Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [277]
“Don’t let all those Grass Valley things weigh on you,” I said. “They’re not important. All that is after.”
“After what?”
“After everything’s happened,” I said crossly. “After I’ve lost interest.”
“Didn’t they put up a lot of refugees from the San Francisco fire and earthquake up here? I’ve just glanced through them, I thought I saw something about that.”
“Yes,” I said. “Who cares? Sit down. Watch the ballgame.”
But she ignored my desperation, that insolent wench. She looked at me with her head on one side and said that if I didn’t need her to work she guessed she’d go wash her hair. Brown-legged in her shorts, filling her cotton jersey, she smiled at Ellen, murmured a good-bye, and left.
Ada had already hoisted the beer cooler up onto her stomach. Her arms squeezed the top so that it popped off. She put it back on. Her fingers slipped and scrabbled on the Styrofoam, the last joints turned at excruciating angles. Her ankles sagged inward on her overweighted arches, her slippers with holes in them to ease the swollen big toe joints shuffled like crippled animals across the floor. None of this was lost on Ellen Ward.
Grunting, Ada got over the sill and inside. That left Al Sutton alone with the two of us, and he couldn’t wait to be gone, though I begged him to stay and have another beer and help generate a Giant rally.
“Fat chanth,” Al said. He was painfully embarrassed, laughed uneasily, shrugged, pulled out his quadruple focals from his shirt pocket and put them on and looked at the television through them, flinched back, said “Jethuth!”, yanked the glasses off, laughed guiltily, put them in his pocket, took them out and put them on again, looked at me and then at Ellen through them, gave another hollow laugh like a groan. He pulled the glasses down on his nose, and the eyes which had been rolling and changing back of the lenses like the eyes of nigger baby dolls you used to throw baseballs at in county fairs looked at us with anguished kindness and apologetic goodwill. He stepped back into a chair. “Woopth, pardon,” he said, and set it back where it had been before he bumped it. The wart appeared between his lips and was sucked back into a sweet imbecilic smile. “Boy, I better get out of here before I butht thomething,” he said. “Nithe to meet you, Mitheth Ward. Lyman, you take care, now.” He managed to get hold of the screendoor handle, let it slip, banged the door, yanked it open, walked into its edge, got by it, and clowning his own clumsiness, the back of his neck red, pulled his head between his shoulders, tightened his neck muscles and widened his mouth, picked up his feet very high and tiptoed away laughing hollowly, leaving me with the ballgame and my ex-wife.
The withered, whittled, hopelessly alive stump twitched and jerked under my down-pressing hands. Out on the lawn the sprinkler called attention to itself like a conspirator in a melodrama, pst! pst! pst!
Now! my fear and anger said to me, and I turned my chair to face her head on. She was not ready to meet me; she frowned down on her hands and handbag as if on the verge of some decision. I cried at her silently, You dare to come here and sit on my porch and drive away my friends! You dare to sit there as if you were welcome, or had a right? Do you remember at all what you did to me? Have you no shame? What do you want here? What have I got left that you’d like to take away from me?
She said to her pale hands, “This business of staying through the winter, of course you can’t be serious.”
“Oh yes I can,” I said, and up came her eyes, one swift open look, dark blue, familiar, shocking. I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well–known better than one knows the look of one’s own eyes, actually–and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness,