Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

A bowl of peaches stood at one end of the trestle table, and a pitcher of foaming liquid. Several people were playing a card game near the peaches. They did not speak, Bella realized, but rather made occasional motions with their free hands. At the other end of the table sat a woman and a man, rapidly signing. In one corner of the room, where bunks met bunks, there was a shipboard oddity — a rocking chair. In it sat a young long-haired Indian woman with a child in her arms, an infant of six months, maybe eight. Robin would have known its age.

Bella remained in the recess at the bottom of the stairs. She was grateful that she was wearing black. The maid paused to hang the basket on a hook. Then she rushed to the chair. With fluttering fingers she addressed the rocking young woman, who slid an arm from beneath the baby and answered in the same way. Then she stood and handed the child to the maid, and the maid sank into the rocker, unbuttoning the top of her uniform and unhooking an undergarment as well. She put the baby to her breast. She bent her head to meet the baby’s eyes, but not before Bella saw that her face had finally attained expression — a kind of meager exaltation.

The girl who had been rocking the child was the same one who’d been sweeping in front of the infirmary the day the cousins got lost. Now she crossed the room, skirting the trestle table and the card players and the animated couple. She entered Bella’s hiding place. This time she had no trouble giving directions. Go away, commanded the beauty wordlessly, her index finger pointing upward.

Bella allowed herself a long final look at the deaf-mute servants, whose employment here was either a kindly move on the part of a paternalistic ship company or a sensible one on the part of a smuggling racket. She took an even longer look at the hungry child, the stowaway whose presence everyone in the room and now Bella too was bound to protect. After these informative looks, she climbed the helical stairs — a journey less difficult than it would have been five pounds ago.

Somewhat later she had finished her own packing and had placed Robin’s empty suitcase on Robin’s bed. Certainly she could pack Robin’s gifts, bathing suits…The key turned in the lock and her cousin entered, pale skin splotched, hair awry, one shoulder strap broken.

“Bella! You don’t have to,” she giggled. She rapidly laid clothing in the case, along with the hammock she’d bought, and a little mahogany box. Meanwhile she hummed, apparently not wanting to ask Bella what she’d been up to. And so Bella kept to herself the Golden Swan ’s secrets, and its secret within those secrets. And her sudden distress — envy, wasn’t it — she kept that to herself too.

The cousins stowed their suitcases in the hall and got undressed and went to bed, all without further speech, without gesture, though from time to time Bella glanced at Robin, and, she supposed, Robin glanced every so often at her.

I.

Daphna invaded and then detonated whenever it suited her. Never on Fridays, though. Friday evening was Sabbath, and her husband expected a proper meal; Daphna’s preparations, however slipshod, kept her busy. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons she taught Hebrew at a local synagogue. As for Mondays, when the weekend had lost its affirmative pull — Mondays were days of sapped energy even for Daphna.

So Wednesdays, by default, were likeliest for her unannounced visits. On Wednesdays her husband taught two classes at the university — an afternoon seminar for graduate students, an evening survey for adults. He took his dinner at the university cafeteria, so Daphna could forget about cooking altogether, could toss tuna fish and a plate of sliced tomatoes onto a kitchen table already burdened with homework and half-eaten apples and Israeli newspapers. That table was so littered that sometimes the children dined on the floor. The newspapers were days old. “Stale news,” Daphna said, “news that has been superseded or even proven false, lifts me to dizzy heights, like the works of magic realism. Have you read García Márquez, Ann? Saramago?” She didn’t pause for a reply; I could have slipped away.

The kids often ate the tuna right out of the can. Three smart and pretty girls — eleven, thirteen, and fifteen at the time the family moved in. They had adapted to their mother’s habits, had learned to take over from her. It was they who set up and then reminded her of parent-teacher conferences, they who organized shopping expeditions for school clothing, they who commanded the housecleaning on Sunday mornings. Sometimes they made additions to the Wednesday-night cuisine — raw carrots, buckwheat kernels. While the buckwheat boiled on the back burner of the ancient stove, the oldest girl sautéed the onions. I saw her doing it one night when Daphna pulled me in for a consultation about the kitchen fan — it was on strike, she said. The girl’s dark hair was bound loosely at the nape. Her lovely, long-nosed profile bent toward her task. When the telephone rang in the hall the youngest picked it up and then called the oldest’s name, and the middle girl took over the onions without a word.

“This malefactory fan?” said Daphna, never without a word.

“Call an electrician,” I advised, and fled.

And so, on late Wednesday afternoons, Daphna, not needing even to chop those onions herself, was free to call on her four resistant neighbors.

We each had a way to avoid her.

Lucienne — seventy-five or so, widowed, overweight — could duck under her kitchen counter as fast as a girl. Fat legs bent, fat arms encircling knees, the whole round self keeping company with a trash can and a bin of root vegetables, Lucienne rested in her makeshift cave until the doorbell stopped ringing. Then she crawled out and struggled to her feet, retying whichever romantic chiffon scarf she was wearing that day.

Connie, who worked mornings at a clinic, had a more deliberate Wednesday defense. At four o’clock she popped a chicken into the oven for her family’s dinner, then ran upstairs to her little alcove of an office, where she could remain unseen. She unlocked her briefcase and did paperwork for two hours; sometimes the bird shriveled, but so what?

I had an easier time than either Lucienne or Connie. I am divorced and my children are out of the house. Perhaps once a week I poach a sole for my friend Rand, but otherwise the kitchen rarely claims me. (Saturday nights he takes me to the dining room at his club: long windows, long portraits, a lengthy evening.) At the real estate agency that bears my name I can always arrange to show a property, and so on those dangerous Wednesday afternoons I was usually convincing a customer to buy some house, mostly by not talking. My height and slenderness alone can make a sale, my staff claims; my golden hair, they add, if they really crave a bonus.

But Sylvia, our street’s spinster, was easy prey. Sylvia started nipping after lunch, and a few hours later she often opened the back door in a fuddled error. Her blouse had by then crept out of her skirt. Her gray hair, which had started the day in a bun, was now a limp corkscrew hanging below its elastic band.

“Ah, Sylvia, I’m so glad to find you at home. Have you time for a cup of tea?” But Daphna didn’t say that. She didn’t say that to any of us when she succeeded in making a capture — of Lucienne, standing in plain view at the window over her sink, having forgotten it was Wednesday, fixed by Daphna’s stare; or of Connie, daring to run downstairs and baste her chicken at just the wrong time, stopped by a knock on the glass door from the deck; or of me, home early, the sale accomplished, intercepted on a dash from garage to back door.