Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [8]
“Look,” Gregory said, “they’re so small.”
“Is there someone inside the house?” Magda asked, and began to cry. “I hope there isn’t anyone inside. What if there’s someone inside the house?”
“It’s not a fire!” Burrage shouted, unable to stop himself. “They’re just cooking lunch! You’d see flames if it was a fire!”
While they stared, the boat rocked gently underneath them. A fish jumped behind them and slapped the water. The breeze brought them a scent of smoke. Burrage turned around and glanced at the opposite side of the lake, where the boy in the rowboat concession was sitting with his feet up in the booth. Gregory reached out for Burrage’s hand. “You didn’t know about this yesterday,” Gregory said. “It wasn’t in the horoscope. Daddy, Magda’s crying.”
“I know,” Burrage said. “She’ll be all right.”
“I want to know if someone’s in the house,” Magda said. Mrs. Schultz was murmuring and muttering. “I want to know,” Magda repeated.
Suddenly Mrs. Schultz stared at Burrage. “You said there wouldn’t be any episodes,” she said, pointing her finger at him. “God damn it, you said nothing would happen to us! And look at what’s happening!” She was shouting. “Look at all the smoke and the fire!” Her finger, still pointing, pointed now at Burrage, Magda, and Gregory.
“Mrs. Schultz,” Burrage begged, “please don’t swear. There are children here.”
“It’s a fire,” she repeated. And then she turned around in the boat, bent down, and cupped her hands in the water. Raising her arms, she doused her head. The water streamed into her gray hair and washed the handkerchief off, so that it dropped onto the gunwales of the rowboat. Again she reached down into the lake and again she scooped a small quantity of water over her head. As the children and Burrage watched, handful by handful the old woman soaked her hair, her skin, and her clothes, as if she were making a formal gesture toward the accidents of life, which in their monotonous regularity had brought her to her present condition.
Horace and Margaret’s Fifty-second
A FEW MONTHS AFTER she had put her husband, all memory gone, into the home, she herself woke one morning with an unfamiliar sun shining through a window she hadn’t remembered was there. A new window! Pranksters were playing a shabby joke on her. She rose heavily from the bed, a groan bursting by accident out of her throat, and shuffled to the new window they had installed during the night. Through the dusty glass she saw the apartment’s ragged backyard of cement and weeds. A puddle had formed in the alley, and a brown bird was flapping in it, making muddy waves as it bathed. Then she looked more closely and saw that the bird was lying on its side.
“I remember this view,” she said to herself. “It’s not a new window. I just forgot to pull down the shade.” She did so now, blocking the sun, which seemed to her more grayish-blue than it had for years. She coughed rhythmically with every other step to the bathroom.
It was Tuesday, and their anniversary. He would forget, as usual. Now, in his vacancy, he had stopped using shaving cream and razor blades. He tore photographs out of their expensive frames, folded them into baskets, and used them as ashtrays. He took cigarette lighters to pieces to see how they worked and left their tiny wet parts scattered all over his nightstand. He refused to read, claiming that what she brought him was dull trash, but she had suspected for a long time that he had forgotten both the meaning of the words and how to read them from left to right across the page. She didn’t want to buy him cigarettes (in his dotage, he had secretly and then quite openly taken up smoking again). He lost clothes or put them on backward or declared universal birthdays so he could give everything he owned to strangers. The previous Wednesday, she had asked him what he would want for their upcoming anniversary, their fifty-second. “Lightbulbs,” he said, giving her an unpleasantly sly look.
She glanced at his lamp and saw that the shade was pleated oddly. “They give you plenty