“I really have no idea,” the General said. “We just lost the habit, somehow. There came a time when I don’t think it would have occurred to either one of us to go near the other sexually. Otherwise we got along pretty well.”
“Goodness,” Aurora said. “I believe I’ll have to think this over, Hector. If nothing else it explains why you were so enthusiastic when we were first getting to know one another. At the time I was quite swept away by your enthusiasm.”
“Swept away, my ass,” the General said. “It took me a good five years to seduce you. Or to convince you to seduce me, whichever it was that finally happened.”
“I remember it as me being swept away,” Aurora said. “If you didn’t sleep with your wife for more than twenty years, then it’s no wonder. I hope we can discuss this matter with Dr. Bruckner at our first session, if that’s what you call them. I find it intensely interesting, particularly in light of what I’ve just been remembering about my mother. I want to hear more about it.”
“We just stopped sleeping together, there isn’t any more to hear,” the General said. “I’m sure it happens to a lot of married couples.”
“Did you have girlfriends, at least?” Aurora asked, watching him closely.
“One or two,” the General said. “Not enough to make much difference.”
They heard the slam of a car door from the street below, and Aurora raised herself up to look. Patsy Carpenter, dressed in exercise garb, was walking up the sidewalk.
“Here comes Patsy to steal my maid and make her jump around,” Aurora said. “I think I better go down to see if Rosie’s made us anything to eat before she goes off to jump around.”
“I’d like two boiled eggs and corned beef hash, if it’s not too much trouble,” the General remarked as he felt around for his crutch.
“Well, it’ll be a lot of trouble if Rosie hasn’t already made it, but we’ll see,” Aurora said, grabbing her robe and heading for the stairs.
11
“Good morning, Patsy—do you know anything about psychoanalysis?” Aurora asked, sweeping into the kitchen. Rosie sat on a stool by the television, chewing her nails.
“Things are no better in Bulgaria,” she said.
Patsy Carpenter was dribbling honey into a cup of tea Rosie had waiting for her. Their aerobics class began in half an hour. She had formed the habit of having tea at Aurora’s while Rosie got her news fix. If Aurora was up, she would frequently contribute some of the local news—that is, what was currently happening vis-a-vis the General or Pascal or some of her other suitors.
“I was in analysis for six years after I left Jim,” Patsy said. “I lived in Mill Valley then. Every human in Mill Valley was either in analysis or had been. What do you want to know about it?”
“Everything,” Aurora said. “The General and I are taking it up. We plan to start today.”
Patsy, at fifty, was still a beautiful woman, or would have been if she could have managed not to look disappointed, Aurora thought. Disappointment, particularly self-disappointment—the variety Patsy suffered from—did not do good things for the female face. Tragedy might have added a kind of gravitas that would have made Patsy commandingly beautiful, but self-disappointment was merely making her look irrelevantly sad.
“The General’s going to be analyzed?” Patsy asked, letting the steam from the tea warm her face.
“Yes,” Aurora said, glancing at the stove to see if any corned beef hash happened to be there. None was, just at the moment.
“Rosie, do you think you could avert your eyes from Bulgaria long enough to boil the General a couple of eggs?” she asked. “He’s in an egg mood and he doesn’t like the way I do them. I will take the responsibility for the corned beef hash if you will just do the eggs before you desert me to undertake your jumpings.”
Rosie promptly got the two eggs out of the refrigerator, but she didn’t avert her eyes from the TV for more than a second or two at a time. The newscaster, the divine Peter Jennings, had just turned his attention to El Salvador, where things were also dicey.
“What if we invade?” Rosie asked. “It’s all jungle down there. It’ll just be another Vietnam, and we can’t afford no more Vietnams.”
“What could you do to a boiled egg that the General could possibly object to?” Patsy asked Aurora. “I don’t eat boiled eggs, but aren’t they usually pretty much the same?”
“Not to a man of Hector’s sensibility, they aren’t,” Aurora said. “I don’t know how many fights we’ve had about the way I boil, or mis-boil his eggs.”
“He is strict about ’em,” Rosie commented.
“Okay, but can’t you just set the timer?” Patsy asked. “What else is involved in boiling an egg?”
“I’m far from certain, but that’s not the point,” Aurora said. “If you were psychoanalyzed for six years, what’s it like?”
“Good lord,” Patsy said. “Do you have an analyst picked out?”
“Yes, a Viennese,” Aurora assured her. She discovered to her relief that she had a can of excellent corned beef hash in her pantry; or, if not already excellent, it undoubtedly would be, once adorned with Rosie’s eggs.
“Just the fact that he’s from Vienna doesn’t mean much,” Patsy said. “Is he Freudian or Jungian or Adlerian or what?”
“I haven’t asked him,” Aurora said. “Besides, I don’t much care. I just want him to straighten Hector out. We’ve already had a fight this morning, and it’s scarcely the breakfast hour.”
“Aurora, analysis isn’t going to make you and Hector stop having fights,” Patsy said. “You should get that notion out of your head.”
“No, thank you, that’s precisely the notion I want in my head,” Aurora said. “I can’t face many more years of these fights.”
“I can’t either,” Rosie said. “Them fights poison the atmosphere.”
She began to bounce around the kitchen, limbering up for her aerobics. Then she did a few stretching exercises, meanwhile keeping a watchful eye on Peter Jennings, who was, at the moment, describing the capture of a serial killer from Illinois.
Aurora popped the corned beef hash into a pan, got herself some tea, and sat down at her table to confront Patsy, a woman of whom she had never entirely approved—not that Patsy had ever entirely approved of her, either. Yet here they were, once again at the same table in the same kitchen, as they had been periodically since Patsy had arrived in Houston as a freshman in college, many years before. Then, of course, Emma had been with them—Emma, as well as Rosie. Now Emma was gone, and Patsy was still turning up in her kitchen. Life was odd. Quite argumentative, even testy, in earlier years, Patsy was now on the whole rather subdued. Her life had not turned out quite as she had hoped; and yet, Aurora reflected, what life did? Patsy’s daughters, Aurora had to admit, were nice young women; nice, and more or less stable, despite their outré dress and violent political opinions. On the whole Patsy seemed to have done better with her children than she and Rosie had managed to do with Emma’s. None of them had been institutionalized, none of them had killed anyone; none of them, as far as she knew, had even been pregnant out of wedlock.
“How is Jorge?” Aurora asked. Patsy’s beau for the past two years was a rather dashing Chilean architect. Patsy always managed to have someone who was both elegant and creative, an ability Aurora envied.
Patsy made a face. “We broke up,” she said. “I can’t believe I got involved with another architect, knowing what I know about them—and another Latin architect, to boot, knowing what I know about them. But I did, and now it’s over. So much for Latin architects.”
“Drat,” Aurora said. “Now I suppose he won’t come to my dinner parties, and he’s the handsomest man in Houston. Couldn’t you have hung on another year or two until I’m ready to give up dinner parties?”
“No, thanks,” Patsy said, looking at her watch. If there was one thing she didn’t mean to discuss, it was the failure of her most recent romance. She got up, went to the sink, rinsed h
er teacup, and turned to Rosie, who was peeking at Peter Jennings from between her own legs, as she stretched.
“Let’s hit it, Rosie,” Patsy said.
“Let’s hit it,” Rosie echoed. The egg timer chimed just as she spoke.
“Just remember to cut the tops off,” she said to Aurora. “What pisses him off is that you never remember to cut the tops off.”
“Yes, and I’m quite likely to forget to cut them off again,” Aurora said. “Only it won’t be because I forget, it’ll be because I refuse.”
“Well, you better, or you know what will happen,” Rosie said. “It’ll set him off for sure.”
“You mean he really won’t break his own eggshells?” Patsy asked, amused. Life at Aurora’s house had its nineteenth century aspects, and it always had. Some scholar of past times should come and study it, before it vanished forever.
“Yes, that is the revolting truth,” Aurora confirmed, popping up to stir the hash. “A four-star general is too squeamish to break his own eggshells. It’s enough to make one a feminist.”
Patsy laughed. “Aurora, when you become a feminist I think I’ll run for president,” she said. “But if you do go to an analyst be sure to tell him about the eggshells. He’ll get a year or so out of that.”
“I’ll be back in an hour and a half,” Rosie assured Aurora. She felt guilty about going away when a fight was brewing and was tempted to dash upstairs with the eggs and break the eggshells herself; on the other hand, the woman who ran the exercise class was really strict about starting on time.
“That’s fine, but I still say you look ridiculous in that leotard,” Aurora said, stirring the hash. “You make a very unlikely ballerina.”
“Bye, Patsy,” she added. “You didn’t help me much with my psychoanalysis, I must say.”
“Well, give me the analyst’s name, and I’ll check him out,” Patsy offered.
“Bruckner,” Aurora said. “Please check him out without delay, if you don’t mind. Hector and I are panting to get started.”
“Good lord,” Patsy said again.
12
Patsy Carpenter’s sensible Honda station wagon was equipped with racecar-driver seat belts, and an air bag that Patsy had had specially installed. Getting buckled in made Rosie feel a little bit like an astronaut, and the way Patsy drove made her feel even more like an astronaut. Even her son Tillman, who had been a stock-car racer from the age of about twelve, and who now owned a small stock-car track outside of Shreveport, didn’t drive as fast as Patsy drove. When he wasn’t racing a stock car, Tillman sort of meandered, but Patsy never meandered. Soon they were smoking out the Southwest freeway, toward Bellaire, where the exercise class was held.
“Did you always drive this fast?” Rosie asked, as Patsy blazed by five or six semis and lots of ordinary cars. The thought of the air bag was a comfort at such times—or sort of a comfort. Rosie still had a few reservations about air bags. What if one started to smother you, for example? Could you bite through it, and if you couldn’t bite through it, how did you keep from being smothered?
“I’m not driving that fast,” Patsy said, grinning at Rosie. “This car is a lot smaller than that boat you ride in with Aurora. In this car it seems like you’re going a hundred when you’re really just doing about eighty-five. Thanks to my air bags we could probably survive a head-on collision at that speed,” she added.
“I just asked,” Rosie reminded her. “I’ve been known to speed myself.”
’I’ll tell you a secret, if you won’t tell Aurora,” Patsy said. “It’s a minor secret, but I still don’t want Aurora to know it—she’d manage to use it against me, somehow.”
“What is it?” Rosie asked. She loved secrets, although they could be burdensome. She had been the recipient of hundreds of Patsy’s secrets, none of which she was supposed to tell Aurora, and of thousands of Aurora’s secrets, none of which she was supposed to tell Patsy. All those secrets were a big responsibility. Rose knew the day would come when she would forget whose secret she was guarding and tell it to the very person she was supposed to be guarding it from. After that happened, no one would ever speak to her again, except her children, who only spoke to her when they were in trouble as it was. Still, she couldn’t wait to hear Patsy’s secret.
“When I drive fast I don’t grind my teeth,” Patsy said. “I grind my teeth when I sleep, I grind my teeth when I read, I grind my teeth when I have to deal with my mother or my children, but I don’t grind my teeth at speeds exceeding seventy miles an hour. What do you think of that?”
Rosie shrugged, although when strapped into the racecar seat belts it was hard to manage much of a shrug.
“Well, when you’re going this fast, you need to keep your eyes on the road,” she said. “I guess your teeth figure it’s time to give it a rest.”
Patsy curled off the freeway, curled again into the parking lot of the health spa, parked, killed the motor, and released her seat belt. She looked at her watch.
“We’ve got five minutes,” she said. “What about Tommy?”
Rosie slowly undid her seat belt. Everyone asked her the same questions about Tommy: the General asked her, Patsy asked her, and several of Emma’s old Houston friends asked her, whenever she ran into them. She had come to dread the questions because she had no answers. Tommy was in jail. Tommy had always exerted a remarkable hold on people, and his tragedy had apparently done nothing to weaken this hold. Everybody wanted to know about Tommy—only there was nothing to know—or nothing, at least, that she knew.
“Aurora went in, I just sat in the car,” Rosie said. “Jails give me the heebie-jeebies. My kids was never in many—just one or two for fights on New Year’s Eve or something. I can’t handle Huntsville. I just can’t. Aurora goes in and I sit in the car and feel like a coward and a rat. I love Tommy too, I ought to go in, but I feel like I might throw up the minute I get inside them bars.”
“Sometimes I’d like to shake him,” Patsy said, thinking of Tommy. “I have the irrational feeling that if I could just shake him I could turn him back into the nice boy he used to be. I’m sure that’s folly, but it’s how I feel. It’s like he sits in that cell and controls us all. None of us will ever be happy while he’s there, and he knows it. I think he likes knowing it. I don’t think he wants any of us to be happy, ever. It makes me just want to smack him.”
Patsy had once been on Tommy’s visitor’s list. He had cut her off because she kept bringing him books; yet Aurora brought him books and he didn’t cut her off. Of course, Aurora was blood kin, but the fact that Tommy wouldn’t let Patsy visit him in the prison anymore left her feeling wretched. She lived, always guiltily, with the knowledge that she loved Tommy more than she loved her own son, David. Tommy had the right kind of brain—or, at least he had the kind she had always been a sucker for—and Davey didn’t. When Emma Horton was dying, she had almost given Patsy her children to raise, but Aurora fought for them and won. Of course, it would have been wrong to separate the three siblings, and Patsy couldn’t really fault Aurora, who had probably done about as good a job as any grandmother could do. But it still rankled that she hadn’t gotten to raise Tommy. After all, he had said his first word to her, one night when she was baby-sitting for Emma and Flap. It was just a mess, what had happened—a mess that was probably never going to get rectified.
“We better get in there,” Rosie said. “Gwen don’t like no laggards.”
“Sorry—I guess I fell into a reverie,” Patsy said, opening her door. “The thought of that boy just throws me off.”
“We can’t break him out of jail,” Rosie told her. “It’s just one of those things we’re going to have to live with.”
She popped out of the car and did a handstand in the parking lot. One of the self-discoveries she had made since she started accompanying Patsy to various exercise classes was that she had a talent for gymnastics. She was small, limber, uninhibited, and equipped with near-perfect balance.
Rosie had gone through mos
t of her life being a mother, wife, and maid. She had never supposed she had a talent, but in fact she did: a talent for doing handstands and other gymnastic feats. She immediately became the star of every exercise class she joined—invariably, if the instructor had to choose one pupil to demonstrate some tricky new exercise, the instructor chose Rosie. Indeed, two health clubs and several instructors had tried to hire Rosie to teach exercises full time. Apart from the fact that Rosie was really good, they needed an uninhibited seventy-year-old to persuade other, less uninhibited seventy-year-olds that it was okay to do bends and stretches and twists that they might otherwise have considered too unladylike to attempt.
On the way to the gym, Rosie did several more parking-lot handstands, to the astonishment of a number of deliverymen and early-morning shoppers. The sight made Patsy giggle. A couple of cops, gossiping and drinking coffee beside their patrol cars, began to eye Rosie suspiciously.
“Oh, stop it,” Patsy said. “Those cops are looking at you. They don’t see many ladies your age doing handstands in parking lots. They may think you’ve just been let out of a bin of some sort.”
Rosie righted herself and glared across thirty yards of asphalt at the policemen, who repaid her with hostile looks of their own. They wanted to enjoy their coffee and not have to deal with anything out of the ordinary for a while, and an old lady in a leotard doing handstands in a parking lot was out of the ordinary, and, in their view, suspicious. They thought it best to keep an eye on her.
“I can remember when this country wasn’t no police state like Romania,” Rosie remarked loudly, as she brushed the dust off her palms.
“Well, I don’t know that it is very much like Romania,” Patsy said. “They haven’t arrested you or beat you or anything.”
Rosie was not mollified. The thought that policemen would look at her suspiciously just for doing a few handstands made her want to join a demonstration as soon as she could find one. Maybe Peter Jennings would be around to report on the demonstration for ABC. Maybe he would even get to ask her a question or two as she was being handcuffed and booked. She had seen women not much younger than herself being handcuffed and booked, and she was sure it would happen to her as soon a she began her life as a demonstrator. She hurried on to the exercise class, eager to get some exercise. She wanted to be in tip-top shape when she started her career as a demonstrator for the rights of men or women or Americans or blacks or pregnant women or whatever. After all, she was tiny, and many cops were large. Unless she was in good shape and had mastered a few resistance techniques, some big ugly cop would probably just pick her up like a sack of flour and carry her off.