Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [74]
“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,