Mosquitoes were beginning to regroup under the banyan shade. Tom went and got the little electric fogger and plugged it into a socket on one of the flood lamps and killed them off, commenting to me when he was finished that he hated to use it because it was so unselective. “When I was a kid, we’d sit on the screened porch on a summer evening and see clouds of mosquito hawks-dragonflies-darting and swooping, eating their weight. Then the bats would begin when the sun went down. So we’ve killed off the mosquito hawks with the spray and we’ve killed the other bugs the bats ate, and now there’s nothing left but billions of mosquitoes and gnats, and we have to keep changing the spray as they get immune.”
“You grew up around here?”
“In the general area. Here and there. We moved around a lot. Steaks ready, Bid? Time for one more drink, then, Trav. Let me fix it for you. Maurie, darling, you are supposed to be tossing the salad, not sampling it.”
She hunched herself. “I didn’t mean… I wasn’t–”
“It’s all right, darling.”
At one point while we were eating, one scene, like a frozen frame, like a color still, underlined the strange flavor of the relationships, of the m‚nage. Maurie and I were on the same bench on one side of the picnic table, r
Maurie on my left. Biddy was across from me. Maurie was eating very politely and properly, and I glanced over and saw the two of them watching her. Husband and kid sister, looking at the wife with the same intent, nervous approval, as a couple might watch their only child plodding through a simple piano solo for visiting relatives. Then the frozen frame moved once again as Biddy lifted the poised fork to her lips and as Tom Pike began chewing again.
Later, as Biddy was saying something to me, Tom’s low voice in a sound of warning, saying merely “Darling!” made Biddy stop abruptly and look quickly at Maureen. I turned and looked at her and saw that she had hunched herself over her plate, head low, had picked up her steak in a greedy fist, and was tearing and gobbling at it. She dropped it back onto her plate and sat, eyes downcast, while under the shelter of the edge of the table she wiped her greasy fingers on the top of her bare thigh, leaving streaks of sheen across the firm brown.
“You forgot again, dear,” Tom said in a gentle voice.
Maurie began to tremble visibly.
“Don’t get upset, honey,” Biddy said.
But suddenly she wrenched herself up and away, striking the edge of the table so solidly with her hip that drinks and coffee slopped out of the glasses and cups. She ran toward the house, sobbing audibly in her blundering, hopeless flight. Tom called sharply to her, but she did not look back or slow down. Biddy got up quickly and hurried after her.
“Sorry,” Tom said. “I guess you can see why we don’t… Biddy will get her settled down and…” He pushed his plate away and said, “Ah, the hell with it!” and got up and walked down toward the lake shore.
He was still there when Biddy came walking back out. She sat opposite me. “She’s resting now. In a little while she won’t remember what happened. I want to have Tom look at her and see if he thinks she needs a shot. Is… is he all right?”
“He acted upset.”
“It’s because she was doing so well.”
She stared down toward the silent figure by the lake shore. I was at an angle to her that gave me a chance to see more than she would have wanted me to see. Her face had a soft and brooding look, lips parted. It was adoration, worship, hopeless helpless yearning love. I knew why she had started to go to pieces in the cocktail lounge. It was a situation nicely calculated to fray her to the breaking point, to have been for a year in this house with the deteriorating wife, the concerned and suffering husband. Loyalty to the big sister. And a humble self-sacrificing love for the husband.