The Evening Star (42 page)

“Did you get really hot, or what?” he asked, looking at his grandmother again. She looked sad—and, for almost the first time ever, she looked
old,
really
old,
which was a shock. Teddy almost backed into a passing pickup, so startled was he by the realization that his grandmother had finally aged. She had always been so attractive and sassy and full of beans that “old” was just not a term he would have applied to her. Jane wouldn’t have applied it either, he was pretty sure.

Even when they got rolling and it was cooler in the car his granny didn’t look much better. He didn’t know what to make of it, except that it was disturbing. It was as if she had lost it suddenly, just in the space of time that it had taken him to go into the prison and talk a little baseball with Tommy. She had always been such a zestful woman that you just weren’t inclined to attach an age to her at all—he realized with surprise that he didn’t even know how old his grandmother
was.
Earlier in the day she could have passed for fifty-five or sixty; now she could almost pass for eighty. It was very startling.

“Don’t look at me that way, Teddy,” Aurora said. “I’ll be all right in a bit.”

She started to reach for her old ally, the rearview mirror, but then decided that in this instance she had better let be. The damage she had suffered was internal—fixing up the
exterior wasn’t going to help, not this time. She could see that Teddy was shocked by her depression, but there was not much she could do about it. At the moment she lacked the energy to explain about Danny Deck and Emma and all that had happened in those years before he was born, when his mother was just a young bride—only a girl, really.

“Maybe you’ll feel better when I get you home,” Teddy said.

“Yes,” Aurora said. “I’m sure I’ll feel better when I get home.”

19

“Listen to me, please!” Aurora said that same evening, near midnight. “Stop raving and listen.”

“I ain’t gonna stop raving,” Rosie said, though she was not so much raving as pacing in her distress. Occasionally she paced out of the kitchen into the garage—the latter was reachable through a small laundry room. There she could be heard kicking garbage cans or pounding on the Cadillac or the wall or whatever she could find to pound on, before returning to the kitchen to pace some more.

“May I remind you that I was at that very prison, this very day!” Aurora said, raising her voice. “I was not happy, I can tell you. I opened the paper to read my horoscope and discovered yet another tragedy.”

“I don’t care. Who cares?” Rosie said. She suddenly grabbed the sugar bowl and threw it through the open door, across the laundry room and into the garage.

“Uh-oh,” Willie said, as they heard the sugar bowl smash. “The ants will be into that sugar.” He was painfully aware that he was the sole cause of the fit Rosie was having. His addiction had been discovered and he had been fired from
the prison, where he had worked for more than twenty years. It seemed, in a way, like the end of the world, and now it had been the end of Mrs. Greenway’s sugar bowl as well.

“Rosie, I would have taken
any
drug this afternoon,” Aurora insisted. “If a pusher or whatever they’re called had walked up to me with a sack of heroin or opium or cocaine or anything I would have taken it.”

Now that she had thrown the sugar bowl, Rosie didn’t feel quite so violent.

“Baloney!” she said, in response to Aurora’s assertion, but she didn’t say it with much force.

“Beg your pardon, it is not baloney, it’s the truth,” Aurora insisted. “Given the opportunity, I would have become an addict, just like poor Willie. In fact, I’d start becoming one right now, if I had the drugs.”

“I got some, you’re welcome,” Willie said quickly, before he thought. After all, Mrs. Greenway had come to his defense at a moment when Rosie was about to kill him, or at least to run him off.

“You shut up, Willie!” Rosie said, her anger flaring anew. “The last thing we need in this house is another dope addict.”

“Who are you to criticize us for our weakness?” Aurora said, pointing her finger at Rosie. “You’ve scarcely set foot in that prison yourself. You’ve cowered in the car for two years, while I went in. You don’t know how sad it is in there. What happened to Danny Deck’s daughter yesterday is only one tragedy in thousands. What happened to Tommy is only one tragedy in thousands. We had to deal with our one, but people who have to work there have to deal with them all. No wonder Willie’s an addict; I say, more power to him!”

“Now what will we do for a sugar bowl?” the General asked. In a way, he was enjoying the crisis. It was rather like a council of war. He would have enjoyed more crises, actually—it was only when there were fights that he was allowed to be part of the family any more; at least it was only during fights that he
felt
like part of the family. Mostly, when things were calm, he was just left to himself, to putter around
until he died. The problem with that was that nothing he was able to putter at was very much fun.

“Hector, it’s not the last sugar bowl in the universe, we’ll buy another one, so mind your own business!” Aurora said. The man was looking alive, for once, but for some reason, in the mood she was in, that annoyed her. If he still had the capacity to look alive, then he ought to look it more often and make himself really useful, it seemed to her.

Rosie gave up, sat down at the table, and began to cry loudly. She hated to cry, in public or otherwise—her way of crying involved emitting a kind of sucking sound as she attempted to suck the tears back into herself as rapidly as they fell. The sucking sound, rather than the tears themselves or the fact that she was distressed, put a very great strain on the nerves of anyone who had to listen to it—in this case, everyone at the table.

Rosie was crying because Aurora had hit her exactly where it hurt: that is, on the dark bruise of guilt she felt for cowering in the car during all those prison visits. Aurora was right about the sadness of the prison, too. Even on a bright sunny day, the prison was sad, as if an invisible cloud of sadness had settled over it. Even watching people come and go in the parking lot made Rosie miserable—all those ground-down people, suffering for the sins of their loved ones, their husbands or fathers.

Aurora was right—she herself was the coward, and what was the use? Willie had worked in that awful place for more than twenty years; why wouldn’t he take dope? The fact that she had worked up her courage and made the big break with C.C. didn’t alter the fact that Willie had an awful job. After all, Willie was just a plain man from East Texas, with an eighth-grade education, who had taken the one job he could get at the time, a job he had now lost. So what if she was involved with a dope addict? Her husband Royce had been a beer drunk most of his life, and C.C. Granby had been weird about sex. At least Willie wasn’t weird about sex.

“What are you jumping on me for?” the General inquired. Aurora had been annoyed with him for months, and he was
getting in the mood to get annoyed back. “Why can’t I even make an innocent remark about the sugar bowl without being slapped down?”

“Hector, do I resemble a philosopher?” Aurora asked brusquely. “All you do is question my motives nowadays. I’ve never enjoyed having my motives questioned, as you ought to know, and I still don’t.”

“That’s right, you’ve never given two seconds’ thought to your goddamn motives,” the General said. “You never have, and you still don’t.”

“So?” Aurora said, lifting her chin. “They are
my
motives, may I remind you? I guess I can ignore them if I want to.”

Rosie finished sobbing; the sucking noises subsided. They all fell silent. All four were wondering briefly how it had happened that they had become trapped in a life with the other three. The fact that they had meant that each was stuck in a kitchen at midnight with three insane, unpleasant strangers. Why them, why then, why there, and why the other humans scattered around the table, with whom, for the moment, relations seemed pointless, if not impossible?

“My boss was real nice about it,” Willie commented—he had reached a point where he found the silence unbearable. Though usually he was so intimidated by Aurora and the General that he rarely said anything in their presence, the novel experience of being fired made him suddenly eager to talk. In fact, he had scarcely stopped talking since it happened.

“That’s good, Willie—I’m glad your boss was nice,” Aurora said.

“Well, I doubt you’re the first dope addict they ever seen at that prison, and I bet you ain’t the last, either,” Rosie said, wiping her eyes on the corner of the tablecloth.

“Don’t wipe your eyes on my tablecloth—get a napkin,” Aurora ordered.

“They gave me a list of these rehab places,” Willie said. “I guess I oughta be thinking about rehab now that I got all this time on my hands.”

“You better be thinking about getting another job if you expect to keep eating,” Rosie said.

“Rosie, what makes you so harsh?” Aurora asked. “Willie is perfectly right. Addiction is a sickness—obviously he needs to get well before he starts looking for a job.”

“I just mean I ain’t supporting nobody while they sit around sticking needles in themselves,” Rosie said. “Rehab’s fine if you can afford it, but it ain’t no substitute for a paycheck.”

“No, rehab isn’t fine,” the General said loudly. “It’s just a goddamn rip-off, if you ask me. Those drug clinics are no better than the nut houses we sent the children to. The nut houses didn’t help the children much and the drug clinics won’t help Willie much, either.”

“What do you think
will
help him, Hector, since you seem to know so much?” Aurora asked. “The reason there are hospitals, if I’m not mistaken, is because the sick are not always able to cure themselves—sometimes not even if they’re getting nice paychecks, as Rosie insists that they should.”

“A healthy sport like golf that will keep the man out in the fresh air is what I recommend,” the General said. “If he doesn’t care for golf he could start playing racquetball.”

The thought of Willie playing racquetball stunned them all for a moment, and the General mistook their silence for assent.

“Vigorous exercise and lots of it is what I recommend,” he said. “It would be a lot better for Willie than sitting around in a clinic with a lot of drug addicts.”

“Hector, I hope you don’t expect us to treat what you just said as a serious comment,” Aurora said.

The General was somewhat startled to find that yet again Aurora didn’t appear to agree with him.

“Why can’t I expect you to treat it as a serious comment?” he asked, a little defensively.

“Because it’s absurd,” Aurora said. “Willie has a chemical dependency. He’s addicted to heroin. Do you seriously expect us to believe that heroin addicts can cure themselves by playing racquetball?”

“I only meant as a first step,” the General said, retreating. “You always twist my words.”

“Willie grew up in an orphanage,” Rosie revealed. “They
whipped him black and blue, Then, getting that job in the prison was probably the last straw.”

She yawned; Willie yawned. Rosie suddenly got up and disappeared into the laundry room. She reappeared in a moment with a broom and a dustpan.

“If you’ll come hold the dustpan I’ll sweep up that sugar before the ants get started,” she said to Willie.

“Oh, come on, leave it,” Aurora said. “I think the ant threat is being exaggerated. After all, ants have to eat too, don’t they?”

“Yeah, but I’m sorry about the sugar bowl,” Rosie said. “I was just freaking out—I never thought I’d be having to deal with stuff like this at my age.”

“Yes, I know the feeling,” Aurora said. “I’m sure if we all had dollar bills for every time we’ve had that feeling we’d be in a position to do takeovers and things of that nature.”

“You sure about the sugar bowl?” Rosie asked. Suddenly her legs felt so tired she was doubtful that she could even make it to her little house. The moment Willie stood up, she leaned on him.

“I hope we ain’t kept you all up,” Willie said, putting his arm around Rosie. “I hate to upset other people with my problems.”

Aurora gave him a nice smile.

“Don’t give it a thought,” she said. “There are many times in life when it’s rather a relief to be asked to think about other people’s problems. One can take a little vacation from thinking about one’s own.”

Willie just nodded. He had been rendered speechless by Mrs. Greenway’s smile—and not for the first time, either. Whenever she chose to smile at him he was rendered speechless, a fact Rosie had not been slow to notice or comment on.

“You got one bad habit now, and that’s heroin,” she had said to him only that morning. “It ain’t the only bad habit in the world, though. There’s two or three more you need to watch out for.”

“Like what, for instance?” he inquired.

“Like flirting with Aurora,” Rosie informed him. “My husband Royce liked to flirt with Aurora, and look what happened to him.”

“Well, what did?” Willie asked.

“He died,” Rosie said.

“Of flirting?” Willie asked.

“That and a few other things,” Rosie said.

Willie decided it was not a matter he needed to pursue any further. If Mrs. Greenway wanted to smile at him, that was surely her business. If Rosie disapproved, she would just have to take it up with her boss. He himself decided to go on enjoying the smiles, but with as little comment as possible.

Hewing to that principle, he managed to steer the shaky Rosie out the door.

“Hector, don’t you think it’s time you went to bed?” Aurora said, once Willie and Rosie made their departure.

“No, I can sleep when I’m dead,” the General remarked.

“Well, no doubt, but a little shut-eye now and then wouldn’t hurt you, even if you aren’t dead,” Aurora commented, getting up to turn on the stove. She felt like having a sip of tea.

“You treat me as if I’m dead,” the General said. “At least you do half the time. When you’re not treating me like a corpse, you treat me worse. You talk to me as if I were an idiot, or a child.”