Woman on the Edge of Time

They were crazy, for they did just that: drank coffee from a blue and white electric percolator just before going to bed, along with a boughten apple pie. The pie tasted wonderful. She could have eaten the whole thing. A terrible desire to eat and eat and eat seized her throat. Food that had flavors. By shifting to the right in her chair she could see the refrigerator in the kitchen, huge and golden brown. It kept drawing her sleepy gaze, all that golden space crammed with food. She had seen it when she got out the nondairy creamer for their coffee. She had seen the turkey defrosting. The freezer was stacked with steaks and roasts and chops, with vegetables in bright cartons. She had seen gallons of milk, a pound of butter, vegetables in the crispers, salad dressings half used, real eggs, orange juice in cartons. She imagined herself rising slowly from her chair and with her Thorazine shuffle–she had been especially heavily doped that day in preparation for her furlough–stumbling into the kitchen to the refrigerator, sitting down on the floor, and pulling out one item at a time until she had eaten everything in the whole golden box. It all called to her in wonderful soprano siren voices: the jar of olives, the chunky peanut butter, the salami, the liverwurst in the opened package, the jar of maraschino cherries, the cheddar cheese, the packaged dip, the bacon, the eggs, the chocolate pudding from the dairy case, the soda, the big round bright pieces of fruit.

They seemed to eat very quickly. Luis talked nonstop about his day. He spoke quickly and he talked a lot and he didn’t like interruptions: in that he was like the brother she had had all her life. But this middle‑aged overweight businessman in the dark gray suit and the wide tie with its narrow dim stripe, the round moon face bulging into jowls, the forehead that ran well back to the middle of his scalp, the fat fingers with a lodge ring that remained braced on the table as he talked as though he feared if he let go of them they would fly up–did she know him from someplace?

“‘They all got brown spots on their leaves,’ he says to me. ‘They’re no good. I paid you six hundred to do the foyer and they all got brown spots.’ ‘That was a special price I gave you,’ I said ‘They’re worth twice that now.’ ‘All covered with brown spots,’ he said. ‘Listen,’ ‘I said, I could have done the job with plastic. We have a beautiful selection of plastic. You wanted live ones. Now look, the world is full of diseases and bugs. You could’ve signed up for my service. My boys come around every month regular as clockwork and they mop off the leaves and they exterminate and they put in the fertilizer. We keep it up. Something kicks off, we replace. It’s insurance. But you weren’t interested. Now you complain to me that some pest has got into your greens. Of course some pest got in. What did you think–you can put up a sign and say no insects allowed? You don’t keep up an investment, it’s money down the drain.’” Luis told the story with satisfaction. “Let that fool paint the leaves green. Trying to cut corners with me. When I do a job like that at a competitive price, I expect the service contract.”

Adele sat taking little nibbles of pie and nodding her head and making soft noises to accompany the loud fast rattle of his voice without interrupting it: um, Adele said, um hum, oh dear, mmm. She looked critically at her nails. Mostly she kept her eyes near his face, while her mind drifted high as a kite on some other wind. Once she smiled quickly, a loose bedroom face, and then smoothed her features over.

Adele blurred into Shirley, Luis’s second and Italian wife, responsible for getting him into her family’s nursery business. Somehow Luis had emerged from the marriage with a chunk of it. He was that way. Shirley had dark brown hair and a full pouting mouth and a full‑blown temper. She had lasted as long as she had because of the business. Yet she had sat there many years saying um hum, oh dear, uh huh, mmm. And Carmel before her. All Luis’s wives came to sound the same, nodding at him, but each one was fancier and had a higher polish. Each one was lighter. Each one spent more money. Carmel had been for hard times. Shirley was for getting set up in business. Adele was for making money in bushels and spending it.

When Adele noticed that Luis had run down for the moment, she said, “No gardenias this time. They have too strong a smell. It gives me a headache.”

“Okay, no gardenias. Yeah, they smell like cheap soap.” Luis nodded, looking pleased. He collected distinctions, judgments, he always had. At eleven years old he was saying seriously, “You know, a Cadillac is a better car than a Chrysler?” Their family’s ancient gray Ford had given way to an only slightly less ancient rust‑colored Hudson. Her father had driven maybe the world’s last Hudson. It was chocolate‑colored and the body was already rusting into shreds when they got it. It suggested a lump of dog shit on wheels.