Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [67]
It’s about this time that she disappears to "fix up" for dinner.
Warren is always surprised how this disappearing happens without his noticing it, like a little bite taken out of the day, so quick it seems stolen. One minute his mother is standing there in her housedress with her face all damp, and the next minute she’s wearing her red and white summer dirndl and a fresh white blouse with a drawstring around the neck. Her hair will be combed and she’ll have lipstick on, dark coral, glossy like the licked surface of a jujube. She looks straight from the Oxydol ads, or so Warren thinks—perky, her eyes full of twinkles, her red lips pulling up, and her voice going slidey and loose. Sometimes she puts on a pair of silver-colored earrings that hang on by pinching her ear lobes hard. Warren can’t help feeling proud of her when he sees her looking like this, coming down the carpeted stairs, all fixed up.
"Fixing up" is one of her girlhood expressions, one of her Hoosierisms, his father calls it. She says a number of other funny things too, like "waiting on" someone instead of "waiting for," or "having a little lie-down" instead of "taking a nap." Her voice has a cracked slant to it, slower but also brighter than other mothers’ voices.
"Just a picnic supper tonight," she says to her husband, as though to confine his expectations. "Just odds and ends."
Sometimes he takes her girlishness literally, sometimes not.
He kisses her cheek, feeling its cleanliness, and then he bends and kisses the tops of the children’s heads, each of them in turn. Are these bright little bodies really connected to his, his old blood running in their young veins, the marrow of his bone matching theirs? Their brushed hair smells of sunshine and dust. Their smiles have a wonderful polish to them but are nevertheless tentative. He is unfailingly moved by the way their expressions have gone shy since breakfast. He touches the knot of his linen tie, considers removing it for dinner, then decides against it.
Decades of parched solitude have made him a voyeur in his own life, and even now he watches himself critically: paterfamilias, a man greeting his family at the end of the working day, gazing into the faces of his children and beyond them to the screened porch where the supper table is set. A corner pane of the folded back porch door catches a ray of sun, and he observes this with a look that is almost seigneurial, his porch door, his rectangle of golden light. "Have you washed your hands?" he hears himself asking his youngest child, and she immediately sticks them straight out for inspection, palms up. His little Joanie, five years old—who is breathless with the sense of the moment, wriggling her wrists, ready to explode. "Perfect," he tells her approvingly, making an announcement of it, but also a secret, and she hops up and down on one foot and then launches her body into a whirling off-center motion, so that he’s reminded of one of those pre-war wind-up toys from Japan.
"Steady there, sweetheart," he says.
Is that his voice flowing out to her? "You’ll bump your head on the doorway."
"No, I won’t."
Of course she won’t.
Conversation at the Flett supper table is not demanding. The children are not made to give an account of their day or to discuss "current events" or, as in one Torrington Crescent family, to speak only in French. Talk just meanders along in an unstructured way, how high the temperature went at noon, what to do about the aphids on the rose bushes, whose turn it is to clear the table. A little sigh