by Joan Barfoot
“This is for strength,” she says, offering to share the dense, crimson results. “And compassion.”
“Interesting combination,” Nora says dryly. “Quite particular.”
“Thanks, Beth, but no,” Sophie says. “It smells good, though.”
This is just habit. It’s the way they have fallen into protecting Beth from each other, even though they both tend to assume, on no great evidence, that Beth herself is oblivious. They suppose her more or less immunized against irritation and insult, maybe by her teas but more likely because staring into mirrors, and staring into herself as reflected in Nora’s most tempest-inducing work, must have rendered her dull-witted. Smooth and unreachable as the figure on canvas, in glass. Baffled by her own skin.
It’s a good thing Beth is beautiful, and in a particular way that is useful. Otherwise, what is the point of her?
Sophie has plenty of points. Or as Philip said to Nora not long ago, “I don’t know how we managed without her.” Whereas of Beth he never got beyond what he said in the first place, which was, “I don’t know what you see in her.” Now these three women of different sizes, shapes, ages, gifts and purposes, but all dressed similarly in black, take their usual places at the kitchen table. The empty chair is large, the silence astounding. Finally Sophie sighs. “Should we get those sheets changed, Nora? We could, if you want. We could even start sorting his things while we’re at it.”
This is the kind of sharp gift for absorbing details and spitting them out that makes Sophie such an excellent assistant, but—how shockingly tactless and precipitous, any notion of launching into closets and drawers, going through Philip’s underwear, his jewellery, his shirts, sweaters and pants, discarding some, saving the rest for keepsakes or for the poor. A brutal use of these first few hours without him. Nora frowns hard. Sometimes Sophie’s history manifests itself in strange ways; like an old wallpaper pattern under paint, it shows through in certain lights.
Still, considering what Nora slept through last night between those white cotton sheets, it would be pushing whatever governs these matters, assuming anything does—maybe good luck, maybe bad—to lie between them again. She nods. “I wouldn’t mind turning the mattress as well. In a while.”
“Oh, please don’t talk this way,” Beth cries. Well, she would.
“We should try to eat, then,” Sophie suggests. As she would. Sophie is tall, and also no sylph, having grown increasingly roly-poly, from a tidy size twelve to a blooming sixteen, in her four years in this house. “I thought I’d let myself go and see how far I got,” she has told them. She got this far: to this table, with this full body, on this harried, startled morning. “I’ll make toast.”
More and more toast, slice after slice, wholewheat and heavy and lavish with butter—even Beth chews and swallows and reaches for more until soon a whole loaf has, like Philip, vanished. Crumbs lie scattered over three black laps and the pine tabletop and the blue-tiled floor at their feet, and still they are hungry. People don’t stock groceries with such ravenous emergencies in mind, so when their collective desires shift to the sweet they do not have on hand the chocolate ice cream, vanilla cakes, muffins flecked with raisins, cookies stuffed with jam, also butter tarts, also cinnamon rolls, that they crave. Even Beth lusts after sugar despite considering sugar, like coffee, ruinous.
Better to eat than to think. Or to feel. Not uncommon in the event of any great shock.
Did caffeine, sugar, other bad habits cause Philip to die? That strong, big-shouldered, physical man, was he tipped over by one weakness too many? He didn’t have many bad habits really.
Sophie shivers, and abruptly she is leaning over, throwing up on the blue-tiled kitchen floor, no time to bolt for the bathroom. Just as swiftly Beth, of all people, is on her feet, narrow hands holding back Sophie’s brilliant red hair. “I’ve got you, it’s all right, let go, it’s all right, I’ve got you.” None of this takes long. In only a couple of minutes Sophie is shaking her bent head out from under Beth’s hand and sitting up straight again.
“I’m sorry. I’m okay now. I’ll clean up.”
Beth says, “You stay still, I’ll take care of it.” And she does, with paper towels and warm water. Another highly unlikely event.
“Are you so very upset, then?” Nora asks Sophie.
“Too much toast.”
“I see.”
This time the silence that follows is broken by Beth. “We could,” she ventures, “have some kind of ceremony.”
“That’s called a funeral,” Sophie replies, tartness already recovered—how quick she is! “If you want ceremony, it’s already kind of built into the system.”
“It’s a nice thought, Beth, I’m sure,” Nora adds. “We’ll have to do something. I can’t quite think what.” Or where. In this horrible town, open to its horrible people, a place, nevertheless, that Philip said was lodged in his bones—what is her current duty to him and his bones?
He was born here. Then his parents, leaving behind their own histories, including their respective mothers and fathers, moved off in search of more promising and ambitious prospects, but he came back every summer for romping holidays with four doting grandparents. As he described it, he was familiar on a daily basis with the bakery that sold hand-made cream puffs. He fished with one grandfather and that grandfather’s buddies and played cribbage with his paternal grandmother who was, he said, short and un-athletic but “a killer at cards.” His other, more sinewy grandmother threw baseballs for him to hit, and his other grandfather, a man of few words but many skills, helped him build a go-kart for himself and spice racks for his grandmothers, and watched him produce his first carving which was, Philip said, in theory a duck.
Hard to suppose those summers were so entirely idyllic, or even that there were very many of them, just a few childhood seasons, but although he grew up and away, and one by one his grandparents died, he retained an unshakeable sense of the basic kindliness of the place, of the careless affection of its residents, of the rare and splendid combination of freedom and cosseting of those summers. And so fifteen years ago he returned, a grown man with his second and more interesting wife, like a boomerang, a homing pigeon, one of those things that turn back to where they began.
He even remembered this house. “It was like a castle,” he told Nora the first time they toured it. “A combination of creepy and mysterious and glamorous. I don’t know who lived here then, but I remember being impressed. A little scared of it, too.”
And where were his parents during those summers? “Actually, I have very little idea. I suppose they worked. And they took holidays, just not here. Here was mine. I lived for those summers.” Even in recent hateful faces, he recognized familiar features and with familiarity, basic harmlessness.
When they moved here, besides being generally in a cheerfully whither-thou-goest frame of mind, Nora saw for herself the town’s excellent prospects, and its charms, and believed that tucked away here she might work without distraction and with a graver concentration than was previously possible. In practical terms, she saw it as a place where, still young and starting again, they could live fairly well compared with the exorbitant city, and where they would be far from any further eruptions and fomentations from Philip’s first wife. Moreover, she thought it unlikely either she or Philip could get into much trouble here.
Now look how much trouble he’s got himself into.
An artist should be able to perceive what is not obvious, so it’s embarrassing, really, that when they first drove here together, and saw this big red brick house for sale, and not only spent some hours examining it, inspecting it, rapping on its walls, climbing into its attics, ducking through its cavernous basement, but also strolling randomly around the streets noting the tidiness, the orderliness of homes, the care obviously expended on the many gardens, the inviting cosiness of the shops, and their variety—well, it’s something of a professional shortcoming that she felt no tremors, foresaw no darker impulses.
Or: the
re were no darker impulses until Nora herself made it otherwise. That was more or less Philip’s view.
By the time they moved here, the house, while firm in its foundations, was abandoned and ramshackle and required a good deal of repair: their first big project together, if they didn’t count as a big project extricating Philip from his original wife. They sanded and painted, stripped wood and cleaned it, ripped out walls and built new ones in new arrangements, tore apart the small barn at the back and reshaped it into a workshop for Philip, designed and added a glassy second-storey addition to be Nora’s studio. Plumbers came and went; so did electricians, and building inspectors.
People carried casseroles and cakes to the door, and said how glad they were to see the old house coming to life. They advised on the subjects of fertilizers and soils and brought lists of service clubs and activities: Rotary, bowling, churches, needlepoint. “Shit,” Philip said, “service clubs, I don’t think so.”
Nora, though, already feeling free and rampant and overflowing with affection, or love, or something, and new to neighbourliness, was further warmed by this array of open hearts. Once she and Philip were more or less settled, furniture arranged, spaces divided between them and small habits and daily customs en route to formation, she set out to work, in fact, on a very bright, vivid painting, narrow but long, of open hearts on a slab. Veins were detailed, arteries large. The hearts were lush. Given their hearts’ desires, they would leap joyfully from butcher’s tray into somebody’s, anybody’s arms, willing to beat ecstatically in any embrace.
She wondered, even, if the piece was sentimental, over the top, positively gushing, but apparently not. The local butcher, delivering beef to their freezer, took a particular dislike to it; as if he, a man who dismembered raw flesh with his cleavers and hands, had been rendered by her painting into a sly subject of fun.
Thus the first aggravation, the first dent; leading, not irrevocably in Philip’s opinion, to the inflammations and extremes of the past year or so; the ones that completed the transformation of an unremarkable town into an outpost of Philistines, a colony of the demented, a haven for trolls and bad witches.
“Double, double, toil and trouble,” Nora says now. Beth looks puzzled, but Sophie lets out one of her belly laughs.
“Fuck ’em,” says Philip—said Philip—heading into the night. Besides having a presence large enough to give pause to insult, he could in depths of ale, lager, Scotch be viewed in the after-dark eyes of men as quite the lad. Sufficiently capacious for life with three women; sufficiently brave. “And you know,” he told Nora, “you’re exaggerating. Even if you weren’t, being friendly reduces the chances of real harm being done.”
Depends what you consider real harm.
And where was his loyalty?
Where is his loyalty now, leaving like this?
Now it is into that town that Philip’s lucky and unlucky body has descended: in that town’s ambulance, followed by a cruiser and Ted Marlowe’s Jetta, to its hospital, and into the hands of its pathologist, to the ministrations of its undertaker and funeral home, to the rejoicings of its florist and to the depradations of its curious. Nora takes a deep breath, and another, and discovers these deep breaths are suppressed, withheld sobs—how long since she turned her head on the pillow and reached out and began learning that everything, everything will be different?
Not long. What does she mourn? What will she come to mourn? Because these are sometimes different things.
“So,” Sophie says, her voice tight, but practical as ever, “what do you think, should we plan a service for here?”
“I don’t know.” Nora shakes her head sharply.
“What? You don’t want to?”
“It’s not that. It’s just, I can’t believe this is possible. That it’s true.”
“Oh!” Beth cries, so that Nora and Sophie turn. What exactly caused that sharp yelp of, what, grief?
Nora ought to be grateful for Sophie’s offer, she is grateful, but she is also Philip’s wife. Was. Was wife, is widow, new definitions and tenses that will become clear and automatic in time but certainly not yet, not today. It should, anyway, be Nora’s role to act on funereal matters.
She and Philip fell so easily into letting Sophie take over tedious or bothersome chores.
Also having first Sophie, then Beth, move here meant Nora and Philip had less time to themselves than they used to. Then too, the time they did have, they may not have used entirely wisely. Or so it seems to Nora right now. It couldn’t have felt that way at the time; the time being anything up to last night.
As with, probably, having children: the more people involved, the more distracted, diffuse, a household becomes.
Not one of the three women at this kitchen table is a mother. Perhaps that’s why they don’t automatically fall into embraces and other solacing gestures they might have known how to make if they had children. Or perhaps that’s not why. For the most part everyone has learned, with greater and lesser degrees of effort, and with greater and lesser degrees of sincerity, to suit each other’s purposes, fit into each other’s hollower spaces, but they have not been quite this harshly tested before.
Also that was with Philip alive, when they were four. Death changes everything. Suddenly Nora is a forty-three-year-old widow. Suddenly Sophie, ten years younger, only has one employer. Suddenly Beth, four years younger still, and aalready surplus to requirements, is further exposed within this smaller, disrupted group.
Each is bound, too, to have different perspectives on Philip himself. Even physically Sophie met him nearly eye to eye, while Beth was chin-height, while Nora’s head dipped nicely into his chest, comforting and obscuring. Also, Sophie and Beth have only known his middle age, a more limited point of view than Nora’s. Sophie thinks of him with B-words like bulky, brawny, boisterous; plus several non-B words. Beth, coming from a world of thin female beauty, found him, more negatively, too loud and too looming. Neither of them knew the man who did odd jobs around town when he and Nora first moved here because they needed the money and he was not too proud to build a deck here, paint a porch there. “It’s all work,” he said, “it’s all cash.” They did not know the man who made the bold decision to earn his own living, minimal in the early days, then rather splendid, designing and building sofas and loveseats, chairs and mantels and buffets and tables which, being unique and individual and very expensive, put his work in demand among those who could choose to afford it. “Snob appeal,” he laughed, although he was serious about the work itself.
As with Nora’s paintings, his market was not in this town. Here, people evidently do not care for her work, and could not afford his.
All three women jump when the phone rings—if death waits for no man, not even a relatively young one like Philip Lawrence, neither do its demands. When Sophie, who answers, hands the receiver to Nora, she says, “It’s the hospital,” and for an instant every heart shifts. Could they have been wrong, might Philip, with some clever medical handiwork, have come alive? Just for a second, an eyelash of time, they each hear fast heavy feet on the stairs, they hear Philip’s voice. He would head first for the coffee pot. Then he would look at them in their various poses and say, “What’s up for the day, then? Not much, I guess, if you’re all still hanging around.” He wouldn’t mean this unkindly. It would just be a remark. Among the many things already missing is the deep, anchoring tone of the male voice adding heft and timbre to the higher-pitched choir.
“Hello?” Nora asks cautiously—what if, what if?
It’s a young-sounding voice, a man’s, an employee, he says, of the hospital’s morgue. So that’s that.
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” he says, and maybe he is. “But there’s a question with regard to your arrangements.”
“Arrangements?”
“I mean who to release the body to when the time comes. We’ve already determined it was too late for organ donation, but it’ll probably be ready by mid-afternoon or so, unless there’s something unf
oreseen, which I need to advise you is always possible. So do you know yet where it’ll be going?”
What is he, a student, a trainee? “I see,” Nora says. It, says this voice. Not Philip Lawrence, or Mr. Lawrence, or even your husband, but it. “Well, I’m afraid we’re not quite as efficient as you people. Would you be able to hold on to him a little longer if necessary, or is there a risk of losing his place in your fridge?”
Most unpleasant; the townspeople, guilty or otherwise, do bring out the worst in her. The young man’s voice drops to a matching unfriendliness. “Not at all. At your convenience. It’s merely a courtesy to advise when the autopsy should be completed and the body available for release.”
Autopsy. Nora puts down the phone. There will be no fast heavy feet on the stairs. Her head wants to rest its new great weight on the table. “It must have been a heart attack, don’t you think?” Sophie says. “Or a stroke, I suppose. It’s strange. He seemed so healthy, didn’t he? Robust.”
Indeed. Nora regards Sophie, contemplating the possible extent of Philip’s health and robustness. “Where there is smoke,” she asks, “is there fire?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Okay, so listen, I should start calling around. It sounds as if we need to get moving.” She’s right, of course, but what a bully Sophie can be. Too much time, maybe, spent striding among the desolate, picking and choosing, doling out and withholding, every life on the edge, not excluding her own. She is useful on many grounds, not least when it comes to cutting through crap, but still, Nora sometimes thinks, Poor refugees. On top of massacres, starvation, deprivation—Sophie.