The Optimist's Daughter (17 page)

Kneeling, moving the objects rapidly out of her way, Laurel reached with both hands and drew it out into the light of the curtainless day and looked at it. It was exactly what she thought it was. In that same moment, she felt, more sharply than she could hear them where she was, footsteps that tracked through the parlor, the library, the hall, the dining room, up the stairs and through the bedrooms, down the stairs, in the same path Laurel had taken, and at last came to the kitchen door and stopped.

“You mean to tell me you’re still here?” Fay said.

Laurel said, “What have you done to my mother’s breadboard?”

“Bread board?”

Laurel rose and carried it to the middle of the room and set it on the table. She pointed. “Look. Look where the surface is splintered—look at those gouges. You might have gone at it with an icepick.”

“Is that a crime?”

“All scored and grimy! Or you tried driving nails in it.”

“I didn’t do anything but crack last year’s walnuts on it. With the hammer.”

“And cigarette burns—”

“Who wants an everlasting breadboard? It’s the last thing on earth anybody needs!”

“And there—along the edge!” With a finger that was trembling now, Laurel drew along it.

“Most likely a house as old as this has got a few enterprising rats in it,” Fay said.

“Gnawed and blackened and the dust ground into it—Mother kept it satin-smooth, and clean as a dish!”

“It’s just an old board, isn’t it?” cried Fay.

“She made the best bread in Mount Salus!”

“All right! Who cares? She’s not making it now.”

“You desecrated this house.”

“I don’t know what that word means, and glad I don’t. But I’ll have you remember it’s my house now, and I can do what I want to with it,” Fay said. “With everything in it. And that goes for that breadboard too.”

And all Laurel had felt and known in the night, all she’d remembered, and as much as she could understand this morning—in the week at home, the month, in her life—could not tell her now how to stand and face the person whose own life had not taught her how to feel. Laurel didn’t know even how to tell her goodbye.

“Fay, my mother knew you’d get in her house. She never needed to be told,” said Laurel. “She predicted you.”

“Predict? You
predict
the
weather,”
said Fay.

You
are
the weather, thought Laurel. And the weather to come: there’ll be many a one more like you, in this life.

“She predicted you.”

Experience did, finally, get set into its right order, which is not always the order of other people’s time. Her mother had suffered in life every symptom of having been betrayed, and it was not until she had died, and the protests of memory came due, that Fay had ever tripped in from Madrid, Texas. It was not until that later moment, perhaps, that her father himself had ever dreamed of a Fay. For Fay was Becky’s own dread. What Becky had felt, and had been afraid of, might have existed right here in the house all the time, for her. Past and future might have changed places, in some convulsion of the mind, but that could do nothing to impugn the truth of the heart. Fay could have walked in early as well as late, she could have come at any time at all. She was coming.

“But your mother, she died a crazy!” Fay cried.

“Fay, that is not true. And nobody ever dared to say such a thing.”

“In Mount Salus? I heard it in Mount Salus, right in this house. Mr. Cheek put me wise. He told me how he went in my room one day while she was alive and she threw something at him.”

“Stop,” said Laurel.

“It was the little bell off her table. She told him she deliberately aimed at his knee, because she didn’t have a wish to hurt any living creature. She was a crazy and you’ll be a crazy too, if you don’t watch out.”

“My mother never did hurt any living creature.”

“Crazies never did scare me. You can’t scare me into running away, either. You’re the one that’s got to do the running,” Fay said.

“Scaring people into things. Scaring people out of things. You haven’t learned any better yet, Fay?” Trembling, Laurel kept on. “What were you trying to scare Father into—when you struck him?”

“I was trying to scare him into living!” Fay cried.

“You what? You
what?”

“I wanted him to get up out of there, and start him paying a little attention to
me
, for a change.”

“He was dying,” said Laurel. “He was paying full attention to that.”

“I tried to make him quit his old-man foolishness. I was going to make him live if I had to drag him! And I take good credit for what I did!” cried Fay. “It’s more than anybody else was doing.”

“You hurt him.”

“I was being a wife to him!” cried Fay. “Have you clean forgotten by this time what being a wife is?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Laurel said. “Do you want to know why this breadboard right here is such a beautiful piece of work? I can tell you. It’s because my husband made it.”

“Made
it? What for?”

“Do you know what a labor of love is? My husband made it for my mother, so she’d have a good one. Phil had the gift—the gift of his hands. And he planed—fitted—glued—clamped—it’s made on the true, look
and see, it’s still as straight as his T-square. Tongued and grooved—tight-fitted, every edge—”

“I couldn’t care less,” said Fay.

“I watched him make it. He’s the one in the family who could make things. We were a family of comparatively helpless people—that’s what so bound us, bound us together. My mother blessed him when she saw this. She said it was sound and beautiful and exactly suited her long-felt needs, and she welcomed it into her kitchen.”

“It’s mine now,” said Fay.

“But I’m the one that’s going to take care of it,” said Laurel.

“You mean you’re asking me to give it to you?”

“I’m going to take it back to Chicago with me.”

“What makes you think I’ll let you? What’s made you so brazen all at once?”

“Finding the breadboard!” Laurel cried. She placed both hands down on it and gave it the weight of her body.

“Fine Miss Laurel!” said Fay. “If they all could see you now! You mean you’d carry it out of the house the way it is? It’s dirty as sin.”

“A coat of grime is something I can get rid of.”

“If all you want to do is rub the skin off your bones.”

“The scars it’s got are a different matter. But I’d work.”

“And do what with it when you got through?” Fay said mockingly.

“Have my try at making bread. Only last night, by the grace of God, I had my mother’s recipe, written in her own hand, right before my eyes.”

“It all tastes alike, don’t it?”

“You never tasted my mother’s. I could turn out a good loaf too—I’d work at it.”

“And then who’d eat it with you?” said Fay.

“Phil loved bread. He loved good bread. To break a loaf and eat it warm, just out of the oven,” Laurel said. Ghosts. And in irony she saw herself, pursuing her own way through the house as single-mindedly as Fay had pursued hers through the ceremony of the day of the funeral. But of course they had had to come together—it was useless to suppose they wouldn’t meet, here at the end of it. Laurel was not late, not yet, in leaving, but Fay had come early, and in time. For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives. She thought of Phil and the
kamikaze
shaking hands.

“Your husband? What has
he
got to do with it?” asked Fay. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Laurel took the breadboard in both hands and raised it up out of Fay’s reach.

“Is that what you hit with? Is a moldy old breadboard the best you can find?”

Laurel held the board tightly. She supported it, above her head, but for a moment it seemed to be what supported her, a raft in the waters, to keep her from slipping down deep, where the others had gone before her.

From the parlor came a soft whirr, and noon struck.

Laurel slowly lowered the board and held it out level between the two of them.

“I’ll tell you what: you just about made a fool of yourself,” said Fay. “You were just before trying to hit me with that plank. But you couldn’t have done it. You don’t know the way to fight.” She squinted up one eye. “I had a whole family to teach
me.”

But of course, Laurel saw, it was Fay who did not know how to fight. For Fay was without any powers of passion or imagination in herself and had no way to see it or reach it in the other person. Other people, inside their lives, might as well be invisible to her. To find them, she could only strike out those little fists at random, or spit from her little mouth. She could no more fight a feeling person than she could love him.

“I believe you underestimate everybody on earth,” Laurel said.

She had been ready to hurt Fay. She had wanted to hurt her, and had known herself capable of doing it. But such is the strangeness of the mind, it had been the memory of the child Wendell that had prevented her.

“I don’t know what you’re making such a big fuss over. What do you see in that thing?” asked Fay.

“The whole story, Fay. The whole solid past,” said Laurel.

“Whose story? Whose past? Not mine,” said Fay.
“The past isn’t a thing to me. I belong to the future, didn’t you know that?”

And it occurred to Laurel that Fay might already have been faithless to her father’s memory. “I know you aren’t anything to the past,” she said. “You can’t do anything to it now.” And neither am I; and neither can I, she thought, although it has been everything and done everything to me, everything for me. The past is no more open to help or hurt than was Father in his coffin. The past is like him, impervious, and can never be awakened. It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. It will never be impervious. The memory can be hurt, time and again—but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it’s vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.

From outside in the driveway came the sound of a car arriving and the bridesmaids’ tattoo on the horn.

“Take it!” said Fay. “It’ll give me one thing less to get rid of.”

“Never mind,” said Laurel, laying the breadboard down on the table where it belonged. “I think I can get along without that too.” Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams. Laurel passed Fay and
went into the hall, took up her coat and handbag. Missouri came running along the porch in time to reach for her suitcase. Laurel pressed her quickly to her, sped down the steps and to the car where the bridesmaids were waiting, holding the door open for her and impatiently calling her name.

“There now,” Tish said. “You’ll make it by the skin of your teeth.”

They flashed by the Courthouse, turned at the school. Miss Adele was out with her first-graders, grouped for a game in the yard. She waved. So did the children. The last thing Laurel saw, before they whirled into speed, was the twinkling of their hands, the many small and unknown hands, wishing her goodbye.

About the Author

One of America’s most admired authors, Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She was educated locally and at Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. She is the author of, among many other books,
The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, The Eye of the Story
, and
Losing Battles
. She died in 2001.