Harriet gave herself a manicure and pedicure and applied a rosy-pink polish to all twenty nails. When she had plucked her eyebrows, she shaved her legs. It was too late to do anything about her hair. If she washed it, it would never dry in time for lunch, especially with the air so humid. She would spray it with cologne and roll it up while she took her bath. The combination of steam and cologne, she had read somewhere, would put a little body back in your hair when you didn’t have time to get to the hairdresser. Not that Harriet often went to the hairdresser. Two or three times a year for a cut and permanent. She’d tried a Toni home perm once, and for two months afterward looked like a dishwater-blond Orphan Annie.
For half an hour she lay dreaming in the bath. She supposed that DeVore would want to be married in the winter since it was hard to leave a farm in the summer, even with a couple of teenage sons still at home to help. A holiday wedding was in some ways more romantic than a June wedding, Harriet thought.
Maybe they would drive to Florida for a honeymoon, or maybe they’d stay home and celebrate with the children. There would be Christmas presents to buy, a tree to trim, cookies to bake, and she was sure to discover little changes she wanted to make in the house right away, to put her own stamp on it.
On second thought, it might be better to wait until after Christmas to be married. DeVore’s wife had passed away last December. December would be a sad anniversary for him and the children. And wouldn’t a Valentine wedding be the most romantic of all? In her own mind, Harriet decided on Valentine’s Day. Six months.
When she was downtown this afternoon she would stop by Egger’s Drugstore and pick up a couple of bride magazines. She wasn’t intending to have a splashy affair with a long veil and train and all of that. For a woman her age it would not be in good taste. But she did want to treat herself to the finest wedding a thirty-nine-year-old woman could tastefully enjoy.
Back in her bedroom, she stood in her slip surveying the open closet. One by one she pulled dresses out, held them up to herself in front of the bureau mirror, and rejected them. At length she chose the shell pink. Ladylike, but quite stylish. It had an engagement look to it. She set it aside. No point in putting it on yet. It would only wrinkle.
Standing before the mirror, Harriet studied her form. Her shoulders were sharp, as were her elbows and hips, but she had a bosom. She wouldn’t exchange her 32B for all the rounded hips and plump arms in southern Minnesota. If DeVore had wanted a round woman, he wouldn’t have taken up with her.
She was a little nervous, though, about his seeing her with her clothes off. Would he tease her about her … slimness? Would he find, in bed, that she had too many corners?
She lay down across the smoothly stretched candlewick bedspread. She had so much to think about, most of it pleasant, but some of it worrisome. What would DeVore look like with his clothes off? Would he want to sleep with her now that they were engaged? And if he did, where? She herself looked forward to that aspect of the future, but she did not want to appear too eager. He might think he’d gotten himself a floozy. On the other hand, she didn’t want him to think she was frigid. Would he break off the engagement for either reason? Her only sharp fear was that he would find a reason to break off with her. The engagement was too new to trust. If she were young and pretty, it would be different. Whatever she might tell Rose, she did not consider herself a catch.
Beside the bed, on the lower shelf of her bedside table, Harriet kept a stack of Better Homes and Gardens she’d been saving in case she ever got married. She had never seen the inside of DeVore’s house, but she had an idea that it would need plenty of clever fixing up of the sort described in the pages of Better Homes and Gardens.
She was fairly handy with a sewing machine and owned her own Singer portable, so she could zip up curtains and slipcovers economically. With curtains and slipcovers and a coat of paint, you could transform the dreariest rooms, creating cozy, stylish surroundings for family and friends.
As she lay across the bed, Harriet’s mood turned blue with old regret, and she rolled onto her side and curled into a ball. If only her parents had lived to see what she’d made of herself. Ten years they’d been dead, and she was still trying to please them.
They had not approved of girls. Girls were trouble. Girls were sly, silly, scheming, weak-bodied, weak-minded, monthly bleeding parasites. Girls put on hoity-toity airs and were ungrateful. They thought they were better than their families.
Boys, on the other hand, were strong and loyal and down to earth. They looked you in the eye and gave you an honest day’s work. Never mind that Billy and Jesse were cunning and lazy and cruel. Harriet’s parents translated their flaws into virtues. Their cunning was cleverness; their sloth, easiness; their cruelty, toughness. Harriet could not win.
The boys were three and five years older than Harriet. When she graduated from business college, Billy was selling women’s shoes in a cheap chain store. Jesse was night clerk at the Clark Hotel. Harriet had invited her parents and the boys to a celebration dinner at the Country Cottage Restaurant. Explaining to the manager that she was celebrating business college graduation with her family, Harriet had ordered the meal ahead of time, choosing everyone’s favorite dishes.
Dinner started with fruit cup, followed by prime rib and french fried potatoes, baby peas and Parker House rolls. She had not preordered dessert, as she was unsure whether the boys would prefer apple or blueberry pie à la mode. When the dinner plates were cleared away and the moment arrived for dessert and coffee, the waitress carried in a small cake, holding it dramatically aloft. Setting it before Harriet, she sang out, “Congratulations, Harriet.”
The cake was decorated with tiny pink roses, graceful garlands, and a rolled sheepskin tied with a pink ribbon. The waitress’s “Congratulations, Harriet” was repeated in flowing script that curlicued across the top.
“Oh, my word,” Harriet gasped. “It’s beautiful.” Tears filled her eyes. Billy and Jesse despised her occasional tears, so she hastily dabbed them with her napkin. She did not want to spoil the party.
“Would you like me to cut it?” the waitress asked. They all had a big piece, and plenty was left over to take home.
“Thank you,” Harriet told her parents and brothers when the waitress had left. “That was the prettiest cake I ever saw.”
“We didn’t order it,” her mother said with heavy-footed indignation. With times so hard, did Harriet imagine that they could indulge in expensive folderol? She put her arm through the strap of her large black handbag. She was missing “One Man’s Family” on the radio.
“It wasn’t us,” Billy told her, looking at his brother, Jesse, and laughing. “Ah, Harriet, you ordered it yourself. Come on, admit it. Who else’d be ordering a fancy cake like that for an old-maid business lady?”
“Well, someone ordered it for me,” Harriet protested, “because I didn’t.”
Then they were all laughing at her, convinced that she’d ordered the cake, that she wanted them to believe she had a secret admirer. The boys wouldn’t let up, but were still at her about it as they all prepared to leave.
Harriet sent them ahead while she paid the bill and left the tip. The waitress who was clearing the table told her, “The cake was a little surprise from the management. We hope you enjoyed it.”
Harriet never told her family that the restaurant had given her the cake. She couldn’t bear to hear another word about it. That night she decided to visit Cousin Kate in Harvester. Maybe she would find work in Minnesota. Harriet sent Christmas cards to her brothers but never heard from them.
She uncurled her long body and sat up. Time to get dressed and put on her makeup. She looked around at the pink-and-white room she would be leaving in February. She had had a good life here, and she would have a good life with DeVore. She would be a prizewinning wife and homemaker, entering homemade watermelon pickles and baked items in the county fair and making her husband proud. DeVore would have no reason to regret having asked for her.
Chapter 18
KATE
Harriet and Rose had driven off in Harriet’s car, laughing and prattling on about Rose and someone named Ernie. Over and over Harriet had said, “You’ll be next, Rose. Mark my words. You’ll be next.”
Kate had followed them out to the front sidewalk to see them off, smiling and waving. She must not appear saddened by Harriet’s engagement. She must not rob the woman of her blind happiness. Blind happiness was not a thing you could hang on to, nor would you want to, really, but it was something everyone deserved—Harriet more than most—once or twice in a lifetime.
Soon enough, being Harriet, she would begin to worry. About winning over DeVore’s children, about keeping a man happy year in and year out, about leaving Kate alone, and worst, perhaps, about losing Bess. In some sense, Bess was the only child of her own that Harriet would ever have. If, as Harriet said, she and Rose were having lunch at the Loon Cafe, Harriet’s blind happiness could be lost in the next hour.
Kate had tried to talk Harriet and Rose into driving over to St. Bridget and having lunch at the St. Bridget Hotel, where the steaks were said to be excellent. On the way back they could have swung around by Red Berry and picked up Rose’s car at the Dakota Ballroom, but Harriet had insisted on the Loon Cafe. Kate supposed that Harriet wanted to dine where the greatest number of people who knew her would witness her brand-new state of engagement. Had she truly not foreseen what might happen when Bess heard the news?
Kate climbed the front steps, leaning heavily on the cane. She must invite DeVore and his children to dinner. A week from Sunday, maybe. Whatever they were like, they must be welcomed and made to feel a part of Harriet’s family. Kate was not acquainted with the Weisses, who lived east of town, except by name. They couldn’t be too bad or she’d have heard something. And who was she to pass judgment, she with Celia and Archer still grist for the mill? If only Bess would mind herself when the Weisses came to dinner, if only she would not run off someplace, refusing to accept them, or, worse, hang about with her smart mouth.
The rules and boundaries Bess set were so personal, so much based on her own private losses and fears, that no one else could fully understand them or even know when they were transgressing them.
Sitting on the stool by the kitchen window, Kate watched the purple grackles in the driveway, squawking and fighting over the toast scraps she’d tossed out for the robins. She didn’t like grackles. They were aggressive dispossessors.
But they were what they were, she supposed. They took what they wanted. Like the man in the fedora—though he had not squawked, but had spoken in refined and businesslike tones. No one had ever spoken to her in tones quite so civil.
She glanced away from the window and began slicing a peach into sections, laying the sections on a plate, while her thoughts returned to Bess. However irrational the child was, she was theirs, hers and Harriet’s.
Kate spread a slice of bread with peanut butter, cut it into two pieces, and laid them on either side of the peach. How pretty the brown was against the golden fruit.
The front screen door squeaked. “Kate?”
“In the kitchen, Frieda.”
“I’ve got the car outside. I’m on my way to Truska’s. Can I get you something? Would you like to come?”
Kate began eating the peach slices. They were sweet and fine textured, and she was grateful to have tasted them at their best moment. “Are you in a hurry?”
“No. Take your time. You don’t eat enough. What do you weigh, ninety-five pounds?”
“I meant, would you have a little time—”
“To drive in the country?”
Kate laughed. “You should go into the mind-reading business.”
“It’s not hard to read your mind. You always want to go for a drive in the country.”
“Do I? Yes, you’re probably right.”
“We’ll go for a little drive first, and then we’ll go shop. That way the butter won’t melt before we get home.”
Kate finished the peach and placed a small Pyrex bowl over the bread and peanut butter to keep it fresh for later. “I’ll just get my purse,” she said.
“It’s a pity they had to run that item about the accident in yesterday’s paper,” Frieda observed as Kate fetched her purse. “I didn’t want to mention it in front of Marie Wall last night, but I was provoked, and I rang ’em at the paper and said as much. You know what they said? They said they needed colorful items that would be of interest to their readers, and not much was happening ten years ago this week. I said, ‘What about World War Two?’ ”
“It was good of you to ring them, Frieda, but you didn’t need to. We don’t have to worry about them running it again for another ten years.” She put the purse strap over her wrist and took down a straw hat from the hook beside the back door. She needed to get out into the fresh air.
Climbing in and out of the car was more and more difficult, but she would do it as long as she was able. She regretted never learning to drive, and she was glad that Bess had learned at school. Rides in the country made Kate feel unaccountably young and uncrippled.
When she was settled in the front seat beside Frieda, Kate pulled a silk scarf from her purse, and because her fingers were stiff, Frieda tied it around her head to keep her hair from flying all over when the wind blew through the window. She would put on the hat when they got to the farm.
Her heart flew out the window and across the fields, some of them as deeply green as the inside of a jungle, others as soft and golden as the down of baby chicks. The smells of clover and newly mown grass lifted her high, high, high until she was beside herself with pleasure, seeing life from a great height. No wonder birds seemed so recklessly happy. Flight put things into perspective.
Big, strong hands at ten o’clock and two o’clock on the steering wheel, Frieda drove with resolute concentration but without conspicuous fear, as if the car were a skittish team of horses known for kicking over the traces, but she, Frieda, was a match for them. At the edge of town she turned onto the gravel road and headed north.
The great, flapping corn leaves waved to Kate and she waved back in the manner of royalty, riding out among her subjects, loving and blessing them all. When she died she wished that she could be buried in someone’s cornfield or under a stand of country trees like those old oaks ahead. She had once thought that she would be buried by the grove on the farm, next to the old folks.
A mile farther on she said, “Frieda, could we—”
“Stop for a minute?”
Kate glanced askance at Frieda. The woman had a knack for anticipating. She was like the faithful dog who lopes to the door just as you’re thinking you might want a walk.
Slowing, Frieda turned off the road and into a barely discernible drive, much overgrown, which led through barbed-wire fencing whose jury-rigged gate was left open. Shifting into low gear, she passed an ABSOLUTELY NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING sign, sniffed and “hmmphed” as if to say, “Some nerve,” then proceeded alongside the box elder grove on her left, nearly impenetrable with fallen trees, saplings, and undergrowth.
The car bounced in the ruts, and the long grass hissed against its undercarriage. Dust filtered up, and Kate held her hand out the window as if to catch the rising dust and the thick, hot sunlight beating down on it.
Veering left, Frieda pulled into a clearing where an old house stood and, some distance from it, a barn lay like a collapsed Chinese lantern.
Kate saw Martin coming in from the fields, sweat and black dirt painting a map of work on his face and neck and arms, saw herself running to meet him and slipping away with him for a few minutes to lie down in the grove.
Stopping the car before the broad front porch of the house, Frieda turned off the ignition. The high, whining whirr of cicadas, like the sound of the dentist’s drill, rushed to fill the void. Ahead, where the car pointed, was a second grove, this one cottonwood
s, and beyond it lay a pond.
For several minutes the two women sat in silence, Frieda plucking a handkerchief from her bosom and polishing her dusty eyeglasses while Kate studied the house with a pitying and devouring eye.
The house sagged along the roofline like a swaybacked horse. Gingerbread was missing from the eaves. But the kitchen’s tin chimney glinted in the sunlight as if it were new.
Though intact, the windows were dark and unwashed. They gazed out with a sadness lacking all hope. Kate’s body clenched with an anger, old but still strong.
Frieda reached into the glove compartment for a small paper bag and said, “Let’s get out. Put on your hat.” Opening her door, Frieda waded around the car through weeds that grabbed at her cotton stockings, pinning prickly seeds to them.
Leaning on her cane and with Frieda holding her other arm, Kate picked her way through the snarled growth of foxtail and knotweed, bindweed and pigweed, bearing toward that spot down nearly to the cottonwoods. Her ankles throbbed like aching teeth.
As they approached, Frieda dispersed a swarm of gnats, fanning at them with her own broad straw hat. The little wooden crosses were long gone, rotted to splinters. But, yes, the rocks were there, outlining the two graves. Why was it that she always expected them to be gone?
Standing beside the graves, Kate apologized to the old folks as she always did when she came here. At her elbow, Frieda clasped her hands together in a moment of reverence. What a good woman Frieda was, Kate thought.
“Stay here a minute,” Frieda told her. “I’m gonna pick you some woodruff.”
That was what the little bag was for, Kate realized. Woodruff for headache tea. “It’s up next to the house on the north side.”
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