Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

The big men left, passing Stu in a deliberately slow manner. Rennie ran after them with a pair of tens. Back in the room, Muffy, whiter than her pillows, asked for a pain tablet. Stu crushed it between two exquisite teaspoons brought by the Jamaican housekeeper. Muffy took a sip of water from a faceted glass. “Stu. Have a nice lunch somewhere.”

“But you…but Rennie…”

“Agnes will make a sandwich when I ring,” she said. A porcelain bell sat on the night table. And so housekeeper and husband left the room.

“Rennie, I must…make an inventory of my things. It’s been on my mind. In the hospital…all I thought of.” This was a prolonged utterance, and she lengthened it further, asking Rennie to open the walk-in closet and announce its occupants. Rennie obeyed. Two pairs of black alligator pumps. Two pairs of brown alligator pumps. Two pairs of brown oxfords. Mr. and Mrs. Penny Loafer — that couple, or its ancestors, must have been all the rage fifty years ago. And dozens of skirts, each of a slightly different tweed; and dozens of sweaters, ranging in shade from vanilla to rancid mocha. And stalwart broad-shouldered fur coats in plastic capes of their own. “Now the chest, the Stephen Badlam chest of drawers, start from the bottom,” said Muffy’s weak voice. There were two drawers of silken underpants, piled squarely like memo pads. Tidy slips, camisoles, beige silk scarves. The three next drawers held gloves, and stockings, and little white blouses. Rennie intoned descriptions. The drawer second from the top held only pearls, strand after strand, each separated from the next by pearly candles, how clever. And finally the single top drawer, high and narrow. Rennie stood on a mahogany stool inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She pulled the drawer out. What could be here? The good stuff must be in a safe somewhere.

What was here was a shoe box. What was in the shoe box was the good stuff. The diamonds, the emeralds, the rubies. Necklaces, bracelets, rings. Worthy jewels of impeccable dull design — some purchased in the finest of stores, some bought at Forget Me Not — all repeating each other like crocuses. Rennie felt rather than heard Muffy’s sigh. She put the shoe box on the bed. One by one Muffy picked up the pieces of jewelry, then put them down, seeming to check them against a mental list — this urgent inventory did not require paper and pencil. Finally she put the lid on the box. “Tomorrow you and Agnes can help me get downstairs, and we’ll look at the furniture and the silver…” She was almost asleep, but with a motion of her hand she indicated that Rennie should return the shoe box to its resting place.

Rennie could leave now. She could go downstairs and say good-bye to Agnes and walk into the spring afternoon. She could return to her store filled with lovely items, some of them oddities: recently she’d had a bronze Puck, and now a graceful brass device with a long spout and a receptacle and a miniature pestle in a hollow cylinder. She had bought this mysterious thing from a man who said he was a Turk…Or she could go home.

Instead, Muffy’s best friend remained at the edge of the bed listening to the shallow breaths, feeling a wet warmth within her own body, as if she were bleeding. Was it envy oozing there? This spoiled Muffy had known what she wanted and had acquired it. What a rare accomplishment. And the objects of Muffy’s affection repaid that affection just by being there, trustworthy, trusting. Something long contained burst from the competent woman sitting on the bed, who did not love things though she traded in them, who did not love people though she pleased them. “We all need you,” Elissa had said. “You’ll live forever.” It would only seem like forever, Rennie thought, and leaned against the bedpost, her mouth loose.

Stu coughed himself into the room. He looked down at his wife. “Still lovely, isn’t she.”

Muffy fell out of bed that night. She broke her arm. She went from hospital to rehabilitation center to nursing home. Even there she managed to sink to the floor when an aide’s attention momentarily wandered; this time she broke a hip. Back to the hospital…

Stu fluttered from the house to wherever Muffy lay. Muffy whispered to Rennie — who visited, who kept visiting — that there were long stretches when he didn’t come. He closed his office, and sold some silver to one of Rennie’s colleagues to pay its back rent. “The stuff wasn’t going to fetch much,” the colleague told Rennie. “We melted it down.” A breezy young couple bought the town house. They would no doubt gut the place from front to back before they divorced.

“I’ll auction everything inside,” Stu said to Rennie one day outside Muffy’s room. “But first you take whatever you want. Buy, I mean.”

Rennie selected a few things: a needlepoint chair, an eighteenth-century sewing box, and the entire dining-room set. “We never used that stuff,” Stu told her. “We liked the Tavern. My new apartment is right near the Tavern.” The table and chairs looked handsome under Forget Me Not’s skylight.

Yefgin took an immediate interest in the sewing box. “Vera would love it,” he said, waving away a starburst pin with pink jewels. But the sewing box was too expensive, even on credit. In the end he asked for the Turkish instrument.

“You mean that lamp?” Rennie wondered. It was a strange gift for either of his loves.

“It’s not a lamp, it’s an opium pipe,” he told her. “I’ll grow poppies in my window box.” He paid cash, and bent his head to kiss her fingers, and he pressed his lips to the roll of twenties too.

The day before the auctioneers were to remove the furniture and paintings, Rennie and Agnes packed up shoes, sweaters, skirts, underwear; all would soon adorn the more petite guests at the local shelter. Agnes carried the boxes downstairs, and left. Rennie put the pearls into a silk sack and moved the inlaid stool to the dresser and took down the shoe box.

She didn’t open it, though. She could tell from its heft that it had lost half its contents. She heard a creak at the threshold of the bedroom, and turned; and there was Stu, one tweed shoulder against the jamb, his thin lips twisted in a grin — shamed maybe; proud maybe; repulsive in any case. Could somebody find this half-man attractive? Ah, somebody probably could, somebody probably did, why, just yesterday, a couple had bought the ugliest lamp Rennie had ever handled and carried it lovingly away. She stepped cautiously down from the stool — the cracking of bones could begin at any age — and handed the sack of pearls and the diminished shoe box to the husband of her best friend.

I.

The first hint of trouble came early in the morning. The telephone rang on Gabrielle’s desk in the lobby — her glass-topped, strategically placed desk: she could see everyone, anyone could see her.

“It’s Selene,” lisping through buckteeth. “I have flu.”

“Oh, my dear…you’ve called the clinic?”

“The doctor forbids me to leave my home.” Home indeed: a heap of brown shingles in an alley in a town forty miles north of Godolphin. Three children and a once-in-a-while man…“My friend Minata will give testimony in my place. From Somalia too, and now she lives on the next avenue. She knows the fee, and that she will stay overnight in the inn. She agrees to come, and tell.”

“And she has…things to tell?” Gabrielle softened her voice. “Was her experience like yours?”

“Ah, worse. Thorns were applied. And only palm oil for the mending. She will take the same bus…”

Thorns and palm oil and two fullback matriarchs, each with the heels of her hands on the young girl’s shoulders as if kneading recalcitrant dough. Someone forces the knees apart. Horrifying tales; Gabrielle knew plenty of them. But would this Minata touch the heart like Selene? I am happy to be in this town Godolphin, in this state Massachusetts, in this country USA, Selene always concluded with humble sibilance. I am happy to be here this night.