Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [18]
“What for? Herb knows what a pressure sprayer looks like. Hell, he’s the one talked me into buying it, and now he uses it more than I do.”
“And on his way to finding it he’ll be handling my collecting funnels and insect nets, storing up tales for Mary Edna to whisper to Hannie-Mavis by way of Lois and Emaline. No thank you.”
Cole leaned back in his chair, smiling. “The three most efficient means of communication: telegraph, telephone, tell a Widener woman.”
“I used to think that was funny. Before their favorite subject was me.”
“They don’t mean any harm.”
“Do you really believe that?” She shook her head, turning her back on him. They did mean her harm. They had from the beginning. Since she’d become mistress of their family home last June, they’d had little to say to her and everything to say about her. Before Lusa herself ever set foot in the Kroger’s or the hardware store, she was already known as a Lexington girl who got down on all fours to name the insects in the parlor rather than squashing them.
“My sisters have more to do than to sit around hating you,” Cole insisted.
“Your sisters haven’t learned my name yet.”
“Lusa, come on.”
“You ask them. I’ll give you ten dollars if one of them gets it right—the whole thing, Lusa Maluf Landowski. They make a show of not being able to remember it. You think I’m kidding? Lois evidently told Oda Black my maiden name was Zucchini.”
“Now, that can’t be.”
“Oda was clucking that she could see why I’d rushed you to the altar to be rid of that.” She watched his face, trying to see if he even understood this humiliation. Lusa had kept her own name when they married, but it hadn’t mattered: everyone called her Mrs. Widener, as if there were no Lusa at all.
“Well, in spite of despising you with all her heart,” he said patiently, “Lois invited us down for a big supper Memorial Day. She wants us all to go out to the cemetery in the afternoon to decorate Mommy’s and Dad’s graves.”
Lusa cocked her head, curious. “When did she call?”
“Last night.”
“The whole family’s invited? How can Lois do that? Her kitchen’s the size of a phone booth.”
“It was much bigger before the ruffles and plastic ducks prevailed.”
Lusa had to smile.
He gestured. “Here’s the kitchen. Why don’t you ever invite everybody up here?”
Lusa stared at him, slack-jawed.
“Well, what?”
She shook her head. “How can you possibly be so dumb? How can you sit there in the middle of this hurricane of hateful women and act like it’s a nice, sunny day out?”
“What?”
She marched to the corner cabinet in the dining room and returned with a particular china plate, which she held up like a flash card. “This means nothing to you?”
“It’s your wedding china.”
Her wedding china, true—it had been her family’s, a pattern from England with delicately tinted botanical paintings of flowers and their pollinators. But did they have to scorn everything she loved? “You don’t recall what happened at the dinner I had here last July, a month after we married? The birthday party for you that I spent about two weeks cooking, without help, in my first failed attempt to impress your family?”
“No.”
“Let me help you out. Picture your eldest sister. Picture her sitting in that chair, blue hair and all, forgive me, wearing a face that would curdle milk. Picture me serving her dinner on this plate, right here.”
He laughed. “I recall Mary Edna took a bite of potatoes and saw a black widow or something underneath and screamed.”
“It was the wing of a sphinx moth. A painting of a sphinx moth. I would not have china with black widows on it. And she didn’t scream, she laid down her fork and crossed her hands like a corpse and has refused my invitations ever since. Even Thanksgiving, Cole, for God’s sake. In your family home, where you and your sisters have eaten every Thanksgiving dinner of your lives, prior to the mortal offense committed by your wife against Her Majesty Mary Edna.”
“Let the rest of them come without Mary Edna, then. She’s always made too much of herself