“You’re going to be all right,” he says automatically.
“You hate me!” she says. “You don’t want me to be all right.”
“I despair of your ever acting normal again, but I do want you to be all right.”
“My side,” she says.
“You’re going to be all right,” he says, walking out of the bedroom to the hall phone.
“The bathtub,” Clara says to Susan.
“What about the bathtub?” Susan says.
“It’s full of water. I tried to soak the pain away.”
“Let it be full of water. It’s all right.”
“Empty it,” she says.
“What does it matter if the tub has water in it, Mom?”
She looks like she might start crying. Susan lets go of her hand to go empty the tub. Charles is on the phone. He is arranging for an ambulance.
In the bathroom there is another heating pad, plugged in and turned to “high.” Susan pulls the plug out. There are movie magazines all over. Susan walks through them to pull the stopper. A cigarette is floating in the water. Susan reaches down carefully, not wanting the wet cigarette to touch her arm. There is a magazine at the bottom of the tub. Susan jerks her hand out.
“They’re coming,” Charles sighs.
“Help me!” Clara screams.
Charles puts the light on in the hallway, goes into her bedroom and holds her cold hand. She grabs his hand tightly, her false fingernails digging into him. He pulls her robe over her.
“I was going to kill myself,” she says.
“I know,” Charles says.
“Of course you weren’t,” Susan says.
“What are they going to do to me?” Clara says.
“Examine you at the hospital. I would have taken you in my car, but I know you like the ambulance better.”
“Which side is the appendix on?” she says.
“The right, I think,” Charles says.
“I think the left,” Susan says. “Maybe the dictionary.…”
“Don’t go!” she says.
“All right,” Susan says.
They sit on either side of her, Charles holding her hand, Susan resting her hand on her mother’s hair.
“What day is it?” she says.
“Thursday,” Susan says.
“What day?”
“Thursday,” Susan repeats.
“He said he was coming home Thursday,” Clara says.
“Believe me, I wish he could be here,” Charles says.
“I know it’s my appendix,” Clara says. She moves in the bed. The robe falls off her.
Susan rides in the ambulance. Charles follows in the car, deliberately driving much too fast in order to keep up with the ambulance, even though he knows the way to the hospital. Once he nearly turns the car over. When he gets to the hospital he is shaking — at least it looks like appropriate emotion. He sits with Susan, waiting. She bites her nails. He puts money in the cigarette machine. Nothing happens. He pushes the coin release. Nothing happens. After a while the doctor comes out and tells them that there is nothing physically wrong with their mother. She has been given a sedative. Her doctor is on the way.
Charles and Susan leave the hospital, go out to the car, begin the drive home. Soon the doctor will call and hint strongly that their mother should go back to the mental hospital.
The rain has stopped. Charles turns on the radio. Elvis Presley is singing “Loving You.” Elvis Presley is forty. Charles turns off the radio. Susan wipes tears out of her eyes.
When they get back to Charles’s house, all the lights are turned off. Charles goes out to the kitchen, still in his coat, and opens the refrigerator for a beer. Susan comes into the dining room and sits down across from him.
“I wish I had some cigarettes,” Charles says. “You don’t smoke, do you?”
“No.”
“Or drink?”
“Wine, sometimes.”
“You don’t even like beer?”
“No,” she says.
He finishes the can, says good night, and goes into his bedroom. He puts on the overhead light and sees Elise and Sam naked in his bed. He turns the light off, closes the door quietly, and stands in the hallway staring at Susan, still at the table.
“I should have known,” Charles says, going into the living room. He puts two pillows side by side at one end of the sofa and lies down, still in his coat.
“You should have,” she says.
“If you don’t smoke or drink, do you do that?” Charles says.
“Yes,” she says.
“Figures,” he says.
“I’m turning off the lights in here,” he says, getting up and turning them off.
“Okay,” she says. She is still sitting at the table when he falls asleep.
TWO
Riding to the hospital in the morning, Charles remembers going to the hospital with his father to get his mother and the new baby sister. There were two baby sisters, but one of them was born dead. His father told him that, but he told him not to let his mother know that he knew.
“How did they get there?” Charles asked.
“You don’t know that? I thought you already knew that.”
Charles had asked his father that question before, when he was sitting on a stool in his father’s workroom. His father said: “I guess you’ve heard of screwing?” Charles had not. He nodded that he had. Charles’s father gave him a nut and a bolt. “Imagine that this is you,” he said, pointing to the bolt. His father gave it a twirl. Charles took it back from him and tried to twirl it, but he dropped the bolt. His father thought that was very funny.
Charles’s gift to his new sister was a package of four number two Unger’s Westover pencils (yellow). He put them on the mattress under her feet. Later he took them back and used them.
Charles liked his father. He died suddenly, at thirty-nine, on the bus coming home from work. He has foggy recollections of Pete at the funeral. Pete worked with his father. When his father died, Pete came over one evening with a bag of oranges. He came other evenings, too, at his mother’s invitation, bringing with him apples, grapefruit, pears, and finally boxes of Whitman’s chocolates, flowers, and a briefcase with his pajamas and toothbrush. One night not long after his mother married Pete, the fuses blew. Pete climbed downstairs and called up a lot of questions. He couldn’t fix it. Charles went down to help, carefully trying one fuse, then another, just as Pete had. “Could your Dad fix the fuses?” Pete asked. “Yes,” Charles said. Pete had cursed and beat his hands on the cinder block wall above the fuse box until they were bloody. Another time when Susan took some of Pete’s wood to make arms for a snowman, Pete pulled the wood out, spanked her with it, made her look out the window at the snowman as she got her spanking.
“If he’s at the hospital, he’s sure to want us to hang around to go to dinner with him. We’re not going to do it,” Charles says.
“I feel sort of sorry for him,” Susan says.
“You can go to dinner with him if you want.”
“No. I’m not going to go to dinner with him.”
“You just feel sorry for him.”
“I do. She’s crazy almost all the time now. And something you don’t know. This will really make you feel sorry for him. He thought she’d be less depressed if they got out more, so he signed them up for six months of dancing lessons. She wouldn’t go, and he couldn’t get his money back, so he went alone the first night. He said they were all old people, and he didn’t go back either.”
“He’s a jackass,” Charles says.