silver Dollar?”
“I’m leaving for home soon. If your father and your uncle ain’t ready to go, they can find their own way back.”
“We’ll see,” Dean says. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow for sure.”
“Supper’s around five. Heat or no, I’m roasting a chicken. If you get your appetite back, you’re welcome to partake. The both of you.”
As soon as the door to the apartment clicks shut, Dean gets the yearbook down from the shelf again. He switches on the lamp beside the bed and thumbs through the heavy glossy pages until he arrives at the portraits of the graduating seniors.
He doesn’t linger on the photograph of Dennis Arneson, whose father died in Korea and who still wore a look of betrayal, nor on the practiced smile of Dorothy Bergstrom, nor on Doris Lantz, her pocked, pitted face smoothed over by darkroom magic. He skims quickly past Gail and Dale Peterson, the other set of twins in the class, and past the girl who was traded from boy to boy like a baseball card. Finally Dean’s eyes come to rest again on Edith Pritchard. She isn’t smiling, but many of the young men and women in these pages aren’t. Eastern Montana doesn’t fill its young with a lot of false promises. Like the faces in many other portraits, Edie’s is angled to the side. But just like her picture as part of the homecoming court, something is different . . . No one else seems as lovely and alive on the page as she does, staring out at the eyes that stare at her. Dean once asked her how the photographer caught that look. She laughed and said, “He told me to act like I knew something no one else knew.” And that was years before cerulean blue.
