In due time, she heard Mrs. Lamb, the housekeeper and cook, who slept out and came in early, clump across the back porch below and let herself in the back door with her own key. Later she heard the yardman working in the yard beside the house, though God knew what work there was for him to do with the grass and all the flowers seared and sapped by the relentless sun, and later still Avery came out of his room and down the hall and stopped outside her door. When he knocked softly, she twisted her head on her pillow and looked at the door but did not speak nor move in excess of the twisting of her head. She kept her eyes on the knob, waiting to see if it began to turn, and when it did begin she immediately closed her eyes and kept them closed. He came into the room and stopped a few feet from the bed and was silent for a minute before he spoke her name. She could hear him breathing and smell his shaving lotion, and she could see him in the dark and private little world behind her lids as he leaned forward slightly from the hips and peered at her to try to determine if she was waking or not. She did not answer, and he spoke again, and she still did not answer, and he went out and closed the door. Hearing his footsteps descending the stairs, she opened her eyes again and began to wonder what made some bad days so much worse than other bad days.
It is not, she thought, anything in the days themselves. Looking back on them, it is impossible to find any reason at all why these were the days when one particularly wanted to die, or to have others die, or felt that it was absolutely essential to do something to change the intolerable procession of degrading days, while at the same time one was irrationally terrified of any change whatever. No, it is not in the day but in oneself that the badness begins and grows with no discernible logic in its beginning and growing today rather than yesterday or tomorrow, and it is not a result of overt misfortune but of intangible oppression that builds and builds to the absolute certainty of proximate destruction. Therefore, since it is in oneself that it begins and grows, and since there is no logic in the beginning and growing, it follows that there is nothing to be done about it, except to bear it and get through it, and if one is lucky this is something that can be done.
She heard the yardman start the power mower and wondered why on earth he was starting the mower when there was no grass to cut. She heard Avery’s Caddy go past the house in the drive and wondered if Avery would be back before evening and hoped that he wouldn’t. She heard Mrs. Lamb’s heavy tread on the stairs and in the hall and waited for Mrs. Lamb’s heavy rapping to sound on the door. It did, and she took her time deciding whether to tell Mrs. Lamb to come in or go away or simply to ignore the rapping altogether, as she had done with Avery’s. After a while she decided that it would be just as well on the whole to get Mrs. Lamb in and out and finished with as quickly as possible.
“Come in,” she said.
Mrs. Lamb opened the door and stepped inside the room, leaving the door open behind her. She was a strong, blocky woman with a massive chests so tightly bound that it gave the appearance of being undivided, and Lisa had once, seeing the remarkable chest, had a joke pop into her head about it, a kind of humorous analogy with one part to be supplied, and the analogy was, what is to a woman as a dromedary is to a camel? The answer was, of course, Mrs. Lamb. There were several things wrong with the analogy, however, and as a joke it really had something wrong with it too, which was that it wasn’t, after all, a very funny joke. It was impossible, anyhow, to imagine Mrs. Lamb being amused by it.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Lawes,” Mrs. Lamb said.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Lamb.”
“Will you have breakfast this morning?”
“No, thank you.”
“You didn’t have breakfast yesterday morning.”
“I seldom eat breakfast.”
“Nor day before yesterday morning.”
“I know.”
“You ought to eat breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day. When you start having children, you will wish you had eaten your breakfast.”
“I consider it unlikely that I’ll ever start having children, Mrs. Lamb.”
Which was worse than the repudiation of a sacred function. It was dereliction of duty not to produce a Lawes, specifically a male Lawes, in an apprehensive world that was presently in the precarious position of having only one left. Mrs. Lamb was privately of the opinion that this production should have begun some months ago, and she was totally incapable of understanding how any woman could be reluctant to do the producing. She would have been almost willing to undertake it herself.
“I could bring it up in a tray,” she said.
“I do not want any breakfast, Mrs. Lamb.”
“Very well. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Yes, there is. You can go away and leave me alone.” Mrs. Lamb flushed and left, slamming the door, and Lisa began immediately to wish that she hadn’t said what she had, and then she began to wonder if it would be possible to remember even a fraction of the times she had said something and wished afterward that she hadn’t, and she knew that it would not. Oh, Christ, what a bitch you are, she thought. What a bitch you are, and what a day it has begun to be with your very gracious treatment of this woman who wished for nothing but to be kind and to bring you your breakfast on a tray. It is quite apparent already that this is a day which should be eliminated, that it would be a good thing to skip at once to tomorrow, but it is also quite apparent that the only way to eliminate a day is to live it, so there is nothing to be done, and after the day is the night, and what in Christ’s name is to be done with the night?
She was beginning to feel uncomfortable, and so she got out of bed and went into the bathroom and then returned and lay down on the bed again and began to think of those she had known, of Alison and Bella and others, who were no longer threats in themselves but were symbols of the threat that survived them. This was not good, was part of the bad day getting worse, and she tried thinking of Carl, how remarkably kind he was, and of Avery, how even more remarkably kind he was, and she wished to God they would quit crucifying her with their cursed kindness, and this wish made her feel guilty and debased and contributed more to the bad day getting worse than Alison and Bella and the others. Trying to achieve a kind of neutrality in her thinking, she considered the party at the country club, but this was no help because the party was assuming the proportions of a terrifying ordeal. And that, of course, was the clue to the bad day. When the past is a depressant and the future is a threat, the bad day is a trap between them, and there is no escape unless you can find it in a bottle.
Thinking of a drink, she began to want one badly, but it would never do to drink today because of tonight, which had to be gotten through somehow and would be difficult enough at best and could be survived only by drinking just ahead of time and just enough to establish and secure the lift that was her only protection. There had been other times when she had resolved not to drink, either for some specific reason or just because she was convinced that drinking was bad for her and should be stopped, and she had then tried substituting coffee for alcohol on the grounds that it was easier to do without something if you immediately put something else in its place instead of leaving an emptiness where it had been. Every time she had wanted a drink and was in danger of submitting, she had made or bought a cup of coffee and drunk it, but eventually she had given up this technique simply because it was impossible for anyone to go on drinking that much coffee indefinitely. Now, however, though it had never worked before, she decided that she would try it again, just for this one day, and she got off the bed and put on slippers and a robe and went downstairs to the kitchen.