The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [24]
Lot sat up. “Are you bad off?” he asked, trembling.
She raised herself on her elbow and then sank down again. “Get Anna up by the creek,” she gasped.
The droning became louder and the shapes grayer. The pain intermingled with them for seconds first, then interminably. It came again and again. The sound of the droning grew more distinct and toward morning she realized that it was rain. Later she asked hoarsely, “How long has it been raining?”
“Most two days, now,” Lot answered.
“Then we lost.” Willie looked listlessly out at the dripping trees.
“It’s over.”
“It isn’t over,” he said softly. “We got a daughter.”
“You wanted a son.”
“No, I got what I wanted—two Willies instead of one—that’s better than a cow, even,” he grinned. “What can I do to deserve all I got, Willie?” He bent over and kissed her forehead.
“What can I?” she asked slowly. “And what can I do to help you more?”
“How about your going to the grocery, Willie?”
Miss Willerton shoved Lot away from her. “What did you say, Lucia?” she stuttered.
“I said how about your going to the grocery this time? I’ve been every morning this week and I’m busy now.”
Miss Willerton pushed back from the typewriter. “Very well,” she said sharply. “What do you want there?”
“A dozen eggs and two pounds of tomatoes—ripe tomatoes—and you’d better start doctoring that cold right now. Your eyes are already watering and you’re hoarse. There’s Empirin in the bathroom.
Write a check on the house for the groceries. And wear your coat. It’s cold.”
Miss Willerton rolled her eyes upward. “I am forty-four years old,” she announced, “and able to take care of myself.”
“And get ripe tomatoes,” Miss Lucia returned.
Miss Willerton, her coat buttoned unevenly, tramped up Broad Street and into the supermarket. “What was it now?” she muttered. “Two dozen eggs and a pound of tomatoes, yes.” She passed the lines of canned vegetables and the crackers and headed for the box where the eggs were kept. But there were no eggs. “Where are the eggs?” she asked a boy weighing snapbeans.
“We ain’t got nothin’ but pullet eggs,” he said, fishing up another handful of beans.
“Well, where are they and what is the difference?” Miss Willerton demanded.
He threw several beans back into the bin, slouched over to the egg box and handed her a carton. “There ain’t no difference really,” he said, pushing his gum over his front teeth. “A teen-age chicken or somethin’, I don’t know. You want ‘em?”
“Yes, and two pounds of tomatoes. Ripe tomatoes,” Miss Willerton added. She did not like to do the shopping. There was no reason those clerks should be so condescending. That boy wouldn’t have dawdled with Lucia. She paid for the eggs and tomatoes and left hurriedly. The place depressed her somehow.
Silly that a grocery should depress one—nothing in it but trifling domestic doings—women buying beans—riding children in those grocery go-carts—higgling about an eighth of a pound more or less of squash—what did they get out of it? Miss Willerton wondered. Where was there any chance for self-expression, for creation, for art? All around her it was the same—sidewalks full of people scurrying about with their hands full of little packages and their minds full of little packages—that woman there with the child on the leash, pulling him, jerking him, dragging him away from a window with a jack-o’-lantern in it; she would probably be pulling and jerking him the rest of her life. And there was another, dropping a shopping bag all over the street, and another wiping a child’s nose, and up the street an old woman was coming with three grandchildren jumping all over her, and behind them was a couple walking too close for refinement.
Miss WiIIerton looked at the couple sharply as they came nearer and passed. The woman was plump with yellow hair and fat ankles and muddy-colored eyes. She had on high-heel pumps and blue anklets, a too-short cotton dress, and a plaid jacket. Her skin was mottled and her neck thrust forward as if she were sticking it out to smell something that was always being