The Cadence of Grass

by Mcguane, Thomas

  Evelyn walked into a hallway so abbreviated her eye was at the level of the fifth or sixth step of a steep staircase, and a mere pivot revealed the living room, whose little brick fireplace had, upon its mantel, a photograph of their provider, Sunny Jim Whitelaw, with his accustomed scowl. There was a compact bookcase with a series of “chicken soup” books, some form of chicken soup for everyone and everything, except for the chicken itself which, in Evelyn’s view, most needed consolation. “We’re eating out on the porch!” came Natalie’s voice from the kitchen, and there Evelyn found a table laid, a white cloth, a plate of large tomato slices and Spanish onions in malt vinegar, tall goblets next to a wrapped bottle of Fumé. Evelyn sat down and looked at the low glare of cold sun beyond the winterized confines of the porch, frost-curled green ash leaves scratching at the glass. Evelyn lifted a goblet with its satisfying knock of ice and water within and thought how pleasant this was and how close to success many unsuccessful lives were, and how rare were genuinely sordid existences outside books and movies. Her sister and Stuart were an unsuccessful couple, not as Evelyn and Paul had been, but because Natalie was obsessed by what she perceived to be the hidden advantages of others. While Stuart was gentle and kind, Paul claimed he was simple enough to hide his own Easter eggs. Stuart’s remark at her father’s death—“That’s the best news I’ve had in years”—made Evelyn think there might be another side to him.

  With a great exhalation of breath, Natalie swept in, balancing the meal on one hand and gesturing with the other for Evelyn to remain seated. Evelyn was pleased to see the anticipated tureen of pumpkin soup, but instead of gnocchi, she found sharply seasoned raviolis stuffed with pork.

  “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love you,” said Natalie, sitting down in a disgusted heap. She found a kind of primness about Evelyn as she waited to be served.

  “It’s beautiful, Nat. I don’t know how you manage.”

  “What do you eat out there on the ranch, corn beef and cabbage?”

  “Various stuff, not that.”

  “You cook for Bill regularly?”

  “Not regularly.”

  “How’s his health?”

  “He’s hanging right in there.”

  Natalie spread her napkin in her lap. “When Dad sent you for riding lessons, I don’t think he ever figured you were never coming back.”

  “Must have been the horses.”

  “Well, whatever. Anyway, it was Mama always drove you out there, not Dad.”

  “She liked to talk to Bill.”

  “She really liked to talk to Bill.”

  “I don’t think there was anything to it, particularly,” Evelyn said.

  “Maybe, maybe not. But she sure liked driving you out there.”

  Evelyn thought she’d let this one drop. But it was remarkable that anything that ever happened to her or Natalie was known almost instantaneously by Bill, however many miles away. And he was forever frustrated that Natalie couldn’t be made to take an interest in the ranch. He must have learned that from Alice Whitelaw. Perhaps, a friendship existed, and if so, fine.

  “This was Daddy’s favorite soup, but not for now, for summer. How is it?”

  “Really good.”

  “You’d eat anything,” Natalie said, looking into the tureen as though daring its contents to be imperfect.

  “I wish I could cook like this, but my mind goes shooting ahead and things catch fire.”

  A car passed by pursued by a column of disturbed leaves, and Evelyn felt something odd about the two of them sitting together as though all the elements that had accounted for them were lifted momentarily and they would now bear the gravity of being the only excuse for their own lives.

  “I’m in love with Frank Sinatra,” said Natalie, starting “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with the touch of a button, “and I’m afraid of winter.” Wind-borne clouds were darkening the sky, and she was obliged to turn on the brass overhead lights, reconditioned salvage from an extinct ranch house in Black Eagle. Stuart gathered odds and ends from junk shops in such odd places as Box Elder and Medicine Lake and Opportunity. Evelyn remembered his pulling up in front of the house with a mountain of junk on a fifth-wheel lowboy, looking contented. “Thousand feet of straight grain Doug fir tongue-and-groove from Hungry Horse!”

  “Old Blue Eyes,” said Evelyn.

  “Funny you’d know that.”

  “One of Bill’s horses, crop-out paint, he looks nuts.”

  “How about ‘Der Bingle’ for Bing Crosby?”

  They were at some sort of dead-end, and Evelyn looked around blankly. Stuart had really made a comfortable little house, though he baffled Evelyn in other ways with facial expressions that seemed to lie behind a scrim, like the faces of people on television whose identities were being protected; and he was so remarkably sexless that she could imagine him coming along before the age of anatomically correct dolls, a curious smoothness not without its appeal. Evelyn noted that Natalie’s intense concentration on her food would provide an excellent backdrop for difficult conversation offered in the form of mere incidentals. As here it came: “You won’t be offended, Evelyn, if I state that Paul is no Daddy.” She paused to make room for the reply that did not come. “He doesn’t understand the first thing about that business. You know Stuart speaks with the utmost kindness of other people, and even he says that Paul is completely lost. When employees go off and leave their pensions behind, something has gone badly wrong.”

  “I’m sure there’s a problem with the transition. Daddy never budged.” Sunny Jim actually had said, “Budge and you die,” something he might have gotten from Bill. At any rate, there was this whole culture of budging and not budging that Evelyn couldn’t follow.

  “It isn’t that at all, Evie. Paul is cruel and he’s inconsistent and he doesn’t know how to run the plant.”

  “Of course he’s cruel. Prison made him cruel. That’s how he is now, but he wasn’t always. In any case, Nat, you need to stay away from him.”

  Natalie seemed to discover in her soup something so minuscule and annoying, it could be retrieved only with the very tip of her spoon. She then placed the spoon next to her bowl and placed the tip of her right forefinger on its handle. “Whatever could you mean?”

  “If you don’t know, then I sure don’t.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Then neither do I.”

  Evelyn looked at her sister. When they were young, she had had an astigmatism that she outgrew and Natalie had had braces and a retainer for her very prominent teeth. They sometimes called each other “Buck Teeth” and “Four Eyes” and now those times seemed to be coming back. On the verge of tears, each had begun to feel ugly and powerless again.

  Natalie snuffled, “I made a key lime pie!” She went to the kitchen and brought it out, a beautiful thing, light and golden at the edges. She sank her knife into it, served them both, then sat, suddenly making herself very still.

  “Pie okay?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “That’s a real one,” Natalie said tragically, “made with condensed milk.”

  “What’d you do for limes?”

  “Just Spanish limes from the store, but they’ll do. Now. Ev. Listen. Stuart, good Stuart, no big future, right?”

  “I don’t—”

  “No, come on, I should know. This is it!” She gestured around the little Craftsman knockoff, so suggestive of modest, happy family life. It had been built during a difficult period in their marriage, and Natalie’s unfortunate habit of discussing those problems with anyone who would listen had given their marriage a poor reputation that persisted even in better times. In fact, during the era when all of Paul’s strengths were a display of lewd aggression and intrigue, Evelyn found herself longing for just such a do-it-yourselfer. But Natalie’s inclusive gesture, her “this is it,” effectively dramatized the distance between what she dreamed and what she had. Evelyn knew too well where this was headed.

  “I cannot go back to P
aul.”

  “We’ll starve.”

  “It will be honorable starvation.”

  “Surely there could be some accommodation with the terms—”

  There was a clangor of the heating that might’ve implicated Stuart’s skills as a plumber. That and the wind-borne leaf storm in the small yard gave the house a precarious feel.

  “I don’t know how Dad could have done this to us.”

  “I loved Dad!”

  “So did I. But it wasn’t easy and please, Evie, don’t be a bitch, it wasn’t easy to watch him make such a husk out of Mama!” Natalie was holding her hair out from her head with both hands: a Medean tableau that would have seemed insincere except that it was done with such mad force that it made Evelyn watch her steps carefully.

  “Nat, look, this is getting to be a scene. Such a nice lunch, so perfectly prepared, as if I were a guest of honor! But is there no way we can discuss this?”

  “‘Discuss’?” Natalie asked, quarreling with the very word.

  “How do you think I like being called a bitch?”

  That stopped her for a moment. Down came the hands, through the thick, crazy hair that only slowly subsided. If only we were wounded celebrities, Evelyn thought, who could set out on a healing retreat away from this pain. Supervised by recovery specialists, we could safely call each other bitch and request that our sister stay out of our estranged husband’s bed without the customary repercussions.

  “Bitch is a terrible word, isn’t it?”

  “Lucy was a bitch,” said Natalie, and suddenly both women were weeping. When they were girls, they shared a Labrador retriever named Lucy, whom their father would not allow in the house. Twenty years previous, on Christmas Eve, the then old and silver-muzzled Lucy froze to death under the wreath on the front door. Natalie’s heart broke as much for her father as for Lucy, whereas Evelyn concluded he was just one of life’s nasty surprises and treated him with unyielding distance. “She’s a cold one,” Sunny Jim later said of Evelyn, only a little chagrined by the feeling that the oldest girl had his number, and completely unaware of the agony he produced in her.

  Evelyn loved Natalie’s food and so did Paul, who owned a sensitive palate among other refinements including prairie architecture, Porsches and Eames furniture. He spotted Art Deco details on buildings, radios and furniture; and for a while was besotted by Bakelite. Sharing his quest for esoteric collectibles, Natalie was once able to discover what a short leap it was from Bakelite to sordid motels on the interstate and the subsequent raw and bankrupt carnival.

  “I love you, Evie, and I don’t want you to do what’s not right.”

  “I love you too, Nat.”

  “Now,” Natalie sobbed, “we shall simply have to downsize.”

  “My God!” Evelyn snapped. “What do you expect?”

  Natalie flung her face up, awash with tears, damp hair tangled at her temples. “I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d drum up some fucking white marriage, some illusion to get the rest of us living like human beings.”

  “What about my life?” Evelyn shouted.

  “What about it? Does mine have to disappear while you review what makes you comfortable?”

  Evelyn stood and said, “Thank you for a lovely lunch.”

  Natalie bowed her head and did not look up when her sister departed. After a decent interval and a deep breath, she consulted her watch, then gave a small sigh.

  It was time to go to town.

  When Evelyn called her mother to explain she had to pick up some medicine for Bill and would be a few minutes late, Alice said with perfect sincerity, “Bill comes first.”

  Why was she always so utterly solicitous on his account, Evelyn wondered, standing in line at the pharmacist’s window while the two men in front of her had a conversation she couldn’t help overhearing. “. . . pulled it out and cleaned it up. Maybe I knocked a hole in it, put the acid to it and then . . . damned if I know. It don’t look dirty but it is. I went on ahead and clamped it but then it dropped several amps. Must be dirty . . .” Men were always talking like this: you couldn’t understand a thing they were saying.

  Once she’d paid for the prescription, Evelyn started up the icy sidewalk toward her car. Coming from the opposite direction was a dandyish male wavering in the poor light of a fall afternoon. Before the figure finally emerged into deep focus, Evelyn felt something of an anxious chill. It was Paul, of course.

  “Hello, Evelyn,” he said levelly.

  She busied herself tying a better knot in the green silk scarf she’d wound around her neck. “Paul. I’m afraid I didn’t recognize you at first.”

  He smiled. “So, Evelyn, why don’t we ever see you down at the plant? Those are your vital interests.”

  “It’s never really fascinated me, Paul.”

  “But it’s on-the-job training for the new CEO, and I’ve got all these dependents!”

  “How do you stand it?”

  His smile seemed unevenly distributed on his face. “It’s a living.”

  “I picture a ship without a rudder.”

  “Oh? We’ve already been approached by a broker out of Atlanta, Joel Kram, old southern family. He made a fortune with a caffeine-laced dairy product called Kreem, then lost half of it defending himself in lawsuits. He used stock footage of Martin Luther King’s famous speech in his ads and dubbed in the word ‘Kreem’ for ‘dream.’”

  “Do we have to meet Mr. Kram?” Evelyn’s arms hung straight at her sides, and she was unafraid.

  “I tell you he’s real. I’ll tape a Dun and Bradstreet to his face so you can read his balance sheet while speaking to him.”

  Evelyn was tired of listening to him. “I hope you do something. From what I hear, you’re running it into the ground.” Then she walked away, skin crawling at this brush of his wings. She was entirely uncertain if she was widening the distance.

  “Paul has offered to lend me his luggage for my trip,” Alice said, standing stocking-footed in the carpet beside neat piles of her travel clothing. “Isn’t that nice?”

  “You’ve got your own luggage,” said Evelyn, somewhat shortly.

  “Paul says it’s inadequate.”

  “He does, does he? Well, Paul loves his luggage in an immoderate way. It’s some kind of English aluminum stuff, like aircraft material. He had a briefcase made out of the same thing, looked like robot luggage or something.”

  “It’s very rugged. And, Evelyn, I am going to Alaska.”

  “Mother, I don’t think it’s necessary to pack as if this were an expedition. I read the brochure, and it’s all a safe and pleasant illusion. If you don’t want to meet the natives—”

  “On National Geographic they tossed people up in the air with a blanket!”

  “—you can tough it out with a manicure and a facial.”

  “Speaking of which, you look a fright.”

  “We’ve been worming cattle.”

  “You and Bill?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he well?”

  “You can’t hurt him with a crowbar.”

  “A beautiful man on a horse.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bill Champion,” said her mother, “rides well.” Then she moved quickly downstairs to the kitchen.

  “Yes, but so did you,” Evelyn called, following behind.

  “Long ago, angel, long ago.”

  “I bet it’s still there.” She swept toast crumbs from the counter into her palm and slapped her hands together over the sink. “Bill said you were right there, right in the middle of it.”

  “That’s very kind, but I don’t quite know how he thinks he knows.”

  “Bill knows everything. Said, ‘Alice was a queen.’”

  “Oh, my!”

  “Mother, your face is red! That’s just the cutest thing!” Evelyn was elated that her mother was sufficiently undefeated by her father’s death to venture a blush. She picked up the swatter and nailed a fly against the window, fearful that as various int
rusions began, this house would become like one of the hulks one saw along old roads. “I can’t believe all the health claims on these tea bags.”

  Once in the living room, and while the tea steeped, Alice Whitelaw said, “You realize I had nothing to do with your father’s estate planning.”

  “Of course I do, Mother. I don’t argue with it anyway. If you aren’t free to plan your own estate, I guess you’re never free.” She recognized her own perverse chipperness. Her hands were in her lap.