On the Babbingtonians’ final day in Chacallit, Richard and Lena served a buffet supper for everyone: Lester and Millie Piper, Luther Huber, Bertha and Richard Reuter, Clara and Harold Russell, Garth and May, Herb and Lorna.
Bertha was nervous. She was dressed in something she had made herself, without benefit of a pattern, after studying an illustration in a magazine. It was meant to be daring, but it had been an act of desperation and it looked it. Over the course of the Babbingtonians’ visit, Bertha had come to feel like a lumpy bumpkin, and she blamed this feeling on Lorna. Bertha was envious, horribly envious. She envied Lorna her legs, her clothes, her baby, her life, her luck, her friends. She didn’t realize that the Babbingtonians weren’t a very sophisticated bunch. Garth seemed to her exactly what he wanted to be taken for: the Arrow collar man. He seemed to live in a world Bertha had inferred from magazines and novels, frightening, possibly evil, immeasurably pleasurable. And May! Everything about May suggested a life of ease, lived on the gentle horizontal, not the tough slopes of the Whatsit Valley, ease that left legs slim and smooth, as May’s short skirts boasted. To Bertha’s envious eye, Lorna and Herb glowed with May and Garth’s reflected light, especially Lorna, who even wore May’s hand-me-down silks.
Garth had brought liquor from Babbington. He passed cocktails around. Lena and Millie refused, and Bertha and Clara refused at first, but Bertha changed her mind when May and Lorna took theirs, and Clara changed her mind when Bertha took one. “Wouldn’t you rather have something else, girls?” asked Lena. She wrinkled her brow.
“Mother, really,” said Bertha.
“She’s right, Mrs. Huber,” said May. “They’re not girls any more.”
Bertha looked hard at May, then at Lorna.
“After all,” said May, “you girls — oh, now I’m doing it — you and Clara are Lorna’s older sisters. I’m sure Lorna doesn’t think of herself as a girl any longer, and — ”
“May,” said Garth. “Why don’t you give me a hand in the kitchen?” May gave a little shrug, as if to say that she couldn’t imagine why Garth couldn’t handle the cocktails by himself, and followed him into the kitchen.
“May,” he whispered, “don’t you think you ought to — ”
“No, I don’t,” said May, struggling to keep her voice down. “That woman has been horrible all week.” She left the kitchen, apparently composed, and she sprinkled light and glittering conversation around the living room while she hunted for Bertha. She found her at the table in the dining room, spooning potato salad onto her plate.
“Bertha, I’d put some of that potato salad back, if I were you,” whispered May. “It looks dreadfully fattening.”
Bertha glared at her.
“Well, perhaps you’re right,” said May. “It can’t make that much difference.” She walked off, beautifully. Bertha watched her go. When May got to the living room, she took Bertha’s husband’s arm, and whispered in his ear something that made him laugh. May succeeded, in a way: she hurt Bertha, made her angry. But May wasn’t the object of Bertha’s anger, Lorna was — Lorna who was slim, who had a lively, bouncing baby, who seemed to have stumbled into a life so much better and easier than Bertha’s, who didn’t even have to fight back when she was taunted, because she had a clever friend to fight for her. All the old hatred came back. Methodically, Bertha began eating her potato salad.
When it was time to go, and Herb lifted Ella from the lap of Harold Russell, Clara’s husband, Ella clung to him and cried furiously. She kicked and screamed and called out for Harold in the car. She sobbed herself into exhaustion. After half an hour of feeble whimpering, she fell asleep. Everyone was silent for a while. Then May said, in Bertha’s voice, “Lorna! You look so thin! I hope you’re taking care of yourself! Have a plate of lard, won’t you? I’m having my second!” Lorna tried not to laugh, but she couldn’t help herself. She began giggling, and soon all four were burlesquing Bertha and Clara, laughing till tears ran down their cheeks.
Bertha lay in bed, awake. The rest of the house was asleep. Cocktails, potato salad, and envy had unsettled her stomach. She felt dizzy in bed, so she got up and went into the kitchen for a glass of warm milk. While the milk was warming she buttered a slice of bread and sprinkled it with sugar, making the treat she called in childhood “bread-and-butter-sugar-bonnet.” She had heartburn, and she thought something rich and sweet and comforting would cure it. She belched. Acid caught in her throat. It tasted of potato salad. She took a piece of paper from a drawer. She poured the milk and began eating the bread-and-butter-sugar-bonnet. She looked at the paper. Acid rose in her throat again. Brashly, she began a letter to Herb.
In Topical Guide 318, Mark Dorset considers Literature: Popular Fiction: Its Effect on Impressionable Readers and Media: Popular Magazines: Their Effect on Impressionable Readers from this episode.
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🎧 318: On the Babbingtonians’ ...