Plains Song (13 page)

Cora said, “Sharon's here on a visit.” She continued to rock, without turning to face him. He had come over so fast it left him winded, wheezing. His head and
his hands trembled. Either he didn't see Sharon clearly, or he seemed to doubt what it was he saw. She had forgotten how the inside of his lips showed red when his jaw hung slack, or he mouthed a cigar.

“She looks like her,” he blurted. It startled them all.

“Like who?” asked Madge.

His head wagging, he said, “Her mother.”

Emerson said, “I don't remember her standin' still long enough to be seen.”

“Maybe he saw her,” said Cora, wetting her lips, “like he knew he wouldn't have her long to look at.” In the silence the child in her lap whimpered, putting a fist to one closed eye.

“It's past her time,” said Madge. “I best be getting her home.”

Cora said, “Fayrene's not going to like it she missed you.”

Orion moved from the door to let Madge, Cora, and Sharon pass through the kitchen. Emerson stayed in his chair. Ned went ahead to hold open the screen. When Sharon glanced back from the yard, Orion stood on the porch, his head tilted back, taking large gulping swallows from the dipper. This impression of Orion, his Adam's apple pumping, would replace all the others Sharon had of her father: a man greedily drinking as if unable to quench his thirst. As they drove along the driveway to the road, she saw the light blink on in Cora's kitchen. “You see that?” said Madge. “She'd never do that if we was still there.”

To Sharon, Ned said, “How they look? They look about the same?”

“Orion's slipping,” said Madge. “He's forgetful. He'd forget to eat if Cora didn't call him. But it did her good to see you. You're like one of her own.”

When Sharon had left the farm to live in Lincoln, she had emerged from an oppression so habitual she had hardly suspected its existence. On returning she sensed her submergence to that lower level of feeling. As if drowsy with ether, she observed their movements and listened to their voices. Did this partially conscious life offer comforts she would live to miss? Half consciously she sensed that. The physical presence of Madge, thick with another child, reduced Sharon's capacity to think, blurring the line between the young woman who recently departed and the one who had returned.

Each day of her visit Sharon put off till the next day asking Madge how she liked marriage. It seemed obvious. How imagine her in another context? Each day after lunch, they sat in the shade cast by the house, with Blanche in the wicker basket between them. The child never cried. She resigned herself to lying on her back rather than her tummy. She resigned herself to Madge's attentions; she resigned herself to Sharon's indifference. Sharon was not too fond of children, and Blanche had resigned herself to that.

“I suppose you like city living better?” Madge asked. A film of moisture gave a shine to her plump face. She had pinned up her hair to feel the coolness of the draft on her neck. It startled Sharon to realize that she would like the city better if Madge lived in it.
She could see her with Blanche on the grass in Lincoln Park, or on a bench at the zoo.

A doctor in Columbus had told Madge that she had too many teeth in her lower jaw. It amused Madge to learn that. It gave Sharon dull shooting pains in her teeth. When they had been little girls it was often Sharon who knew that Madge was sick before Madge did. There were veins like those in a leaf at the back of her knees.

There might still be light in the sky when Ned Kibbee went to bed. He would water the lawn while they washed and stacked the dishes, coming in with his shoes soaked by the wet grass. Sharon would hear the alarm go off at five-thirty, and the pad of Madge's feet as she walked to the kitchen. At night they might sit up, after stacking the dishes, and listen to John McCormack on Madge's new Victrola. Madge had sung for three years in the Battle Creek choir, and liked a good tenor voice. She did not have a musical gift herself, but she felt a gift for it ran in the family. It had turned up in Sharon. There was a touch of it in Fayrene. She came back from the Ozarks with her neck and arms tanned, but her face still a botch of pimples. Madge always hoped she would come back different than she went away. Fayrene was a slender, shy girl, with pigeon breasts so high they looked artificial. At the sight of Sharon she had been speechless. The boy sweet on her, Avery Dickel, had a good job in a creamery in the Ozarks. Fayrene was being encouraged to practice on the flute for the Battle Creek band.

There were spells when the two women said nothing
they remembered, or were aware that they had said. Ned Kibbee helped himself to the food on the table that Sharon no longer took the trouble to offer. He didn't think it rude. He really preferred to help himself. Without interrupting what she was saying to Sharon, Madge would spoon-feed food into the mouth of Blanche, half of which she spat out. While eating she tightly clenched her little fists and banged them hard on the shelf of the highchair. Madge's comment was that like her daddy, she would make a good carpenter.

Ned took time from his work to drive them both to the station, where Madge refused to weigh herself on the waiting room scales. “It's no business but my own,” she said to Ned. Ned weighed 179½. Sharon weighed 104, including one pound of homemade fudge. She would come to visit them again at Christmas, if she cared to, or if not at Christmas, early the next summer. Hugging Sharon to her the best she could, Madge repeated, “It did Cora good to see you. You're like one of her own.”

The long night of fitful sleep on the train Sharon felt herself in limbo, neither coming nor going, seized with a longing that had no object. What was it she wanted? Loneliness overwhelmed her. The lights of villages flashing at the window, even the glow of lamps in solitary farmhouses, made a mockery of her independence. What was it in her nature that led her to choose a life alone? If the man across the aisle, graying at the temples, reminding her of Professor Grunlich of Dartmouth, wearing a Palm Beach suit with bits of
grass in the pants cuffs, buckskin shoes with toes that were grass stained—if this man had spoken to Sharon, if he had suggested she join him for dinner in the diner, if he had sensed, as he surely would, the contradictory needs in her nature and had been free to administer to them, the Sharon Rose who boarded the train in Columbus might not have been the one who got off it in Chicago, and the book of her life might have been different. But he did not speak to her. When she awoke from a spell of napping he was gone.

During the Sunday service Madge studied with interest every married couple she could set her eyes on. There they sat. A few hours earlier, there they lay. Some on their sides, some on their backs, and a few on top of each other. She saw it only dimly, but as something she had experienced she could accept it. It strained her mind, however, it strained her very soul, to accept this fact for the others. The women corseted and solemn. The men sober as judges. Between and beside them the children that had to be made.

Madge would soon have been married for sixteen months. Was there a day of fifteen of those months she had not pondered her experience? Wanting children, she had been prepared for the worst, knowing that the worst had happened to Cora. It could be endured because it need not happen too many times. Madge had chosen Ned as a man she liked and had felt he might minimize the necessary torment. This proved to be true. It had startled her to find how such an easygoing man could become, on the instant, almost a different person, but this could as soon be said of herself. It more than startled her to admit it. She was humbled and bewildered to find that such a torment gave her pleasure.

What would her husband think if he knew that she enjoyed it? Her pains to deceive him relaxed when it seemed clear that it hardly mattered. She had assumed it would end with her pregnancy and was part of a new bride's remarkable sensations, but with the child born she had felt desire for her husband. That she concealed, of course, scarcely admitting it to herself. She had no way of knowing if Ned was aware of her reluctant-willing collaboration. She feared what might happen if she took the initiative. Now that she was pregnant again he turned on his side and was usually snoring while she brushed her hair. She liked his snoring. What would it be like to have a man who lay snoreless and awake?

Madge had hoped that Sharon had come back to say that she had met a man and planned to get married. Only when this had happened would Madge be free to
hint that she found Ned different than she had expected. In what way? Sharon would ask. Madge could not touch on it until Sharon had had the experience. The two girls were open and frank with each other, but they had seldom discussed men and boys. They had never discussed boys and girls. Sharon had blurted out her opinion of marriage on hearing that Madge was engaged to Ned, but Madge felt that this was in part her anger at losing her friend. Sharon was such a pretty thing, like a beautiful doll, Madge found it hard to see her sleeping with a man. She was like a child. How did such little women mate with grown men and have babies? Madge was curious. She felt in Sharon no curiosity on the subject. Madge had had a baby. It might have been brought by storks.

That this baby was a female, the image of Cora, the fifth girl child in a family of females, might have discouraged a man like Ned from the prospect of a large family. Of Mrs. Kibbee's five children, three were sons. The two girls, who came third and fifth, had the advantage of a likeness to their mother, a handsome Scotswoman with almost orange-colored hair and a complexion she had to keep out of the sun. The two daughters were married off before the sons, one to a station agent in Fremont. Mrs. Kibbee felt that children blessed a marriage, but not if they ran exclusively to girls men did not consider attractive. Mrs. Kibbee spoke to Madge, feeling that the woman had the final say in such matters, and Madge was grateful for the advice, knowing that it was so well intended and being in agreement that a family of girls you couldn't marry
off was hardly a blessing to a marriage. Madge didn't say so, of course, but to have borne Cora's child as her first one had led her to look forward to the second, her first child being, in everything but name, Cora Atkins's second. Anybody could see it. Nor was it Madge's nature to deceive herself. Some weeks before Mrs. Kibbee discussed the matter with her, Madge was two months pregnant with her second child, not a word on the subject of children having been exchanged with her husband. Need there have been? He would have left it to her. He was like Emerson in the way he would walk and stand at the screen if she had a problem, and hear what she had to say while he gazed at the sky and picked at his teeth.

“You do as you see fit,” he'd say, and push the screen open to close the discussion. With a hammer, a saw, and some nails he could build a house, he could measure, consider, and come to decisions, but all matters that he couldn't hammer, saw, and measure he left to her. She was flattered.

“Ned takes care of the outside,” she said to Sharon. “He leaves the inside to me.” Weeks after Sharon had left she found herself pondering what she had said. It did not please her that Cora might have said the same thing.

“She looks like her father,” Cora said of Madge, “but she's not at all like him. She likes to work.”

She was slow, and she took her work easy, as she had to, but she liked it. She differed from Cora. Unfinished work weighed so on Cora's mind she might get up at night, or from a nap, to do it. Told to rest, she would
reply, “I can't rest while there's work to be done.” In that very fact Madge took pleasure. Leaving off at night, or resting during the day, she thought of the unfinished ironing and mending and fruit canning. That it remained to be done reassured her. That it was endless did not depress her. She got up pleased in the knowledge there was work to be done. Ned had bought her a motor-driven washing machine that spared her the drudgery of tub-washing sheets and diapers, but she reserved his shirts and socks for the pleasure it gave her to use the washboard. She liked the sound of it. She liked the feel of it under her knuckles. A new bar of Fels-Naphtha soap seemed as fragrant to her as bread from the oven. She liked to slice it as she did butter. The smell of soap on her hands was not unpleasant. The laundry chore to which she looked eagerly forward was hanging out the wash: the blue-whiteness of sheets stretched on the line, and their sun-dried sweetness when she took them by the armful and squeezed the fragrance into her face. They smelled to her like freshly kneaded dough, or cooling bread. Ironing she kept for evenings, when it was cooler, her board set up in the draft from the back to the front, her skirts pinned up so that it would blow cool on her legs. In the winter, the side blinds drawn, she would take off her dress and iron in her slip, her backside warmed by the hot air from the floor radiator. The glide of the iron, the silken feel of the cloth, the sight and smell of a new scorched patch on the pad (reminding her of Cora) were overlapping pleasures so satisfying she delayed work that she might have
finished. While ironing she reviewed the day's events, or lack of events, reflections that might come to her mind at a time when she was not in a position to enjoy them. The scorched odor of the pad was attractive to her, and like strokes of the iron, her mind would pass over and over the wrinkle in her thought till she had smoothed it out. Tilting the iron on its end often signaled a resolution, and the slap of her moistened fingers on its bottom, testing its heat, indicated a fresh beginning. Her own swelling body had its scent which puffed from the dress she stretched on a hanger. She liked to iron without her slippers, enjoying the coolness of the linoleum floor in the summer, and the warmth in the winter, the pipes of the hot-air furnace passing beneath. Ned browsed in the catalogues while she ironed, comparing Ward and Sears Roebuck prices, smearing the heel of his hand with the order forms he had made out with his indelible pencil. She was a help to him in wording letters of complaint.