Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [267]
Ada had already hoisted the beer cooler up onto her stomach. Her arms squeezed the top so that it popped off. She put it back on. Her fingers slipped and scrabbled on the Styrofoam, the last joints turned at excruciating angles. Her ankles sagged inward on her overweighted arches, her slippers with holes in them to ease the swollen big toe joints shuffled like crippled animals across the floor. None of this was lost on Ellen Ward.
Grunting, Ada got over the sill and inside. That left Al Sutton alone with the two of us, and he couldn’t wait to be gone, though I begged him to stay and have another beer and help generate a Giant rally.
“Fat chanth,” Al said. He was painfully embarrassed, laughed uneasily, shrugged, pulled out his quadruple focals from his shirt pocket and put them on and looked at the television through them, flinched back, said “Jethuth!”, yanked the glasses off, laughed guiltily, put them in his pocket, took them out and put them on again, looked at me and then at Ellen through them, gave another hollow laugh like a groan. He pulled the glasses down on his nose, and the eyes which had been rolling and changing back of the lenses like the eyes of nigger baby dolls you used to throw baseballs at in county fairs looked at us with anguished kindness and apologetic goodwill. He stepped back into a chair. “Woopth, pardon,” he said, and set it back where it had been before he bumped it. The wart appeared between his lips and was sucked back into a sweet imbecilic smile. “Boy, I better get out of here before I butht thomething,” he said. “Nithe to meet you, Mitheth Ward. Lyman, you take care, now.” He managed to get hold of the screendoor handle, let it slip, banged the door, yanked it open, walked into its edge, got by it, and clowning his own clumsiness, the back of his neck red, pulled his head between his shoulders, tightened his neck muscles and widened his mouth, picked up his feet very high and tiptoed away laughing hollowly, leaving me with the ballgame and my ex-wife.
The withered, whittled, hopelessly alive stump twitched and jerked under my down-pressing hands. Out on the lawn the sprinkler called attention to itself like a conspirator in a melodrama, pst! pst! pst!
Now! my fear and anger said to me, and I turned my chair to face her head on. She was not ready to meet me; she frowned down on her hands and handbag as if on the verge of some decision. I cried at her silently, You dare to come here and sit on my porch and drive away my friends! You dare to sit there as if you were welcome, or had a right? Do you remember at all what you did to me? Have you no shame? What do you want here? What have I got left that you’d like to take away from me?
She said to her pale hands, “This business of staying through the winter, of course you can’t be serious.”
“Oh yes I can,” I said, and up came her eyes, one swift open look, dark blue, familiar, shocking. I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well–known better than one knows the look of one’s own eyes, actually–and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure. Right then it was as if a woman whom I despised and feared had opened her dress and revealed herself and smiled, asking something that made me rage and grit my teeth. One flicking look, no more. I held onto my stump and told myself oh, be careful!
“Who’ll look after you?” said Ellen Ward in the reasonable tone she had used to use on adolescent Rodman when he wanted a motorcycle or demanded to go hitch hiking with a mixed crowd of high school students and spend Easter weekend on the beach at Carpinteria or La Jolla. “It’s just not sensible. The young one’s going–and you’re well rid of her, if you ask me–and the old one’s so crippled up she can’t even hold a cigarette. She’ll drop you and break your hip or something. You can’t stand anything else wrong with you, darling.”
“I can stand anything I have to stand!”
Her eyes came up again, she eyed me speculatively where I sat trapped in my chair. I was pressing down hard with my hands, but the newspaper in my lap shook and rustled. She smiled, to reassure me; then her eyes left me and went to the television. She half rose.