Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

So Harriet brooded. She sat alone on the stairs, in the hall or at the kitchen table, with her head in her hands; she sat on the window seat in her bedroom and looked down at the street. Old memories scratched and pricked at her: sulks, ungratefulness, words she could never take back. Again and again she thought of the time she’d caught black beetles in the garden and stuck them into the top of a coconut cake Libby had worked all day to make. And how Libby had cried, like a little girl, cried with her face in her hands. Libby had cried, too, when Harriet got mad on her eighth birthday and told Libby she hated her present: a heart-shaped charm for her charm bracelet. “A toy! I wanted a toy !” Later, Harriet’s mother had pulled her aside and told her the charm was expensive, more than Libby could afford. Worst: the last time she’d seen Libby, the last time ever, Harriet had shrugged her hand off, run down the sidewalk without looking back. Sometimes, during the course of the listless day (dazed hours on the sofa, paging dully through the Encyclopaedia Britannica ) these thoughts struck Harriet with such fresh force that she crawled in the closet and closed the door and cried, cried with her face in the taffeta skirts of her mother’s dusty old party dresses, sick with the certainty that what she felt was never going to get anything but worse.

School started in two weeks. Hely was at something called Band Clinic, which involved going out to the football field every day and marching back and forth in the suffocating heat. When the football team came out to practice, they all filed back into the tin-roofed shanty of a gymnasium and sat around in folding chairs practicing their instruments. Afterwards the band director built a bonfire and cooked hot dogs, or got together a softball game or an impromptu “jam session” with the bigger kids. Some nights Hely came home early; but on those nights, he said, he had to practice his trombone after supper.

In a way, Harriet was glad of his absence. She was embarrassed by her sorrow, which was too huge to conceal, and by the disastrous state of the house. Harriet’s mother had grown more active after Ida’s departure, in a manner recalling certain nocturnal animals at the Memphis zoo: delicate little saucer-eyed marsupials who—deceived by the ultraviolet lamps that illumined their glass case—ate and groomed themselves and scurried gracefully about their leafy business under the illusion that they were safely hidden, beneath cover of night. Secret trails popped up overnight, and ran and crisscrossed throughout the house, trails marked by tissues, asthma inhalers, bottles of pills and hand lotion and nail varnish, glasses of melting ice which left a linkage of white rings on the table-tops. A portable easel appeared in a particularly crowded and dirty corner of the kitchen and—upon it, gradually, day by day—a picture of some watery purple pansies (though she never finished the vase they were in, beyond the pencil sketch). Even her hair took on a rich new brunette tint (“Chocolate Kiss,” said the bottle—covered with sticky black drips—that Harriet discovered in the wicker trash-can in the downstairs bathroom). Unmindful of the unswept carpets, the sticky floors, the sour-smelling towels in the bathroom, she lavished a bewildering amount of care upon trivia. One afternoon, Harriet found her pushing stacks of clutter left and right in order that she might get down on her knees and polish the brass doorknobs with special polish and a special cloth; another afternoon—heedless of the crumbs, the grease specks, the spilled sugar on the kitchen counter, of the dirty tablecloth and the tower of dishes, stacked precariously above cold gray sink-water, heedless above all of certain sweet whiffs of spoilage, emanating from everywhere and nowhere all at once—she spent a whole hour frantically buffing down an old chrome toaster until it shone like the fender of a limousine, and then spent another ten minutes standing back to admire her handiwork. “We’re managing all right, aren’t we?” she said, and: “Ida never did get things really clean, did she, not like this?” (gazing upon the toaster) and “It’s fun , isn’t it? Just the three of us?”

It wasn’t fun. Still, she was trying. One day, toward the end of August, she got out of bed, took a bubble bath, dressed and put on lipstick, seated herself on a kitchen step-ladder and leafed through The James Beard Cookbook until she found a recipe called Steak Diane, and then walked to the grocery store and bought all the ingredients. Back home, she put on a ruffled cocktail apron (a Christmas gift, never used) over her dress; lit a cigarette, and made herself a Coke on ice with a little bourbon in it, and drank it while she cooked the recipe. Then, holding the platter aloft over her head, they all squeezed single-file into the dining room. Harriet cleared a space on the table; Allison lit a pair of candles, which cast long, wavering shadows on the ceiling. The dinner was the best that Harriet had eaten in a long time—though, three days later, the dishes were still piled in the sink.

Ida’s presence had been valuable not least in this aspect, previously unforeseen: it had constricted her mother’s range of activity in respects which—only now, too late—Harriet appreciated. How often had Harriet yearned for her mother’s company, wished her up and around and out of the bedroom? Now—in a stroke—this wish was granted; and if Harriet had been lonely, and discouraged by the bedroom door, which was always shut, now she was never sure when that door might creak open and her mother drift out, to hover wistfully about Harriet’s chair, as if waiting for Harriet to speak the word that would break the silence and make everything easy and comfortable between them. Harriet would have helped her mother, gladly, if she’d had any clue what she was supposed to say—Allison knew how to reassure their mother without saying a word, just by the calm of her physical presence—but with Harriet, it was different, it seemed that she was supposed to say or do something, though she wasn’t sure what, and the pressure of that expectant gaze only left her speechless and ashamed, and sometimes—if it was too desperate, or lingered too long—frustrated and angry. Then, willfully, she fixed her gaze on her hands, on the floor, on the wall before her, anything to shut out the appeal of her mother’s eyes.

Harriet’s mother did not often talk of Libby—she could hardly pronounce Libby’s name without breaking down in tears—but her thoughts ran towards Libby most of the time, and their current was as plain as if she spoke them aloud. Libby was everywhere. Conversations turned about her, even though her name went unmentioned. Oranges? Everyone remembered the orange slices Libby liked to float in Christmas punch, the orange cake (a sad dessert, from a World War II ration cookbook) that Libby sometimes baked. Pears? Pears too were rich in associations: Libby’s gingered pear preserves; the song that Libby sang about the little pear tree; the still life, featuring pears, that Libby had painted at the state college for women at the turn of the century. And somehow—in talking wholly about objects—it was possible to talk about Libby for hours without mentioning her name. Unspoken reference to Libby haunted every conversation; every country or color, every vegetable or tree, every spoon and doorknob and candy dish was steeped and distempered with her memory—and though Harriet did not question the correctness of this devotion, still sometimes it felt uncomfortably as if Libby had been transformed from a person into a sort of sickly omnipresent gas, seeping through keyholes and under the door cracks.