At Ivy’s, Doc and Tiff set the table for the Thanksgiving dinner they dreaded—Ivy had prepared a menu based on a mid-nineteenth-century cookbook, and from the gamy smell of things, they didn’t know what to expect. Skinned porcupine? Doc had whispered to Tiff. Pickled oysters? Tiff had whispered back.
Doc stood at Ivy’s china cabinet, running his finger along the rim of a wineglass. “All these wineglasses have chips in them,” he said. Ivy had bought the glasses, and the cabinet, and the whole dining room set, just days before at a garage sale. A week ago the dining room had had nothing in it but a folding chair and a card table with Tiff’s sewing machine. Now there was a long table that seated eight, eight creaky, scuffed-up chairs, the cabinet full of someone else’s best china, and a reproduction of a painting, in a gold-painted frame, of an old man praying over a loaf of bread.
“Those glasses are chipped?” Ivy said. She wiped her hands on her apron as she walked in from the kitchen. “I thought I had checked them over good.”
“I’ll just call Granny and have her bring some of hers over,” Doc said.
“Granny’s already here,” I said, stepping in, still in my fur coat, my purse on my arm, leaning on the umbrella I often used as a cane. “But I’m on my way out already. I’m not staying.”
Too dramatic, I confess, but I also confess that it felt satisfying to silence the room. I’d been dramatic before, certainly, sending everyone scurrying for remedies. A banal palpitation you’ve known since youth can seem, in old age, morbidly foreshadowing. I’ve had a very occasional nervous twitching in my eyelid, for example, since grade school, which first reared up during a math test—now I can manage to convince myself that that slight flutter has never been harmless at all, but rather a sign that I’m about to go blind.
“I want to visit my sister,” I said. “Her nursing home is about an hour’s drive each way, and I don’t want to be driving in the dark, and it gets dark so early.”
“She won’t know you, Essie,” Tiff said, tilting her head with concern.
“Sometimes she knows me,” I said. “No one else is going to visit her today.”
“We should never have taken you to the Willow House,” Doc said. “It’s made you morose.”
“We’ll drive you,” Tiff said.
“No, absolutely not,” I said. “Your mother’s been cooking.”
“I’ve been cooking for three days,” Ivy said, pressing her thumb against the chip in the wineglass. Her dinner was derived from the Thanksgiving depicted in The Plumes and the Feathers, one of Myrtle Kingsley Fitch’s first novels—some bit of hard-biscuit prose about the mail-order German bride of a crotchety homesteader and the serenity she finds in her dying turnip patch—originally published in serial form in an early-twentieth-century women’s magazine.
Ivy’s interest in Myrtle Kingsley Fitch had risen from a harmless, useless literature course she’d once taken at the university, for self-improvement. She had regularly left Tiff with Doc to drive the three hours to campus on Tuesday nights, but by midterm, she hadn’t been coming home until Thursdays; by November, she hadn’t been coming home at all. By finals week, she’d booked her flight to Paris, where she would serve for the spring semester as a research assistant for her lit professor, a noted Myrtle Kingsley Fitch scholar. Myrtle Kingsley Fitch had left Nebraska for Paris in the 1920s, and she’d lived there, with a lesbian chef, until she’d died. In Paris were original documents in private collections and college libraries—handwritten love letters to and fro, royalty statements, notes penciled into the margins of books, an incomplete, unpublished erotic novel written under the nom de plume Mme. Marie Moth-Scryff. When the professor’s sabbatical had expired that August, he’d returned to Nebraska and his faculty wife, and Ivy had stayed in Paris to write him long, poetic letters promising an ugly suicide while she’d clerked in a boutique on the Champs-Élysées, selling perfumey French-milled soap to tourists. For years, Ivy had written those urgent suicide notes.
I’ve been cooking for three days, she had the nerve to tell me when I told her I was going to visit my lonely, dying, twisted sister on Thanksgiving. Three days is absolutely nothing, I wanted to answer. Then I wanted to say, No, it’s worse than nothing. It’s something, then it’s gone in a blink.
But instead I said, “I promise to be back before everything’s completely ruined.” I turned and left before Doc even thought to offer me his car to drive.
I would return in one piece, but only just barely, just after dark. But before that, while I sat shaken on the roadside in my pickup, my heart pumping at a troubling beat, petting the fur of my coat for ease, my family waited for me. They all sat at the ornate table, complete with tarnished silver napkin rings, not eating a bite as Ivy’s complicated sauces clotted in their pans in the kitchen and the wind outside picked up. The wind chimes rattled like they were being rolled down a hill. Doc and Ivy drank from the wineglasses, careful to avoid the chips in the rims.
“Fold your hands together,” Tiff said, her sketchbook in her lap.
“You’re drawing me?” Doc said.
“No, I’m doing a self-portrait,” she said. “But I need to see how the fingers go.”
So Doc posed without another word, slouching like Tiff slouched. He was always telling her to sit up straight.