She stood up and give me her haughtiest lady-of-the-manor look. “Do you think so? I’m so glad to have your opinion, Dolores. I crave it, you know; each night when I go to bed, I lie there in the dark, reviewing the day and asking the same question as each event passes before my eyes: ‘What would Dolores St. George have done?’ ”
Well, that made me madder’n ever. “I’ll tell you one thing Dolores Claiborne
Her mouth dropped open like somebody’d pulled the bolts that held her jaw shut. I’m pretty sure that was the first time I really surprised her, and I marched away in a hurry, before she could see how scared I was. My legs were shakin so bad by the time I got into the kitchen that I had to sit down and I thought, You’re crazy, Dolores, tweakin her tail like that. I stood up enough to peek out the window over the sink, but her back was to me and she was workin her shears again for all she was worth; roses were fallin into her basket like dead soldiers with bloody heads.
I was gettin ready to go home that afternoon when she come up behind me and told me to wait a minute, she wanted to talk to me. I felt my heart sink all the way into my shoes. I hadn’t no doubt at all that my time’d come—she’d tell me my services wouldn’t be required anymore, give me one last Kiss-My-Back-Cheeks stare, and then down the road I’d go, this time for good. You’d think it’d been a relief to get shut of her, and I s’pose in some ways it woulda been, but I felt a pain around my heart just the same. I was thirty-six, I’d been workin hard since I was sixteen, and hadn’t never been fired from a job. Just the same, there’s some kinds of buggery-bullshit a person has to stand up to, and I was tryin with all my might to get ready to do that when I turned around to look at her.
When I saw her face, though, I knew it wasn’t firin she’d come to do. All the makeup she’d had on that mornin was scrubbed off, and the way her eyelids were swole up gave me the idear she’d either been takin a nap or cryin in her room. She had a brown paper grocery sack in her arms, and she kinda shoved it at me. “Here,” she says.
“What’s this?” I ast her.
“Two eclipse-viewers and two reflector-boxes,” she says. “I thought you and Joe might like them. I happened to have—” She stopped then, and coughed into her curled-up fist before lookin me square in the eye again. One thing I admired about her, Andy—no matter what she was sayin or how hard it was for her, she’d look at you when she said it. “I happened to have two extras of each,” she said.
“Oh?” I says. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
She waved it away like it was a fly, then ast me if I’d changed my mind about goin on the ferry with her n her comp’ny.
“No,” I says, “I guess I’ll put up m’dogs on my own porch rail n watch it with Joe from there. Or, if he’s actin out the Tartar, I’ll go down to East Head.”
“Speaking of acting out the Tartar,” she says, still lookin right at me, “I want to apologize for this morning… and ask if you’d call Mabel Jolander and tell her I’ve changed my mind.”
It took a lot of guts for her to say that, Andy—you didn’t know her the way I did, so I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it, but it took an
“Sure I will,” I said, speakin kind of gentle. I almost reached out n touched her hand, but in the end I didn’t. “Only it’s Karen, not Mabel. Mabel worked here six or seven years ago. She’s in New Hampshire these days, her mother says—workin for the telephone comp’ny and doin real well.”
“Karen, then,” she says. “Ask her back. Just say I’ve changed my mind, Dolores, not one word more than that. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I says. “And thanks for the eclipse-things. They’ll come in handy, I’m sure.”
“You’re very welcome,” she says. I opened the door to go out and she says, “Dolores?”
I looked back over my shoulder, and she give me a funny little nod, as if she knew things she had no business knowin.
“Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive,” she says. “Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto. ” And then she closed the door in my face… but gentle. She didn’t slam it.
All right; here comes the day of the eclipse, and if I’m going to tell you what happened—
There—thank you. Boy, don’t that just hit the spot! No; put it away. One’s enough to prime the pump; two might not do anythin but clog the pipes.
All right—here we go again.
On the night of the nineteenth I went to bed so worried I was almost sick to my stomach with it, because the radio said there was a good chance it was gonna rain. I’d been so goddam busy plannin what I was gonna do and workin my nerve up to do it that the thought of rain’d never even crossed my mind. I’m gonna toss n turn all night, I thought as I laid down, and then I thought, No you ain’t, Dolores, and I’ll tell you why—-you can’t do a damn thing about the weather, and it don’t matter, anyway. You know you mean to do for him even if it rains like a bastard all day long. You’ve gone too far to back out now. And I
Saturday—the twentieth of July, 1963—come up hot n muggy n cloudy. The radio said there most likely wouldn’t be any rain after all, unless it was just a few thundershowers late in the evenin, but the clouds were gonna hang around most of the day, and chances of the coastal communities actually seein the eclipse were no better’n fifty-fifty.
It felt like a big weight had slipped off my shoulders just the same, and when I went off to Vera’s to help serve the big brunch buffet she had planned, my mind was calm and my worries behind me. It didn’t matter that it was cloudy, you see; it wouldn’t even matter if it showered off n on. As long as it didn’t pour, the hotel-people would be up on the roof and Vera’s people would be out on the reach, all of em hopin there’d be just enough of a break in the cloud-cover to let em get a look at what wasn’t gonna happen again in their lifetimes… not in Maine, anyhow. Hope’s a powerful force in human nature, you know—no one knows that better’n me.
As I remember, Vera ended up havin eighteen houseguests that Friday night, but there were even more at the Saturday-mornin buffet—thirty or forty, I’d say. The rest of the people who’d be goin with her on the boat (and they were island folk for the most part, not from away) would start gatherin at the town dock around one o’clock, and the old Princess was due to set out around two. By the time the eclipse actually began—four-thirty or so—the first two or three kegs of beer’d probably be empty.
I expected to find Vera all nerved up and ready to fly out of her own skin, but I sometimes think she made a damn career outta surprisin me. She was wearin a billowy red-n-white thing that looked more like a cape than a dress—a caftan, I think they’re called—and she’d pulled her hair back in a simple hosstail that was a long way from the fifty-buck hairdos she usually sported in those days.
She went around and around the long buffet table that was set up on the back lawn near the rose garden, visitin and laughin with all her friends—most of em from Baltimore, judgin by the look n sound—but she was different that day than she had been durin the week leadin up to the eclipse. Remember me tellin you how she went zoomin back n forth like a jet plane? On the day of the eclipse, she was more like a butterfly visitin among a lot of plants, and her laugh wasn’t so shrill or loud.
She seen me bringin out a tray of scrambled eggs n hurried over to give me some instructions, but she didn’t walk like she had been walkin the last few days—like she really wanted to be runnin—and the smile stayed on her face. I thought, She’s happy—that’s all it is. She’s accepted that her kids aren’t comin and has decided she can be happy just the same. And that
“Dolores!” she says. “Dolores Claiborne!” It never occurred to me until a lot later that she’d called me by my maiden name, even though Joe was still alive n well that morning, and she never had before. When it
