These people weren’t much in the way of drinkers. They appeared to view alcohol as yet another inscrutable American convention, and they would dangle their own beers politely, forgetting them for long minutes; so Doug never had more than one. Then he’d say, “Well, back to the fray,” and they would rise to see him off, thanking him once again for whatever he’d done.
At home, by comparison, everything seemed so permanent — the rooms layered over with rugs and upholstered furniture and framed pictures. The grandchildren added layers of their own; the hall was awash in cast-off jackets and schoolbooks. Bee would be in the kitchen starting supper. (How unadorned the Bedloes’ suppers smelled! Plain meat, boiled vegetables, baked potatoes.) And if Ian was back from work he’d be occupied with the kids — sorting out whose night it was to set the table, arbitrating their disputes or even taking part in them as if he were a kid himself. Listen to him with Daphne, for instance. She was nagging him to find her green sweater; tomorrow was St. Patrick’s Day. “Your green sweater’s in the wash,” he said, and that should have been the end of it — would have been, if Bee had been in charge. But Daphne pressed on, wheedling. “Please? Please, Ian? They’ll make fun of me if I don’t wear something green.”
“Tell them your eyes are the something green.”
“My what? My eyes? But they’re blue.”
“Well, if anybody points that out, put on this injured look and say, ‘Oh. I’ve always liked to think of them as green.’ ”
“Oh, Ian,” Daphne said. “You’re such a silly.”
He was, Doug reflected. And a sucker besides. For sure enough, later that night he heard the washing machine start churning.
Most days Ian took the car, but Tuesdays he caught the bus to work so Doug could drive Bee to the doctor. She had to go every single week. Doug knew that doctor’s waiting room so well by now that he could see it in his dreams. A leggy, wan philodendron plant hung over the vinyl couch. A table was piled with magazines you would have to be desperate to read — densely printed journals devoted to infinitesimal research findings.
Two other doctors shared the office: a dermatologist and an ophthalmologist. One morning Doug saw the ophthalmologist talking with a very attractive young woman at the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist must have proposed some time or date, because the young woman shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t make it then.”
“Can’t make it?” the doctor asked. “This is surgery, not a hair appointment. We’re talking about your eyesight!”
“I’m busy that day,” the young woman said.
“Miss Wilson, maybe you don’t understand. This is the kind of problem you take care of now, you take care of yesterday. Not next week or next month. I can’t state that too strongly.”
“Yes, but I happen to be occupied that day,” the young woman said.
Then Bee came out of Dr. Plumm’s office, and Doug didn’t get to hear the end of the conversation. He kept thinking about it, though. What could make a person defer such crucial surgery? She was meeting a lover? But she could always meet him another day. She’d be fired from her job? But no employer was that hardhearted. Nothing Doug came up with was sufficient explanation.
Imagine being so offhand about your eyesight. About your life, was what it amounted to. As if you wouldn’t have to endure the consequences forever and ever after.
Wednesday their daughter dropped by to help with the heavier cleaning. She breezed in around lunchtime with a casserole for supper and a pair of stretchy gloves she’d heard would magically ease arthritic fingers. “Ordinary department-store gloves, I saw this last night on the evening news,” she told Bee. “You’re lucky I got them when I did; I went to Hochschild’s. Don’t you know there’ll be a big rush for them.”
“Yes, dear, that was very nice of you,” Bee said dutifully. She already owned gloves, medically prescribed, much more official than these were. Still, she put these on and spread her hands out as flat as possible, testing. She was wearing one of Ian’s sweatshirts and baggy slacks and slipper-socks. In the gloves, which were the dainty, white, lady’s-tea kind, she looked a little bit crazy.
Claudia filled a bucket in the kitchen sink and added a shot of ammonia. “Going to tackle that chandelier,” she told them. “I noticed it last week. A disgrace!”
Probably it was Ian’s housekeeping she was so indignant with — or just time itself, time that had coated each prism with dust. She wasn’t thinking how it sounded to waltz into a person’s home and announce that it was filthy. Doug cast a sideways glance at Bee to see how she was taking it. Her eyes were teary, but that could have been the ammonia. He waited till Claudia had left the kitchen, sloshing her bucket into the dining room, and then he laid a hand on top of Bee’s. “Peculiar, isn’t it?” he said. “First you’re scolding your children and then all at once they’re so smart they’re scolding you.”
Bee smiled, and he saw that they weren’t real tears after all. “I suppose,” he went on more lightly, “there was some stage when we were equals. I mean while she was on the rise and we were on the downslide. A stage when we were level with each other.”
“Well, I must have been on the phone at the time,” Bee said, and then she laughed.
Her hand in the glove felt dead to him, like his own hand after he’d slept on it wrong and cut off the circulation.
The foreigners set their car on fire, trying to install a radio. “I didn’t know radios were flammable,” Mrs. Jordan said, watching from the Bedloes’ front porch. Doug was a bit surprised himself, but then electronics had never been his strong point. He went over to see if he could help. The car was a Dodge from the late fifties or maybe early sixties, whenever it was that giant fins were all the rage. Once the body had been powder blue but now it was mostly a deep, matte red from rust, and one door was white and one fender turquoise. Whom it belonged to was unclear, since the foreigner who had bought it, second- or third-hand, had long since gone back to his homeland.
John Two and Fred and Ollie were standing around the car in graceful poses, languidly fanning their faces. The smoke appeared to be coming from the dashboard. Doug said, “Fellows? Think we should call the fire department?” but Fred said, “Oh, we dislike to keep disturbing them.”
Hoping nothing would explode, Doug reached through the open window on the driver’s side and pulled the first wire his fingers touched. Almost immediately the smoke thinned. There was a strong smell of burning rubber, but no real damage — at least none that he could see. It was hard to tell; the front seat was worn to bare springs and the backseat had been removed altogether.
“Maybe we just won’t have radio,” John Two told Ollie.
“We never had radio before,” Fred said.
“We were very contented,” John Two said, “and while we traveled we could hear the birds sing.”
Doug pictured them traveling through a flat green countryside like the landscape in a child’s primer. They would be the kind who set off without filling the gas tank first or checking the tire pressure, he was certain. Chances were they wouldn’t even have a road map.