The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [22]
After this the house was quiet again and then she heard someone climbing the stairs and the pleasant noise of dishes on a tray. She put out her cigarette. “Good morning,” Mrs. Wapshot said. “Good morning, Rosalie. I’m going to call you Rosalie. We don’t stand on ceremony here.”
“Good morning.”
“The first thing I want you to do is to let me telephone your parents. They’ll be worried. But what am I talking about? That’s not the first thing I want you to do. The first thing I want you to do is to eat a nice breakfast. Let me fix your pillows.”
“Oh, I’m awfully afraid that I can’t eat anything,” the girl said. “It’s awfully nice of you but I just couldn’t.”
“Well, you don’t have to eat everything on the tray,” Mrs. Wapshot said kindly, “but you’ve got to eat something. Why don’t you try and eat the eggs? That’s all you have to eat; but you must eat the eggs.”
Then the girl began to cry. She laid her head sidewise on the pillow and stared into the corner of the room where she seemed to see a range of high mountains her look was so faraway and heartbreaking. The tears rolled down her cheeks. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Wapshot said. “I’m very sorry. I suppose you were engaged to him. I suppose …”
“It isn’t that,” the girl sobbed. “It’s just about the eggs. I can’t bear eggs. When I lived at home they made me eat eggs for breakfast and if I didn’t eat my eggs for breakfast well then I had to eat them for dinner. I mean everything I was supposed to eat and couldn’t eat was always juss piled up on my dinner plate and the eggs were disgusting.”
“Well, is there anything you would like for breakfast?” Mrs. Wapshot asked.
“I’d love some peanut butter. If I could have a peanut-butter sandwich and a glass of milk …”
“Well, I think that can be arranged,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and carrying the tray and smiling she went out of the room and down the stairs.
She felt no resentment at this miscarriage of her preparations and was happy to have the girl in her house, as if she was, at bottom, a lonely woman, grateful for any company. She had wanted a daughter, longed for one; a little girl sitting at her knees, learning to sew or making sugar cookies in the kitchen on a snowy night. While she made Rosalie’s sandwich it seemed to her that she possessed a vision of life that she would enjoy introducing to the stranger. They could pick blueberries together, take long walks beside the river and sit together in the pew on Sunday. When she took the sandwich upstairs again Rosalie said that she wanted to get up. Mrs. Wapshot protested but Rosalie’s pleading made sense. “I’d just feel so much better if I could get up and walk around and sit in the sun; just feel the sun.”
Rosalie dressed after breakfast and joined Mrs. Wapshot in the garden where the old deck chairs were. “The sun feels so good,” she said, pushing up the sleeves of her dress and shaking back her hair.
“Now you must let me call your parents,” Sarah said.
“I just don’t want to call them today,” the girl said. “Maybe tomorrow. You see, it always bothers them when I’m in trouble. I just don’t like to bother them when I’m in trouble. And they’ll want me to come home and everything. You see Daddy’s a priest—rector really, I mean communion seven days a week and all that.”
“We’re low church here,” Mrs. Wapshot said, “but some people I could name would like to see a change.”
“And he’s absolutely the most nervous man I ever knew,” Rosalie said. “Daddy is. He’s always scratching his stomach. It’s a nervous ailment. Most men’s shirts wear out at the collar, I guess, but Daddy’s shirts wear out where he scratches himself.”
“Oh, I think you ought to telephone them,” Mrs. Wapshot said.
“It’s just