The Evening Star

  “But I’m not in heaven,” she said, looking down. She had long been shamed and puzzled by the achievements of Rosie’s children in contrast to the failures of her own.

  Rosie knew that Aurora envied her her healthy, reliable children—anyone who had raised children and knew what the odds were would be likely to envy her, she knew. They were her children, she had raised them, in anxiety and strife, and yet nowadays she could rarely sense her own hand in their lives or their successes. Somehow it had just happened; one by one they had left her behind and gone on to inhabit worlds where she herself would never live. The kids had once been a part of her, but, for the life of her, she could no longer feel a part of them, and when she thought of them now it was mainly to be glad that they weren’t miserable, as she was.

  “Do you see what I’m getting at?” Aurora asked, shaking off the bitter mood that had been about to sweep over her.

  “I see,” Rosie said. “You’re right. I’m luckier than you. I’m luckier than anybody. I ought to be the happiest old woman on earth. That’s one of the reasons I’m so damn miserable. I ought to be happy but I ain’t—I ain’t at all.”

  “Well, I’m not either, don’t look at me,” Aurora said. “I squeezed an egg over Hector’s head. He’s upstairs, snarling and flailing about even as we speak. He’ll probably shoot me with his army pistol in my own bedroom if I’m not careful.”

  Between the marmalade, the muffin, Aurora’s lecture, and the surprising news about the General and the egg, Rosie began to feel a little better.

  “You squuz an egg over his head?” she asked in wonderment. Aurora’s capacity for inspired retaliation had always amazed her. Why hadn’t she thought to cook an egg and squeeze it on C.C.’s head? It would have surprised him so much he would probably have croaked on the spot. The thought made her smile.

  “That’s better,” Aurora said. “However, I must inform you that there’s no such word as ‘squuz.’ There ought to be, but there isn’t.”

  “I guess there is, if I said it,” Rosie commented—Aurora’s pickiness about words often annoyed her. Still, she was feeling a great deal better suddenly and she slavered a great hunk of marmalade on the next English muffin.

  “That’s not a correct attitude, but never mind,” Aurora said. “May I ask what happened to make you so unhappy?”

  “Oh, well,” Rosie said. “I’d like to forget it, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course I mind,” Aurora said. “Did you and C.C. have sex in the car, or am I mistaken?”

  “Oh, no, you did see—I knew you’d see!” Rosie said. She dropped the muffin—it hit on its edge and rolled several feet across the kitchen floor—and buried her face in her hands. She’d been discovered, and now she’d never, never live it down.

  “Now, now, I didn’t see,” Aurora said, wishing she had. “It’s merely that I inferred that such practices might be taking place. You surely don’t think I’d peek on your intimacies, do you?”

  “I sure do think you’d peek,” Rosie said. “I know you’d peek. Who wouldn’t? I told him you’d peek. Now I want to kill myself.”

  “Rosie, please don’t overdramatize,” Aurora said. “I’m the one who gets to overdramatize. We can’t both get away with it, and I’ve had a lot more practice.”

  Rosie kept her face in her hands. She knew Aurora would see! She had told C.C. Aurora would see! But he begged, she gave in, Aurora did see, and now she would never live it down.

  “The one thing I’m not is prudish,” Aurora assured her, when Rosie had hidden her face and held her silence for a considerable while.

  “People fortunate enough to have active lovers can have sex wherever they want to without a word of complaint from me,” she added. “When I was younger and luckier I had it in a wide variety of places myself, as I informed Pascal the other evening, in no uncertain terms. Surely you’re not thinking I’d begrudge you your good luck?”

  Rosie put little stock in Aurora’s tolerant stance. Besides that, she had no intention of sitting still for the suggestion that what had happened to her amounted to good luck—what had transpired between herself and C.C. that morning was anything but lucky, in her view.

  “What good luck?” she asked, raising her face briefly. “The fact that C.C.’s got this weird thing about doing it in cars is the curse of my life. It ain’t good luck at all, and if you think it is, try it sometime!”

  “It’s odd that I never suspected that you were suffering under this curse until today, when I happened to look out my window just at the right moment,” Aurora said. “I didn’t even know C.C. was weird—I just thought he was lazy, like Hector and Pascal.”

  Rosie looked disgusted, but didn’t answer.

  “Why does he like doing it in cars especially?” Aurora asked, after a decent interval.

  “Because that’s where he done it with his first girlfriend,” Rosie said. “When they got married, C.C. was a boomer and they traveled around a lot and kept on doing it in cars. C.C. got in the habit and now he can’t break it. What you got to remember is that C.C. still thinks like a teenager, even if he is sixty-eight years old.”

  “He’s by no means the oldest teenager in the world,” Aurora pointed out. “The one that threw the crutch at me this morning is even older.”

  “I don’t know,” Rosie said. She felt that she would never enjoy even one day free of confusion in her whole life.

  “Don’t know what?” Aurora asked.

  Rosie sighed. “Maybe it’s just that C.C. was raised in cars,” she said. “He’s just about worthless once you get him in the house.”

  “Hector is nearly worthless too, and he wasn’t raised in cars,” Aurora said—she thought it was about time to switch the conversation back to her problems.

  “I get nervous in cars,” Rosie admitted, ignoring Aurora’s ploy. “I mean, I oughtn’t—it’s the same thing you’re doing, whether you’re doing it in a car or a bed. But I get nervous and then I try to hurry and you know what happens when you try to hurry.”

  “The men hurry faster, that’s what happens,” Aurora said, remembering that Rosie had not looked exactly replete when she stepped out of the station wagon. “Believe it or not I was confronted with the same phenomenon this very day,” she added.

  Rosie peeked through her fingers at the floor she had mopped so often. Fortunately, at the end of its roll across the floor, her English muffin had landed marmalade side up. She retrieved it and took another bite.

  “Since all you seem to want to talk about is sex, let me ask you a question,” Aurora said. “On a scale of one to ten, how would you score your little frolic in C.C.’s station wagon?”

  “What?” Rosie asked. “Score it?”

  “Sure, score it,” Aurora said. “Why not?”

  Rosie suspected a trap of some sort. If she were to give her morning’s lovemaking a grade such as one got in school, she would undoubtedly give it an F, but F happened to be the letter a certain four-letter word started with. Was Aurora trying to trick her into saying the word, and if so, why?

  Then, remembering her nervousness and her frustration, she ceased to care about Aurora’s motive.

  “On a scale of one to ten I’d give it a zero,” she said bitterly. “All I got out of it was a raw back from C.C.’s old scratchy seat covers, and besides that I gouged myself on a screwdriver he left on the seat. Even a zero might be putting it too high. It was more like a minus two.”

  “No wonder you cried,” Aurora said. “I suppose I fared somewhat better, although not much.”

  Rosie had thought Aurora looked sort of cheerful. “Does that mean the General finally perked up?” she asked.

  “Slightly, but only slightly,” Aurora said.

  Rosie considered that it was just one more unfair instance of Aurora getting more than she herself did of life’s pleasures. In the forty years she had been with Aurora there had been thousands of such instances, but that didn’t mean she had stopped resenting them. That Aurora had done bett
er with the General, who was really old, than she had done with C.C., who wasn’t, was no cause for joy; and, besides that, if Aurora had seen the station wagon shaking, the whole neighborhood had probably seen the station wagon shaking.

  “Seventy years of keeping up a decent reputation, and now it’s gone,” she said. “I wish I could just quit and go live in a neighborhood where people don’t start looking out their windows before it even gets light.”

  “Oh, hush,” Aurora said. “I didn’t see a thing, and no one else did, either. I’m just a good guesser. Hector wanted to look but he couldn’t find his crutches in time, so you’re quite safe. Anyway, if you would devote yourself to the study of history even for a few minutes you’ll find that even the most respectable people do ridiculous things now and then. I’ve done several ridiculous things myself, and no one’s more respectable than I am.”

  Rose finished her muffin—life had to go on, or at least it hadn’t yet stopped going on. Someday, she knew, it would stop, for her if not for others, and that would be that. Her main hope was that she’d be fully clothed when she died. Now and then, in low moods, she found herself worrying that she might die naked, in the bathtub or somewhere. That would be too much—she cringed at the thought. But it hadn’t happened yet, and perhaps it wouldn’t happen; meanwhile, all she and Aurora could find to talk about anymore was sex. For most of the years that she had worked for Aurora they had rarely mentioned sex; now they rarely mentioned anything else.

  “I’ve heard old women get nasty-minded,” she said, wishing she had another English muffin. “I sure never thought it would happen to us.”

  “Me neither,” Aurora admitted. She picked up her hairbrush and proceeded to give her hair a thoughtful stroke or two.

  “On the other hand, I’m sure neither of us supposed we’d be making do with what we’re making do with, either,” she said.

  “Right, a nudist and a maniac who can’t keep it up unless he’s in a backseat,” Rosie said. “We deserve better. If there’s anything I hate, it’s starting the day with a minus two.”

  She noticed that, in fact, Aurora didn’t look all that cheerful.

  “How about you, on a scale of one to ten?” she inquired. She had never asked her employer such a question, but since they couldn’t seem to stop talking about sex, she thought she might as well.

  “Oh, I don’t know—perhaps a one and a half,” Aurora said, brushing more listlessly. “Certainly no higher than a two.”

  The phone rang. Aurora ignored it.

  “Want me to get it?” Rosie asked. “It could be Melly. They could have had a car wreck.”

  “No, it’s Hector, I’m sure,” Aurora said. “I don’t wish to speak to him, but you may if you like.”

  Some months before, after weeks of quarreling, she had consented to the installation of a second phone line. The General complained that she spent so much of her time on the phone that he could barely squeeze in his business calls. Also, as he often reminded her, the day might come when he could no longer manage the stairs—he wanted to be able to call down to the first floor, in case there was an emergency of some sort. Now he was in the habit of calling down eight or nine times a day, mainly to inform them that he was lonely.

  “Hi, General,” Rosie said, picking up the phone.

  “Am I to be left here to starve just because I complained about my eggs?” the General asked, in moderate tones.

  “He wants to know if he’s being left to starve because he complained about his eggs,” Rosie said to Aurora.

  “No, but coming on top of a meager one and a half, it was certainly unwise of him to complain,” Aurora pointed out. “After all, I didn’t complain about the one and a half. Besides, he threw his crutch at me. Let me have the phone.”

  “Hello, Hector,” she said coolly, once she got it.

  “Aurora, I’m sorry I complained,” the General said. “I miss you. I wish you’d come back upstairs.”

  “Why, so you can conk me with your crutch?” Aurora asked. “What if I’m not in the mood to be conked?”

  “I won’t conk you—I love you,” the General said. In times past he had seldom declared his love so directly, but now he often had to declare it directly several times a day, just to keep things on an even keel. Even then, they didn’t stay on a particularly even keel. It was rather a disappointment that life was just as uneven at the end as it had been at the beginning and in the middle. He had always supposed that passion would eventually subside, and that when it did life would be calm. He had once rowed a little boat across the Bay of Naples at sunset, and when he thought back on the experience he realized that he had hoped that was more or less how old age would be: serene, beautiful, calm, with sky and water in harmony.

  But here he was, his hands shaking, calling from the second floor of Aurora’s house to the first floor, pleading with her to come back up and see him and, if possible, bring him a scrap of bacon, or something to eat. It wasn’t much like the Bay of Naples at sunset with the evening star bright in the sky.

  “Well, perhaps you do—perhaps I’ll come in a moment,” Aurora said. “You should be getting dressed now. We’re going off to see our analyst in about an hour.”

  “Oh, drat,” the General said. “I forgot about that. I haven’t had a bite to eat, you know. You threw that egg on my head and took my breakfast away.”

  “Rosie says I squuz it,” Aurora said, with a giggle.

  “There’s no such word as ‘squuz,’” the General informed her.

  “Yes, I made that point,” Aurora said. “Did you wash your hair?”

  “Of course I washed my hair,” the General said. “What choice did I have? Did you think I want to go through life with egg all over me?”

  “Hector, I was merely thinking of our poor analyst,” Aurora said. “If I brought you in with egg in your hair, the poor young man might give up on us before we even get started. We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?”

  “No, but the point is, I’m starving,” the General said. “Do you think Rosie could at least make me some oatmeal?”

  “Well, I don’t know, her day has had a tragic beginning, or very nearly,” Aurora said. “I refuse to put your case—you’ll have to put it yourself.”

  She handed the phone back to Rosie, who listened patiently to the General’s request.

  “Okay, but there’s no brown sugar, I forgot to get any,” Rosie said. “You’ll just have to eat it with plain old white sugar, much as you hate it—or else you can have honey.”

  “A little honey will be fine,” the General said.

  18

  Bump hated it when his Bigs shut the bedroom door. First they locked the screen door so he couldn’t escape down the stairs and into the yard. Then they plopped him in his bed with some books and toys, told him to be nice, gave him a kiss or two, and then abandoned him. No matter how he tried to get them to play, or how hard he cried, or how loud he yelled, his Bigs ignored him and disappeared behind their door.

  Often this happened in the morning, not long after his father got home. Everyone would be sitting on the couch and for a while Bump would be the center of attention—his mother and father would kiss him a lot and laugh at the things he did. It was usually when they started to kiss one another that he got abandoned. He knew this and would try to stick a book between their faces if he thought they were going to kiss, but his Bigs just laughed and ducked under the book. They kissed anyway.

  Then they locked him in the house, but out of their bedroom. Sometimes it made him feel lonely, but mainly it made him feel angry. Once or twice he lay on the floor and tried to peek under the door, but all he saw was his father’s shoes and a heap of clothes on the floor.

  Sometimes he yelled, but nobody answered. Sometimes he listened, but all he could hear was jiggle sounds from the bed. They were the kind of sounds he made when he bounced on his Big Granny’s bed. If his own Bigs just wanted to bounce on their bed, why wasn’t he welcome to bounce with them? Once his mot
her was in a hurry and didn’t manage to get the door completely shut, and he slipped in for a second; the bed was making jiggle noises, but his Bigs weren’t bouncing nearly as high as he imagined. Before he got two steps into the bedroom his mother came rushing at him naked, even more like a beast, and flung him into his bunk bed so hard he cried for a long time. She slammed the door to the bedroom so hard it made Bump want to run away. He got a pencil and tried to poke a hole in the screen door—he wanted to squeeze through like Peter Rabbit and run away, but he could only make a tiny hole, and then he broke the pencil.

  Bump liked it in the early mornings, before his father came home. He and his mother would lie on the couch together and play games. His mother would yawn big yawns and sometimes even go back to sleep. She wore a loose gown and sometimes one of her breasts would come out of the gown. Bump would always be naked—he hated his pajamas and would always take them off as soon as he woke up. Sometimes he would try to pull his mother’s gown off so they could be naked together; but his mother would never take her gown off. She didn’t particularly care if one of her breasts fell out, though. She wasn’t so beastlike when she was playing with him in the mornings. She smelled good then—Bump would often lie on top of her and smell her.

  But soon his father would come home and the two Bigs would start talking. Sometimes they would just go right into their bedroom and leave him alone and make him feel helpless. They didn’t seem to realize how bad it was to feel helpless, if you were a Little. The one thing Bump found to do that would let them know how angry he was at being shut out was to drag his toy box across the room and throw all his toys at the bedroom door one by one. He expected his mother to come raging out like a beast when he threw his toys, but she never did. Sometimes they would yell at him to stop throwing the toys, but Bump didn’t stop. He threw every toy in his toy box—sometimes he even tried to butt the door open with a little wagon he had, but it didn’t work. Nothing worked, not even crying and screaming and kicking the door with his feet. The Bigs just stayed in the bedroom, not caring a bit that he felt helpless.