Family Linen (13 page)

“Don't you want to go in there?” the big nurse asked. “She's breathing her last.” The nurse had a gap between her front teeth.

“I can't stand to see it,” Arthur told her, “and I wish you would cut off the goddamn lights.” Which she laughed at. And then went over and cut off some of them. This was not such a bad-looking big old nurse.

Then there came a big commotion from Intensive Care and everybody was screaming and crying and Arthur knew it was over at last. Her two doctors bent from the waist in the hall right outside the door, like penguins. Sybill was screaming the loudest. “She can't die,” Sybill screamed. “She can't die, she has to tell me, I have to know. She has to wake up and tell me, I've been waiting,” and Candy was patting
her
.

“Know what, honey?” Candy asked.

“I have to know if she killed him,” Sybill was screaming. “I have to know. She has to tell me,” Sybill screamed. “She can't just die.” Everybody stared at Sybill, Candy and Myrtle still crying while Sybill screamed. “She's got to tell me! She's got to tell me!” Sybill kept screaming this stuff. Arthur couldn't believe it. Sybill, who would be a pretty middle-aged woman if she'd keep her mouth shut and act right, looked terrible. Eyes all bloodshot, her whole face blotchy and red.

Two little girls, candy-stripe volunteers, started to giggle, up the hall. They thought Sybill had lost her marbles. Maybe she had. People will lose their marbles, in the instance of death. People will shit in their pants. It's awful. Some young nurses got Sybill by the arms although she was trying to fight them off and get back in the room, beating at the nurses with her fists. In times of crisis, people will go off their heads. Arthur's been off his own head for years now. It's been one crisis after another. Sybill was screaming. “She killed him and put him down there. In the well. I saw him, I saw his face.”

“For God's sake,” Myrtle said. Myrtle leaned back against the green tile wall and then her head dropped over to one side and she slid down the wall real slow in the most ladylike faint you could ever imagine.

“Hey, hey!” cried her husband, Dr. Don. “Hey, hey! Right here!”

“Mama, Mama,” said pretty Theresa, who for once had lost her cool, and a little old white-haired nurse came running right over to Myrtle.

Death is a desperate hour.

Sybill had really lost her marbles this time.

“Elevate her feet,” said the little nurse. Somebody turned on the rest of the goddamn lights. Lacy started crying real loud, like a kid, Myrtle was lying flat on her back on the floor with her feet propped up on a stack of towels. “She can't do this to me,” Sybill wailed. “She can-NOT do THIS to ME!” Candy looked at Sybill and then slapped her once, hard. “Ooh! Ooh!” squeaked Miss Elva Pope and Miss Lucy Dee, scurrying out. They carried, for some reason, umbrellas. Arthur realized he was laughing.

He looked for the big pretty nurse. Mother is dead, he tried to think, but so far this meant nothing. “I have to know,” moaned Sybill, sitting at last in a chair. Arthur looked around for Nettie, old buddy old compadre, to see if she was also getting a kick out of Sybill's fit, but what he saw then brought him up short.

Nettie was out of the whole thing, over by the far window smoking, looking out toward the hills. Arthur went over there and touched her shoulder. She whirled around. Arthur had his face fixed to grin, he was thinking
Get a load of Sybill
. You could hear her all over the place. People were coming to stand in the doors of the rooms, to hear her. It was awful. Just then the big nurse came walking down the hall wearing a red sweater, you could tell she was going off duty. “Excuse me, ma'am, but I wonder if you'd care to take a little spin with me, go out for a drink perhaps? I am in shock, as you can see.” Arthur said this to the nurse. A person in despair has got nothing to lose, and he was never the kind of man to let a woman just walk on by. “Goddamn it, Arthur, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You haven't even got a car,” Nettie said. “I'm not myself,” Arthur said to the nurse, “as you can see. Perhaps some other time.” The nurse was laughing. “For future reference,” she said, “the name is Mrs. Palucci.” Sybill yelled, “How can we find out now? How can we ever know?” “How do you spell that?” Arthur asked. The lights were real loud. Mrs. Palucci passed on by. Arthur looked over at Nettie thinking she might be amused in the end by Sybill, Nettie's a tough old bird, but Nettie's little black eyes were as sharp and as bright as cinders, as glowing coals. Nettie's eyes were terrible. She said, “
Elizabeth is lost
.” Nettie looked past Arthur, past Sybill, down the crowded hall, beyond the hills. “
Oh Jesus
,” Nettie said.

It must have been a hundred degrees that afternoon. Her own beauty shop swam, for a second, in her eyes as she came out, turned back, and locked the door. Her mind was a jumble, her mother was dead. But it calmed Candy, coming back from the hospital to her shop, closing up, it always did. She dropped the key in her pocket and looked up to see Don waiting for her, his BMW parked at the curb. Don looked exhausted, the way she felt.

“Listen, Candy, are you sure you want to do this?” he asked abruptly, and Candy looked him in the eye and said, “Yes.

“I've done it before,” she said.

Don stood sweating on the sidewalk, looking at her. “That was different,” he said.

“It's okay,” Candy said. But she appreciated him coming down here, when he had so many other people and things to tend to—he had gotten Myrtle home, and in bed, and had seen to all the rest of them too, she reckoned, and made all the arrangements—after all of this, he had come to see her. After he'd gotten Dr. Grey to give Sybill a shot for her nerves and told her to hold her tongue. In those words, that's what he'd said, “Hold your tongue!” Candy had heard him. Candy had slapped her, earlier, and told her to shut her mouth, and got no place at all. But an old maid will mind a man. And Sybill wanted somebody to shut her up anyway, you could see that. Sybill in her whole life had never acted the way she did that afternoon. She never had. Candy remembered Sybill sitting inside with Mother while all the rest of them went out to play in the snow. Sybill didn't want to get wet, or cold, or dirty. She wouldn't eat snow cream either. She thought it might have germs. Later, she wouldn't learn to jitterbug. So Sybill couldn't be happy, screaming the way she was screaming that afternoon.

She had gone somewhat crazy, if you asked Candy. Now this is okay, and natural. Candy has heard it, and seen it, before. Sybill is not any better than anybody else when push comes to shove. If you're not crazy sooner, you'll be later, is the way Candy looks at it. Little kids who are so wild will make Phi Beta Kappa and grow up to be brain surgeons. Tony was this way. He used to smoke cigarettes when he was eleven, now he's in law school. She can't take any credit. That's the way things are. People who have done it right all their lives will go off their heads in their thirties and forties. A man might go out for a pack of Winstons and never come back, for instance, or go out in the woods to live in a solar teepee. Candy's seen it all. The line of work she's in, she's seen it and heard it all. Life is long and wild and there is usually a point where it makes you crazy. That's natural.

So Candy for one was glad to see Sybill act like a real person for a change. It was funny, though, slapping her—funny in the sense of weird. It made Candy realize that it's been years since she touched Sybill, years. She does everybody else's hair, even Miss Elizabeth's. But Sybill left, and now she gets hers cut up in Roanoke, so that's that. That's fine. Only if it was Candy, she'd feather it around the face, to soften her, and layer the back and sides. She'd give Sybill a Spun Sand rinse to blend in the gray. Sybill's face felt funny to her hand. She shouldn't have slapped her. The trouble with Candy is, she's always done exactly what she feels like, that's just the way she is.

She's never
not
done anything. But she should have let Don handle Sybill. Leave it up to a man. This reminds her of when the kids were little and she was raising them herself, sometimes she felt like some man could walk in off the street, any man at all, the garbage man or a guy from the water company, and tell them to do something or other, anything, and they'd say “Oh sure” and do it. Right away. They'd just say “Oh sure” and do it, when she'd been telling them to do it for half an hour. Not that she told them much. But that's not what she means, that's not the point. A man's the point. Any man at all. It used to make her so mad, but there it is.

And there was Don on the sidewalk to ask her, taking care of it. Taking care of business. Like Elvis. Elvis pitched a fit at his own mother's death. In fact he used to keep chickens at Graceland because his mother liked to throw them corn. Candy can see that. And Don, if she told him, could see that too. Elvis had a sense of family. Don does too, which is funny, since it's not even his family. Not his own blood kin. Or maybe it isn't funny. Arthur can't do it, he's too delicate and too drunk, he's got a bad heart, and Nettie's old now, with her own hands full. Somebody has got to do things. When a hole comes in a family, somebody has got to come forward and fill it. Somebody has to get on the telephone, make arrangements. Don is the orphan, the one from no family, and yet he's the one with more of a sense of it than anyone else.

“
We'll keep this in the family
,” he said to Sybill at the hospital, said to all of them. “You can hold your tongue now,” he said, and Sybill did. She was probably glad to. It's a terrible thing the way most women—well, most people, really—want to be told what to do. Candy runs into that. Sometimes she tells them. They ask her, and she tells them and sometimes they do it, or not. She's not a person who likes to tell them, but they ask. They like to be told. It's all in her line of work. Or it might be that they just want somebody to listen, and that's all. Because there's nobody at home to listen to them, so often that's all. That's finally what shut up Sybill. “We hear you, Sybill,” said Don. Sybill put on some lipstick then and drove herself back to the motel. Maybe that's all she wanted.

So Don took Myrtle and Theresa home, and took Lacy up to Miss Elizabeth's, and Nettie took Arthur. Candy came on home by herself, which is the way she likes it. You get spoiled, after a while. You need your time.

Candy came back, and Doris was straightening up, and she told her to go on home and said she'd close up herself. Doris left. Doris said she was sorry about Miss Elizabeth. Doris is a sweet heavy girl from out in the valley, saving up to go to beauty school, with the prettiest, whitest teeth. She sweeps up and shampoos. Candy hopes she will keep on saving, and actually go, and rise up in the world. A woman needs something to do. But Doris has a boyfriend, so you can't tell. Kids around here get married so fast, they can't see beyond the back seat of a car. They can't see the trap. Well, it doesn't look like a trap, then. Candy couldn't see it either, nobody can. And you can't tell them.

Doris finished and left. The phone was ringing. Candy let it ring. She knew it was about Mother, everybody in town wanting to know. Two people had already come over, she saw, and left food on the counter, all wrapped up. People in Booker Creek are real thoughtful and sweet. It was a macaroni salad, with English peas and pimientos in it, and a sour-cream pound cake. “From the Kitchen of Holly Sue McCready” said a little sticker on the foil around the pound cake. Candy couldn't see how people already knew. Doris had known already, too. Candy wasn't sure who the macaroni salad was from. She has done Holly Sue McCready's hair for fifteen years, she remembers when it got so thin after she had the twins. They ordered her a partial wig then, from California. Candy remembers everything. You have to.

Well. She put the macaroni salad and the pound cake in the refrigerator she keeps there, in back of the shop. She put the pound cake next to Lydia's bean sprouts and cottage cheese. Lydia is real skinny and real young. She talks a mile a minute. Lydia's all ready for the punk look, she can't wait for it to hit Booker Creek. She can't wait for somebody to come in and tell her to give them a Mohawk and dye it green. Fat chance! Candy tells her. She's got ladies that still want a bubble, or a French twist. Lydia isn't long for Booker Creek. She's read too many magazines—and Candy straightened the magazines.
Redbook
,
McCalls
,
Family Circle
,
Good Housekeeping
,
Vogue
,
Cosmopolitan
,
Harper's
,
Town and Country
,
Gourmet
,
Ladies' Home Journal
, you name it, she's got it. Candy's ladies save them and bring them in.

It calms her, closing up. You're one step nearer the grave when your mother dies. Nobody standing in between you and the great beyond, as Miss Elizabeth herself would have said. Candy used to get so mad because her mother always had another word, a fancier word, for whatever it was. Not Candy. She calls a spade a spade. But the older she gets, the more she understands that about her mother. She'll make her look real pretty too, the way she would have wanted it. Candy's got taste. She's not morbid, either. She can do it. Dying doesn't scare her, but all she's got time for's the here and now, which is plenty enough, and more than enough, for her. She straightened the magazines, checked the dryers, put all the brushes in the solution, put the towels in the bag for the laundry. She has a pale-pink-and-gray décor. She loves the way it smells, in a shop. That was the first thing that got her about it, in fact, in addition to the fact that she has always liked hair. The smell calms her, now. It's perfume, and shampoo, and formaldehyde. After she gives a permanent, she sprays pine Lysol in the air, so there's that, too. It's sweet, but there's an edge to it. Candy likes that. She went around with a bag and got what she needed, and closed up. She has rose-pink shag carpet on the floor. It took her a long time to get her own shop. She had it planned right down to the carpet by then.

“Are you sure you want to do it?” Don asked again.

They stood outside on the sidewalk in the sticky heat. People were passing by. “Hey, Dr. Don, hey, Candy,” they said. The mercury vapor streetlight on the corner came on then, soft and sort of slow the way it does, magical. Growing up, Tammy always said it was magical. Tammy's real artistic. The light is lavender. Don looked old.

“I've done it before,” Candy said.

Mrs. Vance Bristol came up and grabbed her elbow. “Honey, I'm just so sorry,” she said, “if there's anything I can do—” Candy said no, but thanks, and watched her click off down the street in her spike heels. Fashion takes a long time to get to Booker Creek, in spite of influences such as magazines and little Lydia Nicewander. Suetta Bristol has worn shoes like that for twenty years, and she used to look good in them. She'd bring a ham, Candy knew, probably take it up to Mother's or over to Myrtle's. Suetta Bristol is famous for her baked hams which she always takes to the family when somebody dies. She bastes them with Coke and orange juice.

“I'm just going up to change first,” Candy told Don. She lives over her shop, where she's lived for years. After a while, it's hard to move or change. Your habits set in. It might have been that some time back, she might have—but you can't tell. Time passes. There's some things you'll never know.

He looked so tired. “Can I come up there, Candy?” he asked.

She looked both ways on the street. They'd been at this for twenty years. “Well,” she said.

Candy went up the stairs and after a few minutes, he came too. She poured him some gin in a jelly glass and he stood by the window, looking down on the street, to drink it. He wore khaki pants and a navy linen jacket, with a striped tie. White shoes. Candy always gets a kick out of the way Don looks here, in her apartment. Probably she ought to straighten up. But she keeps her shop straight, so she likes to let things go at home. Don doesn't fit, he looks funny in her apartment, he's never said one word about it. Maybe by now he likes it. Don sipped his drink and looked out the window.

You can see everything. Right across the street is Hardison's Hardware, and then the Family Shop in what used to be Millard Cline's Florist, years ago, and the bank on the corner, and the dimestore's next on the corner across from the bank. It's gone down, since Verner Hess died. In front of the hardware is a wooden stand that has tomato plants on it, and marigolds, and rosebushes, and a high-school boy out watering them with the hose. On down the street is the jewelry store and Bickman's furniture store and an office supply, and you can see the steeple on the Episcopal church beyond that, and then the old houses that have been made over into lawyers' and doctors' offices, like the old Harrison house, which is OB-GYN. The Smith house is now the Cardinal Tearoom, put in by Lou Durgin's son who was an alcoholic in New York and came back home. At the far end of the street is Miss Elizabeth's up on the hill. Candy lives right here. The streetlight makes a lavender pool on the sidewalk that's magical, Tammy said.

Don said, “Do you remember that time when we were all up at Miss Elizabeth's for Thanksgiving dinner and Karen and Tammy got under the dining-room table and nobody could find them? Remember how we sent all the other kids out in the yard, looking? We really thought they were lost,” he said.

Candy said, “The corn pudding burned.”

Don said, “I remember.” Their girls when they were little looked alike, with yellow hair. She used to French braid it. It's funny. She's known Don a long, long time, since high school. It's been infrequent. There was a time when she was married, and a time when she thought Gray Justice would marry her. She's known other men, off and on. Don has never said a word, or minded. Well, how could he? But you know, deep down, he could. You know what men expect. Except for Don, who is different, who is a genuinely good man. He loves his wife and family, he works on it. He is a man who does right. Sometimes Candy thinks he works on it too hard.