How to Make an American Quilt (5 page)

H
E RETURNS
to find Hy drinking a soda from the bottle, eyes free of makeup traces and closed. She hands him the bottle and he, too, takes a long swallow. “Arthur,” she says as her head falls back against the top of the car seat, “I’m so very tired.”

“I know, honey.”

“Can we just lie down somewhere? Before we go back? If I could just get some sleep somewhere for a few minutes, I’ll be fine. I’ll be okay.”

Arthur turns the key in the ignition and tells her to “relax—by the time we reach home, you’ll have had a nice nap,” but Hy shakes her head. “No,” she tells him, “I can’t sleep at home. I can’t rest knowing we are heading back. Ah, find me a great, shady tree and leave me there. Just for a few minutes.” She closes her eyes as he slowly pulls the car back to the road.

I
T’S LUCKY
that he and Glady Joe always keep that ratty old blanket in the trunk of the car. It looks even more pathetic lying underneath Hy, who is sleeping as if drugged: motionless, careless. Arthur lies beside her, looking up into the branches of this golden oak. They are in the middle of an isolated cluster of oaks that he located near the highway on the side of a grassy, sloping hill. Away from the sounds of traffic. Perspiration beads on Hy’s forehead, wets the base of her throat, and intensifies her heavy perfumed odor, which is noticeable even outdoors. It is so goddamn hot and still. He wishes he had thought to buy another drink and contemplates leaving her there while he makes his way back to Sula for another soda. He’d be gone only a few minutes, but what if she awakened and found herself alone? The picture of Hy as she looks when she waits for him on the curb in front of her house crosses his mind and he imagines her waking up, her face flushed from sleep and heat, whimpering because he is gone and she doesn’t know where. He knows she would cry a child’s sad cry of abandonment and not a grown woman’s anxious sob.

Arthur’s hands feel sticky from the heat. Glady Joe promised to
check in on James tonight and asked if he and Hy were coming back later or what. Did they want to stay north for the night? But he said, No, no, they’d be back. As soon as he calmed her down.

He leans back on his elbows, bored with watching the oak leaves, dappled with sky. He turns back to Hy. Funny how she is a more dolled-up version of Glady Joe. Even stranger that neither sister impressed him as being raised in a small agricultural town like Grasse; they each carried some other quality associated with old money or extensive travel, or possessed some gene of refinement. Yes. The Refinement Gene. Maybe it is the clear beauty of their skin or their choice of clothing or the fact that their father is not a farmer.

Now Arthur is lost in the memory of Glady Joe and how pretty and smart she was when he first found her. A little too serious, he supposed, and not conventionally pretty (though he thought her beautiful). And she was fairly well read for never having been to college. Of course, he was a college graduate, but that was more his parents’ doing than his own. Still, he was grateful. What caught his eye in regard to Glady Joe was her love of
Jane Eyre
. He loved
Jane Eyre
too. Such great friends from the start, drawn to each other by a shared love of reading and ideas, and soon he forgave his parents for moving them to this godforsaken town outside Bakersfield so late in his teenage years, because Grasse gave him Glady Joe.

It is unlikely that he would have thought to return to Grasse once he went to college if he did not know and feel a strong attraction for Glady Joe Rubens. The older half of the Flower Girls, as they were often called.

He once asked Glady Joe if she wanted to live somewhere else, almost certain her answer would be something like “I can’t wait to get out of this place,” only she surprised him by saying, “Actually, I like living someplace where I don’t feel quite comfortable or welcome
because it goads me into traveling or reading. I guess you could say that Grasse brings out the urge to ‘quest’ in me. I’m not sure I’d have that if I lived elsewhere. Any other place I may love,” she said. “I might become happy and complacent and altogether content and then where would I be?” She laid her hand flat on her chest. “I ask you, what sort of life would that be?” She struck him as so mysterious, this mix of autodidacticism and small-town loyalty. He thought if he could come to understand her that he could come to understand himself; the key to her was the key to him.

When they had slept together a few times during a six-month period, Arthur knew he loved her. Glady Joe was not the most artful girl he had ever been intimate with (not that there had been so many, he had to admit), and there were times when the result was more frustration than satisfaction. It was evident that she was trying to please him, but there was something withholding about her when they made love. Sometimes he fought with her. And Glady Joe would look at him with a confused, open look as if she did not know exactly what she had done but it must have been something awful or he wouldn’t be so angry. Then he would take her in his arms and apologize. She said to him, “I don’t think you understand the risk I take for you.”

If I marry her
, he thought,
she will change
. It wasn’t as if every time they were together it was bad; maybe it was a matter of security regarding her own future.

Hy stirs in her sleep. Arthur wonders if she always looked this peaceful when she slept. Glady Joe never did. She was serious when awake and serious when she slept. As if she could just not stop thinking about and mulling over and considering and examining the various angles of her day, her life, her children, her marriage—who knew which thought kept her so preoccupied even in slumber.

Hy sleeps like a woman satisfied. Her limbs are loose and
generous, expansively stretched. Hy sleeps as if she is casually reaching for something, while Glady Joe looks as if she already has that thing but is puzzling out the way in which to keep it with her always.

Hy at fifty has the bloom of young womanhood off her face, but she has another, equally attractive, quality.

Arthur feels compelled to kiss her mouth. As he bends toward her, barely touching her lips, she awakens, slides her arms around his neck, and pulls him close.

Of course, he thinks, she smells nothing like Glady Joe’s garden scent of cut grass, flora, earth, and sky, but physically he can almost convince himself that he holds Glady Joe in his arms, so similar are their figures and lengths when held under his own body. The worn touch of the blanket against the backs of his hands as he laces his fingers through Hy’s damp, messy hair reminds him of Glady Joe; her voice, deepened by love, sounds like Glady Joe. It was Glady Joe who complemented the rhythm of his lovemaking, held her cheek to his. The fullness of Hy’s breasts and the spread of her hips recall Glady Joe. If he closes his eyes against the heat of the day beneath the golden oak, he can almost convince himself that it is his wife he holds in his arms.

After, seated beside each other, content, Arthur leans over to kiss Hy’s throat and, working his way up to her ear, takes her dangling earring in his mouth, pulls it off. “What?” says Hy, tugging her naked earlobe between thumb and forefinger. Arthur opens his mouth, presenting the sparkling object on the soft red cushion of his tongue, as if it were a valuable gift borne up from his heart and not something so recently attached to her person.

T
HE FIRST THING
that strikes Glady Joe when she sees Hy and Arthur that evening is the powerful smell of Hy’s perfume in the house. It
seems to drift and settle about the furniture, underneath chairs, relax in the corners of the rooms.

“Naturally, James asked after you,” Glady Joe says, haltingly because she couldn’t seem to concentrate, “hopes you are all right. I didn’t say anything, really, just that you had to scoot out of town for something.” Glady Joe’s words drift off as she tries to focus on the distraction of her sister’s scent. It is as if Hy’s perfume has shape-shifted and is now a fourth entity in the room; as if the musk has somehow become personified. Glady Joe tells herself it is because Hy sits in such close proximity to her. But as she looks at her she sees that Hy’s lips are slightly parted, as if to make a statement or form a question or speak along on top of Glady Joe’s words. Hy’s body leans forward, drawn to her sister, her hair out of place from the windy drive home. “Really,” continues Glady Joe, “it wasn’t that easy, explaining your departure. I thought I could say anything and James would accept it.”

Hy reclines back in her chair, the tension gone slack for a moment. “Now why, Glady Joe, would you think that?”

Glady Joe cannot answer; her sister’s musky scent feels like an oppressive weight on her chest, a pressure on her heart.

“For chrissake,” Hy continues, “he’s only sick, not stupid.” A sound emits from her throat, somewhere between growl and chuckle—“Only far-gone cancer patients have the luxury of being so drugged that they don’t even know what year it is.” She begins to cry softly. “My James doesn’t even have that. My James.”

Glady Joe is moved to take Hy in her arms and comfort her, but she stops, finds herself snapping instead, “Perhaps
you
made that mistake when you took off down the road with my husband.” She is as shocked by what she has just said as she was to find herself unable to hold her weeping sister. At the mention of the word
husband
, Arthur suddenly comes to life in the room, where he is sitting some distance away from the sisters. Glady Joe finds it peculiar that Arthur appears
to be linked with Hy and not herself. She shakes her head, until something else occurs to her. Rising from the chair, she stalks over to where he sits, grabs his arm, and thrusts it under her nose.

“Glady Joe,” he says with an embarrassed, irritated laugh and tries to pull his arm away, though his wife will have none of that. Leaning into him, she sniffs him arm to shoulder, shoulder to hair. Holding herself tall, she contemptuously tosses his arm back at him, backs away from both Arthur and Hy, her eyes beginning to fill.

“I have to go and think for a minute,” she says.