Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

It was terrible; it was too terrible to be happening. And yet there they stood by the front door. A sharp lump of grief rose in Allison’s throat to see how meticulously Ida folded the green check lying face up on the hall table —twenty dollars and no/100s —making sure that both edges were lined up and perfectly even before she creased it with a zip of thumb and forefinger. Then she unsnapped her little black purse and put it in.

“I can’t live any more on twenty dollars a week,” she said. Her voice was quiet and natural, yet all wrong at the same time. How could they possibly be standing in the hall like this, how could this moment be real? “I love y'all's, but that’s the way it is. I’m getting old.” She touched Allison’s cheek. “Y'all be good, now. Tell Little Ug I love her.” Ug—for Ugly—was what Ida called Harriet when she misbehaved. Then the door closed, and she was gone.

“I expect,” said Libby—and Allison, with slight alarm, noticed that Libby was looking around the kitchen floor in a jerky way, as if she saw a moth fluttering by her feet—”she won’t be able to find them when she gets there.”

“Excuse me?” said Allison.

“ Beets. Pickled beets. Oh I wish somebody would help me,” said Libby, with a plaintive, half-comic roll of her eyes.

“Do you need me to do something for you?”

“Where’s Edith?” said Libby, and her voice was strangely clipped, and crisp. “ She’ll do something for me.”

Allison sat down at the kitchen table, and tried to get her attention. “Do you have to make the beets today? ” she said. “Lib?”

“All I know is what they told me.”

Allison nodded, and sat for a moment in the too-bright kitchen wondering how to proceed. Sometimes Libby came home from Missionary Society, or Circle, with strange and very specific demands: for green stamps, or old glasses frames, or Campbell’s soup labels (which the Baptist home in Honduras redeemed for cash); for Popsicle sticks or old Lux detergent bottles (for crafts at the Church Bazaar).

“Tell me who to call,” she said at last. “I’ll call and tell them that you were in an accident this morning. Somebody else can bring the beets.”

Abruptly, Libby said: “ Edith’ll do something for me.” She stood and walked back into the next room.

“Do you want me to call her?” said Allison, peering after her. “Libby?” She had never heard Libby speak quite so brusquely.

“Edith will straighten it all out,” said Libby, in a weak, peevish voice that was quite unlike herself.

And Allison went to the telephone. But she was still reeling from Ida’s departure and what she had not been able to put into words to Edie was how altered Libby seemed, how confused, how strangely collapsed in her expression. The shame-faced way she kept picking at the side of her dress. Allison, stretching the cord as far as it would go, craned to look in the next room as she spoke, stammering in her consternation. The white, wispy edges of Libby’s hair had seemed to burn red—hair so thin that Allison could see Libby’s rather large ears through it.

Edie interrupted Allison before she was finished talking. “You run home and let Libby rest,” she said.

“Wait,” said Allison, and then called into the next room, “Libby? Here’s Edie. Will you come and talk to her?”

“What’s that?” Edie was saying. “Hello?”

Sunlight pooled on the dining room table, puddles of bright sentimental gold; watery coins of light—reflected from the chandelier—shimmered on the ceiling. The whole place had seemed dazzling, lit up like a ballroom. At her edges Libby glowed hot-red, like an ember; and the afternoon sun which poured around her in a corona carried in its shadow a darkness that felt like something burning.

“She—I’m worried about her,” Allison said despairingly. “Please come over. I can’t figure out what she’s talking about.”

“Listen, I’ve got to go,” said Edie. “I’ve got company at the door, and I’m not dressed.”

And then she had hung up. Allison stood by the telephone a moment longer, trying to gather her thoughts, and then hurried into the next room to see about Libby, who turned to her with a staring, fixed expression.

“We had a pair of ponies,” she said. “Little bays.”

“I’m going to call the doctor.”

“You will not ,” said Libby—so firmly that Allison buckled immediately to her adult tone of authority. “You will do no such thing.”

“You’re sick.” Allison started to cry.

“No, I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s just that they ought to have come and got me by now,” said Libby. “Where are they? It’s getting on in the afternoon.” And she put her hand in Allison’s—her little dry, papery hand—and looked at her as if she were expecting to be taken somewhere.

The odor of lily and tuberose, overpowering in the hot funeral parlor, made Harriet’s stomach flutter queasily whenever the fan revolved and blew a draft of it in her direction. In her best Sunday dress—the white dress with daisies—she sat dim-eyed on a scroll-backed settee. The carvings poked her between the shoulder-bones; her dress was too tight in the bodice—which only increased the tightness in her chest and the suffocating stuffiness of the air, the sensation of breathing an outer-space atmosphere not oxygen, but some empty gas. She had eaten no supper or breakfast; for much of the night, she had lain awake with her face pressed in the pillow and cried; and when—head throbbing—she opened her eyes late the next morning to her own bedroom, she lay quietly for several lightheaded moments, marveling at the familiar objects (the curtains, the leaf-reflections in the dresser mirror, even the same pile of overdue library books on the floor). Everything was as she had left it, the day she went away to camp—and then it fell on her like a heavy stone that Ida was gone, and Libby was dead, and everything was terrible and wrong.

Edie—dressed in black, with a high collar of pearls; how commanding she looked, by the pedestal with the guest book!—stood by the door. She was saying the exact same thing to every person who came into the room. “The casket’s in the back room,” she said, by way of greeting, to a red-faced man in musty brown who clasped her hand; and then—over his shoulder, to skinny Mrs. Fawcett, who had tipped up decorously behind to wait her turn—“The casket’s in the back room. The body’s not on view, I’m afraid, but it wasn’t my decision.”

For a moment Mrs. Fawcett looked confused; then she, too, took Edie’s hand. She looked like she was about to cry. “I was so sorry to hear,” she said. “We all loved Miss Cleve down at the library. It was the saddest thing this morning when I came in and saw the books I’d put aside for her.”

Mrs. Fawcett! thought Harriet, with a despairing rush of affection. In the crowd of dark suits, she was a comforting spot of color in her print summer dress and her red canvas espadrilles; she looked like she’d come straight from work.

Edie patted her hand. “Well, she was crazy about you all down at the library, too,” she said; and Harriet was sickened by her hard, cordial tone.

Adelaide and Tat, by the settee opposite Harriet’s, were chatting with a pair of stout older ladies who looked like sisters. They were talking about the flowers in the funeral chapel, which—through negligence on the part of the funeral home—had been allowed to wilt overnight. At this, the stout ladies cried aloud with dismay.

“Looks like the maids or something would have watered them!” exclaimed the larger and jollier of the two: apple-cheeked, rotund, with curly white hair like Mrs. Santa.