Fletcher Flora - Desperate Asylum

“I don’t know. At any rate, I won’t try to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Do you intend to stay?”

“If you still want it.”

“I do. I am trying to think why it is that I want it, and I believe it is because I am convinced that this is the last chance for both of us, and if it can’t be the beginning of something better, it should at least be the end of everything bad.”

“All right. If I am going to stay, I had better tell you that I invited Emerson and Ed Page to the party Saturday night.”

For a moment he did not understand what she had said, his mind struggling to adjust to the incredibly quick shift of hers from their personal tragic relationship to such petty business. Actually, the shift was not so abrupt nor the new subject so unassociated as they appeared, but this was something he did not know.

“Party? Oh, yes. Em and Ed? Why did you do that?”

“Because I wanted them to come. They are the only people in Corinth I can tolerate. Do you object?”

“No. Of course not. I’m a little surprised that they accepted.”

“It was he who accepted. I don’t think he wanted to, but I rather tricked him into it.”

“Well, they’re welcome. I like Em. Perhaps he’ll help to make the evening bearable.” He opened his eyes and stood up slowly, as if the action required tremendous effort. “I’m going up to the house now. Are you ready to come?”

“Not yet. I want to sit here a little longer.”

“Will you be all right?”

“Perfectly. If you are afraid I may throw myself off the bluff after all, you needn’t be. I am really too great a coward.”

Turning, he walked away. She listened to his footsteps receding on the dry grass. The valley of the river was filling with darkness.

Awakening very early in the morning, she knew at once that it was going to be a bad day. Bad days were in her life nothing unusual, of course, but some days were bad even in comparison with other days that were bad, and it had been that kind of day when she had taken the barbiturates quite a while ago, and it had been that kind of day when she had gone to the park and met Bella, and every time a day like that came along she knew that she would be far better off if she didn’t have to live it. She lay quietly in bed with the still house around her and the bad day ahead of her, and pretty soon she realized that it was Saturday, the day of the party at the country club, and that, however bad the day might be, the night would certainly be worse. Lying there with her eyes closed and not moving a muscle, she tried to think of a way to avoid the bad day and the worse night, but she couldn’t think of a way for the simple reason that there wasn’t any, and then she thought that she would continue to lie quietly in the darkness behind her lids until she went to sleep again, thereby at least-shortening the day if not the night, but she couldn’t do that, either. She opened her eyes and began waiting for whatever was going to happen to start happening.

In due time, she heard Mrs. Lamb, the housekeeper and cook, who slept out and came in early, clump across the back porch below and let herself in the back door with her own key. Later she heard the yardman working in the yard beside the house, though God knew what work there was for him to do with the grass and all the flowers seared and sapped by the relentless sun, and later still Avery came out of his room and down the hall and stopped outside her door. When he knocked softly, she twisted her head on her pillow and looked at the door but did not speak nor move in excess of the twisting of her head. She kept her eyes on the knob, waiting to see if it began to turn, and when it did begin she immediately closed her eyes and kept them closed. He came into the room and stopped a few feet from the bed and was silent for a minute before he spoke her name. She could hear him breathing and smell his shaving lotion, and she could see him in the dark and private little world behind her lids as he leaned forward slightly from the hips and peered at her to try to determine if she was waking or not. She did not answer, and he spoke again, and she still did not answer, and he went out and closed the door. Hearing his footsteps descending the stairs, she opened her eyes again and began to wonder what made some bad days so much worse than other bad days.

It is not, she thought, anything in the days themselves. Looking back on them, it is impossible to find any reason at all why these were the days when one particularly wanted to die, or to have others die, or felt that it was absolutely essential to do something to change the intolerable procession of degrading days, while at the same time one was irrationally terrified of any change whatever. No, it is not in the day but in oneself that the badness begins and grows with no discernible logic in its beginning and growing today rather than yesterday or tomorrow, and it is not a result of overt misfortune but of intangible oppression that builds and builds to the absolute certainty of proximate destruction. Therefore, since it is in oneself that it begins and grows, and since there is no logic in the beginning and growing, it follows that there is nothing to be done about it, except to bear it and get through it, and if one is lucky this is something that can be done.

She heard the yardman start the power mower and wondered why on earth he was starting the mower when there was no grass to cut. She heard Avery’s Caddy go past the house in the drive and wondered if Avery would be back before evening and hoped that he wouldn’t. She heard Mrs. Lamb’s heavy tread on the stairs and in the hall and waited for Mrs. Lamb’s heavy rapping to sound on the door. It did, and she took her time deciding whether to tell Mrs. Lamb to come in or go away or simply to ignore the rapping altogether, as she had done with Avery’s. After a while she decided that it would be just as well on the whole to get Mrs. Lamb in and out and finished with as quickly as possible.

“Come in,” she said.

Mrs. Lamb opened the door and stepped inside the room, leaving the door open behind her. She was a strong, blocky woman with a massive chests so tightly bound that it gave the appearance of being undivided, and Lisa had once, seeing the remarkable chest, had a joke pop into her head about it, a kind of humorous analogy with one part to be supplied, and the analogy was, what is to a woman as a dromedary is to a camel? The answer was, of course, Mrs. Lamb. There were several things wrong with the analogy, however, and as a joke it really had something wrong with it too, which was that it wasn’t, after all, a very funny joke. It was impossible, anyhow, to imagine Mrs. Lamb being amused by it.

“Good-morning, Mrs. Lawes,” Mrs. Lamb said.

“Good-morning, Mrs. Lamb.”

“Will you have breakfast this morning?”

“No, thank you.”

“You didn’t have breakfast yesterday morning.”

“I seldom eat breakfast.”

“Nor day before yesterday morning.”

“I know.”

“You ought to eat breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day. When you start having children, you will wish you had eaten your breakfast.”

“I consider it unlikely that I’ll ever start having children, Mrs. Lamb.”

Which was worse than the repudiation of a sacred function. It was dereliction of duty not to produce a Lawes, specifically a male Lawes, in an apprehensive world that was presently in the precarious position of having only one left. Mrs. Lamb was privately of the opinion that this production should have begun some months ago, and she was totally incapable of understanding how any woman could be reluctant to do the producing. She would have been almost willing to undertake it herself.