Returning, she found Lucille awake.
“Good morning. Have a nice sleep?”
“Is it morning?” Lucille said.
“Oh my, yes. But it doesn’t seem like it, does it? That’s the one thing I don’t like about winter, getting up before the sun.”
While she talked she glanced with a professional eye at Lucille. She seemed rested and quite calm. Though Miss Eustace knew the calmness wouldn’t last, she always considered it a good idea to take advantage of even a momentary improvement.
“Let’s go down to breakfast this morning,” she said cheerfully. “Some new faces would be good for you. Certainly you must be pretty tired of mine.”
Lucille looked a little surprised. She hadn’t, until this moment, been conscious that Miss Eustace had a face. Miss Eustace was uniform and authority, a starched white impersonalized symbol of “we.”
“Let’s wear the red dress. There’s something so cheery about red on a winter morning, I find.”
Lucille had no answer to this. None was possible. Miss Eustace had made up her mind that she, Lucille, in a red dress on a winter morning, should go down to breakfast.
“It’s like a nursery school,” she said.
“What is?”
“This place.”
Miss Eustace laughed. “I suppose it is. Here’s your toothbrush.”
While Lucille was dressing, Miss Eustace made the two beds, timing herself by her watch. Two minutes for Lucille’s bed, one minute, thirty-seven seconds for her own. With pride she marked the times down on her solitaire score pad.
Before she left she opened two windows wide to give the room a good airing, hung up Lucille’s nightgown in the closet, and put her own wrinkled uniform in a laundry bag. Then, with a clear conscience and a good appetite, she went down to breakfast.
The dining room was quiet and orderly. The patients ate at small round tables in groups of three or four.
Automatically Lucille walked to the table where she had sat before with Cora and the Filsinger twins.
Miss Eustace said “Good morning,” to the twins, and then seated Lucille and herself.
“We personally don’t want you here,” Mary Filsinger said. “We like a table to ourselves. I’ve told the superintendent so a dozen times, haven’t I, Betty?”
“I don’t know,” Betty said, with her mouth full. “Don’t stuff your mouth so. It’s disgusting. Chew one hundred times.”
“I can swallow everything whole,” Betty explained proudly to Miss Eustace.
“Don’t talk to her,” Mary said. “She’s a spy.”
Smiling and calm Miss Eustace began to talk about her house in the country and what she had for breakfast there and how her tulip tree first blossomed in the spring and when the blossoms fell off the leaves appeared.
“What color blossoms?” Mary asked, suspiciously. “Pale pink, almost white, really.”
“That’s very funny about the leaves. I don’t believe it for a minute.”
“It’s true,” Lucille said suddenly. “I had a tulip tree, too.”
“I wish I had one,” Betty said.
Her sister touched her hand. “I’ll buy you one.”
“You always say that and you never do.”
“Ungrateful liar.”
“HI swallow something whole if you call me that.”
“Oh, Betty, don’t! Darling, please don’t!”
A maid arrived with orange juice, oatmeal cooked with raisins and a covered dish of eggs on toast.
Lover-like, the twins quarreled, while Miss Eustace talked about dogs. Collies were nice, and so were cocker spaniels, but she preferred Airedales, really. They were very faithful.
“Cats are best,” said Mary, unable to resist Miss Eustace’s dangling bait. “We like cats best of all.”
“Well, cats are nice too,” Miss Eustace agreed. “What do you like best, Mrs. Morrow?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lucille said. “Dogs, I guess.”
“Dogs are vicious,” Mary said, and closed her mouth decisively on a piece of toast.
“Some of them are, of course,” Miss Eustace went on. “It depends mostly on the training and to a certain extent on heredity. I personally have never been able to quite trust a chow, for instance.”
“I’d rather have a tulip tree,” Betty said.
Mary leaned over and muttered something in her ear but Betty tossed her head and looked scornful.
Miss Eustace watched Lucille out of the corner of her eye to see if the scene interested her or upset her. She noted with approval that Lucille had eaten half of her oatmeal, and, though she didn’t talk voluntarily herself, except for the remark about her tulip tree, she seemed to be following the conversation.
We should have quite a good day, Miss Eustace thought, and felt pleased with herself.
The twins were fighting again, in low voices but with a great many flashing glances and passionate gestures. Finally Mary retreated into cold silence, and it was then that Miss Eustace saw her pick up her spoon and tuck it carefully into the bun of hair at the back of her head.
With a furtive glance around the room Mary rose and made for the door. Miss Eustace rose too.
“We’re not supposed to take spoons out of the dining-room,” she said kindly. “Put it back please.”
“Spoon?” Mary cried in great surprise. “What spoon?”
“Put it back.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The nurse in charge of the dining room was making her way toward them between the tables. She had the spoon out of Mary’s hair before Mary was aware it was missing.
“Now, Mary,” she said. “You know better than to do that. This is the second time this week.”
“I’m running away,” Mary cried. “I’m leaving her flat. She can’t treat me like that and get away with it! I’m running away so she’ll know what it’s like to be left with no one to look after her!”
“I’ll swallow something,” Betty said calmly, and before anyone could stop her she had removed her ring from her finger and popped it in her mouth. Gulping and gasping she was dragged out of the room and pounded vigorously on the back by the nurse. But it was too late, the ring had already joined the collection of other articles in Betty’s stomach.
The twins departed in disgrace with Miss Scott.
“Her insides must be a regular museum,” the dining-room nurse said to Miss Eustace. “I’m going to catch it for this.”
“It wasn’t your fault at all,” Miss Eustace said and returned to the table to finish her breakfast.
The episode had apparently made no impression on Lucille. She was intent on her toast, breaking it up into small pieces and arranging them symmetrically around the plate.
She’s being very co-operative, Miss Eustace thought, she’s really trying to eat.
Aloud she said, “Sugar for your coffee?”
“Yes, thanks.”
The fat pink sugar bowl was passed. Lucille would not touch it, its flesh was too pink, too perfect. Not real flesh at all, she thought, but she knew it was because she could see it breathing.
Miss Eustace’s spoon clanged against the grains of sugar. “One or two?”
“One”
“There. Stir it up before you drink it. No, dear, stir it up first.”
She picked up her spoon, dreading the feel of it. Everything was alive, everything hurt. She was hurting the spoon, and though it looked stupid and inert it was hurting her in return, digging into her fingers.
“Not so hard, Mrs. Morrow.”
Round the cup the spoon dashed in fury and pain, stirring up the hot muddy waves and all the little alive things. She swallowed them, in triumph because she had won, and in despair, because, swallowed and out of sight, they would take vengeance on her.