Family Linen

by Lee Smith

  “Turn left at the old Raven Rock cutoff,” Myrtle said now, giving directions. “You know, where we used to go out to the quarry.”

  Myrtle stood in Mother’s driveway looking good. Looking young, blond, content, prosperous—looking, however, a little less certain of the nature of things than she used to. Lacy has always been not so much annoyed as simply astonished by Myrtle and Don: by their enormous blond beauty, their possessions, their health, their absolute invincible belief in human perfectibility. Their blandness. They are people like pound cake, like vanilla pudding. She used to feel—and still felt, post-Jack—that she could never talk to them about politics, or values, or money, or anything. Myrtle, however, had developed lines at the corners of her eyes now which Lacy thought she recognized—lines she knew something about. They had been drinking sherry together earlier that afternoon, sitting around the oak table in front of the old floor fan in their mother’s kitchen. Miss Elizabeth kept nothing stronger than sherry in the house.

  “Do you think you should go like that?” Myrtle asked. “Like that” meant that Lacy was wearing her cut-off blue jeans. It meant that she—like Myrtle—was almost forty. Lacy chose to ignore this remark. Kate ran out of the house then like a bullet, hurtled into the back seat, and slammed the door.

  “I’ll be there at seven,” Lacy said, meaning at the hospital, I’ll be at the hospital, backing out.

  Lovely Myrtle stood by the blossoming pink hydrangea and waved. Lacy remembered her waving just that way from—it seemed—countless floats. Myrtle was Miss Booker Creek, Homecoming Queen, Valentine Princess, while Lacy got good grades and sulked. Myrtle waved, getting smaller and smaller as Lacy backed away, with the mountains spread out blue behind Mother’s house, beyond the green hillside. She backed onto the street and pulled into traffic. Although the town had sprawled in all directions, with malls proliferating on the outskirts, the downtown area had stayed exactly the same. Mother’s house, on the hill at the south end of Main Street, overlooked it all, as it had for half a century. The house was symbolic of so many things: of the fact that she alone, of the three sisters who had grown up there, carried on the traditions which their own mother had tried to instill in them; of her own lofty ideas, ideals, and sensibilities; and of, finally, her profound isolation. Driving through town, Lacy thought of how they had all preferred, finally, in different ways, terra firma. How they all had chosen to come down the hill.

  “I still don’t see why I had to come,” Kate said. “I could have stayed home by myself.”

  Lacy didn’t reply, negotiating the traffic. There never used to be any traffic.

  “Lois Emery stays by herself,” Kate said. “But you don’t think I’m a person. You don’t think I’m responsible. You think I’m some dumb kind of a baby.”

  “When you’re sixteen,” Lacy said in what she hoped was a light tone, “then you can stay by yourself.” She turned left at the courthouse and headed out of town on the bypass, toward the new grocery store Myrtle had recommended.

  “I could have stayed with Dad,” Kate said, trying it out. “Bill is.”

  “Bill has a swim meet,” Lacy reminded her. “He’ll be at the club most of the time we’re away.”

  “I could have stayed with Dad anyway.” Kate was still trying it out. Lacy looked at her in the rearview mirror. They were all new at this.

  “I guess so,” Lacy said. She didn’t explain that Jack was keeping Billy under some duress. And that, as a matter of fact, children are not always welcome in a love nest. “Love nest” made her giggle—it was a phrase from one of the National Enquirers which Fay had had out at the One Stop. ALIENS ENTER LOVE NEST, FRIGHTEN ILLICIT LOVERS was the headline. Fay was still, as always, nuts. But that was the situation: Jack and Susan, back home in Chapel Hill, living in their love nest. Sooner or later, Lacy would have to make some decisions. She supposed she’d have to sell the house.

  She watched the land slip by on either side of the congested road. “Don’t be a stranger, now,” was what Nettie always said when she left. The old country goodbye. But Lacy did feel like a stranger now, driving through empty space. Daddy dead, Jack gone, Mother in the hospital. And Kate nearly grown up, so suddenly, so mysteriously: Kate’s period had started. Even those mountains, which Lacy always loved, looked different. How many times, in how many other places, had she closed her eyes and summoned them up before her? She has always had a Romantic, Jack called it Wordsworthian, attachment to them—she has always been more attached to the place, perhaps, than to her own family. That’s one of my problems, Lacy thought, that tendency to get more attached to the idea of the thing than the thing itself. Oh, don’t be a stranger now. The mountains seemed older, softer, and somehow sad—or perhaps it was only this particular wet June, so much foliage, the haze. Lacy considers herself an old hand at the pathetic fallacy. And she had not been back for three years. When she was a girl, there was nothing but trees and sky along this stretch of road. Now they passed McDonald’s, Long John Silver’s, a K-Mart, a string of used-car lots. She turned left.

  “There used to be a sign here that said Raven Rock, three miles,” she said.

  “I don’t care,” said Kate.

  “No kidding,” Lacy said, and then Kate surprised her by giggling. Kate was moody, lovely, exasperating. She had had a hard time, too, and Lacy hadn’t been able to help her much, consumed, as she had been, by her own pain.

  The Piggly Wiggly, when they arrived, was as huge, as new as Myrtle had promised. As modern as anything in Chapel Hill, or even Raleigh. Booker Creek was changing and very little remained of the old ways—except those cabins you still saw high up, driving down that long valley through the mountains into town, those cabins so high and strange, and the isolated farms in the valley, and except the people, of course: like Nettie.

  According to Myrtle, this Piggly Wiggly was owned by Lewis Ratliff, who had been in Lacy’s class at school. He owned it and three others in neighboring towns. Lacy supposed that this made Lewis Ratliff a grownup, which she was not. She imagined how Myrtle and Don, and Candy, and even Arthur must have kept in touch with lots of the people from school. How they must run into these people day after day, year after year, as all of them married, had children, and aged. These lives seemed continuous, while hers did not.

  A “Rodeo of Values” was in progress at the Piggly Wiggly; pennants fluttered all around the enormous parking lot. A country band played while cloggers in red-and-white checkered outfits danced on a raised wooden platform. A flea market and pony rides were, a sign said, out back.

  “Yahoo,” Kate said sarcastically. Kate was used to Chapel Hill, which is not the real world, in Lacy’s opinion. Not that there’s much advantage in the real world, either. Then Kate said, “Do you think they’ve got any games?” and headed into the Piggly Wiggly alone. Kate wore a man’s hat and dangling silver earrings; she went to the Friends School, and looked like it.

  Lacy locked the car and pulled her cut-offs down in the back. She needed staples—milk, cereal for Kate, some frozen dinners. She had no idea how long they’d be here, how long her mother would be in the hospital, what they’d do about her when she got out, whether Mrs. Dwight would be able to stay with her full time. Of course, in most cases, someone in the family would take over—Nettie, the logical one, would come to live with her. In most families. But for as long as Lacy could remember, her mother had had as little to do with Nettie and Fay as possible, for reasons the children never knew. Their father used to laugh a little and shake his head when they asked him about it, bemused and delighted, as always, by his Miss Elizabeth, by whatever vagaries and affectations she possessed. On the side, he gave them money; Lacy knew that. He had helped them through the long hard time when Millard Cline, Nettie’s second husband, was dying of cirrhosis, before Nettie married and then buried her third husband, Dutch Musick, who owned the One Stop. Gothic. It’s all so Gothic. Lacy remembered in college, when she read F
aulkner for the first time, the way it all made perfect sense. Yes, she thought then. This is how it is. It was like coming home, in a way in which she had never been able to. Don’t be a stranger now, Nettie said.

  The country band at the Piggly Wiggly wore short-sleeved black shirts with glittering red cuffs and collars, and huge black cowboy hats. They were doing an old Kenny Rogers song, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” Lacy thought again of the things she planned to buy. Suddenly she remembered a disastrous dinner she had cooked sometime during the early years of her marriage. She had known, serving this dinner, that something was wrong with it, but she hadn’t been able to figure out what it was. “Lacy,” Jack had said after a moment, “it’s all white.” As indeed it was: fish with a cream sauce, rice, cauliflower, homemade rolls. Lacy used to tell this funny story to their friends. But now it seemed unbearably sad to her. It seemed like so many other things almost independent of herself and Jack, of their enormous good will, things that could not in any way have been foreseen or avoided. It’s something that wouldn’t occur to you, a white dinner. Thinking of Jack, Lacy saw herself again in the picture she had been looking at the night before, at her mother’s: she and Jack, hand in hand, at a beach. In the picture, her mouth is a wide dark bow. Jack’s eyes stare fearlessly into the future. That picture had been taken nearly fifteen years ago, at Wrightsville Beach, when they were in graduate school at Duke, before they married. When they were in love. And now Jack was in love with somebody else—Susan, another graduate student, ten years younger than he was. Doing it all over. But you can’t do it all again, she wanted to scream at him. You can’t have it twice, and you can’t get it back— Although Jack himself looked exactly, she thought, the same: thin, bearded, the lopsided grin, the warm brown eyes. She couldn’t imagine where those years had gone.

  Lacy leaned against a battered blue camper to catch her breath as it all—flying pennants, whirling dancers, jostling crowd—blurred and swam, for a minute, before her eyes. She noticed that the guitarist was staring at her. He was a heavyset man of sixty or so, with a snake tattooed around his arm. “Ruby, for God’s sake turn around!” he sang in a high nasal voice.

  Suddenly Lacy realized that this Piggly Wiggly stood on the site of the old drive-in movie theater where she came with Louie Scuggs, the first boy who really loved her, and with Red McClanahan who touched her breasts and then never asked her out again. She hadn’t liked Louie because he was too much like she was—too smart, too vulnerable, never quite “in.” Lacy was the spelling champion, for instance, instead of a majorette like Myrtle. Louie Scuggs brought olive-and-cream-cheese sandwiches to school. But Red McClanahan! He was the kind of boy Candy knew. Lacy couldn’t believe it when he asked her out; she still couldn’t believe it, twenty years later. Myrtle had told her that Red spent six of those years in prison, that now he sold linoleum and carpet for Sears.

  Lacy remembered three things about the night Red touched her breasts: Thunder Road, starring Robert Mitchum, was playing at the drive-in; she wore a white sundress, with spaghetti straps, which she had made herself in the 4-H Club; and little Linda Milligan, her distant cousin, fell from the top rung of the jungle gym and landed on her face in the gravel right under the giant screen, splitting her chin wide open. Just as Red touched Lacy’s nipples, Linda Milligan ran between the rows of parked cars screaming bloody murder, while Robert Mitchum drove wildly across the huge pearly screen behind her. Robert Mitchum’s job was running moonshine through the woods. It was, Lacy remembered, a really good movie. Linda Milligan grew up, got married, moved to northern Florida. And even now Lacy could almost feel Red’s hands on her breasts.

  The guitarist with the tattoos kept looking at her. “Ruby, I know I’m not half the man I used to be,” he sang with the band, “But Ruby, I still need some company.” Lacy started to giggle; she couldn’t help it. The band took a break, and a little wind whirled the trash at her feet. Lacy knew she should do her shopping. But the guitarist was moving forward. “Listen miss,” he said, “listen,” in her ear. Then suddenly he was right in her face, with his gray-black stubble, his flat light eyes. “Now you’re Verner Hess’s girl, aren’t you?” he asked deferentially. “I ain’t seen you since you was grown.”

  “Yes—” Lacy’s voice sounded strange to her in the sudden lack of music.

  “Well, I don’t know if you remember this or not, but I had a son, Donny Dodd? and he was sweet on you? and we, me and the missus, took you with us water skiing it must of been at least two times, over to Holston Lake. We had us a boat then, for the boys. We used to go over there every Sunday in those days. I’m Ernest Dodd,” he said.

  “Oh sure,” Lacy said, when in fact she didn’t remember any of it, not Donny Dodd’s face, or this father of his, or the missus, nothing at all of those Sundays spent water skiing on Holston Lake. No, wait—there’s “Ramblin’ Rose,” sung by Nat King Cole, coming from the small black transistor radio on the green blanket. Transistor radios were new then. Lacy saw again the wide shining lake, the circle of hills, and a boy coming up at the end of a ski rope, suddenly and totally out of the water. But she couldn’t see this boy’s face: all she remembered was “Rambling Rose,” and the way your nose feels when you get it too full of water. Oh, Jack, she thought, suddenly furious. Oh, Jack darling. Because he had left her, and left her open to all of this.

  “That was fun, that water skiing,” Lacy said to Mr. Dodd, edging past him toward the store. “Please tell your wife hello.”

  “Died,” he said. “Cancer. She was all eat up with it.”

  “I’m sorry.” Lacy shook his hand, squeezing the snake. “Take it easy,” she said, and, “I think you all are real good,” meaning the band.

  She found what she needed and went to stand in the checkout line behind a man and his wife and three little sobbing girls. Sweet on you, she thought. The Dodd boy was sweet on you. The clock over the automatic door said 7:05. Back in North Carolina, her lover would be having a martini, probably, or running. He runs five miles a day. Visiting hours would have started at the hospital. Candy would be there already, smiling softly, in her crinkled white uniform. Arthur might be there too, scowling in a corner, permanently ill at ease. Sybill would have her mouth pursed, legs crossed at the ankle. Out front, Mr. Dodd’s band was starting up again. After Lacy paid, she went to stand by Kate at the line of video games. Kate was playing “Nuclear Holocaust.”

  “This is the last American family,” Kate said. “See, the thing you have to do is get Timmy past these dorks. Whoops,” she said.

  “Come on now.”

  “Mom,” Kate said, but then the screen went dark.

  The air had cooled off, and the violet arc lights were glowing softly all over the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. Mr. Dodd’s band played “Orange Blossom Special,” with a skinny rat-faced boy hunched over the fiddle. A big woman with a long black ponytail ran forward from the crowd and started dancing all by herself on the pavement. Lacy felt old and tired; she knew she could never keep up with her running lover.

  “Weird music,” Kate said. As they waited to turn into the main road, Kate asked what would happen if she got pregnant.

  “Well,” Lacy said, “that would probably be really unfortunate, because it would be so bad for your health, as well as for the baby’s, so I guess we’d all have to sit down together, that is, with the boy, and his parents, and your father, and we’d just have to decide what would be the best thing to do under the circumstances, and then—”

  But Kate flipped the radio dial, not listening. Finally, Lacy stopped talking. She always tends to answer their questions too fully, to give them more information than they need to know.

  “I could, you know,” Kate said after a while.

  “Could what?”

  “Get pregnant now. Couldn’t I?”

  So that’s it.

  “Sure you could,” Lacy said. She waited for a break in the line of ca
rs.

  The early evening air smelled new, green, and full of possibility. The haze was gone. Beyond the bustling parking lot, the mountains rose; high above them, the sky was clear and luminous. Lacy couldn’t understand what she remembered and what she didn’t—why, for instance, the theme song from Thunder Road kept running through her mind. Robert Mitchum’s face, dark and strong, was as big as a house on that shining screen—that screen which used to be right there behind the Piggly Wiggly where the pony rides were. Red McClanahan had coarse brown hair and yellow-green eyes. When he kissed her, he kept them wide open. Life before Jack. Lacy rolled the window down, over Kate’s protests. She found herself smiling, on the road back to Mother’s house.

  Lacy is just so pretty, every day she brings me these flowers. They are blue. We put them in my vase, my swirling vase from Clinus who brings me things too. Lacy is not my baby. Clinus is not my baby either, or Lacy who says these grow up on the hill, Fay, out behind Mother’s house. They grow on the hill by the split rail fence which runs up to the barn, won’t you come out Fay to see them? The whole hillside is blue. Here, we will put them in a vase, but won’t you come out in the car? It’s such a pretty day, Lacy says, it’s so dark in here. Can you see them, Fay, how blue they are, in your vase? Can you see in here? Nettie says leave her be, Lacy. She’s okay. I say I’m okay, you’re okay too and Lacy laughs. I laugh too, ha ha!