Thomas Mcguane - The Cadence of Grass

With a great exhalation of breath, Natalie swept in, balancing the meal on one hand and gesturing with the other for Evelyn to remain seated. Evelyn was pleased to see the anticipated tureen of pumpkin soup, but instead of gnocchi, she found sharply seasoned raviolis stuffed with pork.

“I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love you,” said Natalie, sitting down in a disgusted heap. She found a kind of primness about Evelyn as she waited to be served.

“It’s beautiful, Nat. I don’t know how you manage.”

“What do you eat out there on the ranch, corn beef and cabbage?”

“Various stuff, not that.”

“You cook for Bill regularly?”

“Not regularly.”

“How’s his health?”

“He’s hanging right in there.”

Natalie spread her napkin in her lap. “When Dad sent you for riding lessons, I don’t think he ever figured you were never coming back.”

“Must have been the horses.”

“Well, whatever. Anyway, it was Mama always drove you out there, not Dad.”

“She liked to talk to Bill.”

“She really liked to talk to Bill.”

“I don’t think there was anything to it, particularly,” Evelyn said.

“Maybe, maybe not. But she sure liked driving you out there.”

Evelyn thought she’d let this one drop. But it was remarkable that anything that ever happened to her or Natalie was known almost instantaneously by Bill, however many miles away. And he was forever frustrated that Natalie couldn’t be made to take an interest in the ranch. He must have learned that from Alice Whitelaw. Perhaps, a friendship existed, and if so, fine.

“This was Daddy’s favorite soup, but not for now, for summer. How is it?”

“Really good.”

“You’d eat anything,” Natalie said, looking into the tureen as though daring its contents to be imperfect.

“I wish I could cook like this, but my mind goes shooting ahead and things catch fire.”

A car passed by pursued by a column of disturbed leaves, and Evelyn felt something odd about the two of them sitting together as though all the elements that had accounted for them were lifted momentarily and they would now bear the gravity of being the only excuse for their own lives.

“I’m in love with Frank Sinatra,” said Natalie, starting “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with the touch of a button, “and I’m afraid of winter.” Wind-borne clouds were darkening the sky, and she was obliged to turn on the brass overhead lights, reconditioned salvage from an extinct ranch house in Black Eagle. Stuart gathered odds and ends from junk shops in such odd places as Box Elder and Medicine Lake and Opportunity. Evelyn remembered his pulling up in front of the house with a mountain of junk on a fifth-wheel lowboy, looking contented. “Thousand feet of straight grain Doug fir tongue-and-groove from Hungry Horse!”

“Old Blue Eyes,” said Evelyn.

“Funny you’d know that.”

“One of Bill’s horses, crop-out paint, he looks nuts.”

“How about ‘Der Bingle’ for Bing Crosby?”

They were at some sort of dead-end, and Evelyn looked around blankly. Stuart had really made a comfortable little house, though he baffled Evelyn in other ways with facial expressions that seemed to lie behind a scrim, like the faces of people on television whose identities were being protected; and he was so remarkably sexless that she could imagine him coming along before the age of anatomically correct dolls, a curious smoothness not without its appeal. Evelyn noted that Natalie’s intense concentration on her food would provide an excellent backdrop for difficult conversation offered in the form of mere incidentals. As here it came: “You won’t be offended, Evelyn, if I state that Paul is no Daddy.” She paused to make room for the reply that did not come. “He doesn’t understand the first thing about that business. You know Stuart speaks with the utmost kindness of other people, and even he says that Paul is completely lost. When employees go off and leave their pensions behind, something has gone badly wrong.”

“I’m sure there’s a problem with the transition. Daddy never budged.” Sunny Jim actually had said, “Budge and you die,” something he might have gotten from Bill. At any rate, there was this whole culture of budging and not budging that Evelyn couldn’t follow.

“It isn’t that at all , Evie. Paul is cruel and he’s inconsistent and he doesn’t know how to run the plant.”

“Of course he’s cruel. Prison made him cruel. That’s how he is now, but he wasn’t always. In any case, Nat, you need to stay away from him.”

Natalie seemed to discover in her soup something so minuscule and annoying, it could be retrieved only with the very tip of her spoon. She then placed the spoon next to her bowl and placed the tip of her right forefinger on its handle. “Whatever could you mean?”

“If you don’t know, then I sure don’t.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Then neither do I .”

Evelyn looked at her sister. When they were young, she had had an astigmatism that she outgrew and Natalie had had braces and a retainer for her very prominent teeth. They sometimes called each other “Buck Teeth” and “Four Eyes” and now those times seemed to be coming back. On the verge of tears, each had begun to feel ugly and powerless again.

Natalie snuffled, “I made a key lime pie!” She went to the kitchen and brought it out, a beautiful thing, light and golden at the edges. She sank her knife into it, served them both, then sat, suddenly making herself very still.

“Pie okay?”

“Wonderful.”

“That’s a real one,” Natalie said tragically, “made with condensed milk.”

“What’d you do for limes?”

“Just Spanish limes from the store, but they’ll do. Now. Ev. Listen. Stuart, good Stuart, no big future, right?”

“I don’t—”

“No, come on, I should know. This is it!” She gestured around the little Craftsman knockoff, so suggestive of modest, happy family life. It had been built during a difficult period in their marriage, and Natalie’s unfortunate habit of discussing those problems with anyone who would listen had given their marriage a poor reputation that persisted even in better times. In fact, during the era when all of Paul’s strengths were a display of lewd aggression and intrigue, Evelyn found herself longing for just such a do-it-yourselfer. But Natalie’s inclusive gesture, her “this is it,” effectively dramatized the distance between what she dreamed and what she had. Evelyn knew too well where this was headed.

“I cannot go back to Paul.”

“We’ll starve.”

“It will be honorable starvation.”

“Surely there could be some accommodation with the terms—”

There was a clangor of the heating that might’ve implicated Stuart’s skills as a plumber. That and the wind-borne leaf storm in the small yard gave the house a precarious feel.

“I don’t know how Dad could have done this to us.”

“I loved Dad!”

“ So did I . But it wasn’t easy and please , Evie, don’t be a bitch , it wasn’t easy to watch him make such a husk out of Mama!” Natalie was holding her hair out from her head with both hands: a Medean tableau that would have seemed insincere except that it was done with such mad force that it made Evelyn watch her steps carefully.

“Nat, look, this is getting to be a scene. Such a nice lunch, so perfectly prepared, as if I were a guest of honor! But is there no way we can discuss this?”

“‘ Discuss ’?” Natalie asked, quarreling with the very word.

“How do you think I like being called a bitch?”

That stopped her for a moment. Down came the hands, through the thick, crazy hair that only slowly subsided. If only we were wounded celebrities, Evelyn thought, who could set out on a healing retreat away from this pain. Supervised by recovery specialists, we could safely call each other bitch and request that our sister stay out of our estranged husband’s bed without the customary repercussions.