The Little Friend

After what seemed like forever she re-shifted the baby, and said: “Lemme have that funny book.”

Without a word, Hely reached in his back pocket and handed the comic over. Placidly, without a flicker of gratitude, she shifted the baby’s weight to one arm and reached to take it but before she could, the baby stretched out its arms and caught the comic book between his filthy little palms. With solemn eyes, he drew it close to his face, and then, tentatively, closed his sticky, orange-stained mouth on it.

Hely was revolted; it was one thing if she wanted to read the comic book; it was quite another if she wanted it for the baby to chew. Lasharon made no move to take the comic book away. Instead, she made goo-goo eyes at the baby, and jogged it affectionately up and down—quite as if it was clean and attractive, and not the rheumy little wheezer it was.

“Why Diddy crying?” she said to it brightly, in baby talk, peering directly into its tiny face. “Why Diddy crying back there? Hmn?”

————

“Put some clothes on,” said Ida Rhew to Harriet. “You dripping water all over the floor.”

“No, I’m not. I dried off on the way home.”

“You put some clothes on anyway.”

In her bedroom, Harriet peeled off her bathing suit and put on some khaki shorts and the only clean T-shirt she had: white, with a yellow smiley face on the front. She detested the smiley-face shirt, a birthday present from her father. Undignified as it was, somehow or other her father must have believed it suited her and this thought was more galling to Harriet than the shirt itself.

Though Harriet didn’t know it, the smiley-face shirt (and the peace-sign barrettes, and the other brightly colored and inappropriate presents her father sent for her birthday) had not been chosen by her father at all but by her father’s mistress, in Nashville; and if not for the mistress (whose name was Kay) Harriet and Allison would have received no birthday presents at all. Kay was a minor soft-drink heiress, slightly overweight, with a sugary voice and a soft, slack smile and a few mental problems. She also drank a bit too much; and she and Harriet’s father often got weepy together in bars over his poor little daughters trapped down in Mississippi with their crazy mother.

Everybody in town knew about Dix’s Nashville mistress except his own family and his wife’s. No one had the nerve to tell Edie, or the heart to tell any of the others. Dix’s colleagues at the bank knew, and disapproved—for occasionally he brought the woman to bank functions; Roy Dial’s sister-in-law, who lived in Nashville, had furthermore told Mr. and Mrs. Dial that the lovebirds actually shared an apartment, and while Mr. Dial (to his credit) had kept this to himself, Mrs. Dial had spread it all over Alexandria. Even Hely knew. He’d overheard his mother talking about it when he was nine or ten years old. When he confronted her, she’d made him swear never to mention it to Harriet; and he never had.

It never occurred to Hely to disobey his mother. But though he kept the secret—the only real secret that he did keep from her—it did not seem to him that Harriet would be particularly upset if ever she happened to learn the truth. And about this he was right. No one would have cared except Edie—from outraged pride; for if Edie grumbled about her granddaughters growing up without a father, neither had she or anyone else suggested that Dix’s return would in any way remedy this lack.

Harriet was in a very grim mood, so grim that she relished, perversely, the irony of the smiley-face shirt. Its self-satisfied air called Harriet’s dad to mind—though there was little reason for Harriet’s dad to be so cheerful or to expect cheer from Harriet. No wonder Edie despised him. You could hear it just in the way Edie said his name: Dixon, never Dix.

Nose dripping, eyes burning from the pool chemicals, she sat in the window seat and looked out across the front yard, at the rich greens of the trees in full summer leaf. Her limbs felt heavy and strange from all the swimming, and a dark lacquer of sadness had settled about the room, as it usually did whenever Harriet sat still long enough. When she was little, sometimes she had chanted to herself her address as it would appear to a visitor from outer space. Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, 363 George Street, Alexandria, Mississippi, America, Planet Earth, the Milky Way … and the sense of ringing vastness, of being swallowed by the black maw of the universe—only the tiniest white grain in a sprinkling of white sugar that went on forever—sometimes made her feel as if she were suffocating.

Violently, she sneezed. Spray flew everywhere. She pinched her nose and, eyes streaming, hopped up and ran downstairs for a Kleenex. The telephone was ringing; she could hardly see where she was going; Ida was standing at the telephone table at the foot of the stairs and before Harriet knew what was happening Ida said “Here she is,” and put the receiver in her hand.