The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [92]
“Yes, you better push him home now. He better go home and cool off and repent of his bad manners. He better.”
Jack made a taunting sound, which seemed to point out that Mrs. Cross was just telling Charlotte to do what Charlotte was going to do anyway; Mrs. Cross was just pretending to have control of things. Charlotte had hold of the wheelchair and was pushing it towards the door, her smiling lips pressed together in concentration as she avoided the bookshelves and the butterfly case leaning against the wall. Perhaps it was hard for her to steer, perhaps the ordinary reflexes and balances of her body were not there for her to rely on. But she looked pleased; she raised her hand to them and released her smile, and set off down the corridor. She was just like one of those old-fashioned dolls, not the kind Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd used to have but the kind their mothers had, with the long, limp bodies and pink-and-white faces and crimped china hair and ladylike smiles. Jack kept his face turned away; the bit of it Mrs. Cross could see was flushed red.
“It would be easy for any man to get the better of Charlotte,” said Mrs. Kidd when they were gone.
“I don’t think he’s so much of a danger,” said Mrs. Cross. She spoke in a dry tone but her voice was shaking.
Mrs. Kidd looked at the Scrabble board and the letters scattered all over the floor.
“We can’t do much about picking them up,” she said. “If either one of us bends over we black out.” That was true.
“Useless old crocks, aren’t we?” said Mrs. Cross. Her voice was under better control now.
“We won’t try. When the girl comes in with the juice I’ll ask her to do it. We don’t need to say how it happened. That’s what we’ll do. We won’t bend over and end up smashing our noses.”
Mrs. Cross felt her heart give a big flop. Her heart was like an old crippled crow, flopping around in her chest. She crossed her hands there, to hold it.
“Well, I never told you, I don’t think I did,” said Mrs. Kidd, with her eyes on Mrs. Cross’s face. “I never told you what happened that time I got out of bed too fast in my apartment, and I fell over on my face. I blacked out. Fortunately the woman was home, in the apartment underneath me, and she heard the crash and got the whatyamacallit, the man with the keys, the superintendent. They came and found me out cold and took me in the ambulance. I don’t remember a thing about it. I can’t remember anything that happened throughout the next three weeks. I wasn’t unconscious. I wish I had been. I was conscious and saying a lot of foolish things.
Do you know the first thing I remember? The psychiatrist coming to see me! They had got a psychiatrist in to determine whether I was loony. But nobody told me he was a psychiatrist. That’s part of it, they don’t tell you. He had a thing like an army jacket on. He was quite young. So I thought he was just some fellow who had walked in off the street.
“‘What is the name of the Prime Minister?’ he said to me.
“Well! I thought he was loony. So I said, ‘Who cares?’ And I turned my back on him as if I was going to sleep, and from that time on I remember everything.”
“Who cares!”
As a matter of fact, Mrs. Cross had heard Mrs. Kidd tell this story before, but it was a long time ago and she laughed now not just to be obliging; she laughed with relief. Mrs. Kidd’s firm voice had spread a numbing ointment over her misery.
Out of their combined laughter, Mrs. Kidd shot a quick serious question.
“Are you all right?”
Mrs. Cross lifted her hands from her chest, waited. “I think so. Yes. But I think I’ll go and lie down.”
In this exchange it was understood that Mrs. Kidd also said, “Your heart is weak, you shouldn’t put it at the mercy of these emotions,” and Mrs. Cross replied, “I will do as I do, though there may be something in what you say.”
“You haven’t got your chair,” Mrs. Kidd said. Mrs. Cross was sitting on an ordinary chair. She had come here walking slowly behind Jack’s chair, to help him steer.
“I can walk,” she said. “I can walk if I take my time.”
“No. You ride. You get in my chair and I’ll