Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [9]
He shook his head for thirty seconds before he replied. “Wrong bulbs,” he said. “It’s the special ones I need, with the flames.”
“Lightbulbs don’t have flames,” she said. “It’s filaments now.”
“Don’t argue with me. I know what I want. Lightbulbs.”
She was at the breakfast table reading the paper when she remembered that she had dropped an egg into the frypan, where, even at this moment, it must still be frying: hard, angry, and dry. She forgave herself, because she had been thinking about how to get to the First Christian Residence before lunch, and which purple bus she should take. She walked to the little four-burner stove with its cracked oven window, closed her eyes against the smoke, picked up the frypan using a worn potholder with a picture of a cow on it, and dropped her last egg into the wastebasket’s brown paper bag. Now she had nothing to eat but toast. She was trying to remember what she had done with the bread when she heard the phone ring and she saw from the kitchen clock that it was ten thirty, two hours later than she had thought.
She picked the receiver angrily off the wall. “Yes,” she said. She no longer said “Hello”; she was tired of that.
“Hello?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes, who is it?”
“It’s me,” the voice said. “Happy anniversary.”
Very familiar, this woman’s voice. “Thank you,” Margaret said. “It’s our fifty-second.”
“I know,” the voice told her. “I just wish I could be there.”
“So do I,” Margaret said, a thin electrical charge of panic spreading over her. “I wish you could be here to keep me company. How are you?”
“Just fine. Jerry’s out of town, but of course David’s with me, and last night we roasted marshmallows and made a big bowl of popcorn.”
David. Oh, yes: her grandchild. This must be David’s mother. “Penny,” she said.
“What?”
“I just wanted to say your name.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Margaret said carelessly. “Because I just thought of it.”
“Mother, are you all right?”
“Just fine, dear. I’m going to take the bus to see your father in half an hour’s time. I’m going to wish him a happy anniversary. I doubt he’ll notice. He won’t remember it’s our anniversary, I don’t think. Maybe he won’t remember me. You can never tell.” She laughed. “As he says, the moving men just come and take it all away. You can’t tell about anything. For example, I thought they put a new window in my room last night, but I’d only forgotten to pull down the window shade.” She noticed a list on the refrigerator, a list of things she must do today. It was getting late. “Good-bye, Penny,” she said, before hanging up. She took the list off the refrigerator and put it in her pocket. Then she stood in the middle of the room, her mind whirling and utterly blank, while she stared at the faucet on the right-hand side of the sink and, above it, attached to the cabinet, a faded color photograph of a brown-haired girl, looking away from the camera toward a tree. It was probably Penny, when young.
Once Margaret was on the bus, she was sure that everything would be fine. The sun was out, and several children were playing their peculiar games on the sidewalk, smacking each other and rolling over to play dead. Why weren’t they in school? She knew better than to ask children to explain their reasons for being in any one spot. If you asked such questions, they always had that look ready.
The bus was practically empty. All the passengers, thank God, seemed to be respectable taxpayers: a gentleman with several strands of attractive gray hair sat two rows in front of her, comforting her with his presence. The sun, now yellow, was shining fiercely on Margaret’s side of the bus, its ferocity tempered by tinted glass.
Margaret felt the sun on her face and said, “Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.” This, her one and only phrase to express joy, she had picked up from a newspaper article that had tried to make fun of Gertrude Stein. The article had quoted one of her poems, and Margaret had remembered its first line ever since. “Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea,” she said again, gazing