Pay the Piper Read Free

length he’d suggested, and she’d called the fuel company about a leak in the basement and bought an extension cord. But she had not followed his regimen for working out. He had posted how many sit-ups to do daily, keeping her toes attached to something, and a schedule with barbells, their weights increasingly difficult as time went by. She would tell him, for once, she was not going to do what he said; and that’s that, she added to herself in her mother’s definitive phrase. Jogging was enough for her.
    You, William once said, did all right for a little girl from Delton. Marrying into his prestigious family, he had meant, more or less kindly. She certainly agreed, after the background she came from. She carried about her ownepithet: the little girl from Tennessee. Yet she had stacked up a few Brownie points before meeting him and was neither a country tack nor stupid. She’d published two short stories in reputable literary quarterlies; this fact kept William’s patrician, stalwart, and productive Bostonian female relatives from relegating her to the dust pile where they cast most Southern women, among the flirty, flighty, and mundane.
    She considered her middle-class Southern background, where materialism was success. If only she’d had the nerve, at some point, to tell William’s relatives she could at least cook. They pridefully announced they could not boil water for tea. There was fine art on the walls of William’s relatives’ houses, and fine furniture in them, but still their houses had a sparer, plainer, and more austere look than comparable Southern houses she had known. When his relatives’ rugs and upholstering wore out, these things were often left that way, as if from respect; books sat on shelves, with tattered jackets, because someone was always pulling them out to read them. In Delton, one of her friends had her Book-of-the-Month Club books covered in forest-green felt to match the color of her slipcovers; another old friend as he grew successful bought the whole of the Modern Library, though as she gazed at his lined wall, he confessed the only novel he’d read since college was “The Man in the Long Gray Underwear.” “Gray Flannel Suit”? she timidly suggested. William’s mother and the aunt who helped raise him wore conservative clothes whose hemlines stayed mid-calf no matter what fashion predicted. When Aunt Grace once looked surprised, saying, “You don’t speak French?” Laurel replied, “La plume de ma tante,” and cringed. For years, she longed for some snappy or devastating reply, but none had yet come. William, when they married, pointed out the difference between baking powder and baking soda, because, coming from the South, she not only had never cooked but had never washed out a pair of underpants for herself until she went to college.
    Jubal and Buff could not understand this morning why there were no egg, toast, or bacon scraps. Laurel opened the dishwasher to put in Rick’s dish, seeing there dishes from William’s last meal, and thought how she had said, “I don’t mind cooking your breakfast every morning, but it seems silly since you throw it up.”
    He had stood there with his briefcase, broad-shouldered in the old tweed jacket he went on wearing generously year after year and watery-eyed from tossing his cookies. “Maybe it’s the grease,” he had said.
    â€œYou’re the one who wants your eggs fried in bacon grease,” she had reminded him. “But you threw them up scrambled and soft-boiled, too.”
    Then William had left, and there had seemed some incongruity in a man’s going to Washington, D.C., on a business trip for his high-powered company and yet throwing up his breakfast first, day after day, because his new job and his new boss made him nervous. While knowing how dependent she was on William, she believed she had a different strength; she