The Sisters (20 page)

“Of course, any time you like,” Alma said, wishing she had an excuse to say no. Gordon gave her one. From his post behind the bar, he was jiggling the empty ice bucket.

“Please excuse me,” she said to Mrs. Powell. “My husband needs me.”

As Alma took the ice bucket from Gordon, she remarked that she had just met Claudine Powell.

“You’ve got to keep up with the ice, you know,” Gordon said. “How do you expect me to mix drinks without ice?”

Alma nodded and turned to go back to the kitchen.

“I’ll need more crushed ice when you get back with that,” Gordon said, loudly enough that a few of the men near the bar stopped talking and looked at her.

Alma took the bowl of ice from the freezer and tapped it with an ice pick to separate the cubes. After she’d filled the bucket, she emptied four more ice trays into the bowl, returned it to the freezer, and ran water to refill the trays. She wished she’d thought to say to Claudine Powell that Gordon ought to be the one to conduct the tour of the new kitchen, since it had been remodeled according to his plan, not hers.

Alma had wanted a range—not a wall oven and a cooktop with the immense awkward vent hanging over it like some giant wide-mouthed vacuum tube, poised to swallow her up. And she had wanted everything in pink and yellow, all soft and bright. Along with her old friend Mrs. Murchison, who’d come to stay for a week last spring, Alma had spent hours every day sorting through magazine photographs, advertising brochures, and color samples, designing the kitchen she had dreamt of since childhood—butter yellow appliances set off by pink-and-yellow tile accented in aqua. But Gordon and his mother, who had come in especially from Newman two months ago to give her opinion, had insisted that aqua appliances were more elegant, and that red-and-black tile up the wall and, in larger blocks, on the floor would be most tasteful.

Gordon and his mother had chosen dim accent lighting, too, to set off various aspects of the kitchen they believed most attractive. One of these was the display of crystal on open shelves. Alma had suggested the pieces would be safer but still visible in a windowed cabinet, but Gordon had shaken his head in annoyance, saying open shelves commanded attention. Certainly they demanded attention—twice already in the three weeks since the renovation was complete, Alma had had to wash and hand-dry that spectacular glass to keep it sparkling.

Sometimes she caught herself looking at the pretty yellow refrigerator in the brochure, but she could see now, of course, that Gordon and his mother had been right about the aqua. Alma still hadn’t warmed to the tile floor, though, thinking it looked like some absurd, nightmarishly large chessboard.

Claudine Powell pushed through the kitchen door and said, “Well, here you are.” She took the ice bucket from Alma’s hands. “Now, you just put that down and come enjoy the party.”

Alma tugged at the rim of the bucket. “Gordon needs the ice.”

With a wry smile, Claudine shook her head. “Gordon, Gordon.” She pushed the door partly open with one hand and, rather too loudly, Alma thought, called out, “Bruce!” A slim, balding man in a gray suit appeared, and Claudine said, “Bruce, this is Alma. Isn’t she pretty?” Bruce said hello and then was suddenly holding the bucket Claudine had thrust into his hands. “Take this to Gordon,” she said.

Claudine strolled to the center of the kitchen and turned around slowly, taking it all in. She pointed at the rotisserie. “I suppose Gordon likes leg of lamb.”

“Two or three times a month,” Alma said.

“Well, he doesn’t have to clean that contraption, does he?”

“It’s not so very difficult to clean,” Alma said. That wasn’t true at all, but she wasn’t sure she liked Mrs. Powell’s tone, as though she and Alma were co-conspirators.

The older woman laid one hand lightly on the refrigerator door. “This is Gordon’s doing, isn’t it? The scheme? No woman I know would want all these dark colors.”

“Gordon’s mother likes them,” Alma said, but Mrs. Powell went on as though she hadn’t heard her.

“Hurts your eyes to look at that checkerboard.”

Alma got the bowl of ice out of the freezer again to load the ice crusher, checking to be sure it was set on
Fine
. Gordon was particular about his ice. When she looked up from her cranking, she saw Mrs. Powell had the food sketches in her hands.

“Did you do these?”

Alma nodded. “It was silly, I know, but I needed to see what everything looked like first to be sure the food would fit my serving pieces.”

“It’s nice work,” Claudine said. “Looks like something you’d see in a cookbook.” She put the sketches down and patted Alma on the arm. “I’ll leave you alone, dear. I know it’s hard to be hostess. Next time, think about hiring a girl to help you for the evening.”

Alma dumped the first load of crushed ice into the large bowl she would take out to Gordon and then put another load in the crusher. She looked at the sketches again, seeing, she thought, a little of what Claudine Powell had seen. Surely it was ridiculous for her to feel so pleased with the woman’s compliment, which was probably really nothing more than casual politeness, but Alma felt a rush of warmth in her cheeks.

Earlier in the evening, when she’d made her first round with the hors d’oeuvres, she had noticed Milton, looking so handsome and grown up in the blue suit his father had chosen for his birthday, holding an Old Fashioned glass half-filled with orange juice, clearly thinking himself the equal of the two men who laughed at his third-grade jokes. She wanted to do a watercolor portrait of him while traces of the adored infant remained in his face, to capture him before he tumbled over the edge into puberty.

Surely in another year or two he would be able to sit still for a portrait. Last year when Alma had tried it, Milton became impatient, complaining he wanted to work on his science experiment—he was calculating how long it took various insects to die after being sealed in jars with a cotton pad soaked in alcohol. When she tried to assure him that she needed only another fifteen minutes and went to settle a cushion behind his back to make him more comfortable, he had slapped her hard across the face.

Mixed with the shock of the strike, Alma had felt a sudden, intense longing for Daddy, who in an instant would have snatched Milton by the collar and laid him across his knee for a whipping. Alma had been too stunned to do anything herself, even to speak, and Milton ran off toward his room, singing some song he’d learned on the radio, while she got up to get a cold cloth to hold against her stinging cheek. The boy had hit her so hard he’d left a red mark, but it was easily concealed with an extra layer of foundation.

Gordon had told her when they married—and she had agreed—that when the time came to have child, he would handle the discipline, and so Alma waited without a word through the afternoon, through Gordon’s two after-work scotch and sodas, and then through dinner, until Gordon had sent Milton to his room to do homework.

She had sat down on the edge of the ottoman, facing Gordon. Very quietly and very calmly, she had said, “Dear, our Milton has misbehaved.”

Gordon folded the newspaper in his lap, reached to get a cigarette out of the engraved silver case on the side table. He tapped the end of the cigarette five times against the gleaming walnut surface, picked up the lighter, and, finding it empty, clapped it back down. He looked past Alma and held his hand out, which she understood to mean that he expected her to get up, cross the room, get the lighter they kept on the mantel, and return it to him. She did this, and he flipped the top, spun the wheel with a hard flick of his thumb, lit his cigarette, put down the lighter, and took two long drags. Now he looked her unwaveringly in the eye and said, “Well?”

When she explained what had happened, Gordon tipped his head back and laughed.

Laughed and laughed.

She thought he might never stop.

When at last, still laughing, he looked at her again, he took no notice of the tears that had spilled from her eyes in spite of her resolve not to cry. “That boy knows his own mind,” he said, tapping a dangling ash from his cigarette. “That’ll teach you to listen to him when he says he’s tired of sitting around.”

“You’re not going to punish him,” Alma said, so softly she wasn’t sure she’d said it at all.

“For what?” Gordon seemed almost angry now. At her. “Why should I punish him for being annoyed that you were wasting time he wanted for studying? You ought to be glad he’s so serious about science.” He stubbed out the cigarette, unfolded his paper, and said nothing more.

At the time, she’d felt wounded by both her son and husband, and she’d spent the rest of the evening crying in the bedroom, wondering if either of them would come in to stroke her shoulders. But after a time, she came to see that Gordon was right. Yes, she was truly blessed to have such a son, who, still so young, already knew he was going to be a doctor—a surgeon, perhaps—and who didn’t have time to sit for portraits while his mother taught herself to paint. No, she wouldn’t ask him again. If she wanted to paint him, she could do it from a photograph. Or she could paint the tree in the backyard.

Life was the way you looked at it, she reminded herself. Truly, it was. There had been a time, a year—almost two—after Gordon decided against their having another child, when Alma had nursed a heavy sadness, but at last she had come to see Gordon’s view: the expense—of time, money, and attention—could only be drawn against Milton’s account—and that wouldn’t do. “Nearly thirty thousand dollars to bring up one just to age seventeen,” Gordon had told her, quoting a report he had read in one of his magazines, “and that doesn’t include college. Or medical school.”

How fortunate she was to have such a good provider for a husband, a man who calculated these things. A man thoughtful enough to arrange for her to have a new kitchen with a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, and even a trash compactor. A man who was sensible and practical when it came to handling their fine, ambitious son.

Yes, she was lucky. That was clearest to her when she thought of what her life might have been, given what she’d come from.

Just look at the mess Rainey had made of her life—embarrassing the whole family by having to get married, and then, just when she was beginning to get settled, she’d run off with that little girl of hers—without any explanation to anyone—and filed for divorce. And the worst of it—not more than a year later, there was Rainey, pregnant again, this time by some man she refused to name. Shameful. Those girls of hers, Lynn and Grace, were certain to grow up half wild, no standards at all. Alma felt sorry for them. She felt sorry for Mother and Daddy, too, for the humiliation they must have had to face at church, but when she thought about how they had always indulged Rainey—or at least how Daddy always had—her sympathy waned. Probably Mother had resisted, at first, but then gave in, Alma supposed, when Daddy put his foot down on behalf of his favorite. Yes, she could see that Daddy might have forced Mother into agreeing to have Rainey back, but even so, that was no excuse for the way Mother doted on Rainey’s girls, while she was only polite to Milton.

Well, Alma was out of all that and glad for it. She could bear visiting her parents in Newman once or twice a year, and the rest of the time she could enjoy the prestige of being a doctor’s wife—and perhaps, in time, the wife of a city councilman.

Alma checked her reflection in the broad side of a crystal pitcher on Gordon’s open shelves, tucked a few strands of hair back into place, picked up the bowl of crushed ice, and pushed through the door to join her guests.

E
LEVEN

Letting Go

June 1965

Newman, Indiana

RAINEY

L
YNN
’
S CRIES PUNCTURED RAINEY
’
S SLEEP.

“
No! Daddy! Don’t let go! Daddy! Daddy!”

Rainey stumbled across the room to her daughter’s bed. Still asleep, Lynn thrashed, not screaming now, but seeming desperate to. Her lips were pressed tightly and her face was turning red, as if she were holding her breath.

Mother appeared in the doorway, her face white, her housecoat only halfway on. Daddy limped in behind her, still dressed from the day, his clothes rumpled from the couch. Neither of them had taken time to put on their glasses. They stood at the foot of the bed while Rainey hugged Lynn to her chest, rocked her, and rubbed her back, murmuring, “Breathe, baby. Lynn, breathe. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

Last night, when Carl had brought Lynn home—hours later than he was due—he did not say why she was dressed only in a man’s large T-shirt, but, as he laid her in her bed, he explained the square of gauze over the girl’s eye by saying she’d slipped on the dock. She’d been running too fast, he said, and banged her head into a post. He’d taken her to the emergency room—there didn’t seem any point in calling about it, not after the doctor said she would be all right, not since they were already so late. All she needed was a couple of stitches, a tetanus shot.
An accident
, Carl said.
Could have happened to anyone
—and though she hated to, Rainey had to admit it was true. Lynn was always running too fast, falling down, and might as easily have cut her head on their own front stoop. What had frightened Rainey most was how groggy Lynn was so many hours after the fall. For several minutes, Rainey had patted her daughter’s cheek and rubbed her hands, and finally Lynn had roused, opening her eyes for a moment before falling again into a deep sleep.
They gave her something for the pain,
Carl told them,
because of the stitches
—but after Carl was gone, they had looked at one another, she and Mother and Daddy, as if each was waiting for one of the others to say they didn’t believe him, not quite.