"If Roy goes I'm not going," she says.
"Don't be down on Roy," he tells her. "He's a good scout."
"He's not. I was going to shoot the moon. I'd already took the Queen of Spades, and I had the Ace of Hearts and the Jack and some others and then he ruins it all and Mommy thinks that's so cute. He gets all the attention and everything ever since he was born, just because he's a boy!"
He admits, "It's tough. I was in your shoes, except it was reversed. I had a sister instead of a brother."
"Didn't you hate her?" She removes her face from her folded arms and stares up at him with rubbed-looking green eyes.
He answers, "No. I guess, to be honest, I loved her. I loved Mim." The truth of this shocks him: he realizes how few others in his life he has loved so bluntly, without something of scorn, as his little wiry Mim. Her face seemed a narrower, harder version of his, with the same short upper lip, only a brunette, and a girl. Himself transposed into quite another key, and yet the melody recognizable. He remembers the sticky grip of her fingers in his when Mom and Pop would lead them on their Sunday walk, up the mountain to the Pinnacle Hotel and then back along the edge of the quarry; Mim hung on and roused protectiveness in him and perhaps used it up for everybody else, for every other female. Mim as his own blood sister had a certain unforced claim over him no woman since has been able to establish.
"Was she younger than you or older?"
"Younger. Younger even than me than Roy is than you. But she was a girl and girls are less ornery than boys. Though I guess Mim was ornery in her way. Once she got to be sixteen, she put my parents through hell."
"Grandpa, what's `ornery'?"
"Oh, you know. Mean. Contrary. Rebellious."
"Like Daddy?"
"I don't think of your daddy as ornery, just, what's the word? – uptight. People get to him more than they do to most people. He's sensitive." Formulating even this much thickens his tongue and blurs his mind. "Judy, let's have a contest. You lie over there and I'll lie here and we'll see who can fall asleep soonest."
"Who'll be the judge?"
"Your mother," he says, letting his moccasins fall from his feet onto the floor over the edge of the bed. He closes his eyes on the posterlike Florida sunshine and in the intimate red of his brain envisions swooping on a bicycle down Jackson Road and then Potter Avenue with Mim on the handlebars of his rattly old blue Elgin, she maybe six and he twelve, if they hit a rock or pothole she'll go flying with him and the bike on top of her grinding her into the asphalt and ruining her pretty face forever, a woman's face is her fortune, but in her faith in him she sings, he can't remember the song, just the sensation of snatches of words flicked back into his ears as her long black hair whips against his eyes and mouth, making the bicycle ride more dangerous still. He led Mim into danger but always led her out. Shoo-fly pie. That was one of the songs she used to sing around the house, day after day until it drove them all crazy. Shoo-fly pie and apple pan dowdy, makes your eyes light up, your tummy say "howdy!" And then she would do a thing with her eyes that would make the whole rest of the family laugh.
He feels Judy ease her weight from his side and with that exaggerated, creaking stealth of small children move around the foot of the bed and out of the room. The door clicks, female voices whisper. Their whispers merge with a dream, involving an enormous scoop-shaped space, an amphitheater, an audience somehow for whom he is performing, though there is no other person in the dream, just this sense of presence, of echoing august dreadfully serious presence. He wakes frightened, with dribble down from one comer of his mouth. He feels like a drum that has just been struck. The space he was dreaming of he now recognizes as his rib cage, as if he has become his own heart, a huffing puffing pumping man at mid-court, waiting for the whistle and the highreaching jump-off. At some point in his sleep his chest began to ache, a stale sorrowful ache he associates with the pathetically bad way he played golf this afternoon, unable to concentrate, unable to loosen up. He wonders how long he has slept. The poster of sunshine and palm tops and distant pink red-roofed buildings pasted on the outer skin of the sliding windows has dulled in tint, gone shadowy, and the sounds of golf, its purposeful concussions alternating with intent silence and involuntary cries of triumph or disappointment, have subsided. And in the air outside, like the fluttering tinsel above a used-car lot, birds of many makes are calling to each other to wrap up the day. This hour or two before supper, when play – the last round of Horse at the basket out by the garage in the alley – used to be most intense, has become nap time as he slowly sinks toward earth with his wasting muscles and accumulating fat. He must lose some weight.
Only Judy is in the living room. She is flicking silently back and forth between channels. Faces, black in The Jeffersons, white in Family Ties, imploringly pop into visibility and then vanish amid shots of beer cans plunged into slow-motion waterfalls, George Bush lugging a gun through Texas underbrush, a Florida farmer gesturing toward his burnt fields, a Scotland Yard detective doing a little lecture with a diagram of an airplane's hold. "What's he saying?" Harry asks, but even as he asks, the image is gone, replaced by another, of a manatee being implanted with an electronic tracking device by a male pony-tailed manatee-conservation freak. An impatient rage within the child, a gluttony for images, brushes the manatee away. "Two channels back," Harry begs. "About the Pan Am plane."
"It was a bomb, silly," Judy says. "It had to be."
Children, they believe that headlines always happen to other people. "For Chrissake, cool it with the channel-changer. Lemme get a beer and I'll show you a neat card game. Where is everybody?"
"Grandma went to her women's group, Mom put Roy down for his nap."
"Your daddy -?" He thinks midway he shouldn't bring it up, but the words are out.
Judy shrugs and finishes the sentence. "Hasn't checked in yet."
It turns out she already knows how to play Rummy. In fact, she catches him with his hand full of three-of-a-kinds he was waiting to lay down when he had gin. Caught. Their laughter brings Pru out of her bedroom, in little white shorts her widened hips have stretched into horizontal wrinkles. Her face has taken wrinkles from the pillow, and seems a bit blurred and bloated by sleep, or a spell of crying. How suggestible female flesh is. Her feet are long and bare, with that chipped toenail polish. He asks his daughter-in-law, "What's up?"
She too shrugs. "I guess we'll go to dinner when Janice comes back. I'll feed Roy some applesauce to hold him."
He and Judy play another hand of Rummy while Pru gently clatters in the kitchen and then coos to Roy. Evening down here comes without much ceremony; suddenly the air beyond the balcony is gray as if with fine fog, and sea-scent drifts in through the sliding doors, and the sounds of birds and golf have gone away. This is peace. He resents it when Janice comes back, with that aggressive glow her women's group gives her. "Oh Harry, you men have been so awful! Not only were we considered chattel, but all those patriarchal religions tried to make us feel guilty about menstruating. They said we were unclean."
"Sorry," he says. "That was a crummy thing to do."
"That was Eve's basic sin, the lady professor told us," Janice goes on, half to Pru. "Something about apples being the color of blood, I couldn't quite follow it."
Harry interrupts, "By any chance are either of you two Eves like me, sort of starving?"
"We bought you lots of healthy snacks," Pru says. "Apricots dried without sulphur, unsalted banana chips."
"Is that what that stuff was in little plastic bags? I thought it might be for Chinese food and I shouldn't touch it."
"Yes," Janice decides, "let's just go to dinner. We'll leave a note for Nelson. Pru, any old dress. Evenings, they won't seat shorts and men without jackets."