Family Linen (8 page)

Lacy was never prepared for the pain that kept coming over her: pain so bitter it was sweet almost, like a sore tooth which you have to keep touching with your tongue. She had felt it in the hospital as she looked at her mother, still elegant, still small. And it seemed so ironic
—because I am her daughter, in a sense, more than the others: more than Sybill, than Myrtle, certainly more than Candy. I am more her daughter in a way she could never understand, since I look, I suppose, so different; and since with her, appearances are everything. But the poetry
took,
with me. And how very strange, since she could never tell good from bad, poor thing, or see beyond the iron pink palace of niceness and illusion, of should and sweet, which she had constructed around all of us. She never knew any of us, really. I wonder if she ever knew Daddy, or anybody. Anybody at all. I wonder now if anyone ever does—and if we do, if it's worth it, all the trouble and pain, when it doesn't last
—

The pain came again as Lacy unlocked her car, got in, and put her hand down on the lever to adjust the seat before she remembered it wasn't necessary. Nobody else drove this car now. The seat, already perfectly adjusted, felt burning hot on the backs of her bare thighs and somehow this pleased her, to find a real location for her pain. She switched on the ignition, then the air conditioner, waiting for Myrtle to come out and give her directions to the new grocery store. Miss Elizabeth's condition remained unchanged, so it looked as though Lacy and her daughter Kate would be staying longer than they had thought. Lacy felt a need for supplies, a need to draw her wagons into a circle and prepare for siege. But even after two days of it, two days of being here, nothing had really sunk in yet—not her mother's illness, not even the fact that she was here: that she had, dutiful daughter indeed, come “home.”

For years Lacy had tried to put distance—real, emotional, and psychological—between herself and Booker Creek. Somehow this changed when Jack left her. It was no longer possible. She really thought she had struggled free of her childhood, of that shell that never quite fit, only to find, when Jack left, that she was caught fast in another sort of shell altogether. It was Jack's shell; Jack had made it and made her, fashioned her, too, in a way, but now Jack was gone.
It's worse to be abandoned if you were first rescued. Then you have nothing left except a void. Empty space
. Lacy felt raw, exposed, vulnerable. She could not seem to get her bearings.

She knew she'd get lost trying to find this new Piggly Wiggly, for instance. She knew she'd get lost even with Kate in the car, or especially with Kate in the car, and they'd have a regrettable scene. Kate was having her first period. Lacy was having an anxiety attack, a mild one, as she sat in her car in her mother's long driveway waiting for Kate, waiting for Myrtle. She could hear Myrtle's voice drifting from the open back door of Mother's house as Myrtle talked on the telephone, dealing tactfully, calmly, cheerfully with yet another of Miss Elizabeth's friends who had called to ask how she was “holding up.” It seemed to Lacy that her mother's friends did nothing but call each other on the telephone all day long, greedy for medical gossip. Lacy hated to talk to them. She hated to answer the phone in her mother's house.

In fact this was the strangest thing of all, to be staying here at Mother's while Mother was in the hospital. Lacy felt like an interloper, a snoop, and sometimes—most unsettling of all—exactly like the malcontent, unhappy child she used to be. Sometimes it was as if all those years with Jack, the Jack years as she called them in her mind now, had never happened; sometimes it was as if she had never grown up.

Lacy had been nervous when she arrived, and all the clutter in her mother's house made her more nervous: she wanted to sweep her arm wildly across the surfaces of things, clearing off lamps, lace doilies, framed photographs of the adorable children they never really were, china ashtrays, ceramic animals, cut glass. Instead, for the past two days, she had been pacing through these cluttered rooms nervously, smoking cigarettes, or sitting at the hospital, smoking more cigarettes, or sitting out at the One Stop with Nettie and crazy Fay, drinking Coke, or sitting with Myrtle and Don in that house Myrtle was so proud of, among the ferns and wicker, the lime green and hot pink, drinking daiquiris which Don “whipped up” in the blender. At least, thank God, Sybill was not staying at Mother's too. For some mysterious reason of her own, she had taken a room at the Holiday Inn, which was a relief. It was clear to Lacy—clear to them all—that Sybill had something on her mind, but she wouldn't say what it was, nor would she leave Miss Elizabeth's bedside. Two days had passed since the stroke, and Miss Elizabeth did not improve, and Sybill almost never left her. Lacy had begun to wonder about Sybill's stability; Don and Myrtle, too, were concerned. But who's to say: Lacy wondered about her own stability, for that matter. Well, whatever happened, Myrtle and Don would certainly take care of it.

“Turn left at the old Raven Rock cutoff,” Myrtle said now, giving directions. “You know, where we used to go out to the quarry.”

Myrtle stood in Mother's driveway looking good. Looking young, blond, content, prosperous—looking, however, a little less certain of the nature of things than she used to. Lacy has always been not so much annoyed as simply astonished by Myrtle and Don: by their enormous blond beauty, their possessions, their health, their absolute invincible belief in human perfectibility. Their blandness. They are people like pound cake, like vanilla pudding. She used to feel—and still felt, post-Jack—that she could never talk to them about politics, or values, or money, or anything. Myrtle, however, had developed lines at the corners of her eyes now which Lacy thought she recognized—lines she knew something about. They had been drinking sherry together earlier that afternoon, sitting around the oak table in front of the old floor fan in their mother's kitchen. Miss Elizabeth kept nothing stronger than sherry in the house.

“Do you think you should go like that?” Myrtle asked. “Like that” meant that Lacy was wearing her cut-off blue jeans. It meant that she—like Myrtle—was almost forty. Lacy chose to ignore this remark. Kate ran out of the house then like a bullet, hurtled into the back seat, and slammed the door.

“I'll be there at seven,” Lacy said, meaning
at the hospital, I'll be at the hospital
, backing out.

Lovely Myrtle stood by the blossoming pink hydrangea and waved. Lacy remembered her waving just that way from—it seemed—countless floats. Myrtle was Miss Booker Creek, Homecoming Queen, Valentine Princess, while Lacy got good grades and sulked. Myrtle waved, getting smaller and smaller as Lacy backed away, with the mountains spread out blue behind Mother's house, beyond the green hillside. She backed onto the street and pulled into traffic. Although the town had sprawled in all directions, with malls proliferating on the outskirts, the downtown area had stayed exactly the same. Mother's house, on the hill at the south end of Main Street, overlooked it all, as it had for half a century. The house was symbolic of so many things: of the fact that she alone, of the three sisters who had grown up there, carried on the traditions which their own mother had tried to instill in them; of her own lofty ideas, ideals, and sensibilities; and of, finally, her profound isolation. Driving through town, Lacy thought of how they had all preferred, finally, in different ways, terra firma. How they all had chosen to come down the hill.

“I still don't see why I had to come,” Kate said. “I could have stayed home by myself.”

Lacy didn't reply, negotiating the traffic. There never used to be any traffic.

“Lois Emery stays by herself,” Kate said. “But you don't think I'm a person. You don't think I'm responsible. You think I'm some dumb kind of a baby.”

“When you're sixteen,” Lacy said in what she hoped was a light tone, “then you can stay by yourself.” She turned left at the courthouse and headed out of town on the bypass, toward the new grocery store Myrtle had recommended.

“I could have stayed with Dad,” Kate said, trying it out.
“Bill
is.”

“Bill has a swim meet,” Lacy reminded her. “He'll be at the club most of the time we're away.”

“I could have stayed with Dad anyway.” Kate was still trying it out. Lacy looked at her in the rearview mirror. They were all new at this.

“I guess so,” Lacy said. She didn't explain that Jack was keeping Billy under some duress. And that, as a matter of fact, children are not always welcome in a love nest. “Love nest” made her giggle—it was a phrase from one of the
National Enquirers
which Fay had had out at the One Stop.
ALIENS ENTER LOVE NEST, FRIGHTEN ILLICIT LOVERS
was the headline. Fay was still, as always, nuts. But that was the situation: Jack and Susan, back home in Chapel Hill, living in their love nest. Sooner or later, Lacy would have to make some decisions. She supposed she'd have to sell the house.

She watched the land slip by on either side of the congested road. “Don't be a stranger, now,” was what Nettie always said when she left. The old country goodbye. But Lacy did feel like a stranger now, driving through empty space. Daddy dead, Jack gone, Mother in the hospital. And Kate nearly grown up, so suddenly, so mysteriously: Kate's period had started. Even those mountains, which Lacy always loved, looked different. How many times, in how many other places, had she closed her eyes and summoned them up before her? She has always had a Romantic, Jack called it Wordsworthian, attachment to them—she has always been more attached to the
place
, perhaps, than to her own family. That's one of my problems, Lacy thought, that tendency to get more attached to the idea of the thing than the thing itself.
Oh, don't be a stranger now
. The mountains seemed older, softer, and somehow sad—or perhaps it was only this particular wet June, so much foliage, the haze. Lacy considers herself an old hand at the pathetic fallacy. And she had not been back for three years. When she was a girl, there was nothing but trees and sky along this stretch of road. Now they passed McDonald's, Long John Silver's, a K-Mart, a string of used-car lots. She turned left.

“There used to be a sign here that said Raven Rock, three miles,” she said.

“
I don't care,
” said Kate.

“No kidding,” Lacy said, and then Kate surprised her by giggling. Kate was moody, lovely, exasperating. She had had a hard time, too, and Lacy hadn't been able to help her much, consumed, as she had been, by her own pain.

The Piggly Wiggly, when they arrived, was as huge, as new as Myrtle had promised. As modern as anything in Chapel Hill, or even Raleigh. Booker Creek was changing and very little remained of the old ways—except those cabins you still saw high up, driving down that long valley through the mountains into town, those cabins so high and strange, and the isolated farms in the valley, and except the people, of course: like Nettie.

According to Myrtle, this Piggly Wiggly was owned by Lewis Ratliff, who had been in Lacy's class at school. He owned it and three others in neighboring towns. Lacy supposed that this made Lewis Ratliff a grownup, which she was not. She imagined how Myrtle and Don, and Candy, and even Arthur must have kept in touch with lots of the people from school. How they must run into these people day after day, year after year, as all of them married, had children, and aged. These lives seemed continuous, while hers did not.

A “Rodeo of Values” was in progress at the Piggly Wiggly; pennants fluttered all around the enormous parking lot. A country band played while cloggers in red-and-white checkered outfits danced on a raised wooden platform. A flea market and pony rides were, a sign said, out back.

“Yahoo,” Kate said sarcastically. Kate was used to Chapel Hill, which is not the real world, in Lacy's opinion. Not that there's much advantage in the real world, either. Then Kate said, “Do you think they've got any games?” and headed into the Piggly Wiggly alone. Kate wore a man's hat and dangling silver earrings; she went to the Friends School, and looked like it.

Lacy locked the car and pulled her cut-offs down in the back. She needed staples—milk, cereal for Kate, some frozen dinners. She had no idea how long they'd be here, how long her mother would be in the hospital, what they'd do about her when she got out, whether Mrs. Dwight would be able to stay with her full time. Of course, in most cases, someone in the family would take over—Nettie, the logical one, would come to live with her. In most families. But for as long as Lacy could remember, her mother had had as little to do with Nettie and Fay as possible, for reasons the children never knew. Their father used to laugh a little and shake his head when they asked him about it, bemused and delighted, as always, by his Miss Elizabeth, by whatever vagaries and affectations she possessed. On the side, he gave them money; Lacy knew that. He had helped them through the long hard time when Millard Cline, Nettie's second husband, was dying of cirrhosis, before Nettie married and then buried her third husband, Dutch Musick, who owned the One Stop.
Gothic
. It's all so Gothic. Lacy remembered in college, when she read Faulkner for the first time, the way it all made perfect sense. Yes, she thought then.
This is how it is
. It was like coming home, in a way in which she had never been able to. Don't be a stranger now, Nettie said.