Women & Other Animals (28 page)

"We worry about you," said Andrea. "Daughters worry about their mothers."

"If you were worried about me, you'd have helped put up those four hundred bales of second cutting. There's half a load dumped on the barn floor, and another hundred and twenty bales sitting on the wagon."

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"Maybe I can help when I come next Sunday," said Andrea.

"Oh, never mind. You'd just break those pink fingernails. Besides, you've got no muscle. I don't understand how you two got to be such weaklings." She pushed the bowl of stuffing toward the girls. Their father, Mr. DeBoer, with all his faults, hadn't been a weakling.

"Can we do without the criticism?" asked Elizabeth. "Can we just eat and get this charade over with?" Elizabeth had been Mr. DeBoer's favorite, always prettier than Andrea, and though younger, she was more clever and opinionated. At age thirteen, Elizabeth had insisted that Daddy was right, that they should sell the farm.

Charlotte had been furious at the girl's nerve and slapped her full in the face. Twentyone years had passed, but Charlotte knew Elizabeth hadn't forgiven her.

Charlotte still felt the chill of the fourteenyearold face glaring at her during Mr. DeBoer's funeral, as if Charlotte had caused the heart attack which sent Mr. DeBoer's tractor into a tree.

"Liz, come on. You said you'd try to get along," pleaded Andrea.

"And what do you think about your sister driving that new car," said Charlotte, looking at Andrea but pointing at Elizabeth with her fork. "What do you think that cost her?"

"You'd probably prefer I drove a farm tractor to the Cook County Courthouse," Elizabeth said. "You are hopelessly rural, Mother. It's amazing you even have indoor plumbing. I couldn't live like this again."

"Nothing wrong with the way I live," said Charlotte.

Andrea broke in. "Mom grew these vegetables in the garden, Liz. They're organic."

"That just means she grew them in cow shit. And I'll bet a week's salary she chopped off this chicken's head herself."

"Well, they don't chop their own heads off. At least I know where my food comes from. You buy food all wrapped in plastic, you don't know anything about it."

"Just because I buy my food at the grocery store, she thinks I have no soul. Well, I'm actually going to help people in my life," Elizabeth said to Andrea. "Part of my job will be pro bono work."

"It's true, Mom," said Andrea. "You've always made us feel bad for not wanting to farm."

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"Hell, do whatever you want," said Charlotte. "You can become Nazi doctors for all I care. Cut off people's legs."

"God, Mother." Elizabeth folded her arms.

"Andrea, don't you want more chicken than that?" asked Charlotte. "And you're not eating your potatoes. They're from the garden."

"These potatoes are gritty," said Andrea. "Did you wash them?"

"They seem fine to me," said Charlotte, but when she took another bite, she felt the dirt grate between her teeth. "Just don't bite down hard. Eat some of those beans,"

she said. "They're the bush Romanos I planted this year. They canned real well.''

"They are good, Mom," said Andrea. "Don't you think, Liz?"

Elizabeth reluctantly picked one up on the end of her fork and ate it.

"They'd better be good," said Charlotte. "That's how I got the burn, you girls know, canning these Romanos. They cost me my leg, these beans."

The girls stared at each other across the table. Charlotte couldn't remember just the three of them ever sitting together like this. She found herself enjoying the agitation, the eyerolling, this stunned silence.

Elizabeth shook her head slowly side to side.

"Acorn squash is good, too, Mom," said Andrea.

"Elizabeth," said Charlotte, "you try some squash." There. She had said the name. Elizabeth. For the first time that evening, Charlotte looked into Elizabeth's face. The girl took after Mr. DeBoer's family—the high forehead, the long, thin nose. For weeks after Mr. DeBoer died, the girl had mostly sat on the edge of her bed, staring out her secondstory window toward the road, long blond hair streaming down her back.

Elizabeth spooned some squash onto her plate. Charlotte watched her, searching for a resemblance to the other Elizabeth—Elisa
bet
, her own mother. Charlotte's mother Elisabet had been darkhaired and darkeyed, of untraceable mixed stock, born of generations of city dwellers in Amsterdam. Elisabet, herself a journalist, would have thought it odd that Charlotte married a farmer and became a farmer.

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"I put lots of butter in the squash," said Charlotte. "That's why it's so good."

Elizabeth stopped eating. Andrea slowed. The sun was setting and the westfacing curtains glowed golden, the color of squash.

"Mother," sighed Elizabeth, returning her cloth napkin from her lap to the table. "You know I try not to eat too much fat."

"You girls follow every fad, don't you? I've been eating beef and cream every day of my life."

"Don't you worry that one day your arteries will just explode?" asked Elizabeth.

Charlotte swallowed a last mouthful of gritty potatoes. "I got better things to worry about than my arteries, child."

"The physical therapist did say you should consider losing weight," said Andrea.

"Everybody wants to look like starved Jews these days. I butchered that veal calf. A hundred thirtyfour pounds. Got $1.30 a pound. Neither of you weighs that much, do you?"

Andrea spoke up. "We haven't eaten Thanksgiving dinner here for seventeen years. I was just counting."

"It's not Thanksgiving," said Elizabeth. "I spent Thanksgiving with Nathan and his parents and sister, a normal family."

"But this is like a Thanksgiving dinner," said Andrea.

"This is like a nightmare," said Elizabeth.

"This is like a visit from the Holocaust victims," said Charlotte. "Maybe your stomachs are so shrunken that you couldn't eat even if you wanted to. After they freed the people from the camps, a lot of them couldn't eat, you know, so they starved anyway."

"Oh, this is cheerful dinner conversation," said Elizabeth. "Let's talk about concentration camps."

Charlotte scraped her plate with the side of her fork, and pushed it aside. Even without her leg, she had more meat on her than the girls combined. "It's part of our history, the Holocaust. No sense pretending it didn't happen."

"We should do this every year," said Andrea, forcing a smile. "The three of us. Meet on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. And we'll try to teach you to cook with less fat."

The same way she had eaten every bit of food on her plate,

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Charlotte wanted to say everything that came into her head. And she had the right. These girls had screamed in their cribs, and she had picked them up and nursed them with her own breast milk.

"Worrying about fat is for city people," said Charlotte. "Country people can eat anything they want because they work hard."

"You already killed Dad with this stuff."

"God, Liz, don't say that," said Andrea. "Mom, thank you for cooking for us. Everything is delicious, especially the stuffing."

"That's because it's made with lots of pork sausage," said Charlotte.

Elizabeth clanked her fork on her plate and stood. "This is ridiculous, Mother." She walked over to the window and opened the curtains. The girl probably didn't even remember that oak trees with trunks six feet thick had stood on that property, some of them seventy feet high, more than a hundred years old. The developers had cut down nearly every one. Charlotte hadn't been able to escape the noise of the chain saws anywhere on her property.

"It's like you're trying to poison us," said Elizabeth.

"She's not trying to poison us, Liz. This is how she eats."

"I wish I were back in Chicago. Everything makes sense there. You know, people there actually respect me." Elizabeth's features suddenly looked fragile.

"Liz, we respect you," said Andrea.

"Maybe you do, but
she
doesn't."

"Of course she does."

Liz returned to the table and sat decisively. "Mother, do you know what law school is like? You should be so goddamned proud of me for graduating at the top of my class. But you don't know anything about law school. You have no idea about anything but beef prices and alfalfa and fat."

Charlotte had intended to tell the girl she was proud of her, somehow, but she couldn't do it now. "I know you never came home at all, not even during the summer.

You never helped me can tomatoes or put up hay."

"I had to work during the summer, Mother, to earn money to go to school. Daddy would have helped me."

"You wanted to sell my house!"

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"Stop it, you two!" shouted Andrea. "I can't take this." Her hands went up as if to cover her eyes or her ears but stopped stiff in midair.

"I'm getting the dessert," said Charlotte. She walked slowly, dishes in both hands, to show that she was doing just fine with the artificial leg. In reality, it pinched with each step, and there was another pain, waxing and waning, connected to a leg that lay a mile and a half away in a nondenominational cemetery in River Oaks Township.

Elizabeth spoke quietly to Andrea, but Charlotte could hear. "Let's just mix pure cream with sugar and butter, and eat it by the spoonful until we're fat monsters. Hell, let's just smear it all over our bodies." Charlotte stacked the dishes on the counter as quietly as she could so she could overhear them. These daughters were her flesh, just as surely as that leg had been her flesh, as surely as that land in the subdivision had been her land.

Elizabeth asked Andrea, "Does she have coffee in there?"

"Oh, definitely. She drinks a whole pot every morning." They joined Charlotte in the kitchen as she was slicing a pie into six pieces.

"You made an apple pie!" said Andrea, who in many ways had been an agreeable child.

"Lard crust?" asked Elizabeth. "Or suet?"

"You can't make a pie crust without fat."

"Do you remember when you used to make ice cream?" asked Andrea.

"Look in the chest freezer." Something had come over Charlotte when she was in the township center yesterday, and she had decided to make ice cream, actually bought a twentypound bag of ice at the Harding's grocery—paying for frozen water, that was really the limit, all right. She had turned the handle on the icecream maker for hours last night.

Andrea carried the silver twoquart tin from the utility room into the kitchen. "Liz, can you believe she made ice cream? Jerseycow ice cream."

"God, I haven't thought about Mom's ice cream in years," said Elizabeth. "But none for me, please." She was trying to fit together the pieces of the stovetop percolator from the dish drainer.

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"Let me make that." Charlotte took the pieces from Elizabeth's hands, which were not pretty like Andrea's, but shaped like her own, large with crooked fingers.

"Look, Liz," said Andrea. "I'm just putting a tiny bit on your plate."

The ice cream melted onto the pieces of pie and when the coffee was done, Andrea brought it out in cups with saucers. Charlotte poured an inch of ivory cream into her cup; Andrea poured a few drops into hers.

"Since when do you take cream?" asked Elizabeth.

"I'm just trying it this way."

Elizabeth shook her head. In near silence she ate the ice cream and pie filling, but left the empty shell on her plate. Andrea finished everything except a ridge of pinched crust.

"I guess I should start dishes," Andrea said.

"I'll do them later." Charlotte looked out through the curtains that Elizabeth had left open and saw a sliver of a moon, thin as a fingernail clipping, the kind of moon that would not rise too high. "Right now I want your help with something else." Charlotte had been waiting all night to start this conversation. "Tonight I want us to bring home my leg.''

"What!" shouted Elizabeth. "We are done with this leg thing, Mom. Case closed. It was hard enough to get it where it is."

"Mom, you're not serious," said Andrea.

"I want my leg. I want to bury it on the hill in the pasture."

"This is crazy talk," said Andrea.

"I need a drink," said Elizabeth. A lock of hair fell from the clip which held the rest of it above her neck.

"Bringing it here is out of the question, Mom," said Andrea. "Anyway, it's not really your leg. It's just rotted flesh and bone."

"Andrea, is there any whiskey here?" Elizabeth's eyes searched the edges of the room. The proud look had fallen from her face. She looked like the girl who had lost her daddy.

Andrea shrugged.

"Hell, you think I don't got whiskey, child?" said Charlotte. "I got whiskey." She pushed her chair back and hurried into the kitchen, Page 195

not bothering to conceal her limp, then returned with a full bottle and one water glass which she set in front of Elizabeth. The label was so worn that the words "Old Crow" were barely visible. It had been in her cupboard since Mr. DeBoer died. Elizabeth poured half a glass, and Charlotte and Andrea watched her gulp most of it clown without a breath.

"Hell, I didn't know you drank like that," said Charlotte. "That's how Mr. DeBoer drank. They say a Dutchman doesn't drink, but Mr. DeBoer drank, all right."

"It's no wonder he drank if he lived with you," said Elizabeth, leaning back in her chair. The words stung, but Charlotte savored the attack.

"I've already dug a hole five feet deep," said Charlotte. "I want to put the leg there before one of the cows falls in." She'd been digging for weeks, sloping one side of the hole so she could drag herself in and out.

"I didn't go to law school so I could rob graves," said Elizabeth.

"The leg is all infected," said Andrea.

"It's sealed in a damn box. Pour yourself another drink, Elizabeth," said Charlotte. For the first time in her life, Charlotte wished she were a drinker herself. "Did I ever tell you that I named you after my mother?"

"Yes, but I'm starting to wonder if you really had a mother." Elizabeth drained the rest of her whiskey and banged the glass on the table. "I think maybe you grew out of the ground like a goddamn tree."