Family Linen (23 page)

All the times she'd ever been here were impossible, all the chances she'd taken, the guilt she'd felt. The first four or five times, Myrtle had been quite sure she'd left her iron on, back in Argonne Hills, and that her whole house would be a blackened smoking pile of rubble when she returned. And yet she'd stayed, and yet it wasn't . . .
ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are gone
. This memory made Myrtle smile, but it all seemed so long ago. Well, she had no more business here. She knew it then as surely as she had known she'd marry Don, after their first date. Whatever it was, it was over. What had gotten into her? What was she doing, standing here in an empty house? Myrtle felt so thankful to have missed him that she blessed her lucky stars all the way home, and drove carefully, waving at Clinus when she passed the One Stop. His billboard said
REST IN PEACE.

That's why it was so shocking for Gary Vance to show up this morning at Mother's. Did he know she'd gone out to his house yesterday? Had she left anything there, so he could tell? At least he'd had the sense to wear his pest-control suit. Does he want her back, or does he simply want to let her know he's
here
, if she wants him . . . maybe he just plans to show up forever, year after year, wherever she is. Then Myrtle decides, looking around her mother's parlor, that if she
does
need an exterminator, she'll just get Orkin to come over from Buncoe. A licensed firm is always best, and the sky's the limit, as Don says. But she can't imagine her big glass coffee table in this room.

“Myrtle, can you come here a minute?” It's Lacy in the door, looking harassed, and so Myrtle gets up and follows her sister into the dining room where Candy and Sybill are arguing over a pink glass pitcher.

“It's Depression glass,” Sybill says. “It's worth a lot. A lot more than this whole dessert set, for instance, which is relatively new.”

“You just want that dessert set,” Candy says.

Wait a minute! “Actually, I think I ought to get the dessert set anyway,” Myrtle says, “since Don and I gave it to Mother in the first place. We gave it to her for Christmas 1976.”

“I didn't think we were going to do it that way.” Sybill's tone is very aggrieved. “If that's the case, then I ought to get that blouse which you gave to Elva Pope, to remember Mother by.”

“It wouldn't fit you,” Candy says.

“That's beside the point,” says Sybill firmly.

“Do you really
want
the dessert set?” Candy asks Myrtle.

The truth is, Myrtle doesn't know. She just doesn't know. What she really wants is a cigarette, but they're in the kitchen.

Lacy runs her hands through her hair. “Let's go call Clinus,” she suggests, “and ask him about Depression glass and occupied Japan.”

“You can take my word for it,” Sybill says firmly, to nobody, as Candy and Lacy and Myrtle head for the kitchen. Her words hang in the air like cartoon words. Sybill puts a sticker on the dessert set and follows them into the kitchen where Arthur sits at the round table drinking and dreaming of his own blond Alta who often merges in his mind these days with Mrs. Palucci, and then Lacy is dialing, and the phone rings and rings at the One Stop where Clinus can't hear it, over the barking of his dog, and Nettie doesn't even bother to answer, she's so busy helping Clinus to look for Fay, who has, of all things, disappeared!

* * *

But she's not far. Fay in fact is finally ready for that trip. Except she thinks they might try to stop her, Nettie and Clinus, if they find out, so she's hiding, sort of, or as much as she can, she's so big, stretched out in the back seat of Clinus's car,
ha ha! It's all over now, it's time to shake the dust off your feet honey and hit the road. But Lord it's hot you can't breathe in a closed-up car honey a Pekingese would die on the spot who is also a dog, the one in the schoolbook, but Bert had better shut up barking like that, he's a bad, bad dog. Shut up, Bert. It's so bright out here but we'll buy you some sunglasses honey, you'll need them in all that sand. The beach itself is a mile wide in places, imagine that. Imagine the beach it will take us three days to get there nobody else will go except you and me honey this is our secret honey oh honey we'll go in the car. We will go in the car, Lacy who looks like Princess Di says won't you come in the car Fay to see them, all those flowers on the hillside, and all that blue. Princess Di honey I've been there. I've been there too, and laid among them, and looked straight up over his back at the old blue sky. The wacky way I met my mate was he took me for little spin or a little walk or perhaps it was in a bowling alley, I forget, I forget. Luke and Laura spent an unforgettable night in Wyndham's Department Store. All my children live in Pine Valley including Greg and Jenny the starcrossed lovers destined to spend their lives apart, you have to walk it for yourself. Opal has never loved anybody else but Sam the electrician and never will, she's leaving for NBC now, bye bye. You have to have that spark and then you have to fan the flames. We will all see greener pastures in the sweet bye and bye, which Elizabeth wouldn't let him sing at home, but he could have gone places with so much talent. You never know. Why Alan Ladd was a potato digger before he made it big, Clark Gable was a necktie salesman. I'll sing and you can swim in the water and get some sun. Natalie Wood sank like a stone in her big heavy jacket, death by drowning said Dr. Thomas Noguchi about his investigation as detailed in his new book
Coroner.
Had Christopher Walken and Robert Wagner quarreled, aboard their yacht? Imagine the weight of the water, imagine the manner of death. He meant to go without me, I saw him trying to leave. He tried to sneak out in the storm in the night with Elizabeth sound asleep. He thought we were all asleep. He meant to take that journey by himself, he meant to leave me, and after all he'd said. Some men are just so mean. He said honey oh honey oh honey you'll like it there. But then he meant to leave me in the end. The investigation will continue as detailed by Dr. Don Dotson. Nettie says they will dig up Elizabeth's yard they will put in a pool, everybody who's anybody in L.A. has a pool, you know. Ha ha! I see what he's up to, I read the stars. The investigation will continue as detailed by Dr. Don Dotson and they will find the body in the water death by drowning, and all the dogs will bark. You have to take that lonesome journey by yourself. It's a long hot trip honey but at least we'll get to see the ocean
.

* * *

“
We can't find her
.” It's Nettie, like a little black crow at Miss Elizabeth's kitchen door.

“Find who?” Lacy almost shouts in order to be heard over the sudden roar of the bulldozer, but then Nettie comes on in, followed by Kate, and shuts the door behind her.

“Fay.” Nettie sits down at the kitchen table and starts fanning herself with a newspaper. “She's not over here, is she?” Nettie looks around at all of them. Kate and Theresa look around too, eyes big, holding their tongues.

“Why, you know she hasn't gone anywhere for years and years,” says Candy.

“Well, sometimes she'll take a little walk or something, and that's just what she done this time, I reckon, but me and Clinus can't find her no way.”

“I didn't know she ever took a walk,” Sybill says, and Nettie snaps, “Well, I guess you don't know everything.”

“Did you all look in the closet?” Arthur asks.

This question makes Kate and Theresa, hovering, like butterflies at the edge of the crisis, start giggling. “You all hush,” Myrtle says, rifling frantically through the kitchen drawers for a match, since her butane lighter seems to have disappeared.

“Well, we might as well start in on the kitchen stuff, since we're all in here,” Sybill says, climbing up on a chair so she can reach the blue china clock.

“How long's she been gone?” Arthur asks Nettie.

“Don't know. That's the thing of it. Last I seen of her was last night, actually, she was watching the
Tonight
show. But the TV was on this morning too,
Good Morning America
. So it could of been real late last night, or it could of been this morning. I'll be damned if I know,” Nettie says. Nettie's face is hard and brown as wood, in fact that's what she looks like, a little carved statue, folk art, thrown in among real people. She's different from them. And now she sits and looks beyond them, drumming her fingers softly on the tabletop. Her eyes narrow as she sucks in smoke—what in the world does she see? Nettie looks like one of those smoking monkeys you buy at souvenir stands in Georgia.

“I'll try Clinus again,” Candy says, and dials, and lets it ring.

Sybill turns the blue china clock over and over in her hands, and then runs her finger around the smiling sun in its center, and something comes up in her throat, and she starts to cry.

“Nettie, can I have a match?” Myrtle asks, and Nettie gives her one, and then Myrtle can light her cigarette too and look at the scrap of paper in her hand, an old list of her mother's she found in the drawer.

“Well, you know she couldn't have gone
far
.” Arthur is laughing.

Nettie stands up and moves to the kitchen window.

It's a grocery list Myrtle has found. It reads:
milk, oranges, eggs, bacon, bread, paper napkins, candles, prescription (Rexall), Metamucil, Ivory soap
, all in Miss Elizabeth's elegant, spidery hand. Myrtle is profoundly moved. It could be
her
list—why, she's made this list a hundred times! Myrtle sees her mother clearly, sitting at the little kitchen desk to write this list, writing with her fountain pen and her head inclined to the side, and then Myrtle sees herself, making her own list, with a Pentel. Making a list every day, hundreds of lists, hundreds of days. Myrtle feels like she's making some kind of a breakthrough, but she can't tell what it is. She has got, as she will tell Don later,
mixed emotions
.

Candy pats Sybill, who holds the clock and cries for her mother.

“Jesus!” Kate says.

“This is all so ironic,” says Theresa.

“Did you call Ed Dark?” asks Arthur. Ed Dark is a state trooper they all went to high school with. “Clinus said she'd been talking about a trip,” Arthur says. “You don't reckon she could of gotten down here to the bus station somehow, and gone off on a bus someplace?”

“Arthur, don't be silly,” Candy says. “Besides, wherever would she go?”

“Well, she gets these crazy ideas,” Arthur says, “like all those prayer handkerchiefs that come in the mail from California. You can't tell what she's got in her mind. One time she sent off to buy a square foot of swamp in the Okefenokee, she showed me the deed.”

“Sometimes Clinus knows things,” says Candy, “but he won't say,” and Arthur, looking at her, wonders if Candy knows she's a love child and guesses not.
He's
not going to tell her, that's for sure.

“Clinus don't know a thing about this,” Nettie says. “Clinus is worried to death.”

Then Sybill says suddenly, “Nobody ever loved me,” and Candy hugs her, and says that's silly, and Myrtle says it's silly too. Myrtle hugs Sybill too.

But Nettie stares beyond them out the window, where Dr. Don and Sean stand together watching the bulldozer dig the pool. All that earth looks startlingly red and raw, against the green. Nettie bites her lip. It don't seem like none of the rest of them is even noticing.

Except for Sean.

He's right there beside his daddy when the bulldozer hits the body or what's left of it, where the old well used to be, he's right there when the big bulldozer operator gets down off the yellow bulldozer and waves frantically at Dr. Don to come over there. Sean has been trying to show his father the gun, and see if he'll let him keep it. “Not now, son,” Dr. Don keeps saying, or trying to say, above the roar of the bulldozer, all of which pisses Sean off, the way his father calls him “son” instead of his own name which is bad enough, and the fact that his father won't pay any attention to what he says, which is just typical. Then when the fat guy climbs down off the dozer and leaves it running and waves his arms, Dr. Don takes off at a dead run to see what the old guy wants, like it's something important, more important than his own son.

Idly, so idly that in memory it will always seem like a dream, Sean raises his great-grandfather's silver revolver and points it straight out in front of him. He isn't thinking of anything at all, his mind as clean as a whistle. His father bobs up and down, running across the field, while Sean holds the point of the revolver steady. Dad used to be a jock, he still thinks he's real hot shit. His dad's back goes up and down, up and down as he runs across the dry red clumps of dirt. He's still in real good shape. Sean holds his arm out steadily for a long time, until his arm hurts, and then he pulls the trigger. Bam! It's a huge explosion, a huge satisfying puff of white smoke exactly like you see on TV, and the noise is so loud it seems to ricochet back and forth inside Sean's head like the 4th of July.
Well, that's that
. Sean will remember thinking this, and finding himself flat on the ground with no memory of falling. Smoke hangs all around him. It hurts his nose. He waits for it to clear, to see what has happened.

The first thing he sees is his father, Dr. Don, now running as fast as he can in the
other
direction, back toward him, Sean, and screaming, “Son, are you all right?” Sean says yes, but no sound comes, and then he notices his right hand, which is bleeding. Dr. Don reaches him and kneels and hugs him, hard. “Never fool around with an old gun like that, son,” he says. But Sean doesn't even care. He's
crying
, and so is his dad. Whatever else Sean will have to do in this life, he won't have to kill his father, having done it. He can relax some now, and grow another fourteen inches, and take up tennis and girls. His head is pressed into his father's stiff white shirt. Out the corner of one eye he sees the kitchen door and then the cold-pantry door burst open like doors in one of those fancy little Swiss clocks where the people come pouring out right at noon, and Nettie swoops like a bird across the red earth toward him, followed by his mother, screaming, and Candy and Lacy and Kate . . .