The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [67]
This went on until about Thursday. On Thursday, everyone in the family woke up at a quarter to nine from a sleep that could have been drug- or enchantment-induced. There was no possible consideration of anything except clothing, breakfast, and the fact that the girls were already late for school. Even Lizzie was so somnolent that she gave no thought to the embarrassment of walking into the classroom late. She lifted her arms to receive her sleeves and opened her mouth to receive her Cheerios, and Stephanie wandered around the bathroom as if she didn’t know what she was doing there, and Leah let Dana dress her without a word of protest. Dana kept making toast. I kept eating it. It was buttery and delicious. She wouldn’t let us hurry. She called the office and said I was busy and would be an hour, and a half late, then she called the school and said that the girls would be there in time for recess. She was sleepy, too, and wandered from bathroom to bedroom half-dressed, looking for articles of clothing that were right under her nose. At ten thirty we took Leah early to day care and went to the office together, where Dana worked on the patients I had stood up. I don’t think I thought of Slater or the Other or the crisis of my marriage until well into the second patient, and then the patient’s malocclusion seemed more immediate, and, even, more interesting. Delilah had brought daffodils from her garden and set them on Dave’s desk, and so the day had a refrain, “Aren’t those lovely flowers!”
When I used to work construction, my boss would tell me about the seventeen-inch rule. The seventeen-inch rule has to do with the construction of staircases. If you add together the width of the tread and the height of the riser, they should come out to seventeen inches. If they do, the step will meet the foot. If they don’t, the foot will stumble. Sometimes, if he had a remodeling job in an old house, I would check out the seventeen-inch rule, and it was always true. The effort of steps that were too steep or too shallow was always perceived by the knees and the tendons, if not by the brain. And so I would say that we had a seventeen-inch day. Patients came on time and opened calmly. Teeth nearly drilled themselves, or jumped out into my hand. Dana and Delilah chattered and murmured in the next office. Laura and Dave teased each other. At lunch, Dana and I found ourselves on the back step of the office, facing the alley, eating peanut-butter sandwiches with raspberry jam and drinking milk. Our shoulders touched. She said, “You know, I think Leah told her first joke today.”
“What was that?”
“Well, she was making claws with her hands, and roaring, the way she does, and I said, ‘What’s the name of your monster?’ and she looked at me and said, ‘Diarrhea.’ And then she grinned.”
We laughed and our shoulders bumped.
“Do you want the last bite of this?” She held out a piece of her sandwich.
I nodded and opened my mouth. She put it in. I chewed it. We got up and went inside. An hour and a half later I was finished for the day and half expected to be met by Slater on the steps of the office, but the coast was clear. I took out my list of errands and purchases and walked toward downtown. Everything was on sale, including a very nice blue-and-green plaid Viyella shirt, 16-35, $16 marked down from $50. I put it on in the store, something I never do. As a rule I let new clothes sit in the closet for weeks before wearing them. I kept walking, looking at yards and houses and daffodils and crocuses, and felt that spurious permanency that comes with the sense of true peace. For dinner I bought boned chicken breasts and frozen pesto sauce. Dana came home and made fresh noodles.
Leah sat between Stephanie and Lizzie on the couch and they played this game: Lizzie would take Leah’s face between her two palms and say, “Say yes, Leah,” and then she would nod Leah’s face up and down. Then Stephanie would take Leah’s face from the other side and say, “Say no, Leah,” and turn her head gently from side to side. None of