a baster in greeting. A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray next to a large pan filled with breadcrumb stuffing. There was a festive, roasting smell. I had dressed carefully—and all wrong, I saw now—in a dark blue suit and cream-colored blouse with a frilly collar: the outfit I had worn when I had gone to interview for my job. Nancy, by contrast, was wearing a muumuu patterned with wild green flowers that looked like they might bite your hand off, and orange flames shooting forth toward jagged peaks: the very embodiment of Florizona.
On subsequent Thanksgivings, the moment I arrived, Nancy would draft me into chopping something. This time, however, having accepted the bottle of wine I had brought, she instructed Daphne to “keep an eye on the bird,” and took me off on a tour of the house. In terms of detail, I absorbed very little that first visit, though I did notice the toy airplanes, and the piano, and that the furniture in the living room was strikingly “modern.” Nancy introduced me again to Ben, and for the first time to Mark, who was now a sophomore at Wellspring, with a bony, brooding face and a unibrow. They were sitting on the study sofa, thumbing through a book of Krazy Kat cartoons. By way of greeting, Mark looked up and gave me one of those frowns that can be so much more compelling and attractive than a smile. His very straight brown hair was parted in the middle and cut severely just below the ears, while Ben had shaggy, rather dry hair, paler than his brother’, and inclined to wave. Even so, he too had parted it in the middle. Like Mark, he had his left leg crossed manfully over his right, ankle on knee. They wore more or less identical outfits—pale Oxford shirts and flared jeans—but because Ben’ legs were so long in relation to his torso, his didn’t seem to hang on him properly. The jeans rode up, revealing a band of pale flesh just above the sock line.
We finished up in the bedroom wing. “I won’t subject you to Daphne’ chaos,” Nancy said, bypassing one closed door and opening another to reveal the master bedroom, which was utterly pristine, the enormous bed made up for the occasion with the “dress” bedspread, tailored from heavy slub linen. From here we walked out onto the back porch, which ran the whole length of the house and gave onto a vista of old oaks, red-leafed Japanese maples, and a few exotic fruit trees, including a guava. A very green lawn swept down to the pool, which had been built parallel to the barbecue pit; beyond that I could make out just the edge of the former koi pond, as well as some exuberant rose bushes. For the first but by no means the last time she told me the story of how she and Ernest had come to acquire the house.
There was a moment of spectacular quiet in which all you could hear was the remote trilling of a lark. “It’ very beautiful,” I said—ineptly, I thought—and Nancy, her breast rising with emotion, gave me a smile to suggest regal forbearance: noblesse oblige.
“I shall never live anywhere else,” she said. “When they take me out of here, it’ll be feet first in a pine box.” Then she lit a cigarette. “Well, we’d better be getting back to the kitchen, shouldn’t we?” And she walked me across the porch to the back door.
The kitchen was empty. “Oh, where is Daphne?” Nancy inquired of no one, and ran to open the oven. In those years supermarket turkeys almost always came with a little built-in thermometer that popped up when the meat reached a certain temperature; fortunately, we now discovered, the device remained unejaculated, which meant that even though Daphne had fallen down on the job, the meal’ ruination was not imminent.
In fact, Daphne was in her room. Through the locked door, Nancy shouted, “Daph! What are you doing? I asked you to keep an eye on the turkey! Do I have to do everything myself around here? And while you’re in there, do something with your hair. It looks like a rat’ nest.”
We returned to the living room, where she sat me down at the piano. “Let’ start with this,” she said, arranging some music on the desk. “It’ a baby transcription of Beethoven’ Eighth Symphony.”
The truth was, it had been several years since I’d sat in front of a piano.