Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [74]
Mr. Crozier sat propped up on his pillows and looked for all the world as if he was happy. Happy just to close his eyes and let her talk, then open his eyes and find her there, like a chocolate bunny on Easter morning. And then with his eyes open follow every twitch of her candy lips and sway of her sumptuous bottom.
Old Mrs. Crozier would rock slightly back and forth in her curious state of satisfaction.
The time Roxanne spent upstairs was as long as she spent downstairs, giving the massage. I wondered if she was being paid. If she wasn’t, how could she afford to take the time? And who could be paying her but Old Mrs. Crozier?
Why?
To keep her stepson happy and comfortable? I doubted it.
To keep herself entertained in a curious way?
One afternoon when Roxanne had left his room, Mr. Crozier said he felt thirstier than usual. I went downstairs to get him some water from the pitcher that was always in the refrigerator. Roxanne was packing up to go home.
“I never meant to stay so late,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to run into that schoolteacher.”
I didn’t understand for a moment.
“You know. Syl-vi-a. She’s not crazy about me either, is she? She ever mention me when she drives you home?”
I said that Sylvia had never mentioned Roxanne’s name to me, during any of our drives. But why should she?
“Dorothy says she doesn’t know how to handle him. She says I make him a lot happier than what she does. Dorothy says that. I wouldn’t be surprised she even told her that to her face.”
I thought of how Sylvia ran upstairs into her husband’s room every afternoon when she got home, before she even spoke to me or her mother-in-law, her face flushed with eagerness and desperation. I wanted to say something about that—I wanted somehow to defend her, but I didn’t know how. And people as confident as Roxanne often seemed to get the better of me, even if it was only by not listening.
“You sure she never says anything about me?”
I said again that no, she didn’t. “She’s tired when she gets home.”
“Yeah. Everybody’s tired. Some just learn to act like they aren’t.”
I did say something then, to balk her. “I quite like her.”
“You qwat like her?” mocked Roxanne.
Playfully, sharply, she jerked at a strand of the bangs I had recently cut for myself.
“You ought to do something decent with your hair.”
Dorothy says.
If Roxanne wanted admiration, which was her nature, what was it Dorothy wanted? I had a feeling there was mischief stirring, but I could not pin it down. Maybe it was just a desire to have Roxanne in the house, her liveliness in the house, double time.
Midsummer passed. Water was low in the wells. The sprinkler truck stopped coming and some stores had put up sheets of what looked like yellow cellophane in their windows to keep their goods from fading. Leaves were spotty, grass dry.
Old Mrs. Crozier kept her garden man hoeing, day after day. That’s what you do in the dry weather, hoe and hoe to bring up any moisture that you can find in the ground underneath.
Summer school at the college would end after the second week of August, and then Sylvia Crozier would be home every day.
Mr. Crozier was still glad to see Roxanne, but he often fell asleep. He could fall asleep without letting his head fall back, during one of her jokes or anecdotes. Then after a moment he would be awake, he would ask where he was.
“Right here, you sleepy noodle. You’re supposed to be paying attention to me. I should bat you one. Or how ’bout I try tickling you instead?”
Anybody could see how he was failing. There were hollows in his cheeks like an old man’s and the light shone through the tops of his ears as if they were not flesh but plastic. (Though we didn’t say “plastic” then; we said