The Optimist's Daughter

  She saw the bird at once, high up in a fold of the curtain at the stair window; it was still, too, and narrowed, wings to its body.

  As the top step of the stairs creaked under her foot, the bird quivered its wings rapidly without altering its position. She sped down the stairs and closed herself into the kitchen while she planned and breakfasted. She’d got upstairs again and dressed and come out again, still to find the bird had not moved from its position.

  Loudly, like a clumsy, slow echo of the wingbeating, a pounding began on the front porch. It was no effort any longer to remember anybody: Laurel knew there was only one man in Mount Salus who knocked like that, the perennial jack-leg carpenter who appeared in spring to put in new window cords, sharpen the lawn mower, plane off the back screen door from its wintertime sag. He still acted, no doubt, for widows and maiden ladies and for wives whose husbands were helpless around the house.

  “Well, this time it’s your dad. Old Miss been gone a dozen year. I miss her ever’ time I pass the old place,” said Mr. Cheek. “Her and her ideas.”

  Was this some last, misguided call of condolence? “What is it, Mr. Cheek?” she asked.

  “Locks holding?” he asked. “Ready for me to string your window cords? Change your furniture around?” He was the same. He mounted the steps and came right across the porch at a march, with his knees bent and turned out, and the tools knocking together inside his sack.

  Her mother had deplored his familiar ways and blundering hammer, had called him on his cheating, and would have sent him packing for good the first time she heard him refer to her as “Old Miss.” Now he was moving into what he must suppose was a clear field. “Roof do any leaking last night?”

  “No. A bird came down the chimney, that’s all,” said Laurel. “If you’d like to be useful, I’ll let you get it out for me.”

  “Bird in the house?” he asked. “Sign o’ bad luck, ain’t it?” He still walked up the stairs with a strut and followed too close. “I reckon I’m elected.”

  The bird had not moved from its position. Heavy-looking, laden with soot, it was still pressed into the same curtain fold.

  “I spot him!” Mr. Cheek shouted. He stamped his foot, then clogged with both feet like a clown, and the bird dropped from the curtain into flight and, barely missing the wall, angled into Laurel’s room—her bedroom door had come open. Mr. Cheek with a shout slammed the door on it.

  “Mr. Cheek!”

  “Well, I got him out of your hall.”

  Laurel’s door opened again, of itself, with a slowness that testified there was nothing behind it but the morning breeze.

  “I’m not prepared for a joke this morning,” Laurel said. “I want that bird out of my room!”

  Mr. Cheek marched on into her bedroom. His eye slid to the muslin curtains, wet, with the starch rained out of them—she realized that her window had been open all night—where the shineless bird was frantically striking itself; but she could see he was only sizing up the frayed window cords.

  “It’ll get in every room in the house if you let it,” Laurel said, controlling herself from putting her hands over her hair.

  “It ain’t trying to get in. Trying to get out,” said Mr. Cheek, and crowed at her. He marched around the room, glancing into Laurel’s suitcase, opened out on the bed—there was nothing for him to see, only her sketchbook that she’d never taken out—and inspected the dressing table and himself in its mirror, while the bird tried itself from curtain to curtain and spurted out of the room ahead of him. It had left the dust of itself all over everything, the way a moth does.

  “Where’s Young Miss?” asked Mr. Cheek, and opened the big bedroom door. The bird flew in like an arrow.

  “Mr. Cheek!”

  “That’s about my favorite room in the house,” he said. He gave Laurel a black grin; his front teeth had gone.

  “Mr. Cheek, I thought I told you—I wasn’t ready for a joke. You’ve simply come and made things worse than you found them. Exactly like you used to do!” Laurel said.

  “Well, I won’t charge you nothing,” he said, clattering down the stairs behind her. “I don’t see nothing wrong with you,” he added. “Why didn’t you ever go ’head and marry you another somebody?”

  She walked to the door and waited for him to leave. He laughed good-naturedly. “Yep, I’m all that’s left of my folks too,” he said. “Maybe me and you ought to get together.”

  “Mr. Cheek, I’d be very glad if you’d depart.”

  “If you don’t sound like Old Miss!” he said admiringly. “No hard feelings,” he called, skipping into his escape down the steps. “You even got her voice.”

  Missouri had arrived; she came out with her broom to the front porch. “What happen?”

  “A chimney swift! A chimney swift got out of the fireplace into the house and flew everywhere,” Laurel said. “It’s still loose upstairs.”

  “It’s because we get it all too clean, brag too soon,” said Missouri. “You didn’t ask that Mr. Cheeks? He just waltz through the house enjoying the scenery, what I bet.”

  “He was a failure. We’ll shoo it out between us.”

  “That’s what it look like. It’s just me and you.”

  Missouri, when she appeared again, was stuffed back into her raincoat and hat and buckled in tight. She walked slowly up the stairs holding the kitchen broom, bristles up.

  “Do you see it?” Laurel asked. She saw the mark on the stairway curtain where the bird had tried to stay asleep. She heard it somewhere, ticking.

  “He on the telephone.”

  “Oh, don’t hit—”

  “How’m I gonna git him, then? Look,” said Missouri. “He ain’t got no business in your room.”

  “Just move behind it. Birds fly toward light—I’m sure I’ve been told. Here—I’m holding the front door wide open for it.” Missouri could be heard dropping the broom. “It’s got a perfectly clear way out now,” Laurel called. “Why won’t it just fly free of its own accord?”

  “They just ain’t got no sense like we have.”

  Laurel propped the screen door open and ran upstairs with two straw wastebaskets. “I’ll make it go free.”

  Then her heart sank. The bird was down on the floor, under the telephone table. It looked small and unbearably flat to the ground, like a child’s shoe without a foot inside it.

  “Missouri, I’ve always been scared one would touch me,” Laurel told her. “I’ll tell you that.” It looked eyeless, unborn, so still was it holding.

  “They vermin,” said Missouri.

  Laurel dropped the first basket over the bird, then cupped the two baskets together to enclose it; the whole operation was soundless and over in an instant.

  “What if I’ve hurt it?”

  “Cat’ll git him, that’s all.”

  Laurel ran down the stairs and out of the house and down the front steps, not a step of the way without the knowledge of what she carried, vibrating through the ribs of the baskets, the beat of its wings or of its heart, its blind struggle against rescue.

  On the front sidewalk, she got ready.

  “What you doing?” called old Mrs. Pease through her window curtains. “Thought you were due to be gone!”

  “I am, just about!” called Laurel, and opened the baskets.

  Something struck her face—not feathers; it was a blow of wind. The bird was away. In the air it was nothing but a pair of wings—she saw no body any more, no tail, just a tilting crescent being drawn back into the sky.

  “All birds got to fly, even them no-count dirty ones,” said Missouri from the porch. “Now I got all that wrenching out to do over.”

  For the next hour, Laurel stood in the driveway burning her father’s letters to her mother, and Grandma’s letters, and the saved little books and papers in the rusty wire basket where pecan leaves used to get burned—“too acid for my roses.” She burned Milton’s Universe. She saw the words “this morning?” with the uncompromising hook of her mother’s ques
tion mark, on a little round scrap of paper that was slowly growing smaller in the smoke. She had a child’s desire to reach for it, like a coin left lying in the street for any passer-by to find and legitimately keep—by then it was consumed. All Laurel would have wanted with her mother’s “this morning?” would have been to make it over, give her a new one in its place. She stood humbly holding the blackened rake. She thought of her father.

  The smoke dimmed the dogwood tree like a veil over a face that might have shone with too naked a candor. Miss Adele Courtland was hurrying under it now, at a fast teacher’s walk, to tell Laurel goodbye before time for school. She looked at what Laurel was doing and her face withheld judgment.

  “There’s one thing—I’d like you to keep it,” said Laurel. She reached in her apron pocket for it.

  “Polly. You mustn’t give this up. You must know I can’t allow you—no, indeed, you must cling to this.” She pressed the little soapstone boat back into Laurel’s hand quickly, told her goodbye, and fled away to her school.

  Laurel had presumed. And no one would ever succeed in comforting Miss Adele Courtland, anyway: she would only comfort the comforter.

  Upstairs, Laurel folded her slacks and the wrinkled silk dress of last night into her case, dropped in the other few things she’d brought, and closed it. Then she bathed and dressed again in the Sibyl Connolly suit she’d flown down in. She was careful with her lipstick, and pinned her hair up for Chicago. She stepped back into her city heels, and started on a last circuit through the house. All the windows, which Missouri had patiently stripped so as to wash the curtains over again, let in the full volume of spring light. There was nothing she was leaving in the whole shining and quiet house now to show for her mother’s life and her mother’s happiness and suffering, and nothing to show for Fay’s harm; her father’s turning between them, holding onto them both, then letting them go, was without any sign.

  From the stair window she could see that the crabapple tree had rushed into green, all but one sleeve that was still flowery.

  The last of the funeral flowers had been carried out of the parlor—the tulips, that had stayed beautiful until the last petal fell. Over the white-painted mantel, where cranes in their circle of moon, the beggar with his lantern, the poet at his waterfall hung in their positions around the clock, the hour showed thirty minutes before noon.

  She was prepared for the bridesmaids.

  And then, from the back of the house, she heard a sound—like an empty wooden spool dropped down through a cupboard and rolling away. She walked into the kitchen, where through the open door she could see Missouri just beginning to hang out her curtains. The room was still odorous of hot soapsuds.

  The same wooden kitchen table of her childhood, strong as the base of an old square piano, stood bare in the middle of the wooden floor. There were two cupboards, and only the new one, made of metal, was in daily use. The original wooden one Laurel had somehow passed over in her work, as forgetfully as she’d left her own window open to the rain. She advanced on it, tugged at the wooden doors until they gave. She opened them and got the earnest smell of mouse.

  In the dark interior she made out the fruitcake pans, the sack of ice-cream salt, the waffle irons, the punch bowl hung with its cups and glinting with the oily rainbows of neglect. Underneath all those useless things, shoved back as far as it would go but still on the point of pushing itself out of the cupboard, something was waiting for her to find; and she was still here, to find it.

  Kneeling, moving the objects rapidly out of her way, Laurel reached with both hands and drew it out into the light of the curtainless day and looked at it. It was exactly what she thought it was. In that same moment, she felt, more sharply than she could hear them where she was, footsteps that tracked through the parlor, the library, the hall, the dining room, up the stairs and through the bedrooms, down the stairs, in the same path Laurel had taken, and at last came to the kitchen door and stopped.

  “You mean to tell me you’re still here?” Fay said.

  Laurel said, “What have you done to my mother’s breadboard?”

  “Bread board?”

  Laurel rose and carried it to the middle of the room and set it on the table. She pointed. “Look. Look where the surface is splintered—look at those gouges. You might have gone at it with an icepick.”

  “Is that a crime?”

  “All scored and grimy! Or you tried driving nails in it.”

  “I didn’t do anything but crack last year’s walnuts on it. With the hammer.”

  “And cigarette burns—”

  “Who wants an everlasting breadboard? It’s the last thing on earth anybody needs!”

  “And there—along the edge!” With a finger that was trembling now, Laurel drew along it.

  “Most likely a house as old as this has got a few enterprising rats in it,” Fay said.

  “Gnawed and blackened and the dust ground into it—Mother kept it satin-smooth, and clean as a dish!”

  “It’s just an old board, isn’t it?” cried Fay.

  “She made the best bread in Mount Salus!”

  “All right! Who cares? She’s not making it now.”

  “You desecrated this house.”

  “I don’t know what that word means, and glad I don’t. But I’ll have you remember it’s my house now, and I can do what I want to with it,” Fay said. “With everything in it. And that goes for that breadboard too.”

  And all Laurel had felt and known in the night, all she’d remembered, and as much as she could understand this morning—in the week at home, the month, in her life—could not tell her now how to stand and face the person whose own life had not taught her how to feel. Laurel didn’t know even how to tell her goodbye.

  “Fay, my mother knew you’d get in her house. She never needed to be told,” said Laurel. “She predicted you.”

  “Predict? You predict the weather,” said Fay.

  You are the weather, thought Laurel. And the weather to come: there’ll be many a one more like you, in this life.

  “She predicted you.”

  Experience did, finally, get set into its right order, which is not always the order of other people’s time. Her mother had suffered in life every symptom of having been betrayed, and it was not until she had died, and the protests of memory came due, that Fay had ever tripped in from Madrid, Texas. It was not until that later moment, perhaps, that her father himself had ever dreamed of a Fay. For Fay was Becky’s own dread. What Becky had felt, and had been afraid of, might have existed right here in the house all the time, for her. Past and future might have changed places, in some convulsion of the mind, but that could do nothing to impugn the truth of the heart. Fay could have walked in early as well as late, she could have come at any time at all. She was coming.

  “But your mother, she died a crazy!” Fay cried.

  “Fay, that is not true. And nobody ever dared to say such a thing.”

  “In Mount Salus? I heard it in Mount Salus, right in this house. Mr. Cheek put me wise. He told me how he went in my room one day while she was alive and she threw something at him.”

  “Stop,” said Laurel.

  “It was the little bell off her table. She told him she deliberately aimed at his knee, because she didn’t have a wish to hurt any living creature. She was a crazy and you’ll be a crazy too, if you don’t watch out.”

  “My mother never did hurt any living creature.”

  “Crazies never did scare me. You can’t scare me into running away, either. You’re the one that’s got to do the running,” Fay said.

  “Scaring people into things. Scaring people out of things. You haven’t learned any better yet, Fay?” Trembling, Laurel kept on. “What were you trying to scare Father into—when you struck him?”

  “I was trying to scare him into living!” Fay cried.

  “You what? You what?”

  “I wanted him to get up out of there, and start him paying a little attention to me, for a change.” r />
  “He was dying,” said Laurel. “He was paying full attention to that.”

  “I tried to make him quit his old-man foolishness. I was going to make him live if I had to drag him! And I take good credit for what I did!” cried Fay. “It’s more than anybody else was doing.”

  “You hurt him.”

  “I was being a wife to him!” cried Fay. “Have you clean forgotten by this time what being a wife is?”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Laurel said. “Do you want to know why this breadboard right here is such a beautiful piece of work? I can tell you. It’s because my husband made it.”

  “Made it? What for?”

  “Do you know what a labor of love is? My husband made it for my mother, so she’d have a good one. Phil had the gift—the gift of his hands. And he planed—fitted—glued—clamped—it’s made on the true, look and see, it’s still as straight as his T-square. Tongued and grooved—tight-fitted, every edge—”

  “I couldn’t care less,” said Fay.

  “I watched him make it. He’s the one in the family who could make things. We were a family of comparatively helpless people—that’s what so bound us, bound us together. My mother blessed him when she saw this. She said it was sound and beautiful and exactly suited her long-felt needs, and she welcomed it into her kitchen.”

  “It’s mine now,” said Fay.

  “But I’m the one that’s going to take care of it,” said Laurel.

  “You mean you’re asking me to give it to you?”

  “I’m going to take it back to Chicago with me.”

  “What makes you think I’ll let you? What’s made you so brazen all at once?”

  “Finding the breadboard!” Laurel cried. She placed both hands down on it and gave it the weight of her body.

  “Fine Miss Laurel!” said Fay. “If they all could see you now! You mean you’d carry it out of the house the way it is? It’s dirty as sin.”

  “A coat of grime is something I can get rid of.”