Plains Song (23 page)

Blanche stood framed in the kitchen doorway, the light outlining her wraith-like figure. Seeing Sharon, she crossed her arms so that her hands gripped her shoulders. In shyness a child might have done that, hugging herself in embarrassment. The light glowed in her thinning hair, outlining her skull.

“Of course I remember Blanche,” Sharon said firmly. Owl-eyed, mute, she returned Sharon's gaze. What appeared to be jewels proved to be suds drying on her fingers. Unmistakably, she had Cora's lustrous eyes.

“She'd like to freshen up,” said Madge. “Blanche, you get her a clean towel. She can lie down in your room if she wants to.” She reached to touch Sharon's arm, gently. “You go along now. It's an hour before Bryan and Eileen get here. Fayrene and her girls will talk you silly. You better rest up.”

Sharon followed the mute Blanche into and out of the kitchen, where pots steamed, through the dining room, blocked by the table and chairs, a card table stacked with silver, cups and saucers. From a room at the front, moving so quickly it seemed furtive, a figure slipped past them into the kitchen. Blanche gave no sign that she had seen it. Behind them, from the porch, Madge cried, “Ned, did you see her? Why,
she's pretty as ever!” Did he reply? Sharon heard nothing. Blanche had preceded her into a bathroom, with room for little more than one person. She took both soiled towels from the rack with a quick, practiced gesture. A clean towel, thin as the curtain at the window, she placed on the rim of the washbowl. On the sill of the window there were bottles containing seeds, leaves, and creatures feeding on them.

“Thank you,” Sharon said.

Blanche replied, “You're welcome,” as if Sharon had thanked her for cleaning the erasers. Flies hovered in the dim light of the hall, making no noise. Blanche went ahead of her into the room at the front, where she puffed up the pillow, drew the blind at the window. Again Sharon said, “Thank you.” Again she replied, “You're welcome.” She left the room with her eyes averted, not glancing back.

No one, of course, had written Sharon to say that Ned Kibbee had not
prospered.
They would never say failed, but they might acknowledge he hadn't prospered. The assured and capable young man Madge had married, a builder of houses, would never grow to be the silent, stooped old man who had slithered past her, furtive as a rabbit. What had happened? Sharon turned on her side, lifting a corner of the blind, as if she might see. Down the street, where the trees thinned, were new houses. Here and there sprinklers were running. New cars were parked along the curbs. A TV flickered on a screened-in porch. Lying back,
Sharon gazed at the wall at the foot of her bed. Heat-drugged flies hovered near the light cord. In the blind-filtered light she could dimly see figures on the faded wallpaper, drawn with thin white lines, as on a blueprint. The pattern was flat, without perspective, but objects in the foreground were larger. In the wall of a house the windows were unevenly spaced. The door appeared to be centered, but lacked steps to reach the ground. Much smaller in size was a barn, with the door open to the hayloft. A small figure sat there. Trees, like stalks of celery, thrust up to one side. To the right of the house a stick-thin figure, wearing a stocking cap, held a pail. Of her stay with Sharon Rose, of Briarcliffe, of Chicago, an exotic-looking bird, with a dishevelled topknot, was perched on one of the leaf fronds in the wallpaper. The eyes were open, and bright as hatpins. The wall was streaked with color smears and erasures.

It calmed Sharon to lie quiet on the bed, puzzling it out. Its outline so pale Sharon had overlooked it, a mailbox, on a post, was propped up in a milk can. This object startled her. She had always found it too high to reach. Orion would sometimes lift her from the ground and hold her while she pulled down the lid and peered in. There was seldom mail, but often newspapers and circulars. Orion would then lower her to the ground and she would run with the mail to Cora. But she had lost interest when she could do all this by herself.

Once she had a beau Madge was always the first to
look for the mail. When Lillian wrote to Sharon, Madge would bring her the letter, then wait for the stamp. Sharon was very much concerned what Ned wrote to Madge, but all Madge seemed concerned about were the stamps. Sharon did not understand her. Didn't she see what was happening? In many of her letters Lillian would enclose a small gift, perhaps a handkerchief from Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago, which Madge cared nothing about, but Sharon could sense that it troubled Cora. If it had not been for Lillian, what might her life have been like? She fell into a reverie, both pleasurable and troubling, involving the child-like drawings on the wall and the complexity of her emotions. Were the drawings recent? An effort to recover what had disappeared? On the front side of the house, with its oddly spaced windows, was a door that lacked steps down to the yard. As a child, barely able to walk, Sharon had fallen from the sill into matted grass, and from that moment, to her knowledge, the screen had been kept latched. The door itself stood open to air out the house, but was never used to enter or exit. Drawn in, then erased from the scene, was a tree that had died after Fayrene's marriage. Had it posed a problem? Did it belong among those things that were beyond recovery?

At the door a voice said, “Aunt Sharon, you awake?”

She considered a moment, but remained silent. The voice did not return. Later she pushed up, as if she might cry out, to see a ghostly figure in the bureau mirror, the hair disheveled, one side of the face wind-burned, putting her in mind of a piece of iron-scorched
lace. Then she slept. Not till evening, hearing the clatter of dishes, did she wake up.

Three leaves had been added to the dining room table to accommodate the grownups. The children, Crystal, Carl, and Ardene, sat at a card table between the folding doors. As at her first meeting with Avery Dickel, Sharon faced him across the table, a hulking, graying man who sat waiting for his food, gripping his knife and fork. The gross features, so loutish in a youth, were almost handsome in the ripened man, but a snow of dandruff sprinkled the lapels of his coat. Did he remember her rudeness? He had stooped to scoop up the cat Moses, mewing for food, to curl back the lips and scrape the tartar from its yellow teeth with his thumbnail. The mere memory of it caused her to shudder. Was that one more of the many things she preferred not to face? Caroline sat on his right, and her glance suggested that in one form or another she had heard the story, and that in her opinion animals were better judges of character than some people. Eileen, seated on Avery's left, had a touch of red in her hair and the freckles believed to be from Avery's side of the family. She sat erect, her figure spare as Cora's, her lips firm over teeth that needed adjusting. At her side, Bryan tilted back on his chair to keep his gaze on the light at the window. His left arm rested on the back of Eileen's chair, his finger toying with the collar of her blouse. She gave no sign that this pleased or displeased her.

Maureen Dickel, almost as tall as her father, sat
slouched on the piano stool at Sharon's left. She had Avery's hands and large-boned wrists, around which she absently twisted her napkin. To put her more at ease, Sharon asked her what she planned to do. In a reply so casual Sharon was hardly attentive, Maureen said that whatever she did she planned to live life to the full. It left Sharon too surprised to ask what the fullness of this life might include. In a shrill voice, Crystal, who had heard Sharon's question, shrieked that Maureen worked for Dr. Lewin, and they all went to her to have their teeth cleaned.

“Shut your trap,” Maureen replied.

“If there's not employment here, there is in O'Neill or Sydney,” said Madge.

“There is if you're a woman,” said Ned. These were the first words he had spoken, but Sharon sensed that they had heard them many times.

Avery raised his head as if he would speak, but seeing Sharon, he thought better of it. Time had not altered his open-mouthed, unconscious gaze. Caroline said that those who were willing to work no longer had to go somewhere else to do it, if they had a trade. Eileen said that farmers didn't lack for work, if it was farming, but the way things were going, not many could afford to. It cost Bryan four hundred dollars more a month to farm than the farm paid. They had heard that before too, but they knew that Sharon hadn't, and allowed time for it to sink in.

“I'm afraid I don't understand,” she replied.

Bryan tilted forward to rest his arms on the table. He raised a fork to wag it in Sharon's direction.
“There's nothing much to understand, ma'am,” he said. “It costs me four dollars a bushel to grow wheat they sell to the Russians for a dollar thirty.”

Eileen said, “Which was why Bryan switched to soybeans.”

“But I'm still losing money. I've got farm machinery that cost me double what we paid for the house.”

Caroline said he couldn't blame on the Russians what was the fault of the commodities market.

Shit on the commodities market, he replied. They sat silent, as if waiting for grace. “The thing I liked about Vietnam,” Bryan said, “was that over there at least I knew who to shoot at. Now that I'm back here I'm no longer so sure who the enemy is.”

Was it their custom to ignore him? Blanche came from the kitchen with a basket of rolls, a plate of celery, radishes, and olives. Bryan was the first to help himself to the olives. Blanche said, “Fayrene, you want to see that Sharon gets some of the pickle relish. It's part of Cora's last batch.”

The glass extended toward Sharon, its peeling paper label bearing the words “P. Relish” in Cora's crabbed hand, was of a watery blue color and had originally been used for jelly. These glasses had been stored at the back of the storm cave, and once required both of Sharon's small hands to lift one. The back side of the seal of wax had a syrup of jelly she was allowed to lick off. To no avail, Cora tirelessly cautioned Emerson not to spoon jelly with the spoon he had just licked off. “I'm going to lick it off later,” he would reply, as if that settled the matter.

“Just smell it!” said Fayrene, the one thing Sharon was reluctant to do. The acrid smell of the relish prepared in Cora's steaming kitchen had often pursed Sharon's lips like the taste of lemon. Fayrene used a fork to serve her a portion, but Sharon was reluctant to taste it. The words “blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh” came to her lips as if spoken.

Madge said, “I don't know what I'd do without Blanche,” as Blanche stooped to serve Ned some peas in a cream sauce.

Ned said, “I like canned peas better than fresh ones, always did.”

The smear of flour on Blanche's cheek was less white than her flawless complexion. Was she never in the sun? Madge brushed the flour from her cheek with a flick of her napkin. Behind her closed lips she nibbled on something, but her mind (her
mind
?) was elsewhere. She did not feel the focus of Sharon's gaze. The plate of celery and olives that Avery was hoarding she took from him to extend toward Sharon. In the exchange of glances Sharon remarked only the long twisted lashes.

Fayrene excused herself to rise from the table and fasten napkins to the fronts of the children. The men settled down to eating, their heads lowered over their plates. Sharon had been hungry when she sat down, but the oven fumes on the draft from the kitchen, the sight of mouths chewing, the platter of fried chicken with the side bowl of pan gravy, made her slightly nauseous. The disturbance was physical, one of displacement, with objects and persons in the wrong
places, at the wrong time. She was asked by Maureen if she liked to fly, which did not help. Her face filmed with perspiration, chewing slowly, Madge sat in a digestive reverie, her eyes upward, scanning the ceiling. She flicked her napkin at flies that settled on the food. Blanche kept their glasses full of iced tea, and Fayrene helped her clear the dishes from the table. Homemade strawberry ice cream, hand cranked by Ned (the only thing not the same being the frozen strawberries), was served from a bowl that cooled Sharon like a cake of ice as she held it. Avery scooped the ice cream to his mouth, chewed and swallowed it like mashed potatoes. Ned said, “You know how you know when it's real ice cream? It hurts your teeth.” There was a murmur of assent, but Madge shook her head. Time was allowed for the cream she had in her mouth to melt. “You know it's real ice cream,” she said, “when it waxes the roof of your mouth.”

For the time it took Sharon to place a napkin to her lips, her head nodding in agreement, all those seated around the table were animated by a common, agreeable emotion. They smiled with their eyes. Avery Dickel pushed back his chair, as if to speak. In the pause, while they waited, insects could be heard buzzing at the screen. This sound moved Sharon in a way that filmed her eyes. Across from her, Avery Dickel had tilted back his head to observe something on or near the ceiling. Sharon was not able to see it, but what she heard was like the fluttering of a moth trapped under the shade of a lamp or behind a blind. Bryan, tilted back on his chair, sat with an amused smile on
his lips. The sound increased to where it seemed to hover directly over Sharon's head. A fine powdering of dust and bits of feather fell on her face when she glanced upward.

“That's where Blanche usually sits,” said Madge. “She thinks it's Blanche.”

The bird, a parakeet or a canary, hovered as if it intended to nest in Sharon's hair. Did she gasp? The startled bird rose toward the ceiling, then in a faltering, bobbing flight it moved from head to head, circling the table, pausing as if confused over the head of Caroline.

“Blanche!” she cried, waving her napkin at the bird.

Hearing her name, Blanche came to the door of the kitchen, the apron and its loose strings dangling at her front. In one hand she held a wooden spoon filmed with the ice cream she had been licking. The charm of this picture, the child-woman framed in the door to the cluttered kitchen, held their attention as if they waited for her to speak. Madge said, “Show Sharon how she gives you a kiss,” and as Blanche extended her hand, the bird fluttered to perch on her finger. Her eyes wide with delight, she brought the chirping bird close to her face, her lips wide in a frozen “cheese” expression, as the bird chirped and eagerly pecked at the particles of food between her teeth. Carl and Crystal giggled nervously. Avery Dickel said, “It probably thinks it's eating corn on the cob.” He guffawed, then fell silent. Sharon could hear the sharp metallic click of the beak on the teeth. She believed her eyes, but her emotions were confounded. The
kinship seemed so natural Sharon would not have been surprised if the bird had picked lice out of her hair. She felt withdrawn from the scene, as if she saw it through a window, or within the frame of a painting. In something she had read, so long ago it seemed a memory, a bird had flown into a hall crowded with warriors, in a window at one end and out at the other, leading one of them to observe that its brief flight, out of darkness and back into darkness, was like life itself.