“I tell her, ‘Mother, drop it. Barnaby’s very happy doing what he’s doing,’ I say, and she always says, ‘Yes, but would his salary feed a family?’ ”
“It could,” I said.
“It could?”
“It could if it weren’t a very hungry family.”
Sophia made a face at me.
I knew what we were creeping up on here — what we were skating around the border of. We had never, in so many words, discussed getting married; but I think lately it had been on both our minds. I said, “The way I see it, everyone has a choice: living rich and working hard to pay for it, or living a plain, uncomplicated life and taking it easy.”
“Well, you work hard, Barnaby. You’re practically a slave! Wakened up anytime Mr. Shank gets lonely, setting your alarm for crack of dawn on garbage days …”
“Yes, but it’s the kind of work I enjoy,” I said. “And at least it’s not nine to five.”
“Six to midnight is more like it!”
“Hey,” I said, and I eased my foot on the accelerator. “Do you think I ought to change jobs?”
“No, no,” she said.
“It sure sounds as if you do.”
“I just hate to see you work such long hours,” she said, “and not get better paid for it.”
“I’m paid enough to live on,” I said. Then I got bolder. “Maybe enough for a wife besides, if the wife was frugal.”
The word “wife” hung in the air between us. It didn’t really sound all that bad, after my meditations in the park.
“And face it,” I said, hurrying on. (At heart, I was a coward.) “What other work could I do? I don’t have any useful skills. My education’s been a farce. All I’ve learned is trivia.”
“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” Sophia said. “Of course you have useful skills! There’s no such thing as trivia.”
“There isn’t?”
I had never heard that before. It struck me as so erroneous that I couldn’t decide where to start attacking it. In the end, I said, “Well, here: During the Second World War, when butter was scarce in Germany, the Germans started eating their toast with the buttered side down. That way, they could use less butter and still taste it.”
“Pardon?”
“But what’s surprising is, when the war was over, they went back to buttered side up. You’d think they would have formed a new habit; but no, they reverted to buttered side up the very first chance they got. That’s the kind of trivia I mean.”
Sophia was silent. A truckful of chickens passed us — stacks and stacks of crates, strewing feathers.
“Well, anyhow,” she said, finally. “One option I might suggest is, finish up your degree and then apply at my bank.”
“Your bank!”
“They offer an excellent training program, with full fringe benefits while you’re learning.”
“I’d rather die than work in a bank,” I said.
I felt Sophia’s face whip toward me. I glanced over and saw how pink her cheeks were. “Well. Sorry,” I said, “but—”
“It’s all right for me to work in a bank, but you’re above such things. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Now, hold on, Sofe—”
“I can work nine to five, and scrimp and save up my earnings, which, by the way, I have lost every bit of, my entire savings account wiped out, and thirty dollars in my checking account to last till the end of the month; I can pay for the—”
“Wait,” I said. “Surely you’re not holding me to blame for that fool stunt you did with your money.”
“Fool stunt? I did it to save you! I thought I was protecting you! I thought you would be grateful!”
“Why should I be grateful? I never robbed your aunt. And I certainly never asked you to cover for me.”
“No,” she said. And more quietly, she said, “No, you didn’t. I realize that. It was my mistake. You had nothing to do with it. But I just feel, I don’t know, frustrated when you talk about your plain, uncomplicated life and simple tastes, and I meanwhile am wishing for … oh, nothing fancy! Just to eat out a little more often, go to a play or a concert every now and then. Take a couple of trips together. But we can’t! You don’t make enough money, and mine is at the bottom of Aunt Grace’s flour bin!”
This last sentence ended in kind of a wail. I put my arm around her, although I had to keep an eye on the road. “Hon,” I said. “Look. First of all, I don’t understand why that money is still at your aunt’s.”
“Well, I told you I haven’t been back there. I’m very cross with Aunt Grace, and she knows it. I think she wasn’t nearly as apologetic as she ought to have been.”
“So? You have a key to her house. Slip in sometime when she’s out. Slip in on her podiatrist day, or her beauty parlor day. Steal your money back again.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Sophia said.
“Why not?”
“I’m worried she might catch me.”
“You didn’t let that stop you when you put it there in the first place.”
“But it’s different, getting caught taking money,” she told me.
“Lord God, Sophia! Not if the money’s your own!”
“There’s no need to shout at me,” she said gently.
Then she drew away, sliding out from under my arm.
I didn’t talk anymore after that, and I barely grunted when she made some comment on the scenery. “Isn’t that tree a pretty shade of yellow!” Grunt. It seemed I was my difficult, unappreciative self again. For all the good it did, I might as well not have bothered with my epiphany in the park.
These little glints of wisdom never last as long as you would expect.
12
MAUD MAY had been in the nursing home for over seven months now. First it was one thing and then another. I’d begun to think she was one of those clients who go in and never come out again. Her house had taken on the faded, seedy look of a place that’s been abandoned, and it gave a start and shrank back on itself whenever I walked in. The spider plant I’d been watering all this time had grown so many baby plants that some of them trailed to the floor.
But then at the end of October — Halloween, in fact — they said she was well enough to leave. I remember it was Halloween because she asked me to pick up some trick-or-treat candy before I came to collect her. “I don’t want any neighbor brats soaping my windows in spite,” she told me. Though how she expected to answer the door when they rang, I couldn’t say. She was still exceedingly lame.
So I dropped Martine at Mrs. Cartwright’s, where the two of us were scheduled to clear out the guest room, and then I went to the supermarket. Halloween this year wasn’t likely to amount to much. A thunderstorm had been threatening since early morning. But I bought three sacks of fun-size Almond Joys, along with the other items on Maud May’s shopping list — the prunes and the all-bran cereal, a single grapefruit, a skinny one-quart carton of skim milk. Anyone could have told at a glance that these were an old person’s groceries.
When I let myself into her house, I tried to view it through her eyes. Should that spider plant be so brownish at the tips? And how about the drawers in the sideboard: did they look snooped into, somehow? I hadn’t snooped; I swear I hadn’t; but you never know what people will imagine.
At the Silver Threads Nursing Home, Maud May was ready and waiting. She sat beside the reception desk in the wheelchair they always force departing patients to ride in. A jumble of belongings crowded the floor all around her. “At last!” she snapped when she saw me. “Bentham, we can go now.”
Bentham was the orderly who was joking with the switchboard girl — a young black guy about seven feet tall, with a wedge-shaped hairdo. He threw one last remark over his shoulder and came to help me carry the luggage out. Suitcases, hatboxes, potted plants, a folded aluminum walker … We loaded them all in the back of the truck, A misty rain had started falling, and Bentham said, “Ms. May not going to be too happy about this”—meaning the fact of the open truck bed. “You want I should hunt up a tarp?” he asked.