Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [174]
Adele sat taking little nibbles of pie and nodding her head and making soft noises to accompany the loud fast rattle of his voice without interrupting it: um, Adele said, um hum, oh dear, mmm. She looked critically at her nails. Mostly she kept her eyes near his face, while her mind drifted high as a kite on some other wind. Once she smiled quickly, a loose bedroom face, and then smoothed her features over.
Adele blurred into Shirley, Luis’s second and Italian wife, responsible for getting him into her family’s nursery business. Somehow Luis had emerged from the marriage with a chunk of it. He was that way. Shirley had dark brown hair and a full pouting mouth and a full-blown temper. She had lasted as long as she had because of the business. Yet she had sat there many years saying um hum, oh dear, uh huh, mmm. And Carmel before her. All Luis’s wives came to sound the same, nodding at him, but each one was fancier and had a higher polish. Each one was lighter. Each one spent more money. Carmel had been for hard times. Shirley was for getting set up in business. Adele was for making money in bushels and spending it.
When Adele noticed that Luis had run down for the moment, she said, “No gardenias this time. They have too strong a smell. It gives me a headache.”
“Okay, no gardenias. Yeah, they smell like cheap soap.” Luis nodded, looking pleased. He collected distinctions, judgments, he always had. At eleven years old he was saying seriously, “You know, a Cadillac is a better car than a Chrysler?” Their family’s ancient gray Ford had given way to an only slightly less ancient rust-colored Hudson. Her father had driven maybe the world’s last Hudson. It was chocolate-colored and the body was already rusting into shreds when they got it. It suggested a lump of dog shit on wheels.
An hour after they had all gone to bed, she got up. Then she discovered that Luis had locked her in. She pushed and pushed on the door and then she tried to stick a comb in between the door and the jamb to push the catch back. It would not slide in. She turned back and slowly undressed. This was only Wednesday night. She had Thursday and Friday. He might forget to lock the door. She might find a key that fit it. He might get careless. A knife might work. Weary, heavy with drug, she let herself fall into the strange soft bed and dissolve into sleep.
“You’re dreadfully slow,” Adele complained. “My cleaning lady gets that done in forty-five minutes.”
“It’s the drug. It slows me down. They gave me a real heavy shot so I can hardly move.”
“It seems to me you move fast enough when it’s time to eat.” Adele was consulting a list. Everywhere she had lists—of groceries, of dry-cleaning, of jobs to be done, of people to be called. All morning, while Connie was cleaning and making desserts from the recipe books Adele shoved at her, not trusting her to cook on her own as she knew perfectly how to do, Adele was writing lists at a desk she had at the end of the kitchen. Every list made more work. Connie gripped the handle of the vacuum till her hand ached and took a deep breath and did not allow herself a word. She swept the yellow carpeting while before her the tropical fish Luis always kept swam to and fro in their glass prison in the living room, under the murmur of the bubbler.
Breakfast had been bacon and eggs and toast with strawberry jam and lots of real coffee from the blue and white percolator. All morning whenever she could sneak a chance to do it, she made and drank coffee. How wonderful she felt. Lunch was the next high point. Adele was talking on the phone and told her to help herself to leftovers. First she had a cheese and salami sandwich with a big mug of coffee, sweet and light the way she loved it. She heated the milk first. Then she ate a lot more cheese and salami without bread, so it wouldn’t fill her up too fast.
Each time she opened the door to that paradise of golden possibilities, she felt buffeted by choice. Deciding was so difficult she could hardly