Still Life with Plums Read Online Free PDF Page B

fragrances concocted in my head with the putrid stink of bowel-slung punch and partially digested chicken salad.
    Half a dozen women rush to her aid, including Peggy, who lunges off with two words, “Oh, fuck.” Another six scatter for wet paper towels, quickly returning to wipe down the girl’s face, dress, fingers, and the chunky mess on the floor. Peggy comes back with the now-bawling child in tow.
    “It’s okay,” Peggy says, sitting, hoisting the child onto her lap.
    I’m stunned. “Is this… is she…?”
    “My daughter Emily.”
    “Oh,” is all I can manage, my goddess roped back to earth and now saddled with children.
    “My dress!” Emily whines, running her little fingers across the lime stains on her lacy togs.
    “That’s what Spray ’n Wash is for,” Peggy consoles. She leans close to me. “I swear, the child can barely tie her shoes and already she’s into high fashion. Didn’t get that from me,” Peggy says, and by the look of her, I believe it, though I can only imagine Mother’s dismay if that were me throwing up, not just on my good dress, but in front of the guests: Oh, the humiliation—for her.
    Peggy simultaneously rocks Emily into a torpor, eats her potato salad (not put off by the vomit smell still emanating from her child),and delivers a description of a seven-layer chocolate torte, her specialty, with a gooey center that explodes in your mouth when you bite into it. She wants to know about my job too, and though I can’t offer up anything as exquisite as volcanic cake, I volunteer my best dog stories, including—Mother still doesn’t believe this—my great joy in detailing them with ribbons and tuxedo vests and plastic tiaras.
    We yak for an hour, I swear, Peggy painting visions of driving cross-country to attend this shower. Two thousand miles in a car with no relief drivers, on Route 66 no less, all the way to St. Louis, with a side trip to the Grand Canyon and every funky hot dog stand along the way. The woman is describing my top-down, hair-whipping, dream vacation (sans child’s car seat) if I only had the guts.
    Emily snores, and I am once against stunned to find myself having a real adult conversation with a woman who has a sleeping child draped across her lap, not one who is tugging on Mommy’s thigh or smearing oatmeal-coated fingers down her blouse or screaming for a drink, or a cookie, or that seductively placed toy on the lowest shelf in the impulse-buying zone at the grocery store. I don’t even flinch when Emily’s hand flops over and rests on my forearm, tiny fingers wiggling, and I wonder what she’s up to in her sleep: making Easy-Bake cookies, playing chopsticks on the piano.
    Emily is not the only surprise. Up comes a boy, maybe seven or eight, with three cherry popsicles clutched in his hands. “Mom!” he says, drawing Peggy’s attention to the booty. I love him already because, unlike his spindly sister, he’s a chubby kid, looking like Pugsley Addams in his well-worn striped shirt and uneven buzz cut. I watch Peggy’s face to see if it collapses the way Mother’s did whenever I plodded up to her.
    But Peggy just extends an arm toward him. “There’s my Toby,” she says, drawing him into this maternal tableau. “This is Miss Jackie,” she says.
    Toby looks at the popsicles in his hands and his face puckers up as he labors over long division. “I only brought three,” he says, looking from Emily to Peggy, the other apparent recipients.
    “I don’t think Emily is up for one right now anyway,” Peggy says.
    Emily blows a spit bubble in her sleep.
    “Okay,” Toby whispers, handing mine over first.
    “Thank you, sir,” I say.
    “You’re a good man,” Peggy says.
    Toby delivers some circuitous, non sequitur tale about his exploits in the choir loft, about discovering a box of Jesus puppets, about the wooden-slatted organ pedals. Peggy listens intently, as if he’s divulging directions for Blackbeard’s treasure, offering encouraging