Fayrene’s own mind told her she would miss everybody—Aunt Cora, Uncle Emerson, Orion, and Blossom, the horse she rode to school when the weather permitted—but she liked living in Norfork, taking care of Blanche, and having her own money. Besides her room and keep, Madge would pay her five dollars a month. That was three dollars more than she had made helping Cora sort her eggs for market, four dollars more than she had made helping Emerson shell his popcorn, and two dollars more than Madge had made when she was her age.
It wasn’t necessary for Madge to get up when Ned did, but she would rather do it than lie there awake, listening to the noises in the kitchen. As soon as Ned was out of the house she could go back to bed. With Fayrene taking care of Blanche, Madge could give her attention to little Caroline. The child loved to be fondled. If Madge brought her face up close and blinked her eyes, Caroline would gurgle and squirm with delight. Right off the bat the child knew men from women and was a regular flirt with her father. People do like to fondle a chubby, cunning, soft blond baby, rather than a dark, sober, angular, bony, unsmiling child. They were both Madge’s girls, but Caroline got most of her attention, and when she didn’t get it she was quick to complain. Madge couldn’t punish the child for what she had brought on herself. What she had not foreseen was that a baby so small could be so jealous. If Ned put her down and picked up Blanche she would have a tantrum. That amused Ned, but it led Madge to wonder if it might not lead to trouble. Of all the things she didn’t want in this world it was a spoiled child. It pleased Ned to see how little Caroline would put on a show to win his favor, but he was puzzled and irritated when Madge couldn’t stop her whining later. Ned would never believe, nor would Madge bring it up, that a child who couldn’t talk could play one of them off against the other. And when she began to see it, it was too late. There was no way she could put pressure on Caroline that was not a concession to her, so that she got her father, or she got her mother, in every showdown with Blanche. No one would believe—how believe in an impression so fleeting—that a child exchanged with its mother a glance of cunning and triumph, as Madge stooped to provide her with what she asked for, or idly fingered the buttons of her blouse. The solemn Blanche would sit there silent, eyeing them both.
The two babies looked so strange together—like similar creatures from different litters, one blond and chubby, the other dark and lean—that Madge let Fayrene push Blanche around in the carriage while she carried Caroline. That way the contrast was not so great.
“Do you like one more than the other?” Ned asked her. This startled her. Was he observing and wondering? She had never imagined he would be that curious.
“I suppose I give the new one more attention,” she replied, not wanting to reveal more of her feelings. Would that prove to be true of the next one? “At least I know what not to do next time,” she said, it pleasing him to hear she was once more pregnant, but it troubled him to hear what she was saying. Madge had given little Caroline more attention, in part because she knew how to demand it, but with her pregnancy she was aware that she gave less of herself than previously. Already she was holding something in reserve for the new child. If Sharon had been with her she might have confessed that it was knowing that that made Caroline so demanding. But Sharon would not have been curious. It had displeased her to learn that most of the weight Madge had put on was not her own.
In June Fayrene went to visit her folks in the Ozarks, and for her own sake Madge hoped she would stay there. If the creamery boy asked her to marry him, that’s what she should do. She discussed this with Cora on the day she took the babies out to see their grandparents. In Fayrene’s former room, off the kitchen, Orion had installed a water closet, but the bowl wouldn’t flush until he got a water tank on the roof. Over Emerson’s objection that electric bulbs would upset the chickens and cut down on their laying, Orion had put lights in both of Cora’s henhouses, at the door to the cobhouse, and on a pole at the pump. Emerson said it wasn’t a farm anymore, but a Christmas tree. He might have had lights instead of lanterns in his barn, but he feared the cows wouldn’t like it; if they took a dislike to something it cut down on their milk. Rural electrification was coming to some counties but Emerson wasn’t sure he wanted that either, now that (thanks to Orion) they had their own generator. The less Emerson had to do with government people the better he liked it.
It was unusual for Emerson to talk so much, but he seemed to take a shine to little Caroline, even though she was a girl. Watching him bounce the child on his knee, Madge remembered he had once done the same with her.
“Clipety clop
Clip-e-ty clop
She can’t walk but
She sure can hop!”
He was a comic with the babies, but a solemn owl with everybody else. “Let’s see this one here,” he said, picking up Blanche, but the singing and the bouncing didn’t amuse her. Her head would rock from side to side but her eyes never left Emerson’s face. He confessed to Fayrene it gave him the willies. “Gimme the other one,” he would say to Madge, and pass Blanche, her legs dangling, to Orion. Caroline would squirm and howl if given to Orion, but Blanche would sit picking at the white dog hairs on his blue serge suit. If he made her a face, or blew smoke through his nose, she would watch but never squeal or laugh. In a joshing tone Emerson would say, “That one come with a tongue?” and tickle her in the ribs. Blanche would squirm but she wouldn’t giggle. When Madge asked Dr. Maas if Blanche shouldn’t be talking, the look he gave her was that she should count her blessings, with Caroline more than ready to talk for them both. It amused Madge the way Ned liked to fondle Caroline but was taken with Blanche, her owl-eyed silence and sober gaze appealing to something unspoken between them. Ned liked it, but it got on Madge’s nerves. So much went into her mouth, and so little came out. The alarm clock on Ned’s side of the bed would sometimes not run unless he banged it, and the God’s truth was that was sometimes how Madge felt about Blanche. If her head hadn’t been so wobbly on her neck, she would have given her a shake.
Fayrene came back from the Ozarks two weeks early, with an itchy rash on her arms and backside. It spread to wherever she scratched herself, and proved to be poison oak. Madge had never seen anything spread so fast and look so horrible. They called in Dr. Maas to prescribe for her, and he took Ned aside for a consultation. As unlikely as it seemed, he said, it looked to him like Fayrene was pregnant. Did she know any boys? Here in Norfork she didn’t, nor men for that matter, but it was known she was friendly with this boy in the Ozarks, who worked at a creamery in Okie. Well, Dr. Maas said, to both Madge and Ned, she didn’t get what she’s got from a water fountain. This boy she knew, Avery Dickel by name, was the son of people who were friends with her mother, Ned said, and he took the weekend off to drive to Missouri and speak to them. They didn’t believe it either, but when the boy was asked he admitted to it. His parents agreed with Ned that the sooner they made their vows the better, so he came along with Ned on the drive back. He was not just the person Madge would have chosen, but she was distracted by his joshing manner, as if he didn’t know what he had done. Even with the worst over, Fayrene looked so bad Madge couldn’t believe she would ever look normal. Her hair had to be cut off while her scalp healed. As a child Madge had wondered what a leper looked like, and now she knew. Avery Dickel himself kidded about her appearance the way he would a dog clipped for the summer. It was probably this quality in Avery that led Fayrene to be so fond of him, as well as his indifference to how she looked. Madge went to great pains not to give Sharon the impression that the marriage was sudden and uncalled for, emphasizing the fact that the poison oak led them to put it off until Sharon could pay them a visit. After all, she was her sister, however hard it was for either of them to believe.
Before Lillian Baumann returned from England in September, Madge called long-distance to tell Sharon that Orion had just had a stroke; he couldn’t talk, but for him that was not too much of a loss. Mostly, she was calling for Fayrene, who was to be married while she
was recovering from poison oak, and at this time in her life, her daddy with a stroke, it would comfort her to see her own sister, her closest next of kin. Sharon was actually so flustered by the long-distance call she agreed to what she heard to keep the call short. Hours later, sleepless, she realized that Madge had known just what she was doing. She knew that Sharon found Fayrene depressing, with her terrible acne and painful shyness. Nevertheless, Sharon knew she would go, rather than not be there when Cora cried out, “Where is Sharon Rose?”
After a long night in the coach seat, where she huddled like a child, half draped with the topcoat of the conductor, what Sharon saw through the soot-smeared window was like a continent under water. There had been heavy rains; deep ruts fouled the roads, water sat in pools that reflected the sunrise. A sway-backed white horse stood like a specter in a field of corn stubble, its head drooped as if too heavy to support. The dip and rise of the telephone lines, which she had once found so distracting, seemed wearisome and monotonous to her, like the click of the rails. It might have been an abandoned country. Even the towns seemed curiously vacant. It seemed incomprehensible to Sharon that people continued to live in such places. Numbed by the cold, drugged by the heat and the chores, they were more like beasts of the field than people. Where a lamp glowed a woman like Cora would be lighting a fire, setting a table, or gripping the cold handle of a pump, the water rising with the sound of a creature gagged. Only work that could not be finished gave purpose to life.
At the station Ned Kibbee came forward to greet her, flecks of his breakfast at the corners of his mouth. He said, “You have a nice trip?” and carried her bag to a car with side curtains. He avoided her glance, but she felt his pride in the car. Bundles of shingles were piled in the rear seat. “She’s a good girl,” he said, when the motor turned over, “but there’s times she’s a slow starter.”
“Are cars girls?” Sharon asked. “Why is it a she?”
Ned hadn’t thought about it. He appeared to be thinking while he was driving, but he didn’t speak. Sharon had never given thought to it herself, but it seemed a good question once it had been asked. “I don’t see a girl as a motorcar,” she said. “Do you?”
“You’d see it different if you were a man,” said Ned, and he looked to Sharon for confirmation. The hairy back of the hand he rested on the gearshift was powdered with sawdust the color of corn meal. How different would Sharon see it all if she were a man? She felt a knot of evasion at the center of this casual, seemingly sensible answer. It would have pleased and reassured Madge; why did it displease Sharon?
Ned had spread a bed of gravel over part of the yard, where he parked the car. At the back, work had started on a garage with a peaked roof. A boy, wearing a Sherwin-Williams paint hat, stopped pounding nails to gawk at Sharon. A railing had been added to the porch at the back of the house. At the screen, his shirtsleeves rolled, stood a young man who filled the doorway.
“That’s him,” said Ned to Sharon. “That’s Avery.”
Avery Dickel, the young man sweet on Fayrene, opened the screen door to let them in. Sharon was either so pretty, so small, or both, that he blocked the door and stared at her, his jaw slack. “You never seen a pretty city girl before?” Ned kidded him, and it seemed Avery hadn’t. Madge cried out, “Will you men let her in?” and they moved to one side. She was on her feet, her hands braced on a chair back, to give support to her swollen figure. “We’ll need a larger house,” she said, “if I get any bigger, won’t we, Ned?” Ned nodded his head that he thought so. Madge was too big now for the girls to hug each other, but she stooped enough for Sharon to kiss her. A smear of pancake flour whitened one cheek. “This is Avery,” she said, “Fayrene’s beau. There’s no bed in the house long enough for him. It’s a bed Ned has to build them before he does a house!” Avery Dickel flushed the color of Dentyne gum. The feverish color whitened the fuzz on his beardless cheeks. A more oafish youth Sharon had never seen, but he was too undeveloped to be ugly. He had not said a word. Madge said, “Where’s Fayrene?” and turned to look for her. Fayrene was at the stove in the kitchen. A barber had clipped her neck at the back, but her hair was in curlers. The sleeves of a new pink robe were turned back on her freckled arms. Sharon saw her face, dimly, through a blue cloud of bacon smoke. “Heavens amighty!” cried Madge. “You let him see you burn bacon like that?”
Fayrene was speechless. They stood together watching her burn the bacon. “Open that window behind her,” said Madge, “to help air it out.”
She went ahead of Sharon, her apron strings dangling, to rinse the sawdust off the soap in the bathroom. “I can’t get him to rinse his hands first,” she said, and sorted out the towels to find Sharon a dry one. Her head wagging, she added, “We’ve been waiting for this to happen,” and sighed with relief. There was nothing of the misgiving, the disbelief, the dismay, that Sharon had felt at the sight of Avery Dickel. “They can live in Orion’s place,” she went on. “Fayrene doesn’t mind at all taking care of her daddy. It’s going to help her to have a place of her own. She’s going to make a good wife.”
There wasn’t room for them all at the kitchen table, so they sat in the dining room, flooded with sunlight. Madge spoon-fed Blanche, who sat with her eyes wide, her mouth closed. In order to breathe, Avery Dickel kept his mouth open as he chewed. In profile, Sharon could see that his teeth grew forward, like those of an animal meant to crop grass. It shamed her to feel that something Avery couldn’t help would lead her to find him so unattractive. The way he stared at her, as he chewed, upset her less than his unawareness that she was gazing at him.
“Avery works in a creamery,” said Madge, “but he don’t like it.”
Fayrene said, “He’s going to be an animal doctor.”
“A veter-nary,” said Avery.
Ned said, “That’s good business if you stay clear of the dogs and cats.”
“Farm animals a specialty,” said Avery. He stopped eating to enjoy their attention, suck air between his spaced teeth. The sound he made was like that made by Ned when he called the Kibbee cat, Moses, to come and eat or be scratched. A blue Maltese with the tip of his tail gone, Moses went slowly around the table to look up at Avery, who reached down to stroke him, then scoop him up. With a practiced gesture he curled back the cat’s lips, showing his yellow teeth, and using the thumbnail of his right hand, he chipped off flakes of tartar like scales of paint. “See that!” he said, holding the thumb toward Sharon. She was too stunned to react. “They get like that,” he went on, and drew the hand back to look at the chipped particles more closely. Sharon thought she might be sick, and closed her eyes.
“Animals like him,” said Fayrene. Amazingly, the cat did seem to like him. If Ned or Madge had scraped at its teeth they would have been clawed. Avery cleaned his thumbnail on the edge of his chair seat and peered across at Sharon, whose mouth stood open. Was he checking her teeth?
Madge said, “Something like that might take time, won’t it, Ned? Until they’re settled they can live on the farm.”
Ned said, “You needn’t farm it, just live on it.”
“Orion did well with his pigs,” said Madge. “If you like animals you can just raise pigs.”
“I don’t mind pigs,” replied Avery, “but I don’t like ’em.”
“He don’t like chickens either,” said Fayrene.
“You won’t need any chickens,” said Madge, “if you just look for the eggs laid by Cora’s Leghorns. She don’t trouble to look for more than she needs now.”
The scraps of food from Avery’s plate Fayrene scraped onto her own, as she stacked the dishes.
“Let people finish,” said Madge. “You begin like that, it’s going to be hard for you to stop, you hear me?”
Ned winked at Sharon, said, “I don’t plan to get married, so I better get to work. I got work to do.” Sharon stared at him so intently she saw the pupils of his eyes expand, then contract. A fine meal of sawdust powdered his lashes, the creases of the lids. As he arose he took
the last swallow of his coffee, walked with the cup and saucer to the sink.
“You let Avery do that,” said Madge, “and you’ll never have a meal in peace.” She pushed herself back from the table, tilted forward to rise. “You two sit and get acquainted,” she said to Sharon. “There’s no need for you to help.”
Avery leaned on the table, his tongue probing for food above the gumline. In that manner he had of being self-unaware, he stared at Sharon, his head tilted like the dog on the horn of the Victrola. His cheeks were like apples. A snow of dandruff powdered his shoulders. In all her life Sharon could not remember a young man, or a young woman, she found so repugnant. In a mocking tone she asked, “Would you like to be a farmer?”
“I like animals,” he replied. It had not yet crossed his mind to say that animals liked him.
“Then you’d just love farming,” she said, “since everybody on the farm is an animal. It just takes a little time.” He was silent. Did it mean he was pondering what she had said? In the effort of concentration his brows twitched, his right ear wiggled. “I suppose my problem is,” she went on, “that I don’t really like animals enough. I like people better. I don’t think they should resemble animals.”
What had come over her? What she had said, however, now that it had been said, seemed so obvious she was pleased to have said it.
“What’s so wrong with animals, miss?” he asked.
His calling her “miss” disarmed her. Alone with him, she had been apprehensive he would use her name, as if he knew her.
“Nothing’s wrong with them,” she said, rising from the table, flushed by what she heard herself saying. He gazed at her with wide-eyed wonder.
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