They are only a few blocks from the hospital. It has started to snow.
“I’ll just take what I can get,” Charles says. “We can walk.” He pulls into a parking place.
“I don’t want to get out,” Susan says.
“She’s okay. She can probably come home.”
“This is a lousy vacation,” Susan says.
“We’ll have a turkey on New Year’s Day. We’ll have Sam over.”
“I don’t even like turkey.”
“We’ll have a ham.”
“You’re always thinking about food.”
“Susan. Get out of the car.”
“Do you love me?” Susan says.
“What the hell are you talking about? Will you please get out of the car?”
“You curse all the time. Can’t you answer me?”
“Of course I love you. You’re my sister.”
“You don’t act like you love me. It seemed when I came back like I’d never left because nobody missed me.”
“Susan. I work five days a week at a lousy job and miss my lover at night. On the weekends I go out and get drunk with Sam, and then I get sick. Your mother gets sick all the time and calls me in the middle of the night and at work. I’m just not in a very good mood.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be like that. You should do things you enjoy.”
“I don’t have any money. It’s all I can do to pay the bills and buy Sam drinks, because he doesn’t have any money either.”
“But you could get that girl back.”
“I can’t get her back. She’s not coming back. Christ.”
“You curse all the time.”
Charles opens his door, gets out, and closes it. Susan’s door does not open. He goes around to her side of the car, bends over, puts his mouth against the window. “Get out or I’ll kill you,” he says. She opens the door.
“You’re in a strange mood,” he says. “When I was growing up this would have been called ‘an identity crisis.’ ”
“You always try to make yourself seem older than you are. Why do you do that?”
“I guess on second thought you’re a little sure of yourself to be having any sort of crisis.”
“Were you nice to that girl? If you criticized her all the time, that’s probably why she left you.”
“Stop talking about her. It’s depressing me.”
“What did she look like? Then I’ll stop talking about her.”
“She was pretty tall. Maybe five-nine. She had long brown hair. Blond. Brownish-blond. She was the librarian in the building I work in.”
They go up the steps to the hospital, across the circular drive, and through the revolving door. There are brown plastic sofas everywhere. Charles puts his hand on Susan’s shoulder and guides her to the left, where several women in white uniforms sit behind a desk. He asks his mother’s room number, thanks the woman, and guides Susan toward the elevators. To the right, down a short corridor, is a chapel. There is no one in it.
“You meant it, huh? You really aren’t going to ask anything else.”
They get in the elevator. He stands to one side, pushing floor numbers for the people who enter. It’s a slow day — only one man in a gray overcoat, one man in a brown jacket, a teen-age girl with a yellow ski-jacket and hiking boots, and a fat oriental nurse.
Their mother’s room is the first to the left when they get off the elevator. She shares it with another woman, who is white-haired and fat, a little older than their mother. Both women are asleep. Charles and Susan look at each other, then back out the door.
“I’ll talk to a nurse,” Charles whispers. Susan follows him. At the nurses’ station, Charles asks how his mother is. The nurse says that a doctor will talk to him about what she calls “her condition.” He asks to see the doctor. The doctor isn’t in yet. When will he be in? The nurse thinks two o’clock. She calls it “P.M.” She has square, shiny fingernails and a perfectly round, auburn bun. She looks down at sheets of paper. All Charles can see is her neck. She has a long neck, fairly thin, skin quite pale. He asks if the doctor will call him. He will. He leaves his number. They do not go back to the room.
“If we stick around, Pete will show up. She looked okay. As long as she’s not hooked up to anything she’s okay.”
Susan walks beside him silently. They push the “down” button for the elevator and wait a long time. A woman in a wheelchair rides past. She has on a flowered bathrobe and pink slippers with embroidered flowers on them. A flowered scarf holds her hair back.
“Let’s do something today,” Charles says.
“What do you want to do? What about Elise?”
“Elise. Hell. I forgot Elise.”
“Couldn’t she come?”
“Sure. Sure she could come. I just forgot about her.”
“You don’t like her, do you?”
“Not much. Do you?”
“She lives on my floor. She came here because her mother’s an alcoholic.”
“Your mother’s an alcoholic.”
He opens the car door for Susan. He unlocks his own door, sits down, and laughs.
“I can’t think of anything nice to do today,” he says.
Susan rubs the moisture off the side window with her hand, looks out at the slush.
“In answer to your question,” she says, “I don’t like her very much. One of the guys I used to go with lived with her when they were freshmen.”
“So what’s she doing here?”
“She asked if she could come.”
“Maybe we’ll like Elise better if we can think of something to do with her.”
“Do you think Mom would ever really kill herself?” Susan asks.
“I don’t think so. She always says that.”
“She looked like Esther Williams when she was younger,” Susan says. “She’s been old for so long.”
“She’ll get a lot older. She won’t kill herself.”
“We should have awakened her.”
“We can go back tonight.”
“Maybe we should have called Pete in Chicago.”
“What should we have done? Called every hotel in Chicago? I should say every whorehouse.”
“I don’t think he does that.”
“I don’t care if he does it or not. I don’t know why I said it.”
Charles turns on the radio. Janis Joplin is singing the “la-de-dah, la-de-dah-dah” section of “Bobby McGee.” Janis Joplin is dead. Susan is nothing like Janis Joplin. Susan speaks in precise, clipped rhythms, combs her hair into two carefully brushed sections (part down the middle), does what is expected — or what is unexpected behind people’s backs. Susan does not drink Southern Comfort.
“Did you like Janis Joplin?” Charles asks.
“She was okay.”
“She was great,” Charles says. “All that flapping fringe and that wild hair and those big lips …”
“I guess men find her more attractive than women do,” Susan says.
“That was so great — how she left all that money for a party in her honor when she died.”
“I hope she doesn’t kill herself,” Susan says. “We should have awakened her.”
Charles makes a left turn, pulls up in front of a car that is coming out of a parking place.
“I’m taking you to a Mexican restaurant,” Charles says. “It’s a great place.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
“Come on,” he says. The song is over. Janis Joplin is dead. Jim Morrison’s widow is dead.
The restaurant has round wooden tables and place mats with the sun on them. There is a blue glass vase with dried grasses in it. A hippie in a white T-shirt and jeans gives them menus.
“The chiles rellenos are great,” Charles says. “And black beans.”
“Fine,” she says.
“Try to act enthusiastic. She’s not going to kill herself. This is your vacation.”
“This is your vacation,” she says.