Read Online Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman - Free Book Online Page A

Stay with us was all he would have said. Stay in my sight. To keep wanting, and not getting—it was a satisfaction of its own. She was another house he would never build.
    I cannot stay, she might have said. Oh, Chris. Oh, Lynne, oh, my Chloe, how sweet it sounds, how tender it might be. The four of us living a life, running two businesses, not getting in one another’s way. Danny visiting. Bees swarming.
    But I see farther than you. I see myself weakening, getting querulous, not useless but not useful either. I see Chloe outgrowing Queen Giraffe. I see Lynne trying to conceal her boredom. I see you mourning the loss of your longing…And beyond that bearable future, there are less pleasant predictions; dirty pictures, you might call them. There’s a stroke, and you attach yourselves to the nursing home—not giving money, for I can pay; giving attention you dare not withhold. You cannot leave me day after day, strapped to a chair, calling for my dead child. Or perhaps, mobile, I’ll become a demented comic, wandering from floor to floor and stealing my neighbors’ false teeth. The home will call you like an annoyed principal. And there are worse scenarios—the illness of organs, who cares which organ or what illness so long as it doesn’t kill me as it should but instead keeps me in my room here, visited regularly by strong-armed nurses, the walls shaking with my strenuous attempt not to cry. I’ll scream—too late—for the bedpan. I’ll throw my stone at the laggard aide. Our dusty street will be invaded by the occasional ambulance. My body still alive but decaying visibly and audibly and odorously next to the kitchen will remind us to regret your invitation, my acceptance. The house will call us fools.
      
    In a few days they drove her to the bus. Embraces all around, like other families. “I put the chromite in Fido,” said Chloe.
    Ingrid looked at her for a while. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll use it. And on my spring visit I’ll bring it back to you.”
    She boarded the bus. They waved and waved. She twisted her neck and watched them until the first curve took them out of her sight. Then, she guessed, Lynne and Chloe got into the car, while Chris kept his arm uselessly in the air.

Her Cousin Jamie
    A t their annual convention—they were both high school teachers—Fern and Barbara always got together at least once for coffee. Last year they had graduated to gin. Now, on the final night, they installed themselves at a little table in the hotel bar. They talked about this and that—about the decay of classroom decorum, of course; and about the tumblings that took place at this convention, once-a-year love affairs that saved many a marriage.
    “Like emergency medication,” Barbara suggested.
    “Relieving the flatulence of wedlock,” Fern expanded.
    Fern in her fifties had a broad, unlined brow, clear gray eyes, a mobile mouth. She was fit, and her blondish hair was curly and short, and she wore expensive pants and sweaters in forest colors: moss, bark, mist…Really, she should have been considered handsome; she might even have been admired. But those athletic shoulders had a way of shrugging and those muscular lips a way of grimacing that said she expected to be overlooked. As for Barbara—wide face, wide lap—she was the kind of person people felt safe telling their stories to. Fine: she liked to listen.
    No story had ever come from Fern, though. None seemed to be forthcoming tonight. The two women might have finished the evening in amiable silence—Earth Mother and Failed Beauty, drinking—if a certain colleague hadn’t walked swiftly past the bar toward the elevators.
    Fern leaned forward. “Jamie!” she called, apparently too late. She leaned back again. “Oh well.”
    “Jamie,” Barbara repeated. “That Jamie is the most scrupulous-looking woman I have ever seen. Pulled-back hair. Round glasses. Pale lips. Every day a clean white blouse…You’re related, aren’t