Jane said, “How could you do that? Grace.”
“Well, goddamn!” Grace said, throwing the dishrag onto the counter. “Damn me if I bother to do anything to help you, sister. Maybe that man would be a good companion to you, what you think about that? Or is it that you just want to be an old maid your whole life?”
“Well, it’s what I already am, ‘old’ or not, isn’t it?” Jane said.
“Yes,” Grace said, settling just a bit, ears going from pink back to fleshy translucence in the kitchen light.
“So you think because this man cannot have normal relations with a woman he would want to be with me. You tell him I’m ‘deformed’ or something but I suppose you leave off the part about inability to control my bodily functions. That he would be the companion of a woman around whom he would so often enjoy the stink of the privy. That it would be like living with a grown infant always needing her ‘goddamn’ diaper changed. I don’t suppose you told him that, judging by his reaction at the table, poor man.”
“Poor man! Why did you let it happen that way? Why didn’t you excuse yourself and go upstairs, the way you’ve always done?”
After a long moment so quiet the air began to hiss like a tiny steam valve in another room, Jane said, “To make a point, I suppose. To not take part in a lie.” Grace said nothing. “I am twenty-two years old, Grace. That was old maid age, in the old days. And pretty much is for me now. If I have to accept it, you might as well, too. I imagine I am boring you to death, after all this time living here like that, like an old maid. So if you want me to leave, find my own place, you just say so.”
“I didn’t say that and I don’t mean that. You’re my little sister. I’ve tried to take care of you.”
“And I appreciate that, Grace. But if you want me to leave, want your privacy back, you say so. All right?”
Grace nodded.
“You’re not getting any younger, either, Grace,” she said, in a softer voice, not unkind. “I don’t want to be in your way.”
Grace seemed then on the verge of tears.
Jane left the kitchen and went straight up to her room, sat on her bed looking out the window at downtown, not hearing the sounds of it or smelling the smells of it nor even herself. Only seeing the city’s nightscape, and some part of her seeming to float out into it, undetectable by others, no more than a little pocket of warm breeze in the shade of a tree during summer, so subtle as to make one wonder at whether it was really there, passed, or was just a moment of one’s own disembodied dreaming. That ghost self that now so often seemed to be with her when she was alone.
On Love
Every now and then Dr. Thompson came by to get her on Sunday and took her for a drive in his car. They drove out to the airfield and watched the occasional airplane take off or land. He bought them a box lunch and they would have a picnic at Highland Park and stroll around and toss the ducks pieces of stale bread Jane would bring from Grace’s house.
Once, he convinced her to take a ride on the park’s carousel. It was a rather tame experience, as he was getting on in years and she did not want to straddle a wooden horse or lion or some other odd animal, so they rode in the sleigh seats. Even so, the whirling of the carousel as it gained speed was a thrill, with the world of the carousel house and the world outside its paned windows in slanting light becoming streaked as if in some kind of drugged dream. And when it slowed and came to a stop she had to clasp his forearm and beg a moment to regain her equilibrium, and then of course hurry to the public pool’s bathhouse with her bag in order to change herself, as the ride had made her forget herself entirely for those long moments and when she came out of it she realized that she had that business to take care of before they moved along.
After they had made their way back to his car and got in, he sat for a moment behind the wheel without speaking.
“What are you thinking about?” she said.
“Oh. Just my mind wandering. Got all whirled up on that carousel.”
They sat a moment.
“I want to ask you a question,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“How come you never got married again?”
He frowned in thought. Then said, “I didn’t feel the need. Some people feel like they just have to be married, have a companion. I figured out, after Lett died, that I wasn’t one of them. I guess being married to her had helped me see that.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to pry where I shouldn’t.”
“It’s all right. I don’t mind. Sometimes people get married because it just seems like a good idea at the time. That such-and-such a person would be a good mate, a good person to share a life with. Have children with. People will get married simply because they judge themselves to be compatible. Just because they figure they will get along.”
“Was it that way with you and Mrs. Thompson?” Jane said.
“We got along all right.”
She’d been rude again and wanted to kick herself. But she was curious. And still upset about Grace’s matchmaking, she supposed, taking it out in a way on Dr. Thompson. Her only real friend.
“I apologize for asking that,” she said. “I’d better keep my mouth shut.”
“I really don’t mind. We did kind of grow apart, there toward the end. I loved her. I think she loved me, too. But she began to have a hard time showing it. I think that toward the end I just wasn’t entirely the right man for her. I think she’d have preferred a life in town.”
“But your house is almost in town, barely outside it.”
He smiled, but just with one side of his mouth.
“I guess I mean she would’ve preferred a town life. Society.” He looked at her. “She was lonely for the kind of life she grew up with. Whereas I never really cared much for it.”
“How did you meet?” He’d never told her the story of that.
“Well, now, there you go. I was a biology student at the University of Alabama, intending to apply to Vanderbilt for medical school — although I wasn’t decided on that yet.
“In any case, one weekend I went home with my friend Nate McLemore, who was from here in Mercury, and there was a social on the lawn at someone’s home, I think it was a family named Meyer, and it was a very hot day. Several of the young ladies had parasols against the sun and heat. But as I was walking past this one girl, who did not have a parasol, she fainted dead away and landed right in my arms. I had her just like you’d bend someone down in a tango dance or something, and I had to hold her close for a moment or drop her, and before I could even lay her down on the grass she woke up, and looked straight into my eyes, obviously startled and shaken, and disoriented, of course. And for some reason, one of those odd things you do on impulse, I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m studying to be a doctor.’ And do you know what she did then?”
“Tell me.”
“She laughed, of course. She must have realized, even in her state, that I was as discombobulated as she was. So that was the start of it.”
“She got the chance to look at you close up and intimate. It was by accident but it worked.”
He cocked his head at her and let a vague smile come into his expression.
“Maybe.”
He heaved a sigh and seemed to laugh at himself. “I don’t know, I’m rambling.” He turned to her again. “I have been thinking about love. And I realize that I don’t have the slightest idea what it is. But you felt it for that Key boy, didn’t you? You believed you did.”
In spite of her blushing, she said, “Yes.”
He was quiet for a little while, seeming to study his fingernails.
“Jane. I have to say that I’ve never been certain that I was right to intervene the way I did, with you and that boy.”