The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [52]
“Crazies never did scare me. You can’t scare me into running away, either. You’re the one that’s got to do the running,” Fay said.
“Scaring people into things. Scaring people out of things. You haven’t learned any better yet, Fay?” Trembling, Laurel kept on. “What were you trying to scare Father into—when you struck him?”
“I was trying to scare him into living!” Fay cried.
“You what? You what?”
“I wanted him to get up out of there, and start him paying a little attention to me, for a change.”
“He was dying,” said Laurel. “He was paying full attention to that.”
“I tried to make him quit his old-man foolishness. I was going to make him live if I had to drag him! And I take good credit for what I did!” cried Fay. “It’s more than anybody else was doing.”
“You hurt him.”
“I was being a wife to him!” cried Fay. “Have you clean forgotten by this time what being a wife is?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Laurel said. “Do you want to know why this breadboard right here is such a beautiful piece of work? I can tell you. It’s because my husband made it.”
“Made it? What for?”
“Do you know what a labor of love is? My husband made it for my mother, so she’d have a good one. Phil had the gift—the gift of his hands. And he planed—fitted—glued—clamped—it’s made on the true, look and see, it’s still as straight as his T-square. Tongued and grooved—tight-fitted, every edge—”
“I couldn’t care less,” said Fay.
“I watched him make it. He’s the one in the family who could make things. We were a family of comparatively helpless people—that’s what so bound us, bound us together. My mother blessed him when she saw this. She said it was sound and beautiful and exactly suited her long-felt needs, and she welcomed it into her kitchen.”
“It’s mine now,” said Fay.
“But I’m the one that’s going to take care of it,” said Laurel.
“You mean you’re asking me to give it to you?”
“I’m going to take it back to Chicago with me.”
“What makes you think I’ll let you? What’s made you so brazen all at once?”
“Finding the breadboard!” Laurel cried. She placed both hands down on it and gave it the weight of her body.
“Fine Miss Laurel!” said Fay. “If they all could see you now! You mean you’d carry it out of the house the way it is? It’s dirty as sin.”
“A coat of grime is something I can get rid of.”
“If all you want to do is rub the skin off your bones.”
“The scars it’s got are a different matter. But I’d work.”
“And do what with it when you got through?” Fay said mockingly.
“Have my try at making bread. Only last night, by the grace of God, I had my mother’s recipe, written in her own hand, right before my eyes.”
“It all tastes alike, don’t it?”
“You never tasted my mother’s. I could turn out a good loaf too—I’d work at it.”
“And then who’d eat it with you?” said Fay.
“Phil loved bread. He loved good bread. To break a loaf and eat it warm, just out of the oven,” Laurel said. Ghosts. And in irony she saw herself, pursuing her own way through the house as single-mindedly as Fay had pursued hers through the ceremony of the day of the funeral. But of course they had had to come together—it was useless to suppose they wouldn’t meet, here at the end of it. Laurel was not late, not yet, in leaving, but Fay had come early, and in time. For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives. She thought of Phil and the kamikaze shaking hands.
“Your husband? What has he got to do with it?” asked Fay. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Laurel took the breadboard in both hands and raised it up out of Fay’s reach.
“Is that what you hit with? Is a moldy old breadboard the best you can find?”
Laurel held the board tightly. She supported it, above her head, but for a moment it seemed to be what supported her, a raft in the waters, to keep her from slipping down deep, where the others had gone before her.
From the parlor came a soft whirr, and noon struck.
Laurel slowly lowered the board and held it out level between the two of them.
“I’ll tell you what: you just about made a fool of yourself,” said Fay. “You were just