Family Linen by Lee Smith Page A

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.
    â€œTurn left at the old Raven Rock cutoff,” Myrtle said now, giving directions. “You know, where we used to go out to the quarry.”
    Myrtle stood in Mother’s driveway looking good. Looking young, blond, content, prosperous—looking, however, a little less certain of the nature of things than she used to. Lacy has always been not so much annoyed as simply astonished by Myrtle and Don: by their enormous blond beauty, their possessions, their health, their absolute invincible belief in human perfectibility. Their blandness. They are people like pound cake, like vanilla pudding. She used to feel—and still felt, post-Jack—that she could never talk to them about politics, or values, or money, or anything. Myrtle, however, had developed lines at the corners of her eyes now which Lacy thought she recognized—lines she knew something about. They had been drinking sherry together earlier that afternoon, sitting around the oak table in front of the old floor fan in their mother’s kitchen. Miss Elizabeth kept nothing stronger than sherry in the house.
    â€œDo you think you should go like that?” Myrtle asked. “Like that” meant that Lacy was wearing her cut-off blue jeans. It meant that she—like Myrtle—was almost forty. Lacy chose to ignore this remark. Kate ran out