Get Roger to do it” said Dr. Vanlandingham, and immediately heads nodded all around the table and the meeting moved on to more important business: planning for next month's Ag Showcase. When Roger got back from the Georgia Peanut Growers meeting in Eufala a week later, an oil painting of an onion sandwich was in his office leaning up against the wall on the floor behind his desk.
“I don't know, Roger,” his secretary said. “Dr. Vanlandingham left it here, said you would know what to do with it.”
The sandwich was on white bread, thick-cut slabs of white onion, with blobs of something nearly white glistening around the edges. Roger and Mrs. Eldridge stood and looked at it for a minute.
“That has to be mayonnaise,” said Mrs. Eldridge. “It must be a Vidalia onion,” said Roger. “Otherwise nobody could eat that much onion in a sandwich.”
“It is a Vidalia onion,” said Mrs. Eldridge. “That's what the problem is.”
“What is the problem?” asked Roger.
“You'll have to ask Dr. Vanlandingham,” said Mrs. Eldridge. “All I know is, it's a Vidalia onion sandwich, and that's the problem.”
“We are not hanging that painting in the Vidalia Onion Storage Lab,” said Dr. Vanlandingham emphatically. “This is a scientific institution, not an art gallery. With your experience, Roger, we thought you would be the best one to deal with it.”
“I don't have any experience with onions,” said Roger. “I should think Alex Montgomery or Auburn Brown would be the ones—”
“Your experience with women, we mean,” said Dr. Vanlandingham impatiently. “We decided you should be the one to return it to her and explain tactfully how unsuitable it would be to hang a picture like that in a controlled-atmosphere storage laboratory.
“Why can't you hang it somewhere else, where Dr. Vanlandingham won't be offended by the frivolity?” said Lucy. “On the wall of an office, or in a reception area.”
“That's the problem,” said Roger. “Mrs. Johnson's husband was one of the early Vidalia onion growers; he made a fortune in onions, and left nearly a million dollars to the storage lab. His wife painted it herself and presented it specifically to hang there in his memory.”
“It's a terrible painting,” said Delia, backing away from it with distaste.
“There's definitely something wrong with the mayonnaise,” said Lucy. “It looks almost curdled, as if she added the oil too quickly.”
“I don't know anything about mayonnaise,” said Delia. “It's just a terrible painting. I don't blame Dr. Vanlandingham.”
“But I like the idea of it,” said Roger. “A portrait of a sandwich.”
“Why, Dr. Meadows!” Mrs. Johnson greeted Roger at the door. “My husband used to talk about you. What was it—tobacco, soybeans …”
“Peanuts,” said Roger, “but we all knew Mr. Johnson there at the experiment station. We are all so sorry—” But Mrs. Johnson began to welcome him in a flustered way, almost snatching his hat off his head and bustling him into the next room, where she plumped up sofa cushions and straightened little things on the table. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and began rattling ice cubes and calling out questions about tea, lemon, and sugar in a voice so cheerful it was almost shrill.
The room was very bright. A plate-glass window looked out on an elaborate bird-feeding station, with a little fountain of spray, flagstones interplanted with maidenhair fern, and a clipped hedge of red-tipped photinia so tall and thick you would never know Madison Drive was just on the other side of it. It all looked very cool and peaceful, like a picture in a magazine. Roger felt uneasy about leaning back on the pale, shimmery pillows with their silky tassels, so he sat up on the edge of the sofa trying to keep both feet off the white rug. He tried again:
“Everyone at the experiment station is so sorry about your husband, Mrs. Johnson, and—” But Mrs. Johnson began pouring tea from a yellow pitcher nervously, filling one glass half full and then pouring a little bit into the other glass, and then going back and forth between the two of them as if she couldn't quite make up her mind. A splash of tea slopped onto the rug, but Roger got it quickly with his handkerchief. If she wouldn't even listen to the condolences, he wondered, how in the world was he going to get around to the return of the onion sandwich?
“Mrs. Johnson,” he said.
“I've just been painting all these sandwiches,” Mrs. Johnson said gaily. “I can't help it. I just keep painting and painting.” The walls of the room were lined with paintings of sandwiches in pale frames. The paint looked thick, almost as if it had been daubed on with the back of a spoon, which made the sandwiches appear dry and inedible. There was a tomato sandwich, a cucumber sandwich, a Bibb lettuce sandwich, and what Roger took at first to be a worm sandwich, but on looking more closely, he saw that the worms were clumsily painted bean sprouts.
“I'm running out of sandwiches!” said Mrs. Johnson.
And Roger sprang in: “That Vidalia onion sandwich,” he said, “that you gave Dr. Vanlandingham for the lab—we want to thank you, but—”
“I mean, a grilled eggplant sandwich, OK, with some arugula sticking out around the edges” said Mrs. Johnson. “But who ever heard of a squash sandwich? Who ever heard of an okra sandwich?” Even though neither of them had drunk a sip of tea, she began making dashes at the tall, full glasses with the yellow pitcher, and Roger gave up.
He moved an enormous Menoboni bird book off the table onto the white rug, he took the pitcher out of Mrs. Johnson's hands and put it back on the tray, and then he slid the whole thing over to the other side of the table, out of reach. “Mrs. Johnson,” he said, leaning forward earnestly with his elbows on his knees, “please sit still and let me say this to you.”
And as if she had been stricken, Mrs. Johnson did sit still, bolt upright in the light blue tufted upholstered chair and stared at Roger with a frightened look. He could see little dimples forming in her chin, and suddenly he remembered Mr. Johnson's big blunt hands, with the tufts of bristly hair on the knuckles, and how he would stand too close in a way that felt intimate and threatening all at the same time and say, “Lemme tell you the one about…”
“A controlled atmosphere storage lab is not …” and “The director of the lab feels …” and “A portrait of an onion sandwich, while it might be …” Every one of his carefully rehearsed phrases flew out of his head, and he sat and stared through the glass top of the table at Mrs. Johnson's tense, dry-looking feet. All the strings in the tops of them were stretched tight, as if she might be about to shuck off her thin gold shoes and make a mad dash for safety. The silence seemed strange in that bright room, which she had managed to fill so successfully with noise, and for no reason at all, Roger thought of the little squirming legs of a fat toad-frog on its back in plowed dirt, where Mr. Johnson, touring the onion germ plasm plot, had tossed it right in front of the blades of a disk harrow.
Then Mrs. Johnson said, “My husband was not a nice man. Dr. Meadows. I don't know if you knew that or not.”
Experience with women, Roger thought, has gotten me into this. But he told the truth. “Yes, Mrs. Johnson,” he said. “Everybody knew that.”
“It always seemed odd to me that he became famous for such a mild, bland onion,” said Mrs. Johnson.
“The ‘Georgia Sweet Onion King,’ ” said Roger. “No, it didn't fit him.”
“It hardly ever makes sense what people do,” said Mrs. Johnson. “Look at me: here I am with all this onion money. I could go out of this house right now, go down to Thomasville to Mason's Antiques and buy that little desk he's got in there for twelve thousand dollars, then I could go right over to Travel Time and buy a ticket on a cruise ship to Scandinavia, four meals a day, all summer long, and when I came back I'd have more money in the bank than when I left home. But what do I do? I sit in this house all day and paint these goddamned sandwiches.”
“What's wrong with that?” said Roger. “Why should you buy a twelve-thousand-dollar desk and eat four meals a day in Norway if you'd rather be here painting pictures of sandwiches?”
“Well, just look at them!” said Mrs. Johnson, and she flung herself around in her chair and glared back at the pictures. “Just look at these terrible sandwiches! Who could eat a sandwich like that?”
“But,” said Roger, “pictures aren't always supposed to be … I mean, if you enjoy it, why—”
“Enjoy it?” said Mrs. Johnson, and she stood up out of the blue chair. “Enjoy it?” She glared down at Roger. “I hate painting these sandwiches!” She leaned slightly forward from the waist and covered her mouth with both hands, so that for an instant Roger thought she was going to throw up on the white rug, but instead she burst into tears and just stood there on her tense, tight-strung feet, sobbing and sobbing.
For just a minute Roger felt a flurry of exasperation with Dr. Vanlandingham for his high-minded notions about frivolity in the Vidalia Onion Storage Lab. But then he recovered himself. Nothing could have prepared him to deal with this very strange unhappiness, expressed in oil paintings of gloomy sandwiches, but the one thing he did know for sure was that this room was not suitable for such grief, with its silky fringes, its polished woods, its Boehm porcelain camellias under glass domes; and he took Mrs. Johnson by both shoulders and led her out the French doors and down the steps to the birdbath, where they stood knee-deep in maidenhair ferns. There was a flurrying exodus of birds. A tufted titmouse hit the plate-glass window with a pop and fell to the ground, where it sat a little lopsided in the liri-ope, trying to regain its bearings. Roger's pants were soaked up to the knee by the little misting sprayer, but he didn't see how he could move Mrs. Johnson, so he just stood there while she sobbed into his tea-stained handkerchief, patting her on the back from time to time and watching the water fill up her little gold shoes.