increased. Now that this new pain killer, the one she had been holding in reserve, was on the way her misery was manageable. She let a piece of her mind lay on Nel. It was funny, sending Nel off to that drugstore right away like that, after she had not seen her to speak to for years. The drugstore was where Edna Finch’s Mellow House used to be years back when they were girls. Where they used to go, the two of them, hand in hand, for the 18-cent ice- cream sundaes, past the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where the sprawling men said “pig meat,” and they sat in that cool room with the marble-top tables and ate the first ice-cream sundaes of their lives. Now Nel was going back there alone and Sula was waiting for the medicine the doctor said not to take until the pain got really bad. And she supposed “really bad” was now. Although you could never tell. She wondered for an instant what Nellie wanted; why she had come. Did she want to gloat? Make up? Following this line of thought required more concentration than she could muster. Pain was greedy; it demanded all of her attention. But it was good that this new medicine, the reserve, would be brought to her by her old friend. Nel, she remembered, always thrived on a crisis. The closed place in the water; Hannah’s funeral. Nel was the best. When Sula imitated her, or tried to, those long years ago, it always ended up in some action noteworthy not for its coolness but mostly for its being bizarre. The one time she tried to protect Nel, she had cut off her own finger tip and earned not Nel’s gratitude but her disgust. From then on she had let her emotions dictate her behavior.
She could hear Nel’s footsteps long before she opened the door and put the medicine on the table near the bed.
As Sula poured the liquid into a sticky spoon, Nel began the sickroom conversation.
“You look fine, Sula.”
“You lying, Nellie. I look bad.” She gulped the medicine.
“No. I haven’t seen you for a long time, but you look…”
“You don’t have to do that, Nellie. It’s going to be all right.”
“What ails you? Have they said?”
Sula licked the corners of her lips. “You want to talk about that?”
Nel smiled, slightly, at the bluntness she had forgotten. “No. No, I don’t, but you sure you should be staying up here alone?”
“Nathan comes by. The deweys sometimes, and Tar Baby…”
“That ain’t help, Sula. You need to be with somebody grown. Somebody who can…”
“I’d rather be here, Nellie.”
“You know you don’t have to be proud with me.”
“Proud?” Sula’s laughter broke through the phlegm. “What you talking about? I like my own dirt, Nellie. I’m not proud. You sure have forgotten me.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But you a woman and you alone.”
“And you? Ain’t you alone?”
“I’m not sick. I work.”
“Yes. Of course you do. Work’s good for you, Nellie. It don’t do nothing for me.”
“You never
“I never would.”
“There’s something to say for it, Sula. ’Specially if you don’t want people to have to do for you.”
“Neither one, Nellie. Neither one.”
“You can’t have it all, Sula.” Nel was getting exasperated with her arrogance, with her lying at death’s door still smart-talking.
“Why? I can do it all, why can’t I have it all?”
“You
“You repeating yourself.”
“How repeating myself?”
“You say I’m a woman and colored. Ain’t that the same as being a man?”
“I don’t think so and you wouldn’t either if you had children.”
“Then I really would act like what you call a man. Every man I ever knew left his children.”
“Some were taken.”
“Wrong, Nellie. The word is ‘left.’”
“You still going to know everything, ain’t you?”
“I don’t know everything, I just do everything.”
“Well, you don’t do what I do.”
“You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.”
“What’s that?”
“Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”
