The Optimist's Daughter Part 11

"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."

"If all you want to do is rub the skin off your bones."

"The scars it's got are a different matter. But I'd work."

"And do what with it when you got through?" Fay said mockingly.

"Have my try at making bread. Only last night, by the grace of G.o.d, I had my mother's recipe, written in her own hand, right before my eyes."

"It all tastes alike, don't it?"

"You never tasted my mother's. I could turn out a good loaf too-I'd work at it."

"And then who'd eat it with you?" said Fay.

"Phil loved bread. He loved good bread. To break a loaf and eat it warm, just out of the oven," Laurel said. Ghosts. And in irony she saw herself, pursuing her own way through the house as single-mindedly as Fay had pursued hers through the ceremony of the day of the funeral. But of course they had had to come together-it was useless to suppose they wouldn't meet, here at the end of it. Laurel was not late, not yet, in leaving, but Fay had come early, and in time. For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives. She thought of Phil and the kamikaze kamikaze shaking hands. shaking hands.

"Your husband? What has he he got to do with it?" asked Fay. "He's dead, isn't he?" got to do with it?" asked Fay. "He's dead, isn't he?"

Laurel took the breadboard in both hands and raised it up out of Fay's reach.

"Is that what you hit with? Is a moldy old breadboard the best you can find?"

Laurel held the board tightly. She supported it, above her head, but for a moment it seemed to be what supported her, a raft in the waters, to keep her from slipping down deep, where the others had gone before her.

From the parlor came a soft whirr, and noon struck.

Laurel slowly lowered the board and held it out level between the two of them.

"I'll tell you what: you just about made a fool of yourself," said Fay. "You were just before trying to hit me with that plank. But you couldn't have done it. You don't know the way to fight." She squinted up one eye. "I had a whole family to teach me." me."

But of course, Laurel saw, it was Fay who did not know how to fight. For Fay was without any powers of pa.s.sion or imagination in herself and had no way to see it or reach it in the other person. Other people, inside their lives, might as well be invisible to her. To find them, she could only strike out those little fists at random, or spit from her little mouth. She could no more fight a feeling person than she could love him.

"I believe you underestimate everybody on earth," Laurel said.

She had been ready to hurt Fay. She had wanted to hurt her, and had known herself capable of doing it. But such is the strangeness of the mind, it had been the memory of the child Wendell that had prevented her.

"I don't know what you're making such a big fuss over. What do you see in that thing?" asked Fay.

"The whole story, Fay. The whole solid past," said Laurel.

"Whose story? Whose past? Not mine," said Fay. "The past isn't a thing to me. I belong to the future, didn't you know that?"

And it occurred to Laurel that Fay might already have been faithless to her father's memory. "I know you aren't anything to the past," she said. "You can't do anything to it now." And neither am I; and neither can I, she thought, although it has been everything and done everything to me, everything for me. The past is no more open to help or hurt than was Father in his coffin. The past is like him, impervious, and can never be awakened. It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. It will never be impervious. The memory can be hurt, time and again-but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it's vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.

From outside in the driveway came the sound of a car arriving and the bridesmaids' tattoo on the horn.

"Take it!" said Fay. "It'll give me one thing less to get rid of."

"Never mind," said Laurel, laying the breadboard down on the table where it belonged. "I think I can get along without that too." Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams. Laurel pa.s.sed Fay and went into the hall, took up her coat and handbag. Missouri came running along the porch in time to reach for her suitcase. Laurel pressed her quickly to her, sped down the steps and to the car where the bridesmaids were waiting, holding the door open for her and impatiently calling her name.

"There now," Tish said. "You'll make it by the skin of your teeth."

They flashed by the Courthouse, turned at the school. Miss Adele was out with her first-graders, grouped for a game in the yard. She waved. So did the children. The last thing Laurel saw, before they whirled into speed, was the twinkling of their hands, the many small and unknown hands, wis.h.i.+ng her goodbye.

About the Author.

One of America's most admired authors, Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She was educated locally and at Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. She is the author of, among many other books, The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, The Eye of the Story The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, The Eye of the Story, and Losing Battles Losing Battles. She died in 2001.