“So much else has been going on, it slipped my mind. Kelly said it was about a paving bill. Bob thinks he overcharged him.”
“Bob Berryman may not be Mr. Charm but that doesn’t sound like him, to fight over a bill.”
“Hey, like I said, maybe we don’t really know one another.”
Harry picked tomatoes out of her sandwich. They were the culprits; she was sure the meat, cheese, and pickles would stay inside without those slimy tomatoes. She slapped the bread back together as Mrs. Murphy reached across the plate to hook a piece of roast beef.“Mrs. Murphy, that will do.” Harry used her commanding mother voice. It would work at the Pentagon. Mrs. Murphy withdrew her paw.
“Maybe we should rejoice that Little Marilyn’s made a match at last,” Susan said.
“You don’t think that Little Marilyn bagged Fitz-Gilbert Hamilton by herself, do you?”
Susan considered this.“She’s got her mother’s beauty.”
“And is cold as a wedge.”
“No, she isn’t. She’s quiet and shy.”
“Susan, you’ve liked her since we were kids and I never could stand Little Marilyn. She’s such a momma’s baby.”
“You drove your mother wild.”
“I did not.”
“Oh, yeah, how about the time you put your lace underpants over her license plate and she drove around the whole day not knowing why everyone was honking at her and laughing.”
“That.” Harry remembered. She missed her mother terribly. Grace Minor had died unexpectedly of a heart attack four years earlier, and Cliff, her husband, followed within the year. He couldn’t make a go of it without Grace and he admitted as much on his deathbed. They were not rich people by any means but they left Harry a lovely clapboard house two miles west of town at the foot of Little Yellow Mountain and they also left a small trust fund, which paid for taxes on the house and pin money. A house without a mortgage is a wonderful inheritance, and Harry and Fair were happy to move fromtheir rented house on Myrtle Street. Of course, when Harry asked Fair to leave, he complained bitterly that he had always hated living in her parents’ house.
“Fitz-Gilbert Hamilton is ugly as sin, but he’s never going to need food stamps and he’s a Richmond lawyer of much repute—at least that’s what Ned says.”
“Too much fuss over this marriage. You marry in haste and repent in leisure.”
“Don’t be sour.” Susan’s eyes shot upward.
“The happiest day of my life was when I married Pharamond Haristeen and the next happiest day of my life was when I threw him out. He’s full of shit and he’s not going to get any sympathy from me. God, Susan, he’s running all over town, the picture of the wounded male. He has dinner every night with a different couple. I heard that Mim Sanburne offered her maid to do his laundry for him. I can’t believe it.”
Susan sighed.“He seems to relish being a victim.”
“Well, I sure don’t.” Harry practically spat. “The only thing worse than being a veterinarian’s wife is being a doctor’s wife.”
“That’s not why you want to divorce him.”
“No, I guess not. I don’t want to talk about this.”
“You started it.”
“Did I?” Harry seemed surprised. “I didn’t mean to… . I’d like to forget the whole thing. We were talking about Little Marilyn Sanburne.”
“We were. Little Marilyn will be deeply hurt if Stafford doesn’t show up, and Mim will die if he does—her event-of-the-year marriage marred by the arrival of her black daughter-in-law. Life would be much simpler if Mim would overcome her plantation mentality.” Susan drummed the table again.
“Yeah, but then she’d have to join the human race. I mean, she’s emotionally impotent and wants to extend her affliction universally. If she changed her thinking she might have to feel something, you know? She might have to admit that she was wrong and that she’s wounded her children, wounded and scarred them.”
Susan sat silent for a moment, viewing the remnants of the once-huge sub.“Yeah—here, Tucker.”
“Hey, hey, what about me?” Mrs. Murphy yelled.
“Oh, here, you big baby.” Harry shoved over her plate. She was full.
Mrs. Murphy ate what was left except for the tomatoes. As a kitten, she once ate a tomato and vowed never again.
Harry strolled back to the post office, and the rest of the day ran on course. Market dropped by some knucklebones. Courtney picked up the mail while her dad talked.
After work Harry walked back home. She liked the two-mile walk in the mornings and afternoons. Good exercise for her and the cat and the dog. Once home, she washed her old Superman-blue truck, then weeded her garden. She cleaned out the refrigerator after that and before she knew it, it was time to go to bed.
She read a bit, Mrs. Murphy curled up by her side with Tucker snoring at the end of the bed. She turned out her light, as did the other residents of Crozet ensconced behind their high hedges, blinds, and shutters.
It was the end of another day, peaceful and perfect in its way. Had Harry known what tomorrow would bring, she might have savored the day even more.
2
Mrs. Murphy performed a somersault while chasing a grasshopper. She never could resist wigglies, as she called them. Tucker, uninterested in bugs, cast a keen eye for squirrels foolish enough to scamper down Railroad Avenue. The old tank watch, her father’s, on Harry’s wrist read 6:30 A.M. and the heat rose off the tracks. It was a real July Virginia day, the kind that compelled weathermen and weatherwomen on television to blare that it would be hot, humid, and hazy with no relief in sight. They then counseled the viewer to drink plenty of liquids. Cut to a commercial for, surprise, a soft drink.
Harry reflected on her childhood. At thirty-three she wasn’t that old but then again she wasn’t that young. She thought the times had become more ruthlessly commercial. Even funeral directors advertised. Their next gimmick would be a Miss Dead America contest to see who could do the best work on the departed. Something had happened to America within Harry’s life span, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, but something she could feel, sharply. There was no contest between God and the golden calf. Money was God, these days. Little pieces of green paper with dead people’s pictures on them were worshipped. People no longer killed for love. They killed for money.
How odd to be alive in a time of spiritual famine. She watched the cat and dog playing tag and wondered how her kind had ever drifted so far away from animal existence, that sheer delight in the moment.
Harry did not consider herself a philosophical woman, but lately she had turned her mind to deeper thoughts, not just to the purpose of her own life but to the purpose of human life in general. She wouldn’t even tell Susan what zigzagged through her head these days, because it was so disturbing and sad. Sometimes she thought she was mourning her lost youth and that was at the bottom of this. Maybe the upheaval of the divorce forced her inward. Or maybe it really was the times, the cheapness and crass consumerism of American life.
Mrs. George Hogendobber, at least, had values over and above her bank account, but Mrs. Hogendobber vainly clung to a belief system that had lost its power. Right-wing Christianity could compel those frightened and narrow-minded souls who needed absolute answers but it couldn’t capture those who needed a vision of the future here on earth. Heaven was all very fine but you had to die to get there. Harry wasn’t afraid to die but she wouldn’t refuse to live either. She wondered what it must have been like to live when Christianity was new, vital, and exciting—before it had been corrupted by collusion with the state. That meant she would have had to have lived before the second century A.D., and as enticing as the idea might be, she wasn’t sure she could exist without her truck. Did this mean she’d sell her soul for wheels? She knew she wouldn’t sell her soul for a buck, but machines, money, and madness were tied together somehow and Harry knew she wasn’t wise enough to untangle the Gordian knot of modern life.