Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [170]
“Sure, Lewis. How’s the family? How’s Adele? How’s Mike and Susan?” For an awful minute she thought she had the name of the new baby wrong. She had only been to Luis’s home once since the baby was born. Maybe it wasn’t Susan at all?
“Mike’s fine, he’s talking all the time now, give me this, give me that! He’s his mother’s kid, all right. Susan’s teething, so she squawks all the time, but she’s pretty as a picture. She’s a real blond, yellow hair straight as a ruler. She’s going to be a winner, this one.”
“That’s good, Lewis, that’s wonderful. I wish I could see Susan. I wish I could see you. How’s Adele?”
“She’s fine. She got a new foxtail coat. Good-looking. She wanted mink but she’s going to want that for a long time, if business doesn’t pick up. It’s a bad time for the nursery business, all over. People aren’t spending money the way they did two, three years ago, construction is way down. Except for fruit trees. Lot of people are putting fruit trees in their yards in the suburbs. We’ve tripled our business in fruit trees. But that’s like a one-time thing. People don’t buy a new apple tree every year.”
“Dolly came in to see me, she said maybe you might come?”
“Sure, Connie. Just it’s hard to get the time. Weekends are the only time and the traffic is miserable.”
“Maybe I could come to you, then … Lewis.” She almost slipped and said Luis in her excitement. “Maybe for Thanksgiving I could visit you? I wouldn’t be any work. I could help Adele. I’d love to see the babies.”
“Yeah?” He didn’t add anything, till the operator interrupted. She stuck in more coins. She had saved a good supply.
“At least maybe for a day, Lewis, for Thanksgiving, just overnight? It’s so lonely in the hospital at holiday time. A real family holiday. Everybody goes home. The doctor says I’m much better. You could talk to him, Dr. Redding. Please, Lewis?”
“We’ll see. You’d have to go back Saturday morning because Saturday night we’re giving a party. But you could help around some. We’ll have enough food to feed an army, we always do … .”
“I could help Adele cook and clean. You know I can cook real well, Lewis, remember? I can help you get ready for the party. It’s a lot of work for Adele.”
“Oh, she has a woman in once a week.”
“But for the holidays, it’s a lot of work. I can help and I wouldn’t mind going back Saturday. I wouldn’t mind at all. That would just be so lovely, to come and see you all Thanksgiving.”
“Well, we might do that. I’ll talk to the doctor.”
“Dr. Redding, Dr. Redding, please?” She was trotting alongside to get his attention. “I talked to my brother, and him and his wife, they’d take me for Thanksgiving. I could have Thanksgiving dinner with them? It would be so nice. You said I’m better.”
“Does your brother want you there?”
“He said yes. He said he did. He said I could help his wife.” She trotted alongside. “He said he’ll call you about it.”
“He hasn’t. We’ll see.” He dismissed her with a brusque nod. “Morgan, has Moynihan taken a reading on her this week? I want to keep her monitored.”
As Dr. Morgan took her off to Miss Moynihan’s EEG machine, he commented on the cologne. “Is that for me?” he said, laughing at her as if she were an idiot. “How nice!” He made fun of her all the time because he wasn’t afraid of her; she was too small to scare him the way Sybil did and Alice had.
For the EEG testing, she was taken off ward and up two floors. Always in the elevator her heart beat quickly and she imagined the opportunity of going down instead of going up, and out into the streets, whose gutters were full of the torrents of cold November rain. Miss Moynihan had made her leave her wig and purse behind, but she could still bolt if given a moment, a door.
Miss Moynihan was going to use the second room, with the ten-track machine on her today. Connie was so used to the routine by now she sat docile as at a beauty parlor while Miss Moynihan combed apart what little hair she had and marked her targets, used the jelly and