It’s been a minute. But we’re back, Bad, Bad Lovers, with a new installment. XXIV. And it’s a sad one; doesn’t feel right to make comic chit-chat as an aperitif, so let’s just serve it up. Perhaps best savored if you heat up number XXIII and have a little of that first. And if you’re a recent arrival, you can take yourself all the way back to the Beginning Of It All by clicking right here.
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Apotheosis
Marta’s absence was palpable. Even the house seemed to acknowledge it. At the breakfast table, only phrases absolutely necessary to passing, handing, and pouring were exchanged, and even those parsimonious articulations were made in hushed, almost reverent tones. No one said it, but they all knew. Marta had left.
As soon as breakfast was over, without a word as to her intentions, Aunt Cornelia marched up the stairs, followed by Pearl, Livia, and Danae. Her sister’s face was a bilious, uncertain yellow; Livia was afraid she might throw up.
Cornelia opened Marta’s bedroom door with more decision and authority than anyone recalled ever having seen her display, only to find the sheets rumpled in exactly the same patterns they’d manifested the day before–she had surreptitiously visited her niece’s bedroom each morning for the duration of her stay, and had registered that Marta never made her bed.
Cornelia then announced, unnecessarily in Livia’s opinion, that it looked like Marta had cut and run, confirming her deduction with an examination of the empty chest of drawers, which Marta had not even bothered to close. Cornelia, outraged at the sight of so much bare, vulnerable wood (the insides of the drawers were much paler than the outsides), slammed them shut. “She might as well have marched stark naked out the front door right before our very eyes.” Cornelia sent her own birdy little eyes around the group in search of some solidarity, but everyone else was looking at the floor.
Livia took the news in silence and, after a deferential minute or two, excused herself politely from her aunts’ presence, as though she were leaving the table, and slowly climbed the stairs to her room. She stopped on the third-floor landing and held her breath. She could hear Cornelia’s self-important tread descending the stairs, followed by Pearl’s lighter, more irregular footfalls. They only went into the parlor together when a serious conferral was in order. She wouldn’t be observed if she returned to Marta’s room. But she continued toward her own door; she could look at her mother’s empty room later.
Once inside, she closed the door carefully behind her and approached the mirror above her dressing table. The face that stared out at her was definitely her own, but the features were somehow sharper, more severely drawn; something had happened to the eyes.
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Cornelia, Danae, and Livia were finishing their supper, the leftovers from Cornelia’s dinner. They ate in the kitchen. It didn’t seem right to eat in the dining room anymore. Livia noticed that Danae was wearing makeup, a fact on which neither Pearl nor Cornelia commented. The food was not as delicious as it had been the night before.
Just as Pearl was asking, halfheartedly, if anybody would like some peach cobbler (“anybody”, yesterday, would have meant Marta, too), there was a loud knock at the front door. Pearl went, since she was already up. No one said anything during the several minutes Pearl was away. Livia couldn’t hear any voices; Pearl had stepped out onto the porch, the screen door clacking shut behind her.
When Pearl returned, her pumpkin face was pale and there were tears in her eyes. That had been the sheriff. A bus accident earlier that afternoon. The bus had been heading to New Orleans. Marta had been thrown from the bus, thrown an inexplicably long distance, into a field beside the road where the bus had turned over. Marta’s neck had been broken, instantly, the sheriff said. Necks were always broken instantly. Marta hadn’t felt a thing. Marta had been the only passenger killed in the accident.
Cornelia, her face a sickly white, went straight to her room.
Pearl cried. She cried, and she cried. She cried while they washed the supper dishes, while they dried them, while they put them away. Danae and Livia kept a shocked silence. After they finished the dishes, Pearl, Livia, and Danae sat back down in their accustomed chairs at the table. Aunt Pearl wordlessly offered Livia and Danae each a glass of mulberry wine. Between the three of them, they drank the bottle.
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“Only thirty-four years old.”
At the funeral home in Baton Rouge, Livia and Danae learned how old their mother was. Pearl hadn’t said it. It had been the priest.
Father Clanning had come to comfort the family, to be with them, to represent God’s presence while they took their leave of the loved one. Priests did that, Pearl had explained when Livia asked, with a vehemence that mildly surprised her great-aunt, what he was doing there.
“Only thirty-four years old. Such a waste.”
Father Clanning shook his head sadly. “Such a pity.” He said nothing about the fact that Marta had died in a bus accident, or that the bus had been heading for New Orleans. Pearl was grateful for his discretion. Livia wouldn’t look at him.
But she looked at Marta. Danae and Livia stood side by side, Danae, suddenly the youngest, clutching her sister’s hand. Marta’s eyes were closed, but it looked as though they might flutter open at any moment. Her hair was natural (Pearl had had a serious discussion with the undertaker over the phone early that morning), and she was dressed in an elegant dress, dark blue, that neither Livia nor Danae had seen before.
Marta was breathtaking, perfect. Marta didn’t have possibilities anymore, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t need them. Marta was dead.
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More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…
Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.
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