The Theoretical Foot

by M. F. K. Fisher

  What difference does it make? Oh God, Nan cried fiercely, why do I say such stupid nothings and so politely? Deference? I weep to know that my own breasts will go flat and loose, my arms bony. I weep to see that soon my neck may be dry and stringy, my hair too dull for brushing to revive it. Deference? I still see myself firm and round and fresh, and the years are bitter to me, remembering that lonely time when I was young and full. Wasted. Wasted and now what do I have? My youth is gone untasted. Timothy gone, I’m left a screwy widow woman, with only Lucy for my comfort, and am desolate.

  Nan wiped one tear from her cheek. Lucy thinks I’m crying with her. Perhaps that will make her feel happier. I’m a hypocrite.

  It seemed weird to her that she could go on talking so reasonably, so thoughtfully, while inside another woman spoke. Another? There were several. One wept for loneliness, another turned her eyes away from the swelling frantic ugliness of Lucy’s tears, yet another spoke coldly and surely, saying what all of them knew, that she cannot leave Timothy, not now.

  She’d never spoken so straightly to her friend and she listened to her own voice with a kind of timid amazement as she said she would not leave La Prairie. I am betraying my promise. I am breaking Lucy’s heart. What has come over me? But I cannot, must not leave. I feel there is something for me to wait for. Something is going to happen to make me see clearly at last.

  The crash of Lucy’s slamming door was as tiny to her as a spider’s footstep. Nan felt cool and exhausted as if filled with floating pebbles.

  iii

  To the meadow, to the meadow, and her feet made a little dance of hurrying down the cool twisted stairs. I am escaping. I have already escaped. No more tears, no more of my poor Lucy’s moanings. Stay with me, flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love. That’s not right. Where are my wits? Hasten to the meadows, Nan Garton. Get thee to thy vases.

  Nan laughed softly.

  The two baskets she’d put in the lower hall the night before stood on the tile floor, empty except for shears and the enormous pair of blue and yellow work gloves she’d bought at the Bazar Francais in Veytaux. Everything was ready for her, then, to go out the door and down the path and into the knee-deep flowers where she longed to be.

  But she hesitated. Through half-pulled curtains she looked up almost unwillingly into the living room. It was bright with fresh wax cream in the sun. She stepped quickly down into it and hurried toward the mirror, frowning faintly. I’ll just look, she reasoned, that won’t hurt. It’s just such a beautiful mirror and the colors in it. But she knew that the real reason she ran toward it was that she might see Timothy there. He might be watching on the terrace, going or coming, and she could see him in the mirror and not even speak. Looking could not matter. The mirror made things so clear.

  The mirror was empty. Still the room looked better in it, she saw, less polished and polite in the bright sun. But Tim was not there and Nan turned away.

  “Madam!” François said. “You will excuse me but Monsieur has disappeared!”

  Nan raised her eyebrows coolly, hoping that she did not show anything but polite interest. Damn, François! How did he know she was looking for Timothy when she hardly knew this herself?

  “Yes,” the valet’s voice continued deeply while his dark eyes burned far back in his skull. “Completely vanished.” He looked somberly at her as his cigarette fumed behind him.

  Nan summoned her best French. “Temporarily, I hope.”

  “Madame is correct, temporarily.” And with a high cackling laugh François disappeared around the corner, leaving one tiny pile of ash in the middle of one green tile.

  He’s as crazy as a moth, Nan thought, and now she ran lightly back into the hall, swept up the two baskets and swept without a sound through the wide door, and passed along the white blowing curtains of Daniel’s room, out to the middle path.

  Crazy as a moon-drunk moth, crazy as a dragonfly, mad with mead from jasmine honey. Oh, Miss Garton, you reee-eaally should write! You reee-eaally do say the prettiest things, so poetical like!

  I’ll start with the tall flowers, she thought, as a kind of placid excitement, feeling them brush against her as she walked slowly through them. Sage, and mourning bride, surely, and maybe some Queen Anne’s lace, a very little, and green oats, and will there be wheat? It must be gold, a deep gold for tonight. I’ll wear my dress with gold threads in it. No one has ever seen it. Timothy will love it, with the gold weight on the table and me and a cloud of gold.

  She moved slowly over the steep slopes, under the flickering leaves of ancient fruit trees. The birds were almost silent. Bees sang, though, around the ripening plums and pears, and she sank upon her knees and watched solemnly while a snail with a fine gleaming black-striped shell swept over a gnarled root. Buddha’s curls were snails, she thought. Snail shells have the curve of infinity.

  She snipped with complete absorption at the flower stems, leaving them now short, now tall. Sometimes she stood for several minutes looking down at the colors in her basket, before she started off across the meadow for one stock of wild snapdragon that she remembered near the vineyard wall, or a late ranunculus that flashed down by the brook.

  She felt as light as a new lamb. She was conscious of the bones moving delicately within their warm firm envelope and she licked her upper lip and tasted salt in the beads of sweat that lay there with true sensual delight. She felt again the excitement that had been building up inside her all this summer, as she grew gradually more at peace and at ease with the greater peace of this place.

  I should be worried, sad, ashamed of myself, Nan thought dreamily, but I’m not. There is my friend, morbid and lonely in her room, painting her ugly backgrounds in a kind of masochistic fury. There are Honor and Daniel. Young people are always so sad, so tender and bewildered. There is Timothy, my brother, gone from me. I should be, and am sad. But down here under these trees, on these flowery slopes . . .

  One wild strawberry, dark and tiny, grew secretly under the thick leaves by the wall. She put a harebell beside it and then stood looking through quick tears at the blue lake far below her.

  Help me to be kind, she prayed. Dear God, make me a patient and loving person. Make others love me as I love them. Make Timothy . . .

  iv

  She heard the car horn, short and insistent above the sound of bees and a little brook and turned unwillingly back toward the house. Suddenly she felt hot and tired and the full baskets dragged her faintly freckled arms. The slopes of the meadow seemed deeper than they should. When she reached the top of the path she was breathless and the flowers she picked so lovingly looked limp and bedraggled and she was touched by a little wave of self-pity. Lucy was right, she thought, why should I waste my time fixing beautiful vases for blind eyes? Who cares if I work all day?

  In her room, though, where François had left the green shutters bowed against the sun and all the colors were cool, she put water on her face and brushed back her hot hair and felt gay again.

  I’m hungry, she suddenly decided. I, Nan Garton, the bird woman, the frail spirit who lives on one almond and a sliver of ripe peach, am starved! What will there be for lunch? Hurry. Run down fast, get past Lucy’s room and run to the kitchen to help Sara carve great pink hams, open jars of pâté from Strasbourg, bottles of black cured Greek olives, tins of herring, Polish chickens. To cut thick wedges of brown bread, slice through the smooth flesh of a mild cheese from the mountains, put butter in its tub upon the table! Pile up grapes and plums and the last four-season strawberries on a silver tray. Hurry!

  But at the living room step Nan paused. People were talking in the kitchen, strangers. She all but growled. Would she ever be old enough to stop minding when she had to meet new people? A woman your age, she told herself severely, should be ashamed to be hovering out here like a timid school girl! What had Sara said about the visitors? Nan could not exactly remember. She took a deep breath and ran across the room and up the steps to the kitchen, thinking, Now! Quick! Let’s g
et this over with!

  In the flash of time between her sight of them all standing there and her first words, she knew she would certainly never forget them. They were like a picture, stiff and strange, of some scene from a once-familiar play. The green and white squares they all stood upon, and the white walls with one vivid blue-green poster, and the wide window with its white curtains blowing and the single daisy in the jar: it was naïve and beautiful, like the setting for a village melodrama.

  Sara stood at the left, quick and tall, with one brown hand laid lightly on a pile of lettuce leaves. Honor, in the background by the cellar stairs, leaned against Daniel, with her eyes dark and brooding above her small red mouth, and Daniel leaned against the wall. In front of him Timothy sagged like a clown against the younger man’s crooked knee, Nan’s brother’s face frozen into a wild leer, pretending to be Harpo Marx or, perhaps, a monkey. Half turned away from Timothy and grinning affectionately was a tall happy boy with dark hair and warm small brown eyes. And between them stood the tiny girl. Her hair gleamed almost white above her dark gold skin. She had gray eyes, the biggest eyes Nan had ever seen and seemingly the most startled.

  All their eyes looked straight at Nan: Sara’s pale green and sardonic, Daniel’s their echo, Honor’s black and sad above the bright blue merriment of Timothy’s, and the new boy’s like a wise ape’s, but it was the enormous unblinking gaze of that wee woman that held Nan’s own.

  Oh, she thought, instinctively dismayed, she’s littler than I! She is lovely and so young. Will Dan even look at me now? Will Timothy? Oh, I hate her! No, Nan, she told herself: Discipline, discipline! I must learn to see clearly.

  “Oh!” the little girl gasped. She cried out huskily as if she had seen an archangel, “It’s Anne Garton Temple!”

  The picture they all had made standing there with their eyes turned toward Nan was now broken to pieces as everybody laughed and Nan felt herself grow warm and pleased at Susan Harper’s excitement, and Joe Kelly’s flattery. She knew this was foolish but how strangely nice it was to be recognized so far from America, away from publicity pictures and her fan mail.

  She was embarrassed to feel herself blush, then blush harder still. Timothy came across the kitchen and put his arm around her shoulder. Darling Timothy, knowing exactly how silly and how pleased she felt.

  They scattered suddenly before Sara’s command directing the three men into the cellars, with Susan following after Honor like a bemused kitten. As the girl gave a last glance back at Nan, she almost tripped over the step into the terrace.

  “Who are they, Sara darling?” Nan felt so amused and happy that she could hardly whisper. She leaned close to Sara as if to hear her secrets, and, as she hugged her elbows tightly against her waist, Nan’s eyes were dancing.

  Sara was counting spoonfuls of olive oil into the big wooden bowl in front of her, her lips moving. “They just got in, friends of ours, I told you last night after Joe called from town, remember? I used to know them in the West. They’re staying up at the village.”

  “I like them.”

  Sara stuck one finger in the salad dressing and licked it and then ground more pepper into the bowl and abruptly she looked at Nan.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. They’re so funny, so sweet, like a . . .? Oh, they seem so young and innocent!” And Nan began to laugh again softly.

  “Yes, I like them too,” Sara said warmly. Nan looked seriously at her from far behind her own gaiety and wondered if Sara meant it, or were those strange impersonal green eyes ever to be really warmed by any casual ordinary love? Would Sara really care if she never saw Susan or Joe again? Would she actually notice if Daniel, Honor, and Nan herself were to walk off the terrace into the blue air toward France? Even with Timothy, Sara’s eyes never seemed to be unveiled, and Nan wondered how it was when the two were alone.

  Nan caught her breath for in that instant she suddenly knew that Sara loved her brother with all of herself, brain, bone, and ghost. How had she ever doubted?

  “Oh, Sara!” She cried softly and laid her cheek for a second on the other woman’s thin brown arm. Then, laughing, Nan pushed all the piled green salad leaves roughly into a bowl and ran out into the sunshine with it.

  She’ll think I’ve gone crazy, but I don’t care. I love her. Nan smiled, blinking at the glare from the hot lake and walked down the terrace toward the table.

  When Susan rushed over—voice breaking, eyes wide with adoration—to help Nan carry the salad, the older woman beamed placidly, and when Lucy came swimming through the curtains onto the terrace Nan heard herself cry out affectionately, “How did it go today? Good work?” As if she had not seen the poor struggling woman and her foolish pictures only a while before.

  Was it this morning, truly, that she had listened to Lucy’s harsh sobs? Was it this morning or a life ago that Lucy had snarled at her, “Go on! Get out! Go!”

  “You don’t love anybody but your own brother,” Lucy had said. But it was not true. Nan smiled. She loved everyone and everyone loved her. She looked gaily around, at Lucy, at little Susan’s adoration, at Honor. And there coming across the terrace now were Dan, so thin and fine, and young Joe Kelly. They loved her. And Timothy! As he came into the sunlight, he looked straight at Nan with his eyes wide and winked faintly, first one eye and then the other, as he used to at dancing school. So she was happy. Dancing school! Do you remember, little brother?

  v

  The little tool room at the back of the house was cool and dim. And Nan loved to work there. It was almost like hiding. When she looked out of the windows and into the roots of lilies and well grass, she felt like a small silent animal peering from its burrow and she wondered why all rooms were not built halfway into earth like this one.

  Nobody ever came here aside from François, of course, and Timothy and Sara, for hoes and twine when they gardened, and often the quiet man who tended to the vines. But there was never anyone when Nan Garton fixed the flowers. Perhaps she’d become invisible. Perhaps she had fern seeds in her shoes.

  She hummed almost silently as she stood back to look at the last flower in the last vase, a spray of wine-colored nicotiana rising from the tassel of petunia, pink as store-bought strawberry ice cream, but something was wrong. She regarded the colors dreamily for several minutes, her face intent and as blank as a child’s. She was thinking: I am almost completely absorbed, she thought, as much as I can ever be, because I’m almost not thinking about anything in the world aside from color and the shapes of flowers and their petals. I’m not thinking about what they will say and feel when they see my beautiful flowers and I’m hardly thinking about myself or what they think of me, so I am really as selfless at this moment as I am capable of being, although people say at certain times, like the peak of copulation or the moment of a sneeze, you almost stop thinking about yourself, the way I am now, not thinking about anything hardly, except this flower and its color and what to do.

  She pulled a thick gold zinnia from the intricate pattern of another vase and with slow care wove it down among the stems of the poisonous pink flowers and hid it almost at the base of the tall upward-sweeping nicotiana.

  There, she thought contentedly, there is an arrangement that I am sincerely and absolutely irrevocably sure would never win first prize even for originality at the annual show of the Garden Club. Thank you, dear ladies, for ignoring me. Thank you, you sweet-faced old hags, for forgetting just this once that I am Anne Garton Temple, the author of zubzubzub, the widow of zub, member of zubzub and zub. Thank you, daughters of the finest families with black ribbons holding up your waddles, for not knowing as much about flowers and how they grow and what they say as I do happen to know in the smallest of my tiny, clever, well-born fingers.

  She stood for several more minutes looking at the vases that covered the tabletop and sat riotously on the cold floor. They were more beautiful than any others she had ever done. She thought so every time but now she was sure. The flowers were wild an
d passionate, staid, demure, in a language that spoke only for Nan herself, with epigrams, with small practical jokes, with now-and-then malicious undertones. She knew where every one of them would go and whether other people understood as she looked at them upon their mantles and their desks and dressing tables, and Nan cared not at all. She, in her own room, would be saying many things in every room in the house, unsuspected, silently, with amusement, with cold intelligence, with love.

  She closed the door of the tool room behind her and shivered suddenly in the warmth that rose from the path. Inside the cold walls and floors had made the petunias send out their first sweet smell of twilight. Outside it was still midafternoon.

  She leaned in as she passed the kitchen window and saw by the clock on the stove that there was a half hour before she had to start for tea. She ran up the path again and hurried across the tiny meadow that lay between the house and the vineyard to the shadow of a gnarled cherry tree.

  There, Nan threw herself down onto the thick grass that lay beneath her silkily and rose high on every side of her like a mighty forest. I am hidden, she thought. I am safe. Nothing can see me here.

  Above her the twisted branches of this old tree curved protectively. She could see sky through their leaves and, if she raised her head a little from the steep slope on which she lay, the blue waters of the lake.

  Bow down, thou sweet cherry tree,

  And give my mother some . . .

  Then the top bow of the cherry tree

  Bent down to her knee,

  And so you see, Joseph,

  There are cherries for me,

  And so you see, Joseph,

  There are cherries for three.

  It should seem strange, Nan thought while the stiff music of the song ran in her head, that I’ve been so rude to my poor friend. It should seem strange that I am not ashamed. How does it happen that after so many years of being sweet and gentle and thoughtful and caring terribly what people thought of me, I have suddenly grown resolute? Will she cease to love me? I think not. She says I love only my brother. Is that wrong? She says so, but she loves only me. Perhaps that is because I am the only thing she has. But is Timothy the only thing I have? Yes, yes, he is! He’s all I want.