Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [173]
The yard was elegantly planted, with borders swooping in and out in drifts of pine and juniper, but in the night and the cold, it looked only bleak. The ground was frozen and bare. Through the glare of light surrounding the house to protect it against burglars, she could not see whether the night was clear or cloudy. She hoped it would not snow. That would make it harder to get away. She wished that Luis had invited her out a few more times in the past so that she knew something of the area. Which way would she walk to get to public transportation? She must figure that out.
Without knocking, Adele opened the door. “If you want to set the table, we’re going to have pie and coffee before we turn in.”
They were crazy, for they did just that: drank coffee from a blue and white electric percolator just before going to bed, along with a boughten apple pie. The pie tasted wonderful. She could have eaten the whole thing. A terrible desire to eat and eat and eat seized her throat. Food that had flavors. By shifting to the right in her chair she could see the refrigerator in the kitchen, huge and golden brown. It kept drawing her sleepy gaze, all that golden space crammed with food. She had seen it when she got out the nondairy creamer for their coffee. She had seen the turkey defrosting. The freezer was stacked with steaks and roasts and chops, with vegetables in bright cartons. She had seen gallons of milk, a pound of butter, vegetables in the crispers, salad dressings half used, real eggs, orange juice in cartons. She imagined herself rising slowly from her chair and with her Thorazine shuffle—she had been especially heavily doped that day in preparation for her furlough—stumbling into the kitchen to the refrigerator, sitting down on the floor, and pulling out one item at a time until she had eaten everything in the whole golden box. It all called to her in wonderful soprano siren voices: the jar of olives, the chunky peanut butter, the salami, the liverwurst in the opened package, the jar of maraschino cherries, the cheddar cheese, the packaged dip, the bacon, the eggs, the chocolate pudding from the dairy case, the soda, the big round bright pieces of fruit.
They seemed to eat very quickly. Luis talked nonstop about his day. He spoke quickly and he talked a lot and he didn’t like interruptions: in that he was like the brother she had had all her life. But this middle-aged overweight businessman in the dark gray suit and the wide tie with its narrow dim stripe, the round moon face bulging into jowls, the forehead that ran well back to the middle of his scalp, the fat fingers with a lodge ring that remained braced on the table as he talked as though he feared if he let go of them they would fly up—did she know him from someplace?
“‘They all got brown spots on their leaves,’ he says to me. ‘They’re no good. I paid you six hundred to do the foyer and they all got brown spots.’ ‘That was a special price I gave you,’ I said ‘They’re worth twice that now.’ ‘All covered with brown spots,’ he said. ‘Listen,’ ‘I said, I could have done the job with plastic. We have a beautiful selection of plastic. You wanted live ones. Now look, the world is full of diseases and bugs. You could’ve signed up for my service. My boys come around every month regular as clockwork and they mop off the leaves and they exterminate and they put in the fertilizer. We keep it up. Something kicks off, we replace. It’s insurance. But you weren’t interested. Now you complain to me that some pest has got into your greens. Of course some pest got in. What did you think—you can put up a sign and say no insects allowed? You don’t keep up an investment, it’s money down the drain.’” Luis told the story with satisfaction. “Let that fool paint the leaves green. Trying to cut corners with me. When