Family Linen

by Lee Smith

  And there was Don on the sidewalk to ask her, taking care of it. Taking care of business. Like Elvis. Elvis pitched a fit at his own mother’s death. In fact he used to keep chickens at Graceland because his mother liked to throw them corn. Candy can see that. And Don, if she told him, could see that too. Elvis had a sense of family. Don does too, which is funny, since it’s not even his family. Not his own blood kin. Or maybe it isn’t funny. Arthur can’t do it, he’s too delicate and too drunk, he’s got a bad heart, and Nettie’s old now, with her own hands full. Somebody has got to do things. When a hole comes in a family, somebody has got to come forward and fill it. Somebody has to get on the telephone, make arrangements. Don is the orphan, the one from no family, and yet he’s the one with more of a sense of it than anyone else.

  “We’ll keep this in the family,” he said to Sybill at the hospital, said to all of them. “You can hold your tongue now,” he said, and Sybill did. She was probably glad to. It’s a terrible thing the way most women—well, most people, really—want to be told what to do. Candy runs into that. Sometimes she tells them. They ask her, and she tells them and sometimes they do it, or not. She’s not a person who likes to tell them, but they ask. They like to be told. It’s all in her line of work. Or it might be that they just want somebody to listen, and that’s all. Because there’s nobody at home to listen to them, so often that’s all. That’s finally what shut up Sybill. “We hear you, Sybill,” said Don. Sybill put on some lipstick then and drove herself back to the motel. Maybe that’s all she wanted.

  So Don took Myrtle and Theresa home, and took Lacy up to Miss Elizabeth’s, and Nettie took Arthur. Candy came on home by herself, which is the way she likes it. You get spoiled, after a while. You need your time.

  Candy came back, and Doris was straightening up, and she told her to go on home and said she’d close up herself. Doris left. Doris said she was sorry about Miss Elizabeth. Doris is a sweet heavy girl from out in the valley, saving up to go to beauty school, with the prettiest, whitest teeth. She sweeps up and shampoos. Candy hopes she will keep on saving, and actually go, and rise up in the world. A woman needs something to do. But Doris has a boyfriend, so you can’t tell. Kids around here get married so fast, they can’t see beyond the back seat of a car. They can’t see the trap. Well, it doesn’t look like a trap, then. Candy couldn’t see it either, nobody can. And you can’t tell them.

  Doris finished and left. The phone was ringing. Candy let it ring. She knew it was about Mother, everybody in town wanting to know. Two people had already come over, she saw, and left food on the counter, all wrapped up. People in Booker Creek are real thoughtful and sweet. It was a macaroni salad, with English peas and pimientos in it, and a sour-cream pound cake. “From the Kitchen of Holly Sue McCready” said a little sticker on the foil around the pound cake. Candy couldn’t see how people already knew. Doris had known already, too. Candy wasn’t sure who the macaroni salad was from. She has done Holly Sue McCready’s hair for fifteen years, she remembers when it got so thin after she had the twins. They ordered her a partial wig then, from California. Candy remembers everything. You have to.

  Well. She put the macaroni salad and the pound cake in the refrigerator she keeps there, in back of the shop. She put the pound cake next to Lydia’s bean sprouts and cottage cheese. Lydia is real skinny and real young. She talks a mile a minute. Lydia’s all ready for the punk look, she can’t wait for it to hit Booker Creek. She can’t wait for somebody to come in and tell her to give them a Mohawk and dye it green. Fat chance! Candy tells her. She’s got ladies that still want a bubble, or a French twist. Lydia isn’t long for Booker Creek. She’s read too many magazines—and Candy straightened the magazines. Redbook, McCalls, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s, Town and Country, Gourmet, Ladies’ Home Journal, you name it, she’s got it. Candy’s ladies save them and bring them in.

  It calms her, closing up. You’re one step nearer the grave when your mother dies. Nobody standing in between you and the great beyond, as Miss Elizabeth herself would have said. Candy used to get so mad because her mother always had another word, a fancier word, for whatever it was. Not Candy. She calls a spade a spade. But the older she gets, the more she understands that about her mother. She’ll make her look real pretty too, the way she would have wanted it. Candy’s got taste. She’s not morbid, either. She can do it. Dying doesn’t scare her, but all she’s got time for’s the here and now, which is plenty enough, and more than enough, for her. She straightened the magazines, checked the dryers, put all the brushes in the solution, put the towels in the bag for the laundry. She has a pale-pink-and-gray décor. She loves the way it smells, in a shop. That was the first thing that got her about it, in fact, in addition to the fact that she has always liked hair. The smell calms her, now. It’s perfume, and shampoo, and formaldehyde. After she gives a permanent, she sprays pine Lysol in the air, so there’s that, too. It’s sweet, but there’s an edge to it. Candy likes that. She went around with a bag and got what she needed, and closed up. She has rose-pink shag carpet on the floor. It took her a long time to get her own shop. She had it planned right down to the carpet by then.

  “Are you sure you want to do it?” Don asked again.

  They stood outside on the sidewalk in the sticky heat. People were passing by. “Hey, Dr. Don, hey, Candy,” they said. The mercury vapor streetlight on the corner came on then, soft and sort of slow the way it does, magical. Growing up, Tammy always said it was magical. Tammy’s real artistic. The light is lavender. Don looked old.

  “I’ve done it before,” Candy said.

  Mrs. Vance Bristol came up and grabbed her elbow. “Honey, I’m just so sorry,” she said, “if there’s anything I can do—” Candy said no, but thanks, and watched her click off down the street in her spike heels. Fashion takes a long time to get to Booker Creek, in spite of influences such as magazines and little Lydia Nicewander. Suetta Bristol has worn shoes like that for twenty years, and she used to look good in them. She’d bring a ham, Candy knew, probably take it up to Mother’s or over to Myrtle’s. Suetta Bristol is famous for her baked hams which she always takes to the family when somebody dies. She bastes them with Coke and orange juice.

  “I’m just going up to change first,” Candy told Don. She lives over her shop, where she’s lived for years. After a while, it’s hard to move or change. Your habits set in. It might have been that some time back, she might have—but you can’t tell. Time passes. There’s some things you’ll never know.

  He looked so tired. “Can I come up there, Candy?” he asked.

  She looked both ways on the street. They’d been at this for twenty years. “Well,” she said.

  Candy went up the stairs and after a few minutes, he came too. She poured him some gin in a jelly glass and he stood by the window, looking down on the street, to drink it. He wore khaki pants and a navy linen jacket, with a striped tie. White shoes. Candy always gets a kick out of the way Don looks here, in her apartment. Probably she ought to straighten up. But she keeps her shop straight, so she likes to let things go at home. Don doesn’t fit, he looks funny in her apartment, he’s never said one word about it. Maybe by now he likes it. Don sipped his drink and looked out the window.

  You can see everything. Right across the street is Hardison’s Hardware, and then the Family Shop in what used to be Millard Cline’s Florist, years ago, and the bank on the corner, and the dimestore’s next on the corner across from the bank. It’s gone down, since Verner Hess died. In front of the hardware is a wooden stand that has tomato plants on it, and marigolds, and rosebushes, and a high-school boy out watering them with the hose. On down the street is the jewelry store and Bickman’s furniture store and an office supply, and you can see the steeple on the Episcopal church beyond that, and then the old houses that have been made over into lawyers’ and doctors’ offices, like the old Harrison house, which is OB-GYN. The Smith house is now the Cardinal Te
aroom, put in by Lou Durgin’s son who was an alcoholic in New York and came back home. At the far end of the street is Miss Elizabeth’s up on the hill. Candy lives right here. The streetlight makes a lavender pool on the sidewalk that’s magical, Tammy said.

  Don said, “Do you remember that time when we were all up at Miss Elizabeth’s for Thanksgiving dinner and Karen and Tammy got under the dining-room table and nobody could find them? Remember how we sent all the other kids out in the yard, looking? We really thought they were lost,” he said.

  Candy said, “The corn pudding burned.”

  Don said, “I remember.” Their girls when they were little looked alike, with yellow hair. She used to French braid it. It’s funny. She’s known Don a long, long time, since high school. It’s been infrequent. There was a time when she was married, and a time when she thought Gray Justice would marry her. She’s known other men, off and on. Don has never said a word, or minded. Well, how could he? But you know, deep down, he could. You know what men expect. Except for Don, who is different, who is a genuinely good man. He loves his wife and family, he works on it. He is a man who does right. Sometimes Candy thinks he works on it too hard.

  And as for her, Don says she’s the wild card in his deck. He never meant for it to happen, or to continue. Candy believes this. Often, they’ll go months, or years, between. It’s up to him. She’s here. And it has suited her, too, since she doesn’t want a regular man—Candy likes men, but she doesn’t want one. She’s beyond making plans, or fixing up the house, or asking somebody what they think about something in the paper. She knows that’s what most people want. But not her. She knows what it can be, after all. And she and Don are like an old pair of shoes, real comfortable, back in the closet. Don’s different here. Here, he says, he lets down his hair. He doesn’t have to get ahead in the world, or figure anything out.

  “Candy, Candy,” he said.

  She had her slip on. She came back up behind him and put her arm around his stomach. Don used to be real skinny, in high school. Then he got sort of heavy. Now he’s real trim, he runs three miles a day. Myrtle goes to Total Woman health spa, but Candy doesn’t do a thing. She’s too busy working, that’s a fact. Plus she really doesn’t care.

  “Every time somebody dies, I feel like they’re dying twice,” Don said. “When Verner died, it almost killed me, because it made me miss my own father. I guess because I never knew him. It was like two deaths. And now it’s the same way with Miss Elizabeth. It makes me miss what I didn’t have, kind of like the way they say a leg still aches when it’s been cut off.”

  “Hush, Don,” Candy said. She has yet to meet a man who didn’t try to talk too much. And Don is into this—relating, he calls it. Expressing his feelings.

  Her own feelings went like this—in about ten minutes she had to go over to the funeral home and fix her mother’s hair and makeup so she could lie in her coffin looking good until they buried her, the next day. The coffin cost fourteen hundred dollars, paid for by Dr. Don. Candy planned to put a White Mink rinse on Miss Elizabeth’s hair, to tone down the yellow. And hugging Don from behind, she thought, I wouldn’t mind it, you know, right now. There’s a link between somebody dying and this. But we both know better, we know what’s right. Don finished his drink and straightened his tie, and kissed her. It was businesslike. He was on his way home, and nervous.

  Candy was a little nervous too. She kept trying things on, deciding what to wear. This was not like her. I’ll have to see people at the funeral home, she was thinking. She couldn’t just wear what she usually did, a smock and slacks, or a uniform. Finally she put on a pale blue pants suit.

  She parked between two hearses in the back, and Mr. Gurney Fletcher let her in. Gurney Fletcher is a big man, maybe two fifty, two sixty, with fat red cheeks. Every Christmas, he’s Santa in the Shriners Parade. The children in town all say he looks like a pig, and he does. Gurney Fletcher, Jr., Little Gurney, who is Tony’s age and played on the junior-high football team with him, is just as bad. He used to sit at Candy’s kitchen table, eating peanut-butter-and-marshmallow-creme sandwiches. Little Gurney stood right behind his daddy, both of them sweating, wearing suits.

  “Hello, Mrs. Snipes,” Little Gurney said. He’s already losing his hair.

  “Come in, Candy honey,” said Gurney Fletcher.

  Candy had been there, before. She had fixed up old Tyler Balsam, and Mrs. Clarence Wampler, and Janette Little who died in a wreck by the Chicken Bridge. The boy who was driving, Hugh Roberts, never got over it. Janette Little was real hard to do, but it meant a lot to her mother, who has been one of Candy’s ladies for years. The saddest one she ever did was Juanita and Ted Sizemore’s little girl who was born with a hole in her heart. Why does this stuff happen? you ask yourself. The answer is, you don’t know.

  Miss Elizabeth was wearing her gray voile dress with the white lace collar and cuffs, which Lacy and Myrtle had picked out. The dress had a spray of silk violets at the collar. Her hands were folded on the little white Bible she kept by her bed. That was a real nice touch, Candy thought, but she’d have to work on her nails. They had asked the Fletchers to put stockings and shoes on her too, even though she’d be covered from the waist on down. It didn’t seem right not to, although Gurney had told them that most people don’t have it done. Somebody was singing “Mister Sandman” on Gurney Fletcher’s FM radio.

  “Well, what do you think?” Gurney said.

  Candy reached over and took off her mother’s glasses. She looked funny without them, blank and soft, old. After a woman reaches a certain age, you can tell what she’s like by the lines on her face. Miss Elizabeth’s face looked sad in death, and sweet. Not angry, or mean—Candy has seen that, too. Just soft and sad and kind of worn out. It’s hard to be a good woman. “You all have done a real good job, Gurney,” she said.

  And it was neat as a pin in that back room where they worked. He had her coffin on a kind of a little cart, wheeled over to a table where Candy could spread out her stuff, which she did. Gurney and Little Gurney and their assistant, Ralph Joiner, stood back and talked about fishing while she worked, to put her at her ease. Candy had known what to bring, but she hadn’t known what to expect. About her mother, that is. The main thing was the thing which is always true and which you always tend to forget. Miss Elizabeth was dead. Her spirit was gone. Her flesh was flesh, like it all is, only a little bit more like modeling clay. You could make, and Candy did, a bit of a smile, the way for instance Miss Elizabeth might have smiled to glance down and see a flower in her yard.

  Candy covered up her face and got to work. She used the dry shampoo, then a little White Mink to dull out the yellow, then she sprayed on Redken Airset and blew it dry. Then she set her magnetic rollers, as usual, thinking that hair is a funny thing—it’s not like flesh. It doesn’t change in death. It’s the most vital organ of the body by a long shot. It’s the most responsive. You can damage hair any way you want and it will still come back as healthy as it ever was. It will grow after death. It’s one of the great mysteries. Along with death. Candy has always been good with hair. And sometimes she thinks she was born knowing all about death, too, which might be why she’s lived like she has. She took the rollers out, took the towel off, and combed her out around the face and at the crown and the sides, where people could see, and then sprayed her. She did her nails, Dusty Mauve, and cleaned her glasses, and did her makeup. She put her glasses back on. The radio was playing Willie Nelson, “Georgia on My Mind.” By then Candy’s hands were shaking. Gurney was telling Ralph Joiner about a sand shark he caught one time at Myrtle Beach. Candy was glad they were in there.

  Then Gurney came over and did a better job of folding her hands on the Bible, intertwining her fingers. The Dusty Mauve looked real pretty. He said he’d take off her rings right before he closed the coffin, and give them to the family. He said he always did that.

  “She looks real nice,” he said. “Most peop
le put too much blush on. They think it makes them look more alive but it don’t,” he said.

  Candy said, “No.”

  She could hear people already coming in the front. They had switched the radio to religious. She could smell the flowers. Miss Elizabeth was a lady, and she looked like a lady in death. She had lived, Candy reckoned. She had had children, she had felt things, thought things, she had died. She had loved one man, and another man had loved her. It’s hard to say which of those conditions is better, or worse. Sometimes, neither one of them happens. That’s probably the worst. Candy knows—she’s heard it all. But Mother had had a life. And as for God, what she believed in, Candy couldn’t tell you. She’s not the type to say a word about God. Mother looked peaceful, at rest, the way you’re supposed to. Not all of them do. While she was alive, she was worried so much of the time—about money, about what people would think, about her children. Miss Elizabeth and Candy never saw eye to eye. They were natural strangers. They couldn’t help it. Candy has turned out different from what her mother hoped. There was a time when Candy had to get out, to get away, or she would have died. Died. There were other times, too. Well. Candy thinks back on those times now and it seems crazy how upset she was, it seems like another person. But it was her. Candy used to get so upset, she used to hate Miss Elizabeth. She took off her mother’s glasses and put a little silver liner right along the lashline. She was certainly a lady, you know she couldn’t have killed Jewell Rife, no matter what Sybill thinks she saw. Sybill is crazy anyway, it’s just like her to try and spoil everything. Don told Sybill he would deal with it in due time. Then he made her promise to shut up about it.