Chicken casserole and tossed salad for dinner. She asks me if it is iceberg lettuce. I chopped it small on purpose, knowing she’d ask. I answer that it is romaine. No argument.
Search parties have gone out for the plane.
Mrs. Edway answers the phone. It is the messenger, who says she was kept after school and hopes we weren’t inconvenienced waiting for her. Sensing that things have turned around a bit, I ask her for the phone and tell the messenger that we are replacing the book. I inquire about the kitten. She thinks she knows where she can get one and promises to call back.
Wednesday
Pushing the grocery cart back from the store, I see a car parked in front of the house. Dr. Yeusa received my note in the morning mail. He is a thin man with curly, bushy hair and small silver-rimmed glasses. Mrs. Edway and the doctor look at each other over the tops of their glasses. She refuses to stand when asked, and asks him to join her on the couch. I will fix them tea. She is angry with me for what I have done, so surely I will at least fix tea. She allows the doctor to question her. It is a pain in the stomach that usually comes only at night. He takes her blood pressure; she turns her head to avoid looking. She sees the bad leaves on the violet, the ones I forgot to mention, and gets up, the device still wrapped around her arm. On her way back from the violets, the doctor blocks her way and examines her abdomen. He takes a blood sample and puts it out of sight in his bag at tea-drinking time. Before he leaves he phones in a prescription for sedatives.
She will not speak to me.
There is a knock at the door. Mrs. Edway says, “I like the mint and the assorted.” But it isn’t the Girl Scout. It’s another girl, and she’s brought a basket of kittens — all six weeks old, she says. She takes the blanket off. Mrs. Edway and I study the contents. We each write on a slip of paper which one we like. Her slip reads: gray and white, all gray, the largest kitten. Mine: gray, multicolored, orange-ish one. We confer; yes, by “the largest kitten” she meant the multicolored one. So it is narrowed down to that one or the gray one. I tell her that either is all right with me. She chooses the multicolored kitten. The girl stares, even after we have chosen. No, she says, they’re free, and leaves the house.
I offer the kitten a can of liver, but it seems uninterested and walks off to explore the kitchen.
Dinner: liver and onions, succotash, pound cake. Lately we have been arguing about the necessity of both a green and a yellow vegetable daily, now that vitamin pills are so fashionable. I fix dinner, so she gets both, but the idea of having to eat them for good health gives us something to talk about To annoy me, she used to finish her vegetables and take a vitamin pill. Now, since I shop, I ignore vitamin pills when they are on the list.
On one of my pieces of paper she has begun a thank-you note. I see “Merci, Celeste,” but she shades the note with her hand when she sees me looking.
Two cowboys die, shot by another cowboy on horseback. The rest of the movie shows the cowboy’s dog walking home without his master, and the wife of one of the dead cowboys standing on the front porch staring curiously at the dog, who slinks under the porch. The wife goes down the stairs to look at the dog. Program interrupted by delivery boy from drugstore. Embarrassed to say I nearly tipped him a nickel instead of a quarter. Usually keep that nickel separate from my other change because it’s an Indian head. Mrs. Edway sits stirring the batter for carrot bread. The movie depresses her and she speaks bitterly against Bernie for not calling, wonders what will happen to the inn across the street when it’s sold. She asks how many years we’ve lived in the house, and I tell her fifty. She gets confused when she’s tired. She tosses the kitten a ball of yarn that is nearly as big as the animal itself. The kitten circles it. She asks what we decided to name the kitten. No use lying, telling her the name I like; if it doesn’t ring a bell, she won’t believe me. “Rainbow,” I tell her all the same. She nods. I suspect she’s not tired, but in pain.
She feels better later and says she doesn’t remember discussing the kitten’s name. Where is the piece of paper on which we agreed? The pieces of paper are piled next to the Xerox paper in boxes I bring back from the food store. Of course I can’t produce the evidence. She wins her point and goes to bed.
The weather forecast is for snow.
Thursday
Bernie came in the afternoon, brought her a pumpkin pie Mary Louise made and a package of the new paper for me.
Bad news, but Bernie says they won’t know how bad until more tests are made.
No snow yet. No decision about name.
Friday
She couldn’t see the small illustrations in Man Meets Dog, so I copied them on large sheets of paper. Copied four of them. We’ve enjoyed the book more than The Red and the Black. Secret vote revealed that neither was sorry we had a kitten instead of a puppy.
The news has gotten around. She can’t blame me because I didn’t go out yesterday or today. She had two phone calls, both of them from women offering encouragement. She was polite and didn’t talk long, but long enough to find out that it was Mary Louise who told them.
She won’t eat the pie Bernie brought. She looked through her cookbooks today and found the recipe for apple, and has made an early store list, including the ingredients she’ll need. She doesn’t criticize Mary Louise for telling people what the doctor said, but she talks about Mary Louise’s Catholicism and complains that she’s more narrow-minded than the Pope. How foolish she is to think she’ll go to purgatory because she’s sterile!
She asks me if I remember the night she tried to talk Bernie out of marrying Mary Louise. I do. We talk about it, careful not to overestimate the extent to which Bernie lost his temper. Bernie never would listen to advice.
An uncomfortable moment when Mary Louise cried on the phone and said she had been to church to pray.
Two new violets have taken root.
Watched the sunset. Sky was very bright before the storm began. The colors disappeared in a second and were replaced by fast-rolling clouds and then the snow. Tried to take a picture with the Polaroid, but the sky darkened too fast. Very windy. Didn’t stay out long because of the flu epidemic. She watched me from inside the house — face looked like a ghost’s because of the fluorescent light shining around her. Used to read ghost stories to each other. For years she hasn’t wanted to hear them. She used to get frightened and dive for cover, under the afghan, into the pillows, even though the plots were familiar. Finally cleaned, got rid of the old books last summer. She laughed when she found The Lives of the Angels that Mary Louise gave her for Christmas: a whole book filled with drawings of the angelic hierarchy, faint lines made with a thin pen point, pastel colors swirling behind them like the sky before the snow.
Trying not to think about it.
I do all the reading now because the years have proved that I’m the better reader. I cook better too, although she still fixes a few specialties. I’m not responsible for the flourishing violets — only do what she tells me. Keep track of what was done when by making notes on a calendar hanging above the plants, with pictures of specimen violets on it — a bonus from her violet association for subscribing for ten years.