Family Linen

by Lee Smith

  “Now, honey,” Candy said, hugging Myrtle. Candy was soft, smelling like permanent-wave solution. She must have come straight from her beauty shop.

  Dr. Grissom and Dr. Grey made little sounds in their throats, and left.

  “Do you remember how we made pipecleaner dolls that time with those angel shells at Virginia Beach? We used their shells for skirts?” Myrtle’s voice went up higher and higher. Mother, yellow beneath the oxygen tent, barely seemed to breathe. The lines across the EEG went up and down. In Myrtle’s mind she saw Gary Vance walking across his junky yard in his big white suit.

  “I’ll stay here tonight,” Candy said. Candy was speaking to Don. “If you all can call everybody up and get somebody to come over here in the morning.” Candy speaking to Don like that, or maybe it was just being at the hospital, reminded Myrtle of what it was like when the children were born. They knocked her out with the first two (twilight sleep) and gave her a spinal with Sean, even though Don was all for natural childbirth which was “in” by then. “It’s not your body,” Myrtle said to him at the time. She wouldn’t do it. But somehow, since Mother had had a stroke, Myrtle wished she had, she even wished she had felt all that pain. LORDY LORDY MYRTLE IS 40! she thought. But at least she doesn’t look it.

  Candy hugged her again. Then Candy pulled her back a little and looked at her hair.

  “We need to touch up those roots,” Candy said.

  It was nearly dark when Don and Myrtle finally left the hospital. They stopped for a Hardees on the bypass. A thunderstorm had come and gone—you could still smell the ozone in the air. All the lights were off in Miss Elizabeth’s house on the hill, Myrtle mentioned to Don as they passed it, and Don reminded her that Candy said she had already been up there and paid Mrs. Dwight and sent her home and locked up. Myrtle kept feeling like her life had happened to somebody else. Mother’s house looked so small, up at the end of that long stone walk lined with boxwoods, looking down on the whole town. Myrtle used to think it was the biggest, most imposing house in the world. And now she and Don have their own white colonial in Argonne Hills, with thirty-eight hundred square feet, about double Mother’s.

  Sean was not at home. Don called Louise, who hadn’t seen him. Then Don poured them each a glass of white wine. They like Principato. Myrtle tried to reach Theresa at the lake. Then she gave up on that and called Karen, whose computer boyfriend answered, and left a message. Karen says he’s a genius. Then Myrtle called Lacy, who said she’d come right away, and Sybill, who wasn’t home. She called Nettie and Arthur. “Oh Jesus,” Arthur said. Myrtle could tell he’d been drinking. Sean came in and refused to tell Don where he had been. Don treats adolescents all day long and establishes the best rapport. Sean just breaks their hearts. Myrtle was sipping her wine and dialing again when the doorbell rang.

  Don went to the door and there was Sybill, all dressed up as usual—but tonight, she had a wild hard grim look about her.

  Sybill looked exactly the way Myrtle felt.

  “How did you know?” Myrtle asked.

  “Know what?” asked Sybill.

  I hate all this active-listening shit. Ever since they learned it last year in that class, you can’t have a decent conversation with them. If you ever could. But now I mean you come home from school really pissed about something, I mean really pissed, and they say something like, “Gee, son, you’re very angry!” and then if you say “Well, yes, I am pretty goddamn angry” they say “Yes! Yes, you are! I can tell you’re angry!” and that’s it. Then they smile a big faggy smile and go off whistling or something, and you feel like shit. You feel worse than you did before. There must be some other part to it, some part they didn’t learn or the class didn’t get to, like in History the way they never finish the book.

  The thing that really drives me crazy is how everything around here is so perfect and how they’re so nice. They’re just so goddamn understanding all the time. I mean if you leave a glass someplace, anyplace in the house, it gets automatically picked up like suction, and they’re always going around asking you what your feelings are. Theresa and Karen were lucky. They got out of here before everybody got so rich and understanding.

  Take my room. They say it’s your room, right? They say you can do whatever you want in here, you can play your music as loud as you want, whatever. It’s your room. We won’t go in. But then she always does. She goes in and she’s all disappointed and she says Oh, honey, you’ll make yourself sick it’s so dirty, you’ve got to clean it up right away. So you say okay, and you will, but if you don’t do it right that minute, like if you’ve got something else you have to do right then, when you come back she’s gone in there and done it, she’s been all in your private things, so you get pissed, and then she’s all apologetic, and then she gets pissed too. You can’t get any privacy around here. I’d say this is one of the biggest houses in town and you still can’t get any fucking privacy. In your room or in your head. They want to know what you’re thinking all the time. What you’re feeling. I’ll tell you, it’s not like I’m feeling anything particular, if everybody would quit asking me about it. It’s not like I go anyplace either.

  Like that night, all I did was ride over where they’re building that new office park, they’ve got an unloading ramp there that’s real good, it’s almost like a quarter pipe. I ride an aluminum frame PK Ripper with Red Line cranks. Dad says he’s glad to spring for it, right, but then he goes into all this shit about being an orphan. So anyway I was riding up and down this ramp when the wind came up and the sky started getting purple. I love that. Anyway I could see all this terrific-looking sky through the two-by-fours, they have the building all blocked out against the sky. So I started riding up and down it faster and faster and when the rain hit, then I got under the edge of this place where they keep some tools and shit. Then I went by Jimmy Norton’s trailer on the way home. Jimmy’s a guy I used to go to school with before they sent me to the Academy. Jimmy and his little brother were just sitting in there eating white bread out of the loaf and watching a rerun of “Six Million Dollar Man” on TV. They crack me up. So I stayed over there awhile and then I went home and got a lot of shit from Dad for nothing.

  But I have to admit that the rest of the night was pretty interesting. Dad was sipping on his faggy white wine but you could tell he was upset, and Mom was on the telephone. Grandmother had had a stroke, that was the big deal. The old bat. If you think it’s something over here, you ought to go over to her house, which is what they force you to do every Sunday afternoon. I hate it when people get all faggy and old and forgetful and they tell you how much you’ve grown and ask you the same thing about twenty times. They can’t help it, probably, but you don’t want to be around it. They start doing it early too, like when they’re in their thirties. Mom and Dad do it all the time. Anyway that was it, and Mom was calling the whole family on the phone. Dad was giving me some shit for a while but then he kind of quit, you could tell he had his mind on other things. I went up and put on Synchronicity but then when I heard them yelling, I came back down.

  My aunt Sybill was there. She doesn’t like kids, so normally I disappear whenever she comes around. She’s never had any kids herself, never been married either. She’s a real faggy old bat whose best quality is, she lives pretty far away.

  Anyway, this was old Sybill’s big night. I was trying to sneak my ass just quietly down the hall to watch TV in the den when I heard them all yelling. I froze. It made me think of that poem, Chicken Little. Sometimes I think of the weirdest things. But the shit was falling all over the place, man, right out of the fucking sky. It was awesome.

  What Aunt Sybill said was that she had driven over here to ask Grandmother some very important questions, and that she just couldn’t believe Grandmother had gone into a coma before she had a chance to do it.

  “Questions about what?” Mom asked.

  “Never you mind,” said Aunt Sybill.

  “Oh h
onestly, Sybill,” Mom said. “What?”

  “Just something about Jewell Rife,” Aunt Sybill said, and they went on and on, Mom saying well what is it, and Aunt Sybill not ever coming right out and saying what she meant. Me, I never even heard about this Jewell Rife before, who turned out to be some first husband of Grandmother’s back in the dark ages. I figured it was just about time for Aunt Sybill to hit the loony bin. She probably went out of her mind from horniness after all these years.

  “Sybill, you’re being ridiculous,” Mom says. “If you have something to say, say it.”

  “Never you mind, Myrtle,” Aunt Sybill says.

  “Don’t be afraid to say what you feel,” Dad said. “Whatever it is. You’re only harming yourself by keeping your feelings to yourself, Sybill.”

  “Oh, just forget it,” Aunt Sybill said.

  “Here she is, dying, and you come up with this! ” Mom says. She gulped in her breath the way she does when she starts to cry. “I have to say, Sybill, it’s just like you, to make as much trouble as possible for all concerned.” Then Mom started crying.

  “You would say that,” Aunt Sybill said. “You want everything to go your way.”

  “Now let’s not let this get out of perspective,” Dad said. “We’re all upset. Sybill, whatever the problem is, I’m sure Miss Elizabeth can answer your questions when she recovers. I’m sorry you won’t share your problem with Myrtle and me. But let’s get our priorities straight here. Miss Elizabeth is, as we have been trying to convey to you, gravely ill. Jim Grissom says he suspects she may have had a whole series of small strokes which have gone undetected over the last few years. So let’s deal with first things first.” Dad was using his Charlton-Heston-playing-God voice which I hate. He was rattled, though. He sat down in a chair and then he got back up. Mom and Aunt Sybill were standing in the middle of the living room. For the first time I noticed they look alike.

  “I’ll tell you, Myrtle, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but Mother is the only one I can talk to,” Aunt Sybill said.

  “Uh, oh,” Mom said suddenly, in that voice which means she knows I’m listening. “Little pitchers . . . ”

  Jesus.

  “What, Myrtle?” Sybill said.

  “Little pitchers . . . ” Mom said again. See, she never will just come out and say whatever she wants to say. It’s like pulling teeth. She says everything else, see, and you’re just supposed to sort of guess what’s really on her mind. Unless it’s something totally obvious and then she says it five or six times. She really does live in the dark ages. Nobody else in the world would have said “little pitchers,” right?

  I was moving out of there fast, on my way down the hall, when Dad put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Son, this is a family matter,” he said, meaning don’t spread this shit all over school. But I’m cool, I know that. Who wants to talk about their sick grandmother and their crazy aunt Sybill at school? It also pisses me off the way he calls me “son” whenever any big deal comes up, like I’m some generic son in the grocery store. I’m the only son he’s got. Of course my real name, Sean, is faggy. If I could have any name in the world I wanted, it’d be Rick. Ricks are cool. Anyway I said I wouldn’t say anything and Dad said, get this, “Mum’s the word.” I hate it when somebody says something like that, it’s so embarrassing. The worst part is, he doesn’t even know it’s embarrassing. The last thing I saw, before Dad came to close the door where they were, was Mom standing in the middle of the Oriental rug crying and Dad putting his arms around her. Aunt Sybill was standing real straight by the window smoking a cigarette. She looked terrible.

  I watched Magnum and thought about it. Magnum was trying to solve this mystery about two identical twins and one of them had put some dope in a suitcase or something. Somebody had died. I missed the first part. Both of the twins were girls, real foxes. The mystery was, which one was the hooker and which one was the lawyer, I guess. Magnum is real cool. I was thinking, now somebody might die here. Grandmother might up and die. But it didn’t seem real to me. It didn’t seem as real as Magnum. Then a bad guy was warning Magnum by saying, “Watch it, buddy, I’ve got a black belt,” and Magnum said, “Hey, I do too” and pointed to his own belt, and while the guy was looking at it, he hauled off and hit the guy in the face.

  Right above the TV there’s this shelf which holds all Dad’s old shit—his medals, his football trophies, pictures of him on teams. I don’t do any dope, but I refuse to sign up for any teams, see. It kills him. But I can do without teams. And the thing is, he’d like me better if I was an orphan. But it’s too late. I can’t be an orphan, I’m his son. And I can’t be his best friend, either. The thing is, you don’t want your old man to be so good at everything and be your buddy too. He says he wants to be my best friend because his own father was not around to be with him. This pisses me off and makes me crazy. I mean the nicer he is, the more of an asshole I am. The whole thing pisses me off.

  They were still down there arguing when I went to bed. I thought about going down there and saying, “Gee, Mom and Dad! Sounds to me like you’re really angry with Aunt Sybill!”

  That cracked me up.

  I looked at Playboy for a while, all those foxes, and then I got up and got this stupid stuffed dog I got for my birthday one time when I was about seven or eight, don’t ask me why it’s still around. I got this old dog and listened to “Thriller” and thought about Mom and Aunt Sybill yelling. The thing is, and it says this in the stupid P.E.T. book too and it’s really true, I hate to admit it but it’s true, you’re not really angry much, if you get right down to it.

  And I could tell from their voices they were scared.

  Lacy was never prepared for the pain that kept coming over her: pain so bitter it was sweet almost, like a sore tooth which you have to keep touching with your tongue. She had felt it in the hospital as she looked at her mother, still elegant, still small. And it seemed so ironic—because I am her daughter, in a sense, more than the others: more than Sybill, than Myrtle, certainly more than Candy. I am more her daughter in a way she could never understand, since I look, I suppose, so different; and since with her, appearances are everything. But the poetry took, with me. And how very strange, since she could never tell good from bad, poor thing, or see beyond the iron pink palace of niceness and illusion, of should and sweet, which she had constructed around all of us. She never knew any of us, really. I wonder if she ever knew Daddy, or anybody. Anybody at all. I wonder now if anyone ever does—and if we do, if it’s worth it, all the trouble and pain, when it doesn’t last—

  The pain came again as Lacy unlocked her car, got in, and put her hand down on the lever to adjust the seat before she remembered it wasn’t necessary. Nobody else drove this car now. The seat, already perfectly adjusted, felt burning hot on the backs of her bare thighs and somehow this pleased her, to find a real location for her pain. She switched on the ignition, then the air conditioner, waiting for Myrtle to come out and give her directions to the new grocery store. Miss Elizabeth’s condition remained unchanged, so it looked as though Lacy and her daughter Kate would be staying longer than they had thought. Lacy felt a need for supplies, a need to draw her wagons into a circle and prepare for siege. But even after two days of it, two days of being here, nothing had really sunk in yet—not her mother’s illness, not even the fact that she was here: that she had, dutiful daughter indeed, come “home.”

  For years Lacy had tried to put distance—real, emotional, and psychological—between herself and Booker Creek. Somehow this changed when Jack left her. It was no longer possible. She really thought she had struggled free of her childhood, of that shell that never quite fit, only to find, when Jack left, that she was caught fast in another sort of shell altogether. It was Jack’s shell; Jack had made it and made her, fashioned her, too, in a way, but now Jack was gone. It’s worse to be abandoned if you were first rescued. Then you have nothing left except a void
. Empty space. Lacy felt raw, exposed, vulnerable. She could not seem to get her bearings.

  She knew she’d get lost trying to find this new Piggly Wiggly, for instance. She knew she’d get lost even with Kate in the car, or especially with Kate in the car, and they’d have a regrettable scene. Kate was having her first period. Lacy was having an anxiety attack, a mild one, as she sat in her car in her mother’s long driveway waiting for Kate, waiting for Myrtle. She could hear Myrtle’s voice drifting from the open back door of Mother’s house as Myrtle talked on the telephone, dealing tactfully, calmly, cheerfully with yet another of Miss Elizabeth’s friends who had called to ask how she was “holding up.” It seemed to Lacy that her mother’s friends did nothing but call each other on the telephone all day long, greedy for medical gossip. Lacy hated to talk to them. She hated to answer the phone in her mother’s house.

  In fact this was the strangest thing of all, to be staying here at Mother’s while Mother was in the hospital. Lacy felt like an interloper, a snoop, and sometimes—most unsettling of all—exactly like the malcontent, unhappy child she used to be. Sometimes it was as if all those years with Jack, the Jack years as she called them in her mind now, had never happened; sometimes it was as if she had never grown up.

  Lacy had been nervous when she arrived, and all the clutter in her mother’s house made her more nervous: she wanted to sweep her arm wildly across the surfaces of things, clearing off lamps, lace doilies, framed photographs of the adorable children they never really were, china ashtrays, ceramic animals, cut glass. Instead, for the past two days, she had been pacing through these cluttered rooms nervously, smoking cigarettes, or sitting at the hospital, smoking more cigarettes, or sitting out at the One Stop with Nettie and crazy Fay, drinking Coke, or sitting with Myrtle and Don in that house Myrtle was so proud of, among the ferns and wicker, the lime green and hot pink, drinking daiquiris which Don “whipped up” in the blender. At least, thank God, Sybill was not staying at Mother’s too. For some mysterious reason of her own, she had taken a room at the Holiday Inn, which was a relief. It was clear to Lacy—clear to them all—that Sybill had something on her mind, but she wouldn’t say what it was, nor would she leave Miss Elizabeth’s bedside. Two days had passed since the stroke, and Miss Elizabeth did not improve, and Sybill almost never left her. Lacy had begun to wonder about Sybill’s stability; Don and Myrtle, too, were concerned. But who’s to say: Lacy wondered about her own stability, for that matter. Well, whatever happened, Myrtle and Don would certainly take care of it.