There was a bottle of bourbon on the coffee table and they each had a drink. When Betsey went into the kitchen to heat up the supper Caroline remained with Coverly. It was at this point that Coverly would decide that what had happened had not happened. Caroline spoke to him in a whisper. “I just been dying to meet the man Betsey married,” Caroline said. “Nobody in Bambridge ever thought Betsey’d get married, she’s so
There was a moment before Coverly decided, as he would, that what had been said had not been said when he was confronted with the venom in this remark. He could only conclude that “queer” in Georgia meant charming, original and fair.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Why, she’s just queer, that’s all,” Caroline whispered. “Everybody in Bambridge knew Betsey was queer. I don’t think it was her fault. I just think it was because Step-pappy was so mean to her. He used to whip her, he used to take off his belt and whip her with no provocation whatsoever. I just think he whipped the common sense right out of her.”
“I didn’t know any of this,” Coverly said; or didn’t say.
“Well, Betsey was never one to tell anybody anything,” Caroline whispered. “That was one of the queer things about her.”
“Dinner’s served,” Betsey said in her sweetest and most trusting manner. This much, in retrospect, would appear to be true.
The talk about Bambridge went on through dinner and it was a conversation that, led by Caroline, seemed strangely morbid. “Bessie Pluckette has another mongoloid idiot,” Caroline exclaimed, not cheerfully but with definite enthusiasm. “Unfortunately it’s just as healthy as it can be and poor Bessie can just expect to spend the rest of her life taking care of it. Poor thing. Of course she could put it into the state institution but she just doesn’t have the heart to have her little son starved to death and that’s what they do in the state institution, they starve them to death. Alma Pierson had a mongoloid too but mercifully that one died. And remember that Brasie girl, Betsey, the one with the shriveled right arm?” She turned to Coverly and explained. “She has this shriveled right arm, no longer than your elbow and right at the end of it there’s this teeny-weeny hand. Well, she learned how to play the piano. Isn’t that wonderful? I mean she could only play chords of course with this teeny-weeny hand but she could play the rest of the music with her left hand. Her left hand was normal. She took piano lessons and everything; that is, she took piano lessons until her father fell down the elevator shaft at the cotton mill and broke both legs.” Was this morbidity, Coverly wondered, or were these the facts of life in Georgia?
Caroline stayed three days and was (if one forgot her remarks before dinner) a tolerable guest excepting that her knowledge of tragic, human experience was inexhaustible and that she left lipstick stains on everything. She had a broad mouth and she painted it heavily and there were purple lipstick stains on the cups and glasses, the towels and napkins; the ashtrays were full of stained cigarette ends and in the toilet there was always a piece of Kleenex stained purple. This seemed to Coverly not carelessness but much more—some atavistic way of impressing herself upon this household in which she would spend so short a time. The purple stains seemed to mark her as a lonely woman. When Coverly went to the site on the day she left Caroline was asleep and she had gone by the time he got home. She had left a smear of purple lipstick on his son’s forehead; there seemed to be purple lipstick everywhere he looked, as if she had marked her departure this way. Betsey was watching television and eating from a box of candy that Caroline had given her as a present. She did not look up when he came in and brushed away the place on her cheek where he kissed her. “Leave me be,” she said, “leave me be. . . .”
After Caroline’s departure Betsey’s discontents only seemed to increase. Then there was a night that, according to Coverly’s habit of eliminating facts, especially did not happen. He was kept late at the site and didn’t get home until half-past seven. Betsey sat in the kitchen, weeping. “What’s the matter, sugarluve,” he asked, or didn’t ask.
“Well, I made myself a nice cup of tea,” Betsey sobbed, “and a piece of hot Danish and I was just sitting down to enjoy myself when the telephone rang and there was this woman selling magazine subscriptions and she talked and by the time she was done talking my tea and my Danish were all cold.”
“That’s all right, sugar,” Coverly said. “You can heat it up again.”
“It isn’t all right,” Betsey said. “It just isn’t all right. Nothing’s all right. I hate Talifer. I hate it here. I hate you. I hate wet toilet seats. The only reason I live here is because there’s no place else in the world for me to go. I’m too lazy to get a job and I’m too plain to find another man.”
“Would you like to take a trip, sugar, would you like a change?”
