Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [177]
“No,” Luis said. “Connie can clean up just fine. You stay with us. I don’t see my big girl that often, do I?”
Dolly glanced at her little jeweled watch, then at the numberless blob of clock on the wall that Connie could never read. Vic was to come and pick Dolly up to take her back to the city, once he got done having Thanksgiving dinner with his mother in a restaurant near Leisure World retirement community.
Connie had run the glasses and dishes through the dishwasher and was just starting on the second sinkload of pots, when Dolly burst into the kitchen, weeping. Luis had been teasing her about how she had been talking about marrying Geraldo and nothing had happened.
After Dolly had wept on Connie’s shoulder as so many, so countless many times before, blown her nose, and put her makeup back on layer by delicate layer in the small bathroom off the kitchen, she settled in a chair. “Why did you want so bad to spend Thanksgiving here?” Dolly asked her. “I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to.”
“How come you have to? At least if you go to Carmel she doesn’t make you cry.”
“Yeah, Carmel keeps after me, she just makes me mad.”
“How come you didn’t bring Nita? Is she for real sick?”
“Carmel’s pretending. She doesn’t want to be alone on Thanksgiving. Nita has a little cold, a drippy nose, is all. Carmel says she has her the rest of the time, she gets to keep her holidays. She only did it to spite him. I get caught in the middle. I have to get back to work. He always wants to collect everybody together like some crazy sideshow!” A moment later she was sniveling again. “How can he say I’m fat? How can he? … You know Adele’s only nine years older than me? Just the difference between me and Mark!”
After Adele had put the little ones to bed, she wandered into the kitchen, where Connie and Dolly were putting the dishes away out of the dishwasher here and there, by chance.
“You put the good crystal in the dishwasher!” She was morose now, tense. “You could have broken it all! You don’t do that with crystal. You wash it by hand, of course. Are you so lazy? Or I suppose you’ve never seen a good piece of crystal before.” She was talking to herself. She puttered around the kitchen in low-pitched sulky anger. Dolly giggled softly; Adele appeared not to hear. We are not three women, Connie thought. We are ups and downs and heavy tranks meeting in the all-electric kitchen and bouncing off each other’s opaque sides like shiny pills colliding.
She stuffed a bread knife into the hem of her dress and walked carefully upstairs, aware of its swinging and bumping. Again that night Luis locked her in. Lying stiffly on the bed, this time she heard him turn the key in the lock. She went through the empty drawers of the dresser, she went through the shelves of the medicine cabinet, finding aspirin, toothpaste, antiperspirant, shampoo, a room deodorizer. The bedroom window was closed with an air conditioner. The bathroom window opened a foot and a half after she worked on it with the knife for half an hour. Then she leaned out into that drop, two stories to concrete. No vines, no convenient fire escape, no porch or garage roof to drop to. She was still trapped. She worked on the doorjamb till she was drenched with sweat, but could not get the hall door open.
Friday was a big workday and also her last full day outside the hospital. Saturday she was to clean in the morning and then be carried back to Manhattan well before the party. Friday morning she spent cooking dishes for Saturday’s buffet—three large cakes and two mousses for dessert. At two