The Little Friend полностью

Time was broken. Harriet’s way of measuring it was gone. Before, Ida was the planet whose round marked the hours, and her bright old reliable course (washing on Mondays and mending on Tuesdays, sandwiches in summer and soup in winter) ruled every aspect of Harriet’s life. The weeks revolved in procession, each day a series of sequential vistas. On Thursday mornings, Ida set up the board and ironed by the sink, steam gasping from the monolithic iron; on Thursday afternoons, winter and summer, she shook the rugs and beat them and hung them out to air, so the red Turkey carpet slung on the porch rail was a flag that always said Thursday. Endless summer Thursdays, chill Thursdays in October and distant dark Thursdays of the first-grade past, when Harriet dozed beneath hot blankets, fitful with tonsillitis: the whap of the rug beater and the hiss and burble of the steam iron were vivid sounds of the present but also links in a chain winding back through Harriet’s life until vanishing in the abstract darks of babyhood. Days ended at five, with Ida’s change of aprons on the back porch; days began with the squeak of the front door and Ida’s tread in the hall. Peacefully, the hum of the vacuum cleaner floated from distant rooms; upstairs and down, the slumbrous creak of Ida’s rubber-soled shoes, and sometimes the high dry cackle of her witchy laughter. So the days slid by. Doors opened, doors shut, shadows that sank and rose. Ida’s quick glance, as Harriet ran barefoot by an open doorway, was a sharp, delicious blessing: love in spite of itself. Ida! Her favored snacks (stick candy; molasses on cold cornbread); her “programs.” Jokes and scolding, heaped spoons of sugar sinking like snow to the bottom of the iced-tea glass. Strange old sad songs floating up from the kitchen (don’t you miss your mother sometimes, sometimes?) and birdcalls from the back yard, while the white shirts flapped on the line, whistles and trills, kit kit, kit kit, sweet jingle of polished silver, tumbling in the dish-pan, the variety and noise of life itself.

But all this was gone. Without Ida, time dilated and sank into a vast, shimmering emptiness. Hours and days, and light and darkness, slid into each other unremarked; there was no difference any more between lunch and breakfast, week-end and week-day, dawn or dusk; and it was like living deep in a cave lit by artificial lights.

With Ida had vanished many comforts. Among them was sleep. Night after night, in dank Chickadee Wigwam, Harriet had lain awake in gritty sheets with tears in her eyes—for no one but Ida knew how to make the bed the way she liked it, and Harriet (in motels, sometimes even at Edie’s house) lay open-eyed and miserable with homesickness late into the night, painfully aware of strange textures, unfamiliar smells (perfume, mothballs, detergents that Ida didn’t use), but more than anything else of Ida’s touch, indefinable, always reassuring when she woke up lonely or afraid, and never more lovely than when it wasn’t there.

But Harriet had returned to echoes and silence: a spellbound house, encircled with thorns. On Harriet’s side of the room (Allison’s was a mess) everything was perfect, just as Ida had left it: tidy bed, white ruffles, dust settling like frost.

And so it remained. Underneath the coverlet, the sheets were still crisp. They had been washed and smoothed by Ida’s hand; they were the last trace of Ida in the house, and—as much as Harriet longed to crawl into her bed, to bury her face in the lovely soft pillow and pull the clothes up over her head—she could not bring herself to disturb this last small Heaven left to her. At night, the reflection of the bed floated radiant and transparent in the black windowpanes, a flouncy white confection, as soft as a wedding cake. But it was a feast that Harriet could only look at, and long for: for once the bed was slept in, even the hope of sleep was lost.