Family Linen

by Lee Smith

  Over All

  God is good and God is light

  In this faith I rest secure,

  Evil can but serve the right,

  Over all shall love endure.

  JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

  Alone on the loveseat in the bay window, Lacy closes her mother’s journal. Then she stands up, stretches, and goes to put the journal in the front hall beneath her own purse. No one else seems interested. Myrtle and Don have said they’d like to read it later; Lacy doubts that this day will ever come, but she’ll keep it for them, and for her own Kate. None of them would know what to make of it right now. Actually, the only person Lacy knows who would be able to appreciate this journal is Jack, her own wacky Jack: that fool. Lacy sighs, running her hands through her sandy hair. She can hear them all in the kitchen talking, eating lunch. But she’s not hungry. She stands at the parlor door looking in at the stickers on everything. She sighs again and then thinks of something. She wipes her palms, suddenly damp, on her skirt as she hurries through the hall and into the dining room where the old breakfront stands, its door wide open, its contents spread about the room. They’re still not through with the cut glass, or with the china. One problem is that no one knows how much anything is really worth. Sybill swears that this big blue platter, for instance, the willoware, is worth as much as two or three of the prettier ironstone platters, because the willoware was made in occupied Japan. Can this be true? Or is it merely that Sybill wants the ironstone? Clinus won’t come to tell them, since he has agoraphobia. They have to consult him by phone. Lacy goes over to the breakfront and runs her fingers along the dark smooth wood, pressing. Nothing at the front, the sides—no, wait a second. That fretwork panel, around the bottom . . . Lacy presses again, and the panel swings open. And there it is, her grandfather’s silver-handled revolver after all, and after all these years.

  Kate, passing through the dining room with a Coke, stops dead in her tracks. “Oh wow, Mom, let’s see that,” she says, and Lacy hands it to her very carefully.

  “It might be still loaded,” Lacy says, pointing the barrel down, and Kate grasps it gingerly.

  “How’d you know it was going to be there?” she asks. “In that little place?”

  “Your grandmother mentions it in her journal,” Lacy says. “It belonged to her father.”

  “So that’s my—”

  “Great-grandfather,” Lacy says.

  “Oh wow!” Kate turns the revolver over in her hands and then goes running back into the kitchen and comes out with Sean, whose whole face lights up when he sees it.

  “You mean this is real?” He picks it up too, and points it, sighting down his arm out the window. Lacy is amused that his first reaction is to point it, while Kate’s is to examine.

  “I’d like to have this,” Sean says immediately.

  Lacy laughs. “I’m sure you would, honey. But it’s part of the estate, and so it has to be thrown into the pot along with everything else we’re dividing. Besides, it’s probably really valuable, I should imagine. It must be real old. We’ll have to ask Clinus about it.”

  Sean whistles through his teeth, shaking his head. He wears cut-off jeans and an Ocean Pacific T-shirt, and checkered vans. “It sure is pretty,” he says.

  “Go show it to your daddy,” Lacy tells him. “Nobody’s seen it yet but us.”

  Sean and Kate leave the room and then, because it bothers her to see it standing open, after all those private years, Lacy closes the compartment door in the side of the breakfront, and goes into the kitchen for lunch.

  Sean and Kate are not here, having gone to look for Don, presumably, but there’s a kind of quiver in the air which lets Lacy know they just left. It’s that energy they both have, that they carry with them everywhere, they’re almost literally radiating with it, both of them. Bill doesn’t have it, Lacy thinks, he’s a calmer child, a more disciplined child, getting up at five to swim all those laps, making A’s, staying right now with Susan, whom he probably likes just fine. Bill’s an easygoing, adjustable child. He likes most people just fine. Susan’s face is very dim in Lacy’s memory right now, but Bill’s face glows sharp and bright in her mind, like the face of some sweet young animal. Lacy balls her hands up into fists and fights back tears, Bill just kills her. She misses him. Kate and Sean, on the other hand, are children like Candy and Arthur were, the kind of kids that can walk in a room and chairs fall over for no apparent reason, kids who never clean up their rooms and give the substitute teachers hell, and don’t get along with anyone’s parents.

  “Come on in here and have a sandwich, honey, you look all done in,” Candy says from the round table, and Lacy comes and sits down in the chair.

  “You know what I’ve got here.” Candy’s grinning, eating an enormous sandwich.

  “What?” Then Lacy remembers. Candy always used to make sandwiches out of the leftover turkey and cold dressing, with mayonnaise. Her sandwich looks wonderful.

  “I think I’ll try one,” Lacy says, pulling the turkey platter and the mayonnaise jar across the table.

  “It’s nothing but fat and cholesterol,” Sybill warns. She’s fixed herself a salad, and nibbles at it daintily. “Also I’ve read that if you don’t take the dressing out of the turkey cavity right away it’ll poison you. I wouldn’t touch that dressing with a ten-foot pole,” Sybill says. Mrs. Newsome, down the hill, brought the stuffed turkey up here two days ago. It’s good, too.

  Lacy spreads dressing flamboyantly, in lumpy swirls, across a piece of white bread, something she never has in her house in Chapel Hill, where she keeps only whole wheat and rye. Jack was a health nut. And Lacy’s lover was a vegetarian whose idea of a really good meal was a baked potato with sprouts and cottage cheese on top of it. Lacy realizes that she’s thinking of her lover in the past tense now. She smiles, putting more mayonnaise on top of the dressing, then slices of turkey. Dark meat, which has more flavor. She grins at Candy, then at Arthur, who opens three beers and brings them over.

  “None for me, thanks,” Sybill says too brightly, too politely. She’s right at the end of her rope, a place she recognizes, a place she’s been before.

  Lacy says, “And as for cholesterol, I just don’t care. When you’re going through a major trauma, you can eat anything, you never gain an ounce.” In fact, she thinks she’s lost weight since the funeral, in spite of all the wonderful food she’s been eating.

  And so has Myrtle, which is not surprising, since she never seems to sit down or eat a bite. Myrtle sails through the kitchen right now looking distracted, stopping only long enough to take a Diet Coke from the refrigerator. She lives on Diet Cokes, which just came out, and Merit menthols. Myrtle looks so worried—Candy and Lacy eat their turkey-and-dressing sandwiches and drink their beer, but Myrtle zooms on through the house to the parlor where she sinks down upon the old velvet sofa in some confusion. She doesn’t understand herself, these days. Don doesn’t understand her, either. Don has said they need to take the Couples Communication Course again, which is true, but there are a lot of things on her mind lately which Myrtle doesn’t want to communicate to Don. Anyway, the Couples Communication Course won’t be offered until September. A lot can happen between now and then. Myrtle’s mind goes reeling, as she tries to imagine what these things might be. She almost had a heart attack and died on the spot, for instance, right in the middle of counting silver teaspoons, when Gary Vance showed up at the door this morning in his pest-control suit. It was entirely too much like mental telepathy—because to tell the truth, Myrtle had been thinking about him. She’d even gone out there, much to her own astonishment.

  She could tell you exactly when it started, when Gary Vance burst back into her mind which he hadn’t crossed in days and certainly not since her mother’s death—it was in Mr. Constantine’s office yesterday afternoon, at the precise moment Don announced that they would move into her mother’s house right away. Well, to be
gin with, she was just amazed! Hasn’t she spent the last three years decorating her own home in Argonne Hills until now it’s nearly perfect? How could Don imagine that she’d even consider living in this old place which needs so many repairs—and just imagine the fuel bill, with these high ceilings! But Don, surprisingly, was adamant—when Myrtle buttonholed him outside Mr. Constantine’s office, perfectly furious, to say what she really thought—which she couldn’t do at the time, she’d never make a scene in front of everybody—well, Don was just adamant, that’s all.

  “Listen, honey,” he said firmly, “that house has been in the family for almost a hundred years. We can’t let it go. And I believe she knew we wouldn’t—she trusted us to take care of it, and restore it, which we’ll do. And modernize it too, of course, don’t worry!” Here, Don pinched Myrtle’s thin cheek. “We’ll put in a whole new kitchen, a new washer and dryer, central air, whatever you want. You just name it. The sky’s the limit, baby!” said Dr. Don.

  And Myrtle simply didn’t know what to do then. She loves to be married to a man who can say, “The sky’s the limit, baby,” and mean it. But Don has no idea at all of the work involved, the work she’ll have to do while he’s at his clinic curing acne and taking off warts. She’ll be the one who has to deal with the contractor and call the electrician and drive to Roanoke for fixtures. “I’m just not up to it,” Myrtle said. They stood on the blazing-hot sidewalk downtown, outside Mr. Constantine’s office.

  Don looked at his wife carefully, lovingly, paying her that rapt attention which she never could resist. Then he put his arm around her. “You’re just upset about her death,” he said. “But don’t worry, I’ll make all the initial arrangements, you can pick up the slack in a week or so.”

  Don, always a go-getter, has become a man possessed. His graying blond hair seems to stand almost straight up and crinkle, giving off sparks. He looks ready for anything, like an astronaut. He looks like John Glenn, in fact, instead of George Peppard . . .

  “I’d like to get the pool put in right away so we can use it this summer,” he said.

  Myrtle wanted to tell thim that their things, the things they have now, like the king-size bed and the wicker conversation set with its lime-green and pink cushions, these things will never do in her mother’s house. It’s not Myrtle’s style, it’s just not. She’s entirely too young for such an old house. They’ll have to have a garage sale. And how can he assume that she can handle a whole new house anyway, when she keeps locking herself out of her own? But Don doesn’t know about that, Myrtle reminds herself.

  “I want to take the driveway on around the back and down the other side, full circle,” Don said, opening the car door for her, carefully closing it. “Like that house in Atlanta that I showed you in Southern Living.”

  And he talked on and on and on about her mother’s house, as they drove home, but Myrtle just couldn’t follow it, her mind skipping back, oddly, to Gary Vance. When Don detailed plans for a gazebo, she thought of the mole in the small of Gary’s back. When Don mentioned a deck off the kitchen, then steps down to the patio, she remembered a little dark spot, a kind of a fleck, in Gary’s left eye.

  So she lied like a rug, as she said to herself triumphantly, she was so smooth, making up a grocery list and then telling Don that she just had to run out to the Piggly Wiggly. He didn’t even seem to notice, sketching plans for the pool and the driveway on a tablet, figuring things on his pocket computer. Myrtle went into the downstairs bathroom and washed her face and put on new makeup. In spite of the strain she’d been under during these last few days, she thought she looked fine. She covered the shadows under her eyes with Germaine Monteil Hides Anything and then considered her face critically. Losing a few pounds had given her some cheekbones, at least. Myrtle put a little extra blush on her new cheekbones and left, swinging her purse, calling back to Don, who was too wrapped up in his own plans to answer.

  Then she drove furiously, recklessly, out the interstate to Gary’s house, past the One Stop, past the Cash ’N Carry and the Happy Times Day Care Center, careening into Gary’s littered driveway in a cloud of dust. The ground out there was parched and hard, and no grass grew. The familiar termite car was gone. She’d missed him. Myrtle braked abruptly, turned off the ignition, put her head down on her steering wheel, and wept. He had said, “Come back if you want to,” and she was here, but he was not. And his house was as awful as ever—more awful, in fact, the aqua cinderblocks glowing in the late afternoon sun, Clorox bottles and cat-food cans scattered in the weeds. Who had a cat? Probably some former tenant. Gary Vance might be a former tenant himself now, for all she knew. She felt no connection with this place.

  But yet some force propelled her from her car, out into the heat, and across the yard to the door which she knew was always unlocked, and so she went, and opened it, and stood for a minute in Gary’s living room. If you could call this living! There was the armchair with the saucepan under it, the TV on the floor, newspapers scattered about. There was the odd pale water stain on the far wall, where the roof leaked. Myrtle wanted him so bad she thought she couldn’t stand it, she thought she would die at first, staring at that water stain, as waves of horrible longing came over her, leaving her all weak and washed out from desire. “You’re crazy,” Myrtle said to herself, which didn’t help at all. Gary Vance himself seemed suddenly secondary to her love for him. In fact she couldn’t really remember exactly what he looked like, just those odd bits of him, that speck in his eye, the mole on his back, his bony feet. All spring and summer, he went barefoot. If he had been there, he’d be barefoot. But he wasn’t. Myrtle stood for a while in Gary Vance’s living room looking out his picture window at trucks roaring by on the interstate. She felt as light and insubstantial as the dust that turned in the sunlight that came through the glass.

  All the times she’d ever been here were impossible, all the chances she’d taken, the guilt she’d felt. The first four or five times, Myrtle had been quite sure she’d left her iron on, back in Argonne Hills, and that her whole house would be a blackened smoking pile of rubble when she returned. And yet she’d stayed, and yet it wasn’t . . . ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are gone. This memory made Myrtle smile, but it all seemed so long ago. Well, she had no more business here. She knew it then as surely as she had known she’d marry Don, after their first date. Whatever it was, it was over. What had gotten into her? What was she doing, standing here in an empty house? Myrtle felt so thankful to have missed him that she blessed her lucky stars all the way home, and drove carefully, waving at Clinus when she passed the One Stop. His billboard said REST IN PEACE.

  That’s why it was so shocking for Gary Vance to show up this morning at Mother’s. Did he know she’d gone out to his house yesterday? Had she left anything there, so he could tell? At least he’d had the sense to wear his pest-control suit. Does he want her back, or does he simply want to let her know he’s here, if she wants him . . . maybe he just plans to show up forever, year after year, wherever she is. Then Myrtle decides, looking around her mother’s parlor, that if she does need an exterminator, she’ll just get Orkin to come over from Buncoe. A licensed firm is always best, and the sky’s the limit, as Don says. But she can’t imagine her big glass coffee table in this room.

  “Myrtle, can you come here a minute?” It’s Lacy in the door, looking harassed, and so Myrtle gets up and follows her sister into the dining room where Candy and Sybill are arguing over a pink glass pitcher.

  “It’s Depression glass,” Sybill says. “It’s worth a lot. A lot more than this whole dessert set, for instance, which is relatively new.”

  “You just want that dessert set,” Candy says.

  Wait a minute! “Actually, I think I ought to get the dessert set anyway,” Myrtle says, “since Don and I gave it to Mother in the first place. We gave it to her for Christmas 1976.”

  “I didn’t think we were going to do it
that way.” Sybill’s tone is very aggrieved. “If that’s the case, then I ought to get that blouse which you gave to Elva Pope, to remember Mother by.”

  “It wouldn’t fit you,” Candy says.

  “That’s beside the point,” says Sybill firmly.

  “Do you really want the dessert set?” Candy asks Myrtle.

  The truth is, Myrtle doesn’t know. She just doesn’t know. What she really wants is a cigarette, but they’re in the kitchen.

  Lacy runs her hands through her hair. “Let’s go call Clinus,” she suggests, “and ask him about Depression glass and occupied Japan.”

  “You can take my word for it,” Sybill says firmly, to nobody, as Candy and Lacy and Myrtle head for the kitchen. Her words hang in the air like cartoon words. Sybill puts a sticker on the dessert set and follows them into the kitchen where Arthur sits at the round table drinking and dreaming of his own blond Alta who often merges in his mind these days with Mrs. Palucci, and then Lacy is dialing, and the phone rings and rings at the One Stop where Clinus can’t hear it, over the barking of his dog, and Nettie doesn’t even bother to answer, she’s so busy helping Clinus to look for Fay, who has, of all things, disappeared!