The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [221]
Jinny—not out playing croquet—stood with her legs apart, cutting off locks of her hair at the hall mirror. The locks fell at her feet. She had on straw sandals, the kind that would have to be ordered, boy's shorts. She looked up at me, short range, and said "Just in time, to tell me when to stop." She'd cut bangs. Her smile reminded me of the way a child will open its mouth all right, but not let out the cry till it sees the right person.
And turning to the mirror she cut again. "Obey that impulse—" She had seen Maideen then, and she went right on cutting her hair with those stork-shaped scissors. "Come in too, take off your gloves."
That's right: she would know, with her quickness like foreknowledge, first that I would come back when the summer got too much for me, and second that I'd just as soon bring a stranger if I could find one, somebody who didn't know any better, to come in the house with me when I came.
Father, I wished I could go back.
I looked at Jinny's head with the ragged points all over it, and there was Miss Lizzie coming down; she had just stopped to change her shoes, of course. For the kind that came down stairs like a march. As we all fell in together, we were leaving where we met too, starting down the hall with nobody pairing, and over each other's names or whatever we said, Jinny's voice hollered at Tellie for cokes. She counted us with her finger. That lightness came right back. Just to step on the matting, that billows a little anyway, and with Jinny's hair scattered like feathers on it, I could have floated, risen and floated.
In rockers—we sat on the back porch—we were all not rocking. The chairs, white wicker, had a new coat of paint—their thousandth-and-first, but one new coat since I left Jinny. The outside—a sheet of white light—was in my eyes. The ferns close around us were hushing on their stands, they had just been watered. I could listen to women and hear pieces of the story, of what happened to us, of course—but I listened to the ferns.
No matter, it was being told. Not in Miss Lizzie's voice, which wouldn't think of it, certainly not in Jinny's, but in the clear voice of Maideen where it had never existed—all the worse for the voice not even questioning what it said—just repeating, just rushing, old—the town words.
Telling what she was told she saw, repeating what she listened to—young girls are outlandish little birds that talk. They can be taught, some each day, to sing a song people have made.... Even Miss Lizzie put her head on one side, to let Maideen be.
He walked out on her and took his clothes down to the other end of the street. Now everybody's waiting to see how soon he'll go back. They say Jinny MacLain invites Woody out there to eat, a year younger than she is, remember when they were born. Invites, under her mama's nose. Sure, it's Woodrow Spights she invites. Who else in Morgana would there be for Jinny Stark after Ran, with even Eugene MacLain gone? She's kin to the Nesbitts. They don't say when it started, can anybody tell? At the Circle, at Miss Francine's, at Sunday School, they say, they say she will marry Woodrow: Woodrow'd jump at it but Ran will kill somebody first. And there's Ran's papa and the way he was and is, remember, remember? And Eugene gone that could sometimes hold him down. Poor Snowdie, it's her burden. He used to be sweet but too much devil in him from Time was, that's Ran. He'll do something bad. He won't divorce Jinny but he'll do something bad. Maybe kill them all. They say Jinny's not scared of that. Maybe she drinks and hides the bottle, you know her father's side. And just as prissy as ever on the street. And oh, don't you know, they run into each other every day of the world, all three. Sure, how could they help it if they wanted to help it, how could you get away from it, right in Morgana? You can't get away in Morgana. Away from anything at all, you know that.
Father! You didn't listen.
And Tellie