Harriet came out in her panties and bra, and I saw that she was a good bit thinner than when we’d dressed together in Texas in April.
She wanted me to help her decide what to wear. “I bought these two-tone slingbacks. Look.” She held them up. “What do they remind you of? Aren’t they absolutely an echo of the saddle oxfords we wore at Pritchard’s? I couldn’t resist them even though they cost an arm and a leg—well, okay, an elbow and a knee. I thought I’d wear them and this white piqué.” She glanced at me. “I see you’re barelegged; maybe I will do that, too. See, I’ve belted the dress in the same caramel color as is on the shoes. What do you think?” She held up a short sleeveless dress, almost a tennis dress.
“I like that,” I said from across the room at my dressing table.
“Sorry I parboiled myself in there so long.” Harriet looked almost too thin, her ribs outlined beneath her breasts. “I can’t resist those deep tubs. I wanted us to get dressed together, the way we used to. Of course nowadays nobody has anything that zips up the back or has to be hooked at the neck. Remember all those clothes? They go back before panty hose, which to today’s generation is probably like saying before the combustion engine. I think panty hose and television arrived the same year. Has anyone done a study of legwear and communications? The radio and silk stockings?”
“Radar and leg makeup?” I tried to go along. I knew such talk was her way of gathering herself together. Her skin seemed unusually pale, and I realized that in addition to her tanning cream she must have worn a lot of makeup on the plane.
Harriet made an imaginary check mark in the air. “Very good. The microchip and seamless hose?” She pushed me off the slipper chair in front of the mirror and sat down to do her face.
I stood watching as the roses returned to Harriet’s cheeks, the flush to her brow, her lips became pink and her lashes thick. It was misleading; my friend now looked so glowing, so rested, so well.
“I was remembering,” Harriet said, brushing her shiny hair, “all those parties you and Nolan used to have. Remember? When did we quit doing that? Coming to the big anniversaries, five, ten, fifteen? The big birthdays, thirty, forty? Wasn’t that the last? Ye gods, that was ages, eons, ago, and it seems like weeks. Forty. I can hardly believe I’m that old, even. Thirty-seven, that’s a nice age for a blond; old enough, not too old.”
I recalled those parties, too. After we’d stopped trooping the children along, instead leaving them with friends here, mine; leaving hers with Doll and Nat in their old house past the Thicket. I remember Harriet and me dressing together like girls waiting for our dates. Skirts up or down, it didn’t matter the fashion, Harriet always wore something that did justice to her legs. When hemlines were long, she’d worn her highest heels and sheerest hose, and a slit in the skirt if that was allowed, or, if not, simply hiked her skirt when she sat down. She used to say she couldn’t have endured living in the days when women’s clothing, heavy and layered, came all the way down to their shoetops, where the most you could hope to show was a “well-turned” ankle.
Nolan had enjoyed having Harriet and Knox visit in those days. He’d used it as an excuse to fix something fancy to drink. He was still a fraternity boy at heart, the kind who’d thrown parties with a keg of beer in the backyard in high school. Whatever the time of year, he’d have something special. In the summer—that would have been for our anniversaries—he’d set a Waring blender of frozen daiquiris on the counter in the kitchen. Icy snow cones of rum and lime juice that we drank on the porch while Nolan talked banking with Knox, and “we girls” caught up with our news. In those days, we didn’t worry about drinking too much; it wasn’t part of our thinking. There might be pitchers of Bloody Marys, hot with Nolan’s secret mix of pepper and spices, cold from the refrigerator, or maybe Tequila Sunrises or Margaritas, in homage to our Texas visitors. When had all that festive drinking turned serious for the men, when had it turned worrisome and damaging?
“I think it’s great of you to have your friends over to meet me,” Harriet said, standing and turning to see how she looked from the back, “but next time I think we ought to do something just us, to celebrate that we are single now, you know? Maybe something with just women? That’s what I’m going to do—I’ve already decided—when you come to Texas next spring. I’ve already got it all worked out.
“I’m going to invite all of Birthday Club—whoever’s left by then—and have an old-timey luncheon with flowers and cloth napkins at card tables. And maybe even little prizes. A number under your plate and the package wrapped and placed under the table? The way we did when we were first married, remember? Back when we were trying to be grown-up women having bridge parties. The absolute Dark Ages. Antebellum, several bellum for that matter.”
I wanted to tell her about our all-women clients’ party, but the disparity between what she was imagining and the reality of our gathering stopped me. Sometimes it was hard to translate her life into mine or mine into hers. Yet, if you looked at it with a clear eye, we after all had simply moved into a new stage together: the all-women party having come around again with the same purpose but in a very different form.
Harriet slipped into her short white dress and raised her arms to clip a white velvet bow on her smooth hair. But the gesture of lifting her arms to secure the ribbon seemed to hurt, and for a moment she froze, sucking in her breath. She’d taken a handful of pills with a little orange juice as she’d climbed into the tub. Since then she hadn’t been coughing and her voice sounded more the way it used to.
“Ouch,” she said. “Damn. Damn.” She finished fixing the bow and hugged her rib cage. “I think these coughing fits tear something loose. They’re bound to. I imagine it like”—she winced, paused, taking a shallow breath—“the inside of some sound system with a couple of wires pulled loose. Not that they have wires anymore. But, then, I was made in the old days.”
“Are you all right?” I stood nearby, not sure what to do.
“Fine. It goes away.” She sat back down and checked her lipstick. “I didn’t mean to be telling you who to invite to your house,” she said, looking at me reflected in the mirror. “It’s just—you don’t have somebody over who took care of your husband, not at something like this, a little dinner. I don’t care what’s going on with you two, you and the old doctor. It’s like asking the rector, who, at lowly old St. Bart’s now suddenly calls himself Father. Really. I mean, it looks like you’re asking for special treatment.” She turned around on the stool. “And her, your partner. You just don’t have somebody you work with. They’re like The Odd Couple Who Came to Dinner, is how it looks to me.”
I expected a bit of a skirmish between “that girl” and “that woman,” some resistance on both their parts to being lumped together, each so threatening to the other on general principles. But I trusted to their affection for me, and mine for them, to smooth things out. And I knew that Will would welcome the chance to look after us all, and would not mind being outnumbered three to one. “You’re my friends,” I told her.
“Besides,” Harriet added, anxious, “being a doctor, he’ll spend the whole evening staring at my chest.”
I laughed. “That would hardly be a first, now would it?”
• • •
WILL CAME IN THE back way, leaving the dogs in the fenced yard to run about. He kissed me on the mouth and ran his hands down my back. “What’s for supper?” he said.
“I haven’t seen you two going at it before,” Katie told him. “You look right nice.”
Will took off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair, giving Katie a pat on the shoulder by way of greeting. “Man comes in the kitchen, I’ve read the literature, he’s supposed to kiss the woman and ask, ‘What’s for supper?’ ” He helped himself to a beer.
I told him, “The woman’s supposed to lift the lid off the iron skillet and say, ‘Stew.’ ” I was flushed from the heat of the stove—and the joy of having these two mingling with the smell of supper.
K
atie asked, “Where’s your friend got to?”
I put my spoon down and looked at Will. “Harriet had a bad spell, just as we were getting ready. She was laughing at something I said, and then—”
“You holding up?” he asked me.
I nodded. “I made three peach desserts for dinner.” In truth, I was feeling guilty about Harriet. I wanted it to be a nice party for her, after the trauma of having to drive through the cemetery and then stumble into Nolan’s room. And I’d been thinking mostly about what the evening meant to me, my pleasure in the preparing of it.
“That’s a good enough answer,” Will said. He gestured toward the front of the house. “I’m headed for a rocker. Want to join me, Pegues?”
“In a minute,” Katie said. “I’ve some news for Sarah.”
I’d made my favorite stew, glad the weather had turned cooler. I’d baked a pork roast with cumin and thyme and black pepper, soaked red, white and black beans, and then thrown them in, adding potatoes (I’d used the shepodys, Harriet’s Potato of the Month), red and yellow bell peppers, and a turnip for flavor. While Harriet had napped earlier, propped on three pillows, the sound of her breathing filling the bedroom, I’d cut up the meat and potatoes, added the juice and beans and peppers, tasted the stew, chopped in fresh tomatoes, added a little red wine and left it to simmer down.
It was such a satisfaction not to have to fix party food for people more interested in the bar: thin sliced beef, shrimp on beds of ice, vegetables presented as works of art. Just a skillet of stew, some spoon bread and washed salad greens. I’d been unable to decide which peaches to use or which dessert to make, and, suffused with delight at the bounty, had made three. I’d put tart Georgia Belles and Cortland apple slices on a French pie dough, then made a cobbler with the rich Monroes, mixing in vanilla and heavy cream, and was going to pile the sweet yellow O’Henry eating peaches on a shortcake. What a feast. How well my trees had provided for me.
“Junior came by the shop late this afternoon,” Katie was telling me. She was on a stool, watching the cooking, in a long black-and-brown wraparound skirt tied up on one hip like a sarong, high wedge sandals and a black T.
“Did he want his check back?” I stirred and listened.
“He wants to be a client.”
“Junior?” Imagine that.
“He says he’d like to do the downstairs in the same Calhoun-style I used in the upstairs sitting room for his mother. He wants to use different papers but get the same effect.” Katie looked pleased. “Sounds to me like he wants to do over the entire house, room by room.”
“Did you tell him how we do things?”
“I did. I think it was finding that check that cinched it. He liked his mother writing it out and the fact she kept track of what was owed all by herself. I expect that Dexter Senior kept a close fist around the money.”
“Our first male client.” I turned and raised a wooden spoon in toast.
“We never had a policy against it,” she said.
Just then Harriet came down the stairs and into view. “It’s me at last,” she called out in a squeaking voice. She’d reapplied her makeup; small gold balls hung from her ears. She’d put on jewelry for my party. I was touched, knowing what that meant to her.
“Hey, don’t you look pretty!” Katie stood holding out a hand, making an effort on my behalf.
“Don’t you.” Harriet thrust hers out as well. “Can I help you, Sarah? I’m sorry I took—so long.”
I put the lid on the stew. “This has to simmer. Let’s go out on the porch.”
Outside, Harriet offered her hand again. “Will, isn’t it?”
“Most of the time,” he said amiably, enveloping my friend in a hug. Seating her in a rocker, he asked, “What’ll you have? I’ve got myself a beer, the other ladies are having lemonade. I can get you Old Corn Cob or whatever the house-brand whiskey is, you name it. What’s your plea-surer?”
Harriet looked up at him. “I’ll take a lemonade, too, Will, if you don’t mind. With a little something to sweeten it?” She made it a question, a furrow between her brows.
“How does gin sound?”
“Just fine. Fine.” She seemed clearly relieved.
He didn’t go right in the house, however, but stood by her chair. “Let me get this out of the way first,” he said, “then we can get to visiting.”
He was in a white shirt and suit pants, his coat and tie left in the kitchen after making rounds. He had deep wrinkles, I could see when I looked at him objectively, and too much weight around his middle. But the sight of him here, as a lover, as more than a physician or a friend, filled me with happiness. How fine it was to have things be in public the way they were in private.
“I was mighty sorry to lose Sarah’s husband,” Will said. “I’m sure you don’t recall me all that well from the gaggle of specialists attending Nolan Rankin from head to toe, but I was there. He was a good man; I looked after him the best I knew how.”
Harriet looked embarrassed. “I know you did. There was nothing anybody …”
He went to fetch her drink, touching my cheek with his hand as he passed.
“Imagine Sarah and me becoming widows the same year,” Harriet said to Katie, being friendly. “I guess you knew my husband, Knox, died in a car accident only last November.”
I looked at Katie, wondering how she would answer. She was sitting on the porch floor, her back to the railing, her long legs folded yoga-style. I knew her thinking: that if someone you loved died, that was bad news and you were entitled to have a bad time. But you weren’t entitled to make a big deal out of whatever name the world gave your particular version of living without a man—widowed, divorced, single. I’d heard her hold forth on that, pointing out that, in fact, if you took into account girlhood, widowhood, those who divorced, those who never married, most women didn’t live with men, and the women who did did so for less than half their lives. I also knew that Harriet would get her back up once they were on that subject. Considering her feelings about Doll having left Nat and Pammy being unmarried, living without men was a topic wild horses couldn’t get her to discuss in public.
But Katie didn’t make her speech. “I was sorry about your man,” she said. “It was a bad year all around in that department.”
Harriet nodded. “I’m seeing somebody new,” she confided, a bit tentative, in case this wasn’t all right to say to a feminist.
“I may join you in that,” Katie replied, sighing. “I had lunch today with a long-time steady, but the sparks didn’t fly.” She twisted her gold bracelet. “You give a chunk of your life to somebody and it leaves a big gap when he goes. But then when he comes back, it doesn’t seem possible that he can fill that big a hole, not him, just a normal guy.”
Harriet said, “I bet,” and then, “I guess I’m just at the stage where he’s starting to take up that—chunk.” She repeated Katie’s word.
I relaxed. The two women might be miles apart in their thinking about women, but they were clearly close enough in their attitude toward men.
Will brought Harriet’s drink, a jigger of lemonade in gin, he said, in a highball glass with a lemon slice on the rim. After handing it over and making sure it was to her liking, he settled himself in the rocker next to me. I leaned back, my arms behind my head. How fine, I thought, to be at home in my home. The dogs, making contented noises, settled at my feet.
“I found a new private eye for you, Will,” Katie said.
“A series? I like a series.”
“He’s just starting out but he’s done colors in the titles so far: blue, red, white. The PI’s named Easy Rawlins. He’s black. They’re set in the Fifties.”
“Fine,” Will said. “John D. MacDonald did colors with his Travis McGees. I get queasy when they pick too short a list, say the days of the week. In seven days the PI could get snuffed. I like that gal who’s doing the letters of the alphabet. I figure by the time she makes it to Z is for Zealot I’ll be”—he counted on his fingers—“o
n my way to ninety, staring down the road to it.”
“I don’t know those—books,” Harriet said, stopping to swallow part of her drink. “Knox never read anything but his Civil War histories.”
I realized she was feeling outside the conversation. I’d been looking at Will as he talked, hoping when he did get to be ninety we’d be rocking right here, supper simmering on the stove, new frisky dogs thumping their tails.
Will picked up on her tone and changed the topic. “Sarah’s got me hooked on these radio call-in shows,” he said. “Do you have them out your way?”
Harriet hesitated, then found her voice. “Most people listen to tapes, I imagine,” she said. “I mean, I’ve been going to Houston every week.…” She looked upset, as if she’d given away her secret, then hurried on. “My children are there. I can’t believe I have grown children running the financial and legal world, but I do. Anyway, I like to put on some familiar music and that helps when I’m fighting that hellish traffic.…”
Will put a hand on my arm and sat a bit. Then he said to me, “Did you see that the sheriff’s office has decided to train hounds to track down criminals? The trail gets cold quick, he said.”
Tracking criminals in our neck of the woods? Traffic violators? Tourists from Chattanooga? “What kind of dogs?” I asked him.
“Redbone hunting dogs.” Will held up two fingers. “The first pair are named Bonnie and Clyde. Figure that: naming canine crime fighters Bonnie and Clyde. The sheriff said they were just starting the hounds on the basics. TGIF.”
Life Estates Page 17
