by Donna Tartt
When the tow truck finally came, Edie accepted a ride home from the driver. It was the first time she’d been in a truck since World War II; the cab was high, and climbing up inside it with her cracked ribs had not been fun: but, as the Judge had been so fond of reminding his daughters, Beggars Can’t Be Choosers.
By the time she got home, it was nearly one o’clock. Edie hung up her clothes (not until she was undressing did she remember that the suitcases were still in the trunk of the Oldsmobile) and took a cool bath; sitting on the side of her bed, in her brassiere and panty-waist, she sucked in her breath and taped up her ribs as best as she could. Then she had a glass of water, and an Empirin with codeine left over from some dental work, and put on a kimono and lay down on the bed.
Much later, she’d been awakened by a telephone call. For a moment, she thought the thin little voice on the other end was the children’s mother. “Charlotte?” she barked; and then, when there was no answer: “Who is calling, please?”
“This is Allison. I’m over at Libby’s. She … she seems upset.”
“I don’t blame her,” said Edie; the pain of sitting up suddenly had caught her unawares, and she took her breath in sharply. “Now’s not the time for her to entertain company. You ought not be over there bothering her, Allison.”
“She doesn’t seem tired. She—she says she has to pickle some beets.”
“Pickling beets!” Edie snorted. “I’d be mighty upset if I had to pickle beets this afternoon.”
“But she says—”
“You run home and let Libby rest,” said Edie. She was a little groggy from her pain pill; and, for fear of being questioned about the accident (the policeman had suggested her eyes might be at fault; there had been talk of a test, a revoked license) she was anxious to cut the conversation short.
In the background, a fretful murmur.
“What’s that?”
“She’s worried. She asked me to call you. Edie, I don’t know what to do, please come over and see—”
“What on earth for?” said Edie. “Put her on.”
“She’s in the next room.” Talk, indistinguishable; then Allison’s voice returned. “She says she has to go to town, and she doesn’t know where her shoes and stockings are.”
“Tell her not to worry. The suitcases are in the trunk of the car. Has she had her nap?”
More mumbled talk, enough to test Edie’s patience.
“Hello?” she said loudly.
“She says she’s fine, Edie, but—”
(Libby always said she was fine. When Libby had scarlet fever, she said she was fine.)
“—but she won’t sit down,” said Allison; her voice seemed far away, as if she hadn’t brought the receiver properly to her mouth again. “She’s standing in the living room.…”
Though Allison continued to speak, and Edie continued to listen, the sentence had ended and another begun before Edie realized—all of a sudden—that she hadn’t understood a word.
“I’m sorry,” she said, curtly, “you’ll have to speak up,” and before she could scold Allison for mumbling there was a sudden ruckus at the front door: tap tap tap tap tap, a series of brisk little knocks. Edie re-wrapped her kimono, tied the sash tight and peered down the hall. There stood Roy Dial, grinning like an opossum with his little gray saw-teeth. He tipped her a sprightly wave.
Quickly, Edie ducked her head back into the bedroom. The vulture, she thought. I’d like to shoot him. He looked as pleased as punch. Allison was saying something else.
“Listen, I’ve got to let you go,” she said, briskly. “I’ve got company on the porch and I’m not dressed.”
“She says she has to meet a bride at the train station,” said Allison, distinctly.
After a moment, Edie—who did not like to admit she was hard of hearing, and who was used to galloping straight over conversational non sequiturs—took a deep breath (so that her ribs hurt) and said: “Tell Lib I said lie down. If she wants me to, I’ll walk over and take her blood pressure and give her a tranquilizer as soon as—”
Tap tap tap tap tap!
“As soon as I get rid of him,” she said; and then said goodbye.
She threw a shawl over her shoulders, stepped into her slippers and ventured into the hall. Through the leaded glass panel of the door, Mr. Dial—mouth open, in an exaggerated pantomime of delight—held up what looked like a fruit basket, wrapped in yellow cellophane. When he saw that she was in her robe, he gave a gesture of dismayed apology (eyebrows going up in the middle, in an inverted V) and—with extravagant lip movement, pointed at the basket and mouthed: sorry to bother you! just a little something! I’ll leave it right here …
After a moment’s indecision, Edie called—on a cheery, changed note—“Wait a minute! Be right out!” Then—her smile souring as soon as she turned her back—she hurried to her room, closed the door and plucked a housedress from her closet.
Zip up the back; dab, dab, rouge on both cheeks, puff of powder on the nose; she ran a brush through her hair—wincing at the pain in her raised arm—and gave herself a quick glance in the mirror before she opened the door and went down the hall to meet him.
“Well, I declare,” she said, stiffly, when Mr. Dial presented her with the basket.
“I hope I didn’t disturb you,” said Mr. Dial, turning his head, cozily, to look at her from the opposite eye. “Dorothy ran into Susie Cartrett at the grocery store and she told her all about the accident.… I’ve been saying for years”—he laid a hand on her arm, for emphasis—“that they needed a stop light at that intersection. Years! I phoned out at the hospital but they said you hadn’t been admitted, thank goodness.” A hand to his chest, he rolled his eyes Heavenward in gratitude.
“Well, goodness,” said Edie, mollified. “Thank you.”
“Listen, that’s the most dangerous intersection in the county! I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. It’s a shame, but somebody’s going to have to get killed out there before the Board of Supervisors sits up and takes notice. Killed.”
It was with surprise that Edie found herself softening to Mr. Dial’s manner—which was most agreeable, particularly as he seemed convinced that the accident could in no way have been her fault. And when he gestured out to the new Cadillac parked at the curb (“just a courtesy … thought you might need a loaner for a couple of days …”) she was not nearly so hostile at the sly liberty as she would have been even a few minutes before, and walked out with him, obligingly, as he went over all the features: leather seats, tape deck, power steering (“This beauty’s just been on the lot for two days, and I have to say that the minute I saw it, I thought: now here is the perfect car for Miss Edith!”). To watch his demonstrations of the automatic windows and so forth was oddly satisfying, considering that only a short while ago some folks had been so presumptuous as to suggest that Edie should not drive at all.
On he talked. Edie’s pain pill was wearing off. She tried to cut him short but Mr. Dial—pressing his advantage (for he knew, from the tow-truck driver, that the Oldsmobile was bound for the junk-yard)—began to throw out incentives: five hundred dollars knocked off the list price—and why? Palms spread: “Not out of the goodness of my heart. No maam, Miss Edith. I’ll tell you why. Because I’m a good businessman, and because Dial Chevrolet wants your business.” In the rich summer light, as he stood explaining why he would also extend the extended warranty, Edie—with a stab of pain in her breastbone—had a sharp ugly nightmare-flash of impending old age. Aching joints, blurry eyes, constant aspirin after-taste in the back of the throat. Peeling paint, leaky roofs, taps that dripped and cats that peed on the carpet and lawns that never got mowed. And time: time enough to stand in the yard for hours listening to any con artist or shyster or “helpful” stranger who drifted down the pike. How often had she driven out to Tribulation to find her father the Judge chatting in the driveway with some salesman or unscrupulous contractor, some grinning gypsy tree pruner who would later claim that the quote was per limb
, not per tree; companionable Judases in Florsheim shoes offering him girlie magazines and nips of whiskey, with all kinds of ground-floor opportunities and incredible overrides in between; mineral rights, protected territories, enough no-risk investments and Chances of a Lifetime to finally relieve the poor old fellow of all he owned, including his birthplace.…
With an increasingly black and hopeless feeling, Edie listened. What was the use of fighting? She—like her father—was a stoic old pagan; though she attended church as a civic and social duty, she did not actually believe a word of what was said there. Everywhere were green graveyard smells: mown grass, lilies and turned dirt; pain pierced her ribs every time she took a breath and she could not stop thinking of the onyx and diamond brooch inherited from her mother: which she’d packed, like a stupid old woman, in an unlocked suitcase which now lay in the unlocked trunk of a wrecked car, across town. All my life, she thought, I have been robbed. Everything I ever loved has been taken from me.
And somehow Mr. Dial’s companionable presence was a strange comfort: his flushed face, the ripe smell of his aftershave and his whinnying, porpoise laugh. His fussy manner—at odds with the solid ripeness of his chest beneath the starched shirt—was queerly reassuring. I always did think he was a nice looking man, thought Edie. Roy Dial had his faults but at least he wasn’t so impertinent as to suggest that Edie wasn’t competent to drive.… “I will drive,” she had thundered at the pipsqueak eye doctor, only a week earlier, “I don’t care if I kill everybody in Mississippi.…” And while she stood listening to Mr. Dial talk about the car, laying his plump finger on her arm (just one more thing to tell her, and one more after that, and then, by the time she was thoroughly tired of him, asking: What would I have to say to make you my customer? This instant? Tell me what I have to say in order to get your business.…); while Edie, strangely powerless for once to disengage herself, stood and listened to his pitch, Libby, after becoming sick in a basin, lay down on her bed with a cool cloth on her forehead and slipped into a coma from which she was never to awake.
————
A stroke. That was what it was. When she’d suffered the first one, no one knew. Any other day, Odean would have been there—but Odean had the week off, because of the trip. When Libby finally answered the door—it had taken her a while, so long that Allison thought that maybe she was asleep—she wasn’t wearing her glasses, and her eyes were a little blurry. She looked at Allison as if she was expecting someone else.
“Are you all right?” Allison asked. She’d heard all about the wreck.
“Oh, yes,” said Libby, distractedly.
She let Allison in, and then wandered away into the back of the house like she was looking for something she’d misplaced. She seemed fine except for a splotchy bruise on her cheekbone, the color of grape jelly spread thin, and her hair not as tidy as she usually liked it.
Allison said, glancing around: “Can’t you find your newspaper?” The house was spanking clean: floors freshly mopped, everything dusted and even the sofa cushions plumped and properly placed; somehow the very tidiness of the house had kept Allison from realizing that anything might be wrong. Sickness, in her own house, had to do with disorder: with grimy curtains and gritty bedsheets; drawers left open and crumbs on the table.
After a brief search, Allison found the newspaper—folded to the crossword, with her glasses sitting on top of it—on the floor by Libby’s chair, and carried them in to the kitchen, where Libby sat at the table, smoothing the tablecloth with one hand in a tight, repetitive circle.
“Here’s your puzzle,” said Allison. The kitchen was uncomfortably bright. Despite the sun pouring through the curtains, the overhead lights were on for some reason, as if it were a dark winter afternoon and not the middle of summer. “Do you want me to get you a pencil?”
“No, I can’t work that foolish thing,” Libby said fretfully, pushing the paper aside, “the letters keep sliding off the page.… What I need to do is go ahead and get started on my beets.”
“Beets?”
“Unless I start now they won’t be ready in time. The little bride’s coming into town on the Number 4.…”
“What bride?” said Allison, after a slight pause. She’d never heard of the Number 4, whatever that was. Everything was bright and unreal. Ida Rhew had left only an hour before—just like any other Friday except that she wasn’t coming back on Monday or ever again. And she’d taken nothing but the red plastic glass she drank out of: in the hallway, on the way out, she had refused the carefully wrapped cuttings and the box of presents, which she said was too heavy to carry. “I aint need all of that!” she said, cheerily, turning to look Allison straight in the eye; and her tone was that of someone offered a button or a piece of licked candy by a toddler. “What you think I need all that nonsense for?”
Allison—stunned—fought not to cry. “Ida, I love you,” she said.
“Well,” said Ida, thoughtfully, “I love you too.”
It was terrible; it was too terrible to be happening. And yet there they stood by the front door. A sharp lump of grief rose in Allison’s throat to see how meticulously Ida folded the green check lying face up on the hall table—twenty dollars and no/100s—making sure that both edges were lined up and perfectly even before she creased it with a zip of thumb and forefinger. Then she unsnapped her little black purse and put it in.
“I can’t live any more on twenty dollars a week,” she said. Her voice was quiet and natural, yet all wrong at the same time. How could they possibly be standing in the hall like this, how could this moment be real? “I love yalls, but that’s the way it is. I’m getting old.” She touched Allison’s cheek. “Yall be good, now. Tell Little Ug I love her.” Ug—for Ugly—was what Ida called Harriet when she misbehaved. Then the door closed, and she was gone.
“I expect,” said Libby—and Allison, with slight alarm, noticed that Libby was looking around the kitchen floor in a jerky way, as if she saw a moth fluttering by her feet—“she won’t be able to find them when she gets there.”
“Excuse me?” said Allison.
“Beets. Pickled beets. Oh I wish somebody would help me,” said Libby, with a plaintive, half-comic roll of her eyes.
“Do you need me to do something for you?”
“Where’s Edith?” said Libby, and her voice was strangely clipped, and crisp. “She’ll do something for me.”
Allison sat down at the kitchen table, and tried to get her attention. “Do you have to make the beets today?” she said. “Lib?”
“All I know is what they told me.”
Allison nodded, and sat for a moment in the too-bright kitchen wondering how to proceed. Sometimes Libby came home from Missionary Society, or Circle, with strange and very specific demands: for green stamps, or old glasses frames, or Campbell’s soup labels (which the Baptist home in Honduras redeemed for cash); for Popsicle sticks or old Lux detergent bottles (for crafts at the Church Bazaar).
“Tell me who to call,” she said at last. “I’ll call and tell them that you were in an accident this morning. Somebody else can bring the beets.”
Abruptly, Libby said: “Edith’ll do something for me.” She stood and walked back into the next room.
“Do you want me to call her?” said Allison, peering after her. “Libby?” She had never heard Libby speak quite so brusquely.
“Edith will straighten it all out,” said Libby, in a weak, peevish voice that was quite unlike herself.
And Allison went to the telephone. But she was still reeling from Ida’s departure and what she had not been able to put into words to Edie was how altered Libby seemed, how confused, how strangely collapsed in her expression. The shame-faced way she kept picking at the side of her dress. Allison, stretching the cord as far as it would go, craned to look in the next room as she spoke, stammering in her consternation. The white, wispy edges of Libby’s hair had seemed to burn red—hair so thin that Allison could see Libby’s rather large ears through it.
Ed
ie interrupted Allison before she was finished talking. “You run home and let Libby rest,” she said.
“Wait,” said Allison, and then called into the next room, “Libby? Here’s Edie. Will you come and talk to her?”
“What’s that?” Edie was saying. “Hello?”
Sunlight pooled on the dining room table, puddles of bright sentimental gold; watery coins of light—reflected from the chandelier—shimmered on the ceiling. The whole place had seemed dazzling, lit up like a ballroom. At her edges Libby glowed hot-red, like an ember; and the afternoon sun which poured around her in a corona carried in its shadow a darkness that felt like something burning.
“She—I’m worried about her,” Allison said despairingly. “Please come over. I can’t figure out what she’s talking about.”
“Listen, I’ve got to go,” said Edie. “I’ve got company at the door, and I’m not dressed.”
And then she had hung up. Allison stood by the telephone a moment longer, trying to gather her thoughts, and then hurried into the next room to see about Libby, who turned to her with a staring, fixed expression.
“We had a pair of ponies,” she said. “Little bays.”
“I’m going to call the doctor.”
“You will not,” said Libby—so firmly that Allison buckled immediately to her adult tone of authority. “You will do no such thing.”
“You’re sick.” Allison started to cry.
“No, I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s just that they ought to have come and got me by now,” said Libby. “Where are they? It’s getting on in the afternoon.” And she put her hand in Allison’s—her little dry, papery hand—and looked at her as if she were expecting to be taken somewhere.
