Chapter 8 #2
“She’s worried about you, Frances. Along with a few other things.” I wasn’t looking forward to admitting our embarrassing circumstances, especially to somebody who wouldn’t even read our letters. “I told her I’d come check on you and we could celebrate your birthday.”
She smiled. It was fierce. “But my birthday’s not for another three weeks,” she said, her words like tight little bubbles popping in the air.
I smiled back and let her squirm over that a second. I’d be staying only as long as it took to get this sorted out. “I meant, we could celebrate it early.”
Frances picked up one of my uneaten sandwiches but put it back down. Raising her neck up, she said over the sink counter, “Picador, you and Polly go on and start cleaning up the table now. I don’t want the house a mess all day.”
Polly murmured, “Yessum,” and went out the swinging door, but Picador kept right on with drying a blue-and-white gravy dish, getting in every crevice and seam, then pulled a stool over and, standing up on her tippy-toes, placed it high in a cupboard.
Only then did she dry her hands one last time and stroll out, opening the swinging door wide so it went flap flap flap.
My sister’s mouth pinched. It was marvelous to watch.
“Don’t get me wrong, Birdie. I really do miss all y’all down in Footely.”
“Mmm, I’m pretty sure you would’ve read our letters if that was true.”
“What I’m saying is, if you’re planning on staying awhile, there some things you need to understand.”
“Fine, understand me then. And then I want to change out of these clothes.” My dress felt like sandpaper on my chafed skin.
“It’s not like it was back home, here. Things are—they’re different for me now, Bird.
The Tartts are respected people, they have stature.
And they’ve been places, to Europe and Africa.
Rory’s daddy was a very well-known businessman.
He started one of the biggest banks in Oxford.
” She batted her long lashes as if waiting on a congratulations from me, and what did she expect me to say, Good job?
You must’ve worked very hard to marry a man whose daddy worked very hard?
“Believe me, Franny, we’re all very happy you married somebody with money,” I said. “You have no idea how happy we are.” I wiped a splatter of mud off the lap of my dress with my napkin. “Though I’m still waiting on Daddy’s coffin to explode because you married a banker.”
“I can’t help it if Rory’s family is so important,” she said, and while she might not’ve been too happy to see me, she sure was happy to have somebody to say that to. “That’s why you can’t just show up here out of the blue looking like we’re poor country hicks or something.”
“We are not poor,” I said. Actually, we were now. But before this year, I would never have called us poor.
Frances laughed at this without laughing; it was more of a snort. “Oh yes we are. Compared to the Tartts, we most certainly are poor. His mama treats me like I come from Podunk, Mississippi.”
“Well, if the shoe fits, Franny.”
“You have no idea how hard I’ve worked, Bird, to make a good impression here, and get invited to the right luncheons and join committees so the Tartts won’t think I’m just some common country trash—” She started blinking, her neck stretching and growing.
Lord, I thought she’d outgrown that. “It’s not easy to get as far as I’ve gotten and I won’t have you waltz in here barefooted in that homemade dress and ruirn it all for me. ”
“Calm down, Goose, you’re getting your feathers ruffled. I’m not here to ruirn anything for you.”
“That right there,” she said, poking a finger at me, “that’s what I’m talking about. It’ll be just like when you drew that goose picture, you ruirned it for me then and you’re gonna ruirn it for me now—I mean ruin! See what you do to me?”
“Franny, that goose picture was ten dang years ago.”
“I told you. Do not. Call me. Goose,” she said, her neck grown tall and taut. Couldn’t she understand, the effect was the cause? “I am not that goose person anymore and nobody here knows a thing about that goose-calling.”
“Alright, I’m sorry. I will not call you … that. Anymore.”
Thank goodness her long, straining neck settled back into place. “All I’m saying is I’ve worked very hard to improve myself, Bird, and I just—I want to be the wife Rory wants me to be. Can you understand that?”
No. But I said, “I guess.” She talked like she was a thing in a catalogue, that she could change out for a different size or shape. “But you need to remember where you come from, Frances, because you do come from Podunk, Mississippi, and your mama and meemaw and sister still live there.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” she said, folding her hands prim in her lap. “To be honest, Rory likes that I’m a small-town Delta girl. He thinks a wife should be ladylike, not one of those girls who discusses politics and newspapers and has all sorts of noisy opinions.”
“I can’t wait to meet him,” I said.
“He’s down in Jackson today, seeing to some important clients, but he’ll be home around supper.”
I nodded but there was something else that’d been stuck in my craw for a year now, that I was ready to finally get out. “Why didn’t you invite us to your wedding, Franny?”
She set her hands on the edge of the table, like she was bracing herself. She must’ve known that would crush us. “I didn’t invite anybody, alright? I wanted to, but we got married in such a hurry, I didn’t even have time to find a dress. Mrs. Tartt had to borrow one for me.”
“Why a hurry?” I asked. If I didn’t know what a gosh-darn prude Frances was, I’d think she meant she was in trouble.
“It was some legal thing, taxes or something, it doesn’t matter. Rory wanted to hurry and so did I.”
I was pretty sure that wasn’t the whole truth, but Picador, the tiny housemaid, had come in carrying an armful of dirty linens.
She toted them past us to a little washroom off the back of the kitchen, and Frances stood up.
“We better get you changed before Mrs. Tartt gets home from bridge. Now look, when I introduce you, I want you to be nice.”
“I’m always nice.”
“Well she’s not, she’s a witch,” she said, checking behind her. “I keep asking Rory when we can move out of his mother’s house. She’s always lingering around the place.”
“Oh yeah, she really ought not linger in her own house,” I said.
“And for some reason I don’t think she likes me very much,” Frances said. “I don’t know why.”
“It’s a mystery,” I said and followed her out.
Frances led me up a dim, narrow staircase off the kitchen, which she called the “service stairs,” and at the top, we went down a pale carpeted hall, to a bathroom.
This bathroom was something else entirely from my brief history of bathrooms. It was almost the size of my bedroom at home, tiled in a fleshy, flat pink.
A rounded porcelain sink stood under an oval mirror, the toilet stool tucked, discreetly, in the far corner, and under a window sash stretched a long white tub with a pair of silver spouts curving over the side of it like the necks of swans.
Frances went over and twisted both knobs.
Up on the wall, a white box started to rattle.
When I reached under the taps, I felt cold and hot water pouring out at the same time, and while I was not ignorant of the hot-water tank—I read the Sears, Roebuck catalogue like anybody else when I couldn’t sleep—this would be my first warm bath without hauling fifteen pots of boiling water from the stove to the tub.
“Good Lord, no wonder you married Rory so quick,” I said when I slipped down into the velvety warmth.
It wasn’t to get in the man’s bed, it was to get in his bathtub.
The water felt buttery on my chafed skin and I leaned back and closed my eyes.
If it felt this nice in July, it must’ve been downright delicious come January.
Next to the tub, Frances sat on a stool and stared straight ahead. She never could stand being around nakedness, not even her own. It was on almost before it was even off. I guess she peeked, though. “Oh my God, Birdie, when did you stop shaving your armpits?”
“When you abandoned us and quit fussing at me to do it. I don’t see the point of risking my life every time my underarm grows a hair.” From the medicine cabinet, she brought her nickel-silver Curvfit razor, and I soaped up my armpits and made my sister happy.
While I ran a washrag up my neck and over my face, she crossed her legs and wagged her foot. “What do you do down in Footely when you’re not working at the store?” she asked.
“I do what I’ve always done, Frances. Spread joy all the day long.”
“But what else? I mean, what do you do?” she said and I thought, Here we go. My little life was not exciting enough for her.
“It’s pretty much the same as when you left, Franny.
Get up at dawn, milk the cow, make the coffeepot, cook my world-famous eggs.
After work, I make supper, you know I like to cook.
Sunday is church, Tuesday nights I play bridge with the old men at the store, and Saturday nights I go back to the Foote and listen to people talk on the telephone. ”
“Don’t you get lonely? Not having a boyfriend or a husband?” She sounded genuinely worried. I’d be touched if the question wasn’t so irritating.
“Hard to be lonely when you’re never alone, Frances,” I said, though this was a lie. Even with Mama and Meemaw at the house, loneliness hung like the heat. “Why, what do you do all day long?” I asked. “Besides eat finger sandwiches and order the maids around.”
“I go to luncheons and committee meetings.”
“Yeah, we covered that. What else?”