Family Linen Read Online Free Page A

explains. “Like anorexia nervosa. You never heard of that either until it got popular, and then it was everyplace.”
    â€œI heard of it,” Betty says.
    Sybill knows for a fact that all Betty ever does at the hospital is give out visitor passes. “Oh, come on.” Sybill’s patience is wearing real thin.
“Nobody
did.” She gets up and snaps off the TV before the sports and weather come on, even though they always watch the sports and weather, and frequently “Family Feud.” “I need to lie down,” she says.
    â€œ
Well!
” Betty, miffed, stands to go. “It probably all goes back to your mother,” she says.
    â€œI love my mother, it’s the rest of them I can’t stand.” Of course this is not quite true of Myrtle. But when Sybill thinks of her brother and sisters in general, she feels a sense of confusion amounting almost to nausea. Arthur, Myrtle, Lacy, and Candy—especially Lacy and Candy. Just being in the same room with Candy embarrasses Sybill.
    â€œI can tell you’re holding back,” Betty says.
    â€œI don’t know who you think you are, Dr. Joyce Brothers or who,” Sybill snaps. Of course she’s holding back, she has no intention of telling Betty or any other real person about old Ed Bing whose condominium even now is visible right across the pool, who’s probably cooking his own steak in his own dinette, this minute.
    â€œ
Buenos días!
” Betty leaves in a huff, and Sybill sinks down on her puffy white sofa and cries. Betty’s her best friend, after all. Sybill feels her eyes swelling up; she can’t get her breath. She’s not used to crying like this—to be honest, she hasn’t shed a tear since her Pekingese, Missy, passed away at the age of twelve, two years ago. Before that, it was all the way back to
Love Story
. It’s not that she doesn’t feel strong emotions, it’s just that she rarely cries. A line from a song on the radio pops into her head: “Used to be I was falling in love, but now I’m only falling apart.” Sybill can’t remember the next line, but the verse ends with the line “total eclipse of the heart.” Sybill thinks she’s having a total eclipse of the heart. And she’s not up to it, it’s been years . . .
    Because Sybill is the kind of woman who gave up all those ideas long ago, gave them up so gradually she didn’t even realize she was doing it. As a young girl, she always expected to marry. As a young woman, she expected this, too. But she was in no hurry. It was a question of waiting for the right man to come along. While she waited, Sybill finished college and worked and dated others—such as the mathematics instructor at Douglas Freeman High School in Richmond where she first taught, a red-haired man who took her out to the Bonanza Steak House for dinner and even, on several occasions, tuned up her car, but somehow never got beyond that stage—nor, Sybill realized even at the time, did she want him to. Although kind, he was not Mr. Right.
    For two whole years after that, she went out with Mercer Delaney, a pharmacist from Farmville, Virginia, who she met through a colleague at Douglas Freeman. This was the last time, looking back on it, that anybody ever offered her a blind date. Sybill and Mercer Delaney dated every other weekend when his sister came to stay with his mother, who lived with him. Sybill and Mercer attended many model airplane rallies—his hobby. Sybill spent a lot of time sitting out in the wind catching cold while Mercer tried to repair his engine. Finally it came to seem to her that Mercer would never grow up, that his mother would never die.
    Sybill’s most serious love, however, was illicit. A man who came to teach industrial arts at the technical school in Roanoke, where Sybill still works, began to show her a lot of attention—this was in 1975, close to ten years