“Of course he’s cruel. Prison made him cruel. That’s how he is now, but he wasn’t always. In any case, Nat, you need to stay away from him.”
Natalie seemed to discover in her soup something so minuscule and annoying, it could be retrieved only with the very tip of her spoon. She then placed the spoon next to her bowl and placed the tip of her right forefinger on its handle. “Whatever could you mean?”
“If you don’t know, then I sure don’t.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Then neither do I.”
Evelyn looked at her sister. When they were young, she had had an astigmatism that she outgrew and Natalie had had braces and a retainer for her very prominent teeth. They sometimes called each other “Buck Teeth” and “Four Eyes” and now those times seemed to be coming back. On the verge of tears, each had begun to feel ugly and powerless again.
Natalie snuffled, “I made a key lime pie!” She went to the kitchen and brought it out, a beautiful thing, light and golden at the edges. She sank her knife into it, served them both, then sat, suddenly making herself very still.
“Pie okay?”
“Wonderful.”
“That’s a real one,” Natalie said tragically, “made with condensed milk.”
“What’d you do for limes?”
“Just Spanish limes from the store, but they’ll do. Now. Ev. Listen. Stuart, good Stuart, no big future, right?”
“I don’t—”
“No, come on, I should know. This is it!” She gestured around the little Craftsman knockoff, so suggestive of modest, happy family life. It had been built during a difficult period in their marriage, and Natalie’s unfortunate habit of discussing those problems with anyone who would listen had given their marriage a poor reputation that persisted even in better times. In fact, during the era when all of Paul’s strengths were a display of lewd aggression and intrigue, Evelyn found herself longing for just such a do-it-yourselfer. But Natalie’s inclusive gesture, her “this is it,” effectively dramatized the distance between what she dreamed and what she had. Evelyn knew too well where this was headed.
“I cannot go back to Paul.”
“We’ll starve.”
“It will be honorable starvation.”
“Surely there could be some accommodation with the terms—”
There was a clangor of the heating that might’ve implicated Stuart’s skills as a plumber. That and the wind-borne leaf storm in the small yard gave the house a precarious feel.
“I don’t know how Dad could have done this to us.”
“I loved Dad!”
“So did I. But it wasn’t easy and please, Evie, don’t be a bitch, it wasn’t easy to watch him make such a husk out of Mama!” Natalie was holding her hair out from her head with both hands: a Medean tableau that would have seemed insincere except that it was done with such mad force that it made Evelyn watch her steps carefully.
“Nat, look, this is getting to be a scene. Such a nice lunch, so perfectly prepared, as if I were a guest of honor! But is there no way we can discuss this?”
“‘Discuss’?” Natalie asked, quarreling with the very word.
“How do you think I like being called a bitch?”
That stopped her for a moment. Down came the hands, through the thick, crazy hair that only slowly subsided. If only we were wounded celebrities, Evelyn thought, who could set out on a healing retreat away from this pain. Supervised by recovery specialists, we could safely call each other bitch and request that our sister stay out of our estranged husband’s bed without the customary repercussions.
“Bitch is a terrible word, isn’t it?”
“Lucy was a bitch,” said Natalie, and suddenly both women were weeping. When they were girls, they shared a Labrador retriever named Lucy, whom their father would not allow in the house. Twenty years previous, on Christmas Eve, the then old and silver-muzzled Lucy froze to death under the wreath on the front door. Natalie’s heart broke as much for her father as for Lucy, whereas Evelyn concluded he was just one of life’s nasty surprises and treated him with unyielding distance. “She’s a cold one,” Sunny Jim later said of Evelyn, only a little chagrined by the feeling that the oldest girl had his number, and completely unaware of the agony he produced in her.
Evelyn loved Natalie’s food and so did Paul, who owned a sensitive palate among other refinements including prairie architecture, Porsches and Eames furniture. He spotted Art Deco details on buildings, radios and furniture; and for a while was besotted by Bakelite. Sharing his quest for esoteric collectibles, Natalie was once able to discover what a short leap it was from Bakelite to sordid motels on the interstate and the subsequent raw and bankrupt carnival.
“I love you, Evie, and I don’t want you to do what’s not right.”
“I love you too, Nat.”
“Now,” Natalie sobbed, “we shall simply have to downsize.”
“My God!” Evelyn snapped. “What do you expect?”
Natalie flung her face up, awash with tears, damp hair tangled at her temples. “I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d drum up some fucking white marriage, some illusion to get the rest of us living like human beings.”
“What about my life?” Evelyn shouted.
“What about it? Does mine have to disappear while you review what makes you comfortable?”
Evelyn stood and said, “Thank you for a lovely lunch.”
Natalie bowed her head and did not look up when her sister departed. After a decent interval and a deep breath, she consulted her watch, then gave a small sigh.
It was time to go to town.
When Evelyn called her mother to explain she had to pick up some medicine for Bill and would be a few minutes late, Alice said with perfect sincerity, “Bill comes first.”
Why was she always so utterly solicitous on his account, Evelyn wondered, standing in line at the pharmacist’s window while the two men in front of her had a conversation she couldn’t help overhearing. “… pulled it out and cleaned it up. Maybe I knocked a hole in it, put the acid to it and then… damned if I know. It don’t look dirty but it is. I went on ahead and clamped it but then it dropped several amps. Must be dirty…” Men were always talking like this: you couldn’t understand a thing they were saying.
Once she’d paid for the prescription, Evelyn started up the icy sidewalk toward her car. Coming from the opposite direction was a dandyish male wavering in the poor light of a fall afternoon. Before the figure finally emerged into deep focus, Evelyn felt something of an anxious chill. It was Paul, of course.
“Hello, Evelyn,” he said levelly.
She busied herself tying a better knot in the green silk scarf she’d wound around her neck. “Paul. I’m afraid I didn’t recognize you at first.”
He smiled. “So, Evelyn, why don’t we ever see you down at the plant? Those are your vital interests.”
“It’s never really fascinated me, Paul.”
“But it’s on-the-job training for the new CEO, and I’ve got all these dependents!”
“How do you stand it?”
His smile seemed unevenly distributed on his face. “It’s a living.”
“I picture a ship without a rudder.”
“Oh? We’ve already been approached by a broker out of Atlanta, Joel Kram, old southern family. He made a fortune with a caffeine-laced dairy product called Kreem, then lost half of it defending himself in lawsuits. He used stock footage of Martin Luther King’s famous speech in his ads and dubbed in the word ‘Kreem’ for ‘dream.’”