She remembered the months that followed. Great gobs of guilt followed. In her bed at night she thought of ways to undo what she’d done. What she’d done was terrible. Horrible. Unthinkable.
So why was she thinking of it? Why had she chosen that (random?) date... with a sudden movement, she hit the stop, hit the power, turned it off. All this nostalgia stuff, sure, she could relive joyful days... if she could remember when they were, there must have been some, there must have been many... Relive... how about anticipate? Could her Beta foretell the future? Aha, that was the question — the lottery number was drawn on Saturday nights. If, say, she had the number in advance... why not? If she could see next Sunday’s newspaper... on Sunday mornings she always read the newspaper from cover to cover, and on page two the lottery numbers were listed... yeah, hey, that was the deal!
She found a pen and pad, calculated, and gave Beta the Sundaycoming date. “Turn it on first, you dope,” she said aloud, then followed suit. Date repeated, she sat back to watch.
The TV screen said NO FILE FOUND.
She said aloud, “What do you mean, no file found?”
The screen blinked. NO FILE FOUND.
She tried again, something easier, tomorrow’s date. Again the message came, No file found.
Great. No future from Beta. Only the past.
The G-d past.
You can’t run away from the past, Didi, she could hear her mother saying that. Her mother had a litany of trite sayings, tried and true was among them. Certain beliefs were “tried and true.” Such as, “What goes around comes around.” She’d asked her once, “What the heck does that mean?”
“You’ll find out,” she’d said. “One day you’ll find out.”
Mornings when Uncle Willis was in residence he’d come down for breakfast and watch Mother, watch DiDi with his little beady eyes, and she’d reconsider anew. He deserved a poisoned pickle, the dirty old man... no, no, he doesn’t, no one deserves that. But how to undo what she’d done? By ruining all the pickles, how could she explain that, the jars had leaked? Mother had closed the jars herself, checked them thoroughly. The best plan, destroy the offending jar was the best plan, but which was the one? She should have marked it somehow, that’s what she should have done, but she hadn’t and now when she sneaked down to his cubbyhole (Uncle Willis’s pickles were kept in that special place, dark and cool, a little cave behind the chimney in the basement because it was thought that things kept longer and better there) and looked at the jars — how many, eleven, now ten, then nine, eight — he was working on jar number four, was it the one? He seemed all right — yet was number four, his current jar, the one? No signs yet of any illness, but would he suddenly gasp for breath, clutch his throat, keel over right then and there and die?
“Didi, are you feeling all right? You look so funny...”
“No, I’m fine, Mother. Just fine. How are you, Uncle Willis? Are you fine, too?”
“Yes, Didi. I’m fine.” And so he was.
So — which of the remaining eight? They all looked alike. She took them out and even shook them, could see no sediment that looked unnatural. How about if she carried all of them away somehow (in what to where?) and claimed that they’d been stolen? Come now, DiDi, be sensible. Undecided, she pondered and puzzled and watched, half-hoping (damn you, Uncle Willis) and half-fearful (damn you, dreadful DiDi).
It was during the eighth jar that it happened. (Total agony as he chewed his way through the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh), the dinner table was the scene, but what was the date? Think hard, think hard, it was in autumn, after Halloween, she thought, how about November... sometime in early November, she called out a date, and a scene came to life.
Mother looked nervous, DiDi thought. Strange, Mother was always so calm. Partly because Mother wasn’t prone to wild imaginings as DiDi was but also because she was a naturally accept-things-as-they-are person. What did she have to be nervous about?
“I have an announcement to make, Willis,” she said suddenly, causing Uncle Willis to pause forkful in mid-air to say, “Yeah?”
“Didi, I should have told you first, but to tell the truth it’s all seemed so unreal, I couldn’t believe it myself. I’m going to get married. On Monday. To Ronald Brent. You know, Didi, that nice man at the supermarket. The one in charge of the fruits and vegetables. With the dark hair. You know the one.”
“Is that so.” Uncle Willis put his forkful of gravied potato in his mouth and chewed.
“The fat one?” DiDi asked. “That’s getting bald?”
Mother looked hurt, and DiDi apologized. “I’m sorry, he’s just a little — plump, Mom. And just a little bald. Actually he’s very nice looking. When did you two — become friends?”
Mother blushed. “Oh, it’s been a long time coming. He always had a kind word when I came marketing, and he’d save some extra nice tomatoes when my plants had stopped producing, and then he began to walk along with me and we’d talk a little, you know, just pleasant conversation and I found that he’s never married because he took care of his mother, who recently passed away, poor thing, she had cancer, it was a slow and painful death and I felt so sorry for Ronald. He looked drawn and thin, yes, he did, Didi, too thin, so I made a casserole for him and, well, one thing led to another and he’d take me out for a soda or an ice cream on his break and...” She smiled, and she looked suddenly as young as one of DiDi’s friends. “Yesterday he proposed, and today...” she held out her hand, “he gave me a ring.”
“Congratulations,” said Uncle Willis, cutting into his chicken-fried steak.
“But I thought...” DiDi stopped, bit her lip.
“Oh.” Mother blushed again. “You mean — Willis and I...” Suddenly flashing fire, she looked at Uncle Willis. “I guess you could say your Uncle Willis changed his preference.”
“Your mother and I called the other thing off awhile back,” said Uncle Willis between bites. “Figured it might not work out. Pass me the peas, will you, Didi?”
Oh my God, thought DiDi. Oh my God. It worked. I really did come between them. But surely he didn’t think, he couldn’t think... “Where will we live, Mother? Here?”
“Oh no. Ronald has a very nice little house. Over on Market Street. You’ll like it, I’m sure.”
Watching Uncle Willis, DiDi said, “If you say so.” He didn’t even look up, sopped a piece of bread into his gravy.
On the day they moved away... that date she thought she did remember, well, maybe not exactly, but near enough... if she told the Betamax what to do, would it do it? Would it show DiDi stealing down to the basement, picking up the hammer that was kept on a bench, smashing Uncle Willis’s pickles, watching the pickles flop like dead fish onto the dirt floor, watching the juice soak into the soil?
She closed her eyes and saw without benefit of telecommunications. “Didi? Are you ready? Where are you, Didi?” Mother’s voice from upstairs.
A swift ascent of the steps. “Here, Mother. I’m ready. I’m ready now.”
At the front door Mother looking backward, “It’s been a haven,” saying to Ronald, “I do feel bad about Willis. No one to look after him now. I do hope he’ll be all right.”
“He’ll be all right, Mother,” DiDi, coming between them, had assured her. “Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.”
And he had been. Obviously. For years. Until his recent demise. What had Uncle Willis died of, anyway? Old age? He couldn’t have been that old. Cancer? Stroke? Heart attack? She realized she didn’t know the cause of her benefactor’s death. Natural causes, she supposed that’s what it came down to. Natural causes.
But not from poisoned pickles. Whatever the cause, not that.
For God’s sake, that was years ago. If her doctored pickles had caused trouble, that would have happened ages ago...