Early Warning

“Anger” happened the next day, when she chanced to see a woman she knew at the supermarket, a woman who made a point of gossiping equally about everyone they knew. She was friendly to Lillian in the canned-goods aisle, and happened to remark that she had seen “Mary Jo Canton’s new hairdo. Well, darling, hair don’t.” In the parking lot, when Lillian was pulling out and this woman was walking behind the boy pushing her very full cart to her very ample Mercedes-Benz (and who had one of those? Lillian would like to know), Lillian could not help reflecting that this woman was six years older than she, drank heavily, and was poisoned by malice. Surely she should be the one having a lump in her breast?

Obviously, Sunday was the day for “bargaining.” While they sat up in bed, reading articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times about Reagan and Ford being too old for the presidency and Bush having swiped all of Ford’s voters, and now this John Anderson fellow, whom Arthur rather liked — but at any rate, the Republicans had overcome the contentiousness between the right wing and the rest of the Party (they passed sections back and forth) — Lillian did quietly wonder what she would give up in order to avoid the coming ordeal. Maybe the house? No eggs? No steak? No Brie? No buttery popcorn? She shifted around on the bed, and Arthur offered her an article about the difference between people who draw the drapes and people who throw up the blinds: light-house people, dark-house people. Lillian enjoyed the article, but was there anything she should have done differently? Detergent? Breast-feeding? She could think of nothing else that was not human sacrifice, and if you came right down to it, that did seem to be the bargain that religion dealt in, didn’t it? Someone must die so that others may live. Mary Elizabeth? Tim? Lillian sighed, and Arthur said, “You okay, honey? You want another cup of coffee?”

Lillian said, “No, thanks. One’s enough today.” Really, she did want another cup of coffee, and when Arthur came back into the bedroom with his second, the fragrance was seductive. But giving up coffee was a start. Maybe.

Monday, she pretended to be asleep with her head buried in the pillow, and then, after Arthur left, she sat up and let the tears and sobs flow. It was all too easy to imagine herself dead, and it wasn’t good. She herself would be beyond sensation, she was pretty sure, and if not, then she felt she had done nothing to deserve punishment (through no virtue of her own — she had been taught to be a good girl, and she had been a good girl). But what Arthur and Debbie, especially, and maybe Janet and Dean would do without her, she literally could not imagine. Debbie called her every day; Arthur followed her around whenever he was not at work, and when he was at work, he called her in the morning and in the afternoon. Dean called her when he was worried about something, and Tina called her when she was excited about something. There was nothing oppressive about these calls — she loved them. They were the currency of news flowing freely, buoyed with jokes and funny stories, bits from TV, magazines, school. As soon as she thought of something funny or strange, she thought of who might enjoy it more, and called them — they did the same. But they would not as readily call one another. She was the switching station, the spot where information flowed to and from. Claire’s situation was shocking, now that Paul had refused to sign the papers and accused her of destroying her children and threatened to find a judge who would make sure she ended up without a penny, but wouldn’t Lillian’s own departure be even worse in its way, something her family could not make the best of? It seemed like this all day, all the way up to the moment when she mixed the mashed potatoes from the night before with an egg yolk and formed them into little patties, which she then breaded and fried, and then she thought maybe she was making too big a deal of this.

She dreamt all night about a scene she might have seen in a movie, though which one she could not remember. A man is sleeping while his sheepdog is driving his sheep over a cliff. He keeps looking over the cliff at the dead sheep, again and again; how he woke up was not in the dream. She dreamt it, then she dreamt herself telling about it, then she dreamt herself telling herself that it was only a dream. But she kept looking over the cliff at the corpses of the sheep.

When she woke up, she knew there was nothing to be done, and she felt okay all that day. She cooked Arthur’s breakfast and kissed him on his bald spot while he was eating and did the dishes and put some laundry into the machine and sorted through packets of flower seed from the year before and exclaimed with Debbie about Carlie’s putting together a twelve-piece jigsaw puzzle all by herself. Then she got in the car and drove to the doctor.