The Tie That Binds(69)

They talked for a minute more and hung up. Edith said later she didn’t mind lying about the cream. It was a lie, though. In the refrigerator on the top shelf she knew very well that there was already a full, unopened half-pint of cream, more than enough to whip for Lyman’s pie. But now she was glad she had lied. She said she was even a little bit proud of herself for having thought so fast on the phone. It meant that she would be allowed to see Rena and Mavis once more. That had been the one thing she hadn’t been sure of accomplishing—and she wanted very much to see Rena again. Now that too was going to happen. So she went directly from the phone to the refrigerator and took the half-pint of cream and poured it into the sink. Then she made lunch.

Lyman was not at all hungry, she said. Stooped over his bowl of tomato soup, he played with his spoon, stirring the red stuff around in the bowl, and ate only a bite or two of his cheese sandwich. He was tired, wilted, glassy eyed; the early morning had exhausted him, she knew that, and he was ready now to lie down on his bed in the living room. But she just couldn’t permit it. Not yet, she couldn’t. She told him she had two more magazines for him to see.

“What magazines?” he said. “I already looked at magazines.”

“No, these are different. You’ve never seen these before.”

“I did too,” Lyman said. He pushed himself up from the table and shuffled into the living room. Edith followed him.

“Wait,” she said. “Lyman.”

“What?”

“You can look at your postcards.”

“I don’t have no postcards.”

“Of course you do. Why, the ones you sent me when you were gone all those years.”

She went over to the wall above her bed and untacked the first postcard he had sent her, the one from California, during that other December, that December in 1941 after they had bombed Pearl Harbor. She brought it back and showed him the picture he had chosen.

“See what it says up here in the corner? Los Angeles, California. And on the other side this is what you wrote me:

“Dear Sis,

Well, I made it out here. Now they all say I’m not right for soldiers. So I’m working a job in a airplane factory. It beats farming anyhow.

Love, your brother,

Lyman.”

“I wrote that,” Lyman said.

“That’s right. You do remember, don’t you?”

“Give it to me,” he said. “It’s mine.”

She gave him the postcard to hold in his own old farm boy’s hands, to peer at and turn over, to remember even if it was only dimly; and so he was perked up again for a while. He sat down once more in the stuffed chair in the parlor under the lamp, while his sister removed the remaining postcards from the walls in the other room. But Edith didn’t know how long that semi-alert condition would last; she said she realized then that she would have to move her plans ahead by at least an hour. But that would be all right too; afterwards such things as time and tiredness wouldn’t matter. There would be something like rest, afterwards.

So she began immediately to clean and stuff the chicken. A month ago she had thought of having turkey for supper, but in the past week she had decided against it because there would be too much left over, and besides, chicken was turkey to Lyman. So she made that one compromise, and when the chicken was ready, stuffed with its legs secured, she put it to bake in the oven in time for an early supper. Then she peeled potatoes and got out a jar of canned beans to have ready. Chicken and potatoes and green beans and, afterwards, pumpkin pie—it would make a satisfactory meal.

That’s exactly what she said, a satisfactory meal. You see what lengths that old lady was going to. If you don’t it’s my fault; I sure as hell mean for you to see it. Because she had thought about it for a long time—I don’t know for how long exactly, but for long enough anyhow—for God only knows how many nights, lying there in that dark room in that yellow house, listening to her brother snore and whistle and mumble nonsense in his old man’s sleep, while all the time she was trying to think, trying to know what to do with him, until finally after enough nights and enough troubled hours there seemed to be only one option that might work. An option, of course, that concluded with a satisfactory meal. Only she didn’t tell us that. Not at the time, she didn’t. Over here, we were still just hoping that he would die, that he would go to sleep and not wake up. It didn’t happen, though. You know that. It just got worse and worse, without ever quite becoming impossible. And all the time she was tired.

She said she was so tired in fact that she permitted herself a short nap that afternoon. She folded her arms on the table and put her head down. It wasn’t a long nap she intended to take, but she didn’t wake until almost an hour later when she heard the car on the gravel outside the house. It was Mavis and Rena, bringing the cream. She stood up and met them at the door. Rena, my green-eyed, black-haired daughter who loves that old lady, was full of a little girl’s news.

“You know what?” she said.

“What, sweetheart?”

“I’m staying overnight with Sheila Garfield. At her house.”

“Are you?”

“But you probably don’t know Sheila Garfield, do you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Because she lives in town and goes to the second grade with me. Well, we’re going to stay up past midnight and have a party and everything. On account of it’s New Year’s. That’s tomorrow.”