The Little Friend (60 page)

“Well, goodness,” said Edie, mollified. “Thank you.”

“Listen, that’s the most dangerous intersection in the county! I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. It’s a shame, but somebody’s going to have to get killed out there before the Board of Supervisors sits up and takes notice.
Killed.
”

It was with surprise that Edie found herself softening to Mr. Dial’s manner—which was most agreeable, particularly as he seemed convinced that the accident could in no way have been her fault. And when he gestured out to the new Cadillac parked at the curb (“just a courtesy … thought you might need a loaner for a couple of days …”) she was not nearly so hostile at the sly liberty as she would have been even a few minutes before, and walked out with him, obligingly, as he went over all the features: leather seats, tape deck, power steering (“This beauty’s just been on the lot for two days, and I have to say that the minute I saw it, I thought: now
here
is the perfect car for Miss Edith!”). To watch his demonstrations of the automatic windows and so forth was oddly satisfying, considering that only a short while ago some folks had been so presumptuous as to suggest that Edie should not drive at all.

On he talked. Edie’s pain pill was wearing off. She tried to cut him short but Mr. Dial—pressing his advantage (for he knew, from the tow-truck driver, that the Oldsmobile was bound for the junk-yard)—began to throw out incentives: five hundred dollars knocked off the list price—and why? Palms spread: “Not out of the goodness of my heart. No maam, Miss Edith. I’ll tell you why. Because I’m a good businessman, and because Dial Chevrolet wants your business.” In the rich summer light, as he stood explaining why he would also extend the extended warranty, Edie—with a stab of pain in her breastbone—had a sharp ugly nightmare-flash of impending old age. Aching joints, blurry eyes, constant aspirin after-taste in the back of the throat. Peeling paint, leaky roofs, taps that dripped and cats that peed on the carpet and lawns that never got mowed. And time: time enough to stand in the yard
for hours listening to any con artist or shyster or “helpful” stranger who drifted down the pike. How often had she driven out to Tribulation to find her father the Judge chatting in the driveway with some salesman or unscrupulous contractor, some grinning gypsy tree pruner who would later claim that the quote was per
limb
, not per tree; companionable Judases in Florsheim shoes offering him girlie magazines and nips of whiskey, with all kinds of ground-floor opportunities and incredible overrides in between; mineral rights, protected territories, enough no-risk investments and Chances of a Lifetime to finally relieve the poor old fellow of all he owned, including his birthplace.…

With an increasingly black and hopeless feeling, Edie listened. What was the use of fighting? She—like her father—was a stoic old pagan; though she attended church as a civic and social duty, she did not actually believe a word of what was said there. Everywhere were green graveyard smells: mown grass, lilies and turned dirt; pain pierced her ribs every time she took a breath and she could not stop thinking of the onyx and diamond brooch inherited from her mother: which she’d packed, like a stupid old woman, in an unlocked suitcase which now lay in the unlocked trunk of a wrecked car, across town.
All my life
, she thought,
I have been robbed. Everything I ever loved has been taken from me
.

And somehow Mr. Dial’s companionable presence was a strange comfort: his flushed face, the ripe smell of his aftershave and his whinnying, porpoise laugh. His fussy manner—at odds with the solid ripeness of his chest beneath the starched shirt—was queerly reassuring.
I always did think he was a nice
looking
man
, thought Edie. Roy Dial had his faults but at least he wasn’t so impertinent as to suggest that Edie wasn’t competent to drive.… “I
will
drive,” she had thundered at the pipsqueak eye doctor, only a week earlier, “I don’t care if I kill everybody in Mississippi.…” And while she stood listening to Mr. Dial talk about the car, laying his plump finger on her arm (just one more thing to tell her, and one more after that, and then, by the time she was thoroughly tired of him, asking:
What would I have to say to make you my customer? This instant? Tell me what I have to say in order to
get your business.…
); while Edie, strangely powerless for once to disengage herself, stood and listened to his pitch, Libby, after becoming sick in a basin, lay down on her bed with a cool cloth on her forehead and slipped into a coma from which she was never to awake.

————

A stroke. That was what it was. When she’d suffered the first one, no one knew. Any other day, Odean would have been there—but Odean had the week off, because of the trip. When Libby finally answered the door—it had taken her a while, so long that Allison thought that maybe she was asleep—she wasn’t wearing her glasses, and her eyes were a little blurry. She looked at Allison as if she was expecting someone else.

“Are you all right?” Allison asked. She’d heard all about the wreck.

“Oh, yes,” said Libby, distractedly.

She let Allison in, and then wandered away into the back of the house like she was looking for something she’d misplaced. She seemed fine except for a splotchy bruise on her cheekbone, the color of grape jelly spread thin, and her hair not as tidy as she usually liked it.

Allison said, glancing around: “Can’t you find your newspaper?” The house was spanking clean: floors freshly mopped, everything dusted and even the sofa cushions plumped and properly placed; somehow the very tidiness of the house had kept Allison from realizing that anything might be wrong. Sickness, in her own house, had to do with disorder: with grimy curtains and gritty bedsheets; drawers left open and crumbs on the table.

After a brief search, Allison found the newspaper—folded to the crossword, with her glasses sitting on top of it—on the floor by Libby’s chair, and carried them in to the kitchen, where Libby sat at the table, smoothing the tablecloth with one hand in a tight, repetitive circle.

“Here’s your puzzle,” said Allison. The kitchen was uncomfortably bright. Despite the sun pouring through the curtains, the overhead lights were on for some reason, as if it
were a dark winter afternoon and not the middle of summer. “Do you want me to get you a pencil?”

“No, I can’t work that foolish thing,” Libby said fretfully, pushing the paper aside, “the letters keep sliding off the page.… What I need to do is go ahead and get started on my beets.”

“Beets?”

“Unless I start now they won’t be ready in time. The little bride’s coming into town on the Number 4.…”

“What bride?” said Allison, after a slight pause. She’d never heard of the Number 4, whatever that was. Everything was bright and unreal. Ida Rhew had left only an hour before—just like any other Friday except that she wasn’t coming back on Monday or ever again. And she’d taken nothing but the red plastic glass she drank out of: in the hallway, on the way out, she had refused the carefully wrapped cuttings and the box of presents, which she said was too heavy to carry. “I aint need all of that!” she said, cheerily, turning to look Allison straight in the eye; and her tone was that of someone offered a button or a piece of licked candy by a toddler. “What you think I need all that nonsense for?”

Allison—stunned—fought not to cry. “Ida, I love you,” she said.

“Well,” said Ida, thoughtfully, “I love you too.”

It was terrible; it was too terrible to be happening. And yet there they stood by the front door. A sharp lump of grief rose in Allison’s throat to see how meticulously Ida folded the green check lying face up on the hall table—
twenty dollars and no/100s
—making sure that both edges were lined up and perfectly even before she creased it with a zip of thumb and forefinger. Then she unsnapped her little black purse and put it in.

“I can’t live any more on twenty dollars a week,” she said. Her voice was quiet and natural, yet all wrong at the same time. How could they possibly be standing in the hall like this, how could this moment be real? “I love yalls, but that’s the way it is. I’m getting old.” She touched Allison’s cheek. “Yall be good, now. Tell Little Ug I love her.” Ug—for Ugly—was
what Ida called Harriet when she misbehaved. Then the door closed, and she was gone.

“I expect,” said Libby—and Allison, with slight alarm, noticed that Libby was looking around the kitchen floor in a jerky way, as if she saw a moth fluttering by her feet—“she won’t be able to find them when she gets there.”

“Excuse me?” said Allison.

“
Beets. Pickled beets. Oh
I wish somebody would help me,” said Libby, with a plaintive, half-comic roll of her eyes.

“Do you need me to do something for you?”

“Where’s Edith?” said Libby, and her voice was strangely clipped, and crisp. “
She’ll
do something for me.”

Allison sat down at the kitchen table, and tried to get her attention. “Do you have to make the beets
today?
” she said. “Lib?”

“All I know is what they told me.”

Allison nodded, and sat for a moment in the too-bright kitchen wondering how to proceed. Sometimes Libby came home from Missionary Society, or Circle, with strange and very specific demands: for green stamps, or old glasses frames, or Campbell’s soup labels (which the Baptist home in Honduras redeemed for cash); for Popsicle sticks or old Lux detergent bottles (for crafts at the Church Bazaar).

“Tell me who to call,” she said at last. “I’ll call and tell them that you were in an accident this morning. Somebody else can bring the beets.”

Abruptly, Libby said: “
Edith’ll
do something for me.” She stood and walked back into the next room.

“Do you want me to call her?” said Allison, peering after her. “Libby?” She had never heard Libby speak quite so brusquely.

“Edith will straighten it all out,” said Libby, in a weak, peevish voice that was quite unlike herself.

And Allison went to the telephone. But she was still reeling from Ida’s departure and what she had not been able to put into words to Edie was how altered Libby seemed, how confused, how strangely collapsed in her expression. The shame-faced way she kept picking at the side of her dress. Allison, stretching the cord as far as it would go, craned to
look in the next room as she spoke, stammering in her consternation. The white, wispy edges of Libby’s hair had seemed to burn red—hair so thin that Allison could see Libby’s rather large ears through it.

Edie interrupted Allison before she was finished talking. “You run home and let Libby rest,” she said.

“Wait,” said Allison, and then called into the next room, “Libby? Here’s Edie. Will you come and talk to her?”

“What’s that?” Edie was saying. “Hello?”

Sunlight pooled on the dining room table, puddles of bright sentimental gold; watery coins of light—reflected from the chandelier—shimmered on the ceiling. The whole place had seemed dazzling, lit up like a ballroom. At her edges Libby glowed hot-red, like an ember; and the afternoon sun which poured around her in a corona carried in its shadow a darkness that felt like something burning.

“She—I’m worried about her,” Allison said despairingly. “
Please
come over. I can’t figure out what she’s talking about.”

“Listen, I’ve got to go,” said Edie. “I’ve got company at the door, and I’m not dressed.”

And then she had hung up. Allison stood by the telephone a moment longer, trying to gather her thoughts, and then hurried into the next room to see about Libby, who turned to her with a staring, fixed expression.

“We had a pair of ponies,” she said. “Little bays.”

“I’m going to call the doctor.”

“You will
not,
” said Libby—so firmly that Allison buckled immediately to her adult tone of authority. “You will do no such thing.”

“You’re sick.” Allison started to cry.

“No, I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s just that they ought to have come and
got
me by now,” said Libby. “Where are they? It’s getting on in the afternoon.” And she put her hand in Allison’s—her little dry, papery hand—and looked at her as if she were expecting to be taken somewhere.

————

The odor of lily and tuberose, overpowering in the hot funeral parlor, made Harriet’s stomach flutter queasily whenever
the fan revolved and blew a draft of it in her direction. In her best Sunday dress—the white dress with daisies—she sat dim-eyed on a scroll-backed settee. The carvings poked her between the shoulderbones; her dress was too tight in the bodice—which only increased the tightness in her chest and the suffocating stuffiness of the air, the sensation of breathing an outer-space atmosphere not oxygen, but some empty gas. She had eaten no supper or breakfast; for much of the night, she had lain awake with her face pressed in the pillow and cried; and when—head throbbing—she opened her eyes late the next morning to her own bedroom, she lay quietly for several lightheaded moments, marveling at the familiar objects (the curtains, the leaf-reflections in the dresser mirror, even the same pile of overdue library books on the floor). Everything was as she had left it, the day she went away to camp—and then it fell on her like a heavy stone that Ida was gone, and Libby was dead, and everything was terrible and wrong.

Edie—dressed in black, with a high collar of pearls; how commanding she looked, by the pedestal with the guest book!—stood by the door. She was saying the exact same thing to every person who came into the room. “The casket’s in the back room,” she said, by way of greeting, to a red-faced man in musty brown who clasped her hand; and then—over his shoulder, to skinny Mrs. Fawcett, who had tipped up decorously behind to wait her turn—“The casket’s in the back room. The body’s not on view, I’m afraid, but it wasn’t my decision.”

For a moment Mrs. Fawcett looked confused; then she, too, took Edie’s hand. She looked like she was about to cry. “I was
so
sorry to hear,” she said. “We all loved Miss Cleve down at the library. It was the saddest thing this morning when I came in and saw the books I’d put aside for her.”