I drove to the IGA in town the next day, but the stakes were high, and I hardly knew where to begin. Perley was just starting solid foods. Perched regally in the shopping cart, he swung his arms out for pickles and olives, anything briny. But I was there for staples. I filled the cart with oil, rice, flour, beans, cans of tomatoes, cans of fish, a box of powdered milk, bouillon cubes. Back at home, Karen and Helen said I was cheating.
Cheating or not, I was glad that I had such foresight. The odds were against us, and as August wore down into September, we rolled doubles only twice, once Snake Eyes, once the Necklace. We spent most weeks working our way through what we had on the shelves. We developed a new taste for crawdads dug from the murky garden paths, bluegills netted from the creek, chickweed, the cattails that grew at the bottom of the driveway. But it was impossible to get enough. The crawdads and the bluegills were mostly bone or cartilage, the chickweed and cattails flared fast inside us and then went out. The meat we could get, possum, raccoon, or squirrel, we would savor, knowing it wouldn’t last. Helen’s passion for wild food didn’t match her skill in getting it. Most of what we had planted in the garden was either low-calorie or low-yield. We looked forward with urgent vigilance to the potato harvest, only to find that we’d grown enough to feed us for only a few meals, and not enough to store. The green beans, on the other hand, were so plentiful that for most of September they were nearly all we ate. I was ravenous, much hungrier than I’d been when I was pregnant. I came to love only two things deeply, Perley and fat. I woke from dreams of fat, thought of fat while I was driving in nails, caught myself admiring the crease of fat behind Perley’s knees. I dreamed of fat, and I ate what I could, and what I ate Perley drank from my body. As he grew, I shrank. But no matter what, I nursed Perley. No matter what, I saw to it that Perley thrived.
Karen and Helen might not have been getting much nutrition, but they were thriving, too. Thriving on self-satisfaction. They could barely contain themselves.
“It’s a good lesson,” Karen said. “We’ll learn to store food better.”
“We’ll learn to get more wild foods,” Helen said. “We can get acorns.”
“We’ll get a couple of deer and have venison all winter,” Karen said.
“What about Perley?” I said. “Soon he’ll be eating more food. I want him to be healthy.”
“It’s not healthy to be feasting all the time,” Karen said. “This is better. This is better for Perley. He’ll be hardy. He’ll be ready for anything, right from the beginning of his life. And he’s got you. You’ll nurse him as long as he’ll let you. Right, Lily?” But I could see how happy she was, so I could see that she didn’t need me to answer.
* * *
They could agree on Survival Dice, but when it came to the house, the truce between Karen and Helen was bound to fall apart. After all, the truce was based on starvation, a condition whose first symptom is irritability and whose second symptom is poor decision-making. The house continued to go up but it didn’t get any better. The first September rain, the roof leaked and water blew in through the walls. We had to wait for a dry day to do anything about it. Grim, Helen bought caulk, grout, and spray foam insulation. Pale, she climbed a ladder and patched the roof. Tight-lipped, Karen sprayed foam into the gaps in the walls. I rested beneath the dogwood with Perley. He was almost crawling by then, tipping himself forward onto all fours so that he could reach out and share the last tin of kippers with me. Karen and Helen stopped for lunch, and Helen divided a songbird in half.
“I divide, you decide,” Karen said.
“But I divided,” Helen said.
“Right, so I get to decide,” Karen said. They ate their swift in tense silence.
“We need to move the woodstove in soon,” Karen said. It had been sitting beneath a tarp at the top of the driveway all summer. It weighed four hundred pounds.
“We should borrow a dolly,” Helen said.
“A dolly won’t work,” Karen said. “It’s too heavy and the ground is too uneven.”