Woman on the Edge of Time

Now Luis sat at the table’s head in a chair with arms, carving the huge turkey with an electric knife he flourished wildly. The strange stuffing he had already piled in a big bowl. On his right and left were Mark and Bob, his sons by his second marriage. Next to Bob, Dolly was dressed up in a jade green pants suit with a ruffled copper chiffon blouse, looking gorgeous and wound tight enough for her head suddenly to fly off. Nervousness ticked in her throat like a bomb. Delicately she ate green olives from a glass dish. Neither Shirley nor Carmel was there, of course, left to their own devices. Luis liked to command the attendance of all his children at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, having the money to back up his commands. But Nita was missing. Carmel had insisted she was too sick to go. Then came Celeste, Adele’s eight‑year‑old from her first marriage, Connie herself, and then baby Susan in her high chair on one side of Adele and the toddler Mike on the other side.

Luis, big with pleasure, lorded it now over his full plate and the dinners of everyone else. “Mark, you take more potatoes. That’s how come you’re so skinny. Makes you weak. That’s why you didn’t make the football team. Now, you try out for wrestling, listen to me–you can be skinny in wrestling. You wrestle in your own weight class, see?”

Mark grew red in the face and his fork slumped in his hand.

“Now take Dolly. She doesn’t need to eat to get fat. She just looks at the potatoes and she gains weight, right?”

“I’m not fat, Daddy. I’ve lost all the weight I need to.”

“It won’t last. It’s heredity. Look at your mother. If I didn’t work as hard as I do, I’d be as fat as she is.”

Luis was fat. He’d been fat for twenty years, but he refused to admit it. He talked about weight all the time. He wanted his women to be thin for him, she thought, wondering if she could ask for more turkey yet or if she should wait till it was offered. Dolly sat nervously poised for further attack from Luis. She had grown up thinking her parents married; then had come the period when Luis was proving legally he had never married and she was a bastard. Shirley’s parents would never let her marry a divorced man. But then Dolly had become the child of his first marriage, and since she was eighteen she had been supposed to call him Daddy. Adele was Anglo and they didn’t care how many times you got married, just so it was legal. So Dolly had slid into being his legal up‑front daughter again. If only he could have divorced Connie, his sister, or made her illegitimate, how happy Luis would be!

“Look at your aunt pack it away now. Eats like there’s no tomorrow. If you ate like her, Mark, you’d make the football team for sure. Bob, why aren’t you eating your sweet potatoes? Those are the best part of the meal.”

“They are not I don’t like them, Dad. They taste funny.”

“There’s nothing funny about the way they taste. At your age you don’t know what’s good … . Celeste, what are you doing?”

Celeste jumped. She was happily swishing her candied sweet potatoes, cranberry relish, and broccoli into a multicolored mush, pressing it all together and sculpting it into castles with her fork. “Nothing.”

“Adele, she’s playing with her food again. That’s a disgusting habit. You ought to have that put on your head to wear.”

Adele blinked from her serene, faintly smiling cocoon. Connie watched her sideways, sure she was on something. No wonder Adele got on so well with Luis. She was hardly ever in the same room with him, no more than his fancy guppies swimming behind glass. She tended her two youngest with a casual smiling absentminded air, all the time off somewhere screwing seven‑foot bronze angels on sunset clouds. She could not help speculating what Adele was on. Adele might just be incredibly stoned, but Connie didn’t think so: she was too far off. Downers, most likely.

“Susan?” Adele focused on her baby in the high chair. “Why, she’s a little darling. She ate her pudding all up!”

“It’s Celeste again. Making mud pies with her food!”

“Oh, Celeste,” Adele said with a sweet smile. “You can play afterward. You know that upsets your daddy.” Her long thin hand laden with rings floated like a scarf through the air and sank to rest beside her scarcely touched plate.