Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [9]
“No, but she left a note. What’s the matter with Claudia?”
“Oh, nothing all that serious. Just, you know, a little bleeding …”
Ian began studying an area slightly above her head.
“So anyway,” she said, “I thought I’d fix you some supper. Ordinarily I’d invite you to our place, but we’re going out so I brought something over. There’s potato salad, and ham, and I’ve put some peas on the stove to warm up.”
He didn’t tell her he usually ate at Cicely’s. All summer the family had tactfully left her and Danny alone, allowing them to get past the honeymoon stage, so they met only on special occasions like Bee’s birthday and the Fourth of July. Lucy must not have any notion about their day-to-day lives.
He followed her through the dining room to the kitchen, where he found Thomas and Agatha sitting in two straight-backed chairs. There was something eerie about children who kept so quiet you didn’t realize they were in the house. Thomas held a large, naked doll with a matted wig. Agatha’s hands were folded tidily on the table in front of her. They looked at Ian with no more expression than the doll wore. Ian said, “Well, hi, gang,” but neither of them answered.
He leaned against the sink and watched Lucy flitting around the kitchen. Her hair billowed halfway down her back, longer than he would have expected. She wore white sandals and her toenails were painted fire-engine red. None of the girls at school painted their nails anymore. Everyone was striving for the natural look, which all at once struck Ian as homely.
He realized she must have spoken to him. She was facing him with her head cocked. “Pardon?” he asked.
“Do you want your ham cold, or heated up?”
“Oh, um, cold is fine.”
“It won’t be real fancy,” she said, opening the refrigerator. “Tomorrow if your mom’s still busy we’ll ask you to dinner. Why, you haven’t been over since I painted the living room!”
“No, I guess not,” Ian said.
She and Danny were renting a one-story house just north of Cold Spring Lane. So far they had hardly any furniture, but everything they did have was modern, modern, modern—black plastic and aluminum and glass. Bee claimed it would take some getting used to, but Ian loved it.
“Next week I start on the children’s room,” Lucy said. “I found this magazine with the best ideas! Sit down, why don’t you.”
He pulled out a chair and sat across from the children. A place had already been laid for him with the company silver and his mother’s best china. Two candlesticks from the dining room flanked a bowl of pansies. He began to feel ridiculous, like one of those rich people in cartoons who banquet all alone while a butler stands at the ready. He asked Thomas and Agatha, “Am I the only one eating?”
They gazed at him. Their eyes were a mournful shade of brown.
“How about you?” he asked Thomas’s doll. “Won’t you join me in a little collation?”
He caught Thomas’s lips twitching—a victory. A chink of a giggle escaped him. But Agatha remained unamused. “Her name is Dulcimer,” she said reprovingly.
“Dulcimer?”
“Ian doesn’t care about all that,” Lucy told them.
“She used to have clothes,” Agatha said, “but Thomas went and ruined them.”
“I did not!” Thomas shouted.
Lucy said, “Ssh,” and lit the candles.
“She used to have a dress with two pockets, but he put it in the washer and it came out bits and pieces.”
“That was the washer did that, not me!”
“Now she has to go bare, because his other dolls’ clothes are too little.”
Ian forked up a slice of ham and looked again at Dulcimer. Her body was cloth, soiled to dark gray. Her head was pink vinyl and so were her arms and her legs, which had a wide-set, spraddled appearance. “Maybe she could wear real baby clothes,” he suggested.
“Mama won’t—”
“That’s what I say, too!” Thomas burst out.
“Mama won’t let her,” Agatha continued stubbornly. There was something unswerving about her. She reminded Ian of certain grade-school teachers he had known. “Mama’s got all these baby clothes she buys at Hochschild’s, nightgowns and diapers and stuff Dulcimer