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Show 10 her grandmother would have sat, which one was her favorite chair. I show her the alcove where Sadie and I would drink tea, the lawn chairs outside the garden window, where Sadie would sit when the weather was kind. I do not mention the bed. "She didn't drink tea," Luel remembers, "at least not the regular kind." I picture Sadie in a long panorama of tea-drinking in that quiet alcove; it was Sadie who always brought an herb tea with her. "Fennel," remembers Luel, "she used to tell us it civilized her digestion, by 'encouraging the dignified and timely exit of what had entered.'" She laughs. I laugh too; I can remember Sadie saying the very same th-ing. She was an endearing, charming, witty woman, a small thin frail bird-like assemblage of highly animated bones. I can remember the loose skin on her thin quick arms, the way her eyes darted about, her lively distaste for anything common, for boredom, dullness, the dreary routines of gossip. For her sake, I think, one can be glad that she could not attend her own funeral. But Luel's laughing suddenly ceases. "What did she wear when she was here?" she asks, and now I see that she sees something hanging on the door of the bathroom. She gets up slowly from the couch, moves with studied nonchalance around the living room, edges into the bedroom towards the bathroom. Suddenly, I realize what she sees: it is Sadie's silk dressing gown, the one Luel and her father had brought at Christmas. "She left it here for them all," I say on purpose, but Luel does not seem to hear. She fingers the silk lace at the yoke of the gown, saying nothing. |