The Little Friend (59 page)

But Edie’s attention seemed elsewhere. On they rolled. The road was wide and empty: no cars, cloudless sky, margins of rusty red dust that converged to a pinpoint at the horizon. Suddenly, Edie cleared her throat—a loud awkward AHEM.

Harriet—startled—glanced away from the window and at Edie, who said: “I’m sorry, little girl.”

For a moment, Harriet didn’t breathe. Everything was frozen: the shadows, her heart, the red hands of the dashboard clock. “What’s the matter?” she said.

But Edie didn’t look away from the road. Her face was like stone.

The air conditioner was up too high. Harriet hugged her bare arms.
Mother’s dead
, she thought.
Or Allison. Or Dad
. And in the same breath, she knew in her heart that she could handle any of those things. Aloud, she said: “What happened?”

“It’s Libby.”

————

In the hubbub following the accident, no one had stopped to consider that anything might be seriously wrong with any of the old ladies. Apart from a few cuts and bruises—and Edie’s bloody nose, which looked worse than it was—everyone was more shaken up than hurt. And the paramedics had checked them out with irritating thoroughness before permitting them to leave. “Not a scratch on this one,” said the smart-aleck ambulance attendant who had assisted Libby—all white hair, and pearls, and powder-pink dress—from the crumpled car.

Libby had seemed stunned. The worst of the collision had been on her side; but though she kept pressing the base of her neck with her fingertips—gingerly, as if to locate a pulse—she
fluttered her hand and said, “Oh, don’t worry about
me!
” when, against the protest of the paramedics, Edie climbed out of the back of the ambulance to see about her sisters.

Everybody had a stiff neck. Edie’s neck felt as though it had been cracked like a bullwhip. Adelaide, pacing in a circle by the Oldsmobile, kept pinching her ears to see if she still had both earrings and exclaiming: “It’s a wonder we’re not dead! Edith, it’s a wonder you didn’t kill us all!”

But after everyone was checked for concussions, and broken bones (why, thought Edie,
why
hadn’t she insisted that those idiots take Libby’s blood pressure? She was a trained nurse; she knew about such things), in the end, the only one the paramedics wanted to carry to the hospital was Edie: which was infuriating, because Edie wasn’t hurt—nothing broken, no internal injuries and she knew it. She had permitted herself to be caught up in argument. Nothing was the matter with her but her ribs, which she had cracked on the steering wheel, and from her days as an army nurse Edie knew there was nothing in the world to do for cracked ribs except to tape them up and send the soldier on his way.

“But you’ve got a cracked rib, maam,” said the other paramedic—not the smart-aleck, but the one who had a great big head like a pumpkin.

“Yes, I’m aware of that!” Edie had practically screamed at him.

“But maam …” Intrusive hands stretching towards her. “You’d better let us take you to the hospital, maam.…”

“Why? All they’ll do is tape me up and charge me a hundred dollars! For a hundred dollars I can tape up my own ribs!”

“An emergency room visit is going to run you a whole lot more than a hundred dollars,” said the smart-aleck, leaning on the hood of Edie’s poor smashed car (the car! the car! her heart sank every time she looked at it). “The X-rays alone will run you seventy-five.”

By this time, a slight crowd had gathered: busybodies from the branch bank, mostly, giggling little gum-chewing girls with teased hair and brown lipstick. Tat—who signalled to the police car to stop by shaking her yellow pocketbook at
it—climbed into the back seat of the wrecked Oldsmobile (even though the horn was blaring) and sat there with Libby for most of the business with the policemen and the other driver, which had taken forever. He was a spry and irritating little old know-it-all man named Lyle Pettit Rixey: very thin, with long, pointy shoes, and a hooked nose like a Jack-in-the-box, and a delicate way of lifting his knees high in the air when he walked. He seemed very proud of the fact that he was from Attala County; also of his name, which he took pleasure at repeating in full. He kept pointing at Edie with a querulous bony finger and saying: “that
woman
there.” He made it sound as if Edie was drunk or an alcoholic. “That
woman
run right out in front of me. That
woman
got no business driving an automobile.” Edie turned, loftily, and stood with her back to him as she answered the officer’s questions.

The accident was her fault; she had refused to yield; and the best that she could do was accept the blame with dignity. Her glasses were broken, and from where she stood, in the shimmering heat (“that
woman
sure picked herself a hot day to dart out in front of me,” complained Mr. Rixey to the ambulance attendants), Libby and Tat were little more than pink and yellow blurs in the backseat of the wrecked Oldsmobile. Edie blotted her forehead with a damp tissue. At Tribulation every Christmas, there had been dresses in four different colors laid out under the tree—pink for Libby, blue for Edie, yellow for Tat and lavender for baby Adelaide. Colored penwipers, colored ribbons and letter paper … blond china dolls identical but for their dresses, each a different pastel.…

“Did you,” said the policeman, “or did you not execute a U-turn?”

“I did
not
. I turned around right here in the parking lot.” From the highway, a car mirror flashed distractingly in the corner of Edie’s vision, and at the same time an inexplicable memory from childhood leapt up in her mind: Tatty’s old tin doll—dressed in draggled yellow—lying windmill-legged in the dust of Tribulation’s kitchen yard, beneath the fig trees where the chickens sometimes escaped to scratch. Edie herself had never played with dolls—never been the slightest bit
interested in them—but she could see the tin doll now with a curious clarity: her body brown cloth, her nose glinting a macabre metallic silver where the paint had rubbed away. How many years had Tatty dragged that battered thing with its metal death’s head around the yard; how many years since Edie had thought of that eerie little face with the nose missing?

The policeman interrogated Edie for half an hour. With his droning voice, and his mirror sunglasses, it was slightly like being interrogated by The Fly in the Vincent Price horror movie of the same name. Edie, shading her eyes with her hand, tried to keep her mind on his questions but her eyes kept straying to the cars flashing past on the bright highway and all she could think of was Tatty’s ghastly old doll with the silver nose. What on earth had the thing been called? For the life of her, Edie couldn’t remember. Tatty hadn’t talked plain until she went to school; all Tat’s dolls had had ridiculous-sounding names, names she made up out of her head, names like Gryce and Lillium and Artemo.…

The little girls from the branch bank got bored and—inspecting their nails, twirling their hair around their fingertips—drifted back inside. Adelaide—whom Edie blamed, bitterly, for the whole business (she and her Sanka!)—appeared very put out, and stood a cool distance from the scene as if she weren’t a part of it, talking to a nosy choir friend, Mrs. Cartrett, who had pulled over to see what was going on. At some point she’d hopped in the car with Mrs. Cartrett and driven off without even telling Edie. “We’re driving to McDonald’s to get a sausage and biscuit,” she’d called out to Tat and poor Libby. McDonald’s! And—to top it all off—when the insect-faced policeman finally gave Edie permission to leave, her poor old car had of course refused to start, and she had been forced to square her shoulders and walk back into the horrible chilly branch bank, back in front of all the saucy little tellers, to ask if she could use the telephone. And all the while, Libby and Tat had sat, uncomplainingly, in the back of the Oldsmobile, in the frightful heat.

Their cab hadn’t taken long to come. From where she stood, at the manager’s desk in the front, talking on the
phone to the man from the garage, Edie watched the two of them walking to the taxi through the plate-glass window: arm in arm, picking their way across the gravel in their Sunday shoes. She rapped on the glass; Tat, in the glare, turned halfway and raised an arm and all of a sudden the name of Tatty’s old doll came to Edie so suddenly that she laughed out loud. “What?” said the garage man; the manager—wall-eyed behind thick glasses—glanced up at Edie as if she were crazy but she didn’t care.
Lycobus
. Of course. That was the tin doll’s name. Lycobus, who was naughty, and sassed her mother; Lycobus, who invited Adelaide’s dolls to a tea party, and served them only water and radishes.

When the tow truck finally came, Edie accepted a ride home from the driver. It was the first time she’d been in a truck since World War II; the cab was high, and climbing up inside it with her cracked ribs had not been fun: but, as the Judge had been so fond of reminding his daughters, Beggars Can’t Be Choosers.

By the time she got home, it was nearly one o’clock. Edie hung up her clothes (not until she was undressing did she remember that the suitcases were still in the trunk of the Oldsmobile) and took a cool bath; sitting on the side of her bed, in her brassiere and panty-waist, she sucked in her breath and taped up her ribs as best as she could. Then she had a glass of water, and an Empirin with codeine left over from some dental work, and put on a kimono and lay down on the bed.

Much later, she’d been awakened by a telephone call. For a moment, she thought the thin little voice on the other end was the children’s mother. “Charlotte?” she barked; and then, when there was no answer: “Who is calling, please?”

“This is Allison. I’m over at Libby’s. She … she seems upset.”

“I don’t blame her,” said Edie; the pain of sitting up suddenly had caught her unawares, and she took her breath in sharply. “Now’s not the time for her to entertain company. You ought not be over there bothering her, Allison.”

“She doesn’t
seem
tired. She—she says she has to pickle some beets.”

“Pickling beets!” Edie snorted. “I’d be
mighty
upset if I had to pickle beets this afternoon.”

“But she says—”

“You run home and let Libby rest,” said Edie. She was a little groggy from her pain pill; and, for fear of being questioned about the accident (the policeman had suggested her eyes might be at fault; there had been talk of a test, a revoked license) she was anxious to cut the conversation short.

In the background, a fretful murmur.

“What’s that?”

“She’s worried. She asked me to call you. Edie, I don’t know what to do,
please
come over and see—”

“What on earth for?” said Edie. “Put her on.”

“She’s in the next room.” Talk, indistinguishable; then Allison’s voice returned. “She says she has to go to town, and she doesn’t know where her shoes and stockings are.”

“Tell her not to worry. The suitcases are in the trunk of the car. Has she had her nap?”

More mumbled talk, enough to test Edie’s patience.

“Hello?” she said loudly.

“She says she’s fine, Edie, but—”

(Libby always said she was fine. When Libby had scarlet fever, she said she was fine.)

“—but she won’t sit down,” said Allison; her voice seemed far away, as if she hadn’t brought the receiver properly to her mouth again. “She’s standing in the living room.…”

Though Allison continued to speak, and Edie continued to listen, the sentence had ended and another begun before Edie realized—all of a sudden—that she hadn’t understood a word.

“I’m sorry,” she said, curtly, “you’ll have to speak up,” and before she could scold Allison for mumbling there was a sudden ruckus at the front door:
tap tap tap tap tap
, a series of brisk little knocks. Edie re-wrapped her kimono, tied the sash tight and peered down the hall. There stood Roy Dial, grinning like an opossum with his little gray saw-teeth. He tipped her a sprightly wave.

Quickly, Edie ducked her head back into the bedroom.
The vulture
, she thought.
I’d like to shoot him
. He looked as pleased as punch. Allison was saying something else.

“Listen, I’ve got to let you go,” she said, briskly. “I’ve got company on the porch and I’m not dressed.”

“She says she has to meet a bride at the train station,” said Allison, distinctly.

After a moment, Edie—who did not like to admit she was hard of hearing, and who was used to galloping straight over conversational non sequiturs—took a deep breath (so that her ribs hurt) and said: “Tell Lib I said lie down. If she wants me to, I’ll walk over and take her blood pressure and give her a tranquilizer as soon as—”

Tap tap tap tap tap!

“As soon as I get rid of him,” she said; and then said goodbye.

She threw a shawl over her shoulders, stepped into her slippers and ventured into the hall. Through the leaded glass panel of the door, Mr. Dial—mouth open, in an exaggerated pantomime of delight—held up what looked like a fruit basket, wrapped in yellow cellophane. When he saw that she was in her robe, he gave a gesture of dismayed apology (eyebrows going up in the middle, in an inverted V) and—with extravagant lip movement, pointed at the basket and mouthed:
sorry to bother you! just a little something! I’ll leave it right here …

After a moment’s indecision, Edie called—on a cheery, changed note—“Wait a minute! Be right out!” Then—her smile souring as soon as she turned her back—she hurried to her room, closed the door and plucked a housedress from her closet.

Zip up the back;
dab, dab
, rouge on both cheeks, puff of powder on the nose; she ran a brush through her hair—wincing at the pain in her raised arm—and gave herself a quick glance in the mirror before she opened the door and went down the hall to meet him.

“Well, I declare,” she said, stiffly, when Mr. Dial presented her with the basket.

“I hope I didn’t disturb you,” said Mr. Dial, turning his head, cozily, to look at her from the opposite eye. “Dorothy ran into Susie Cartrett at the grocery store and she told her all about the accident.… I’ve been saying for
years
”—he laid a hand on her arm, for emphasis—“that they needed a stop
light at that intersection. Years! I phoned out at the hospital but they said you hadn’t been admitted, thank goodness.” A hand to his chest, he rolled his eyes Heavenward in gratitude.