“Congrats, Rita,” Scott tells her. “You look sort of like you some more.”
Rita ladles out mashed potatoes and pours gravy.
“I didn’t like that other stuff,” Scott says. “The lost Goth look. ‘
Shifting of face is the name of him who’
et cetera—remember those lines, Reet?”
Rita eats a forkful of food and stares at Scott, eyes narrowed.
“And, chicklet, I bet you never looked in a mirror once. Not to mention the invective. Hey, Rita . . .”
Egon intervenes. “Scott. Please. Bygones, and . . . well, please. This is
Rita
back.”
Rita has been eating potatoes stolidly, her head straight forward. The platter of chicken sits in the middle of the table, untouched.
“Rita is back?” says Scott. “How do you tell? Rita, the bleater, are you back, my darling?”
Bunny puts her fork down with emphasis. “Listen, mister. Cool it some, okay?”
Rita is still unresponsive. Back straight, even though the shoulders are twitching slightly.
Daddy says, “Oh, dear. Perhaps some of us have been out in the sun too long?”
And I’m fired to action. “Scott, for God’s sake, what’s with you? Let it go. So Rita wasn’t feeling good for a while; now she’s better. Why’re you keeping at it? I just don’t get it.”
Somehow the spectacle of Rita’s stolid back and shoulders is more touching than crying would be, or seeing her with her head in her hands. She doesn’t do any of that. She eats for a while and then raises her eyes and says at Scott, “Quit pretending like I’m dirt on your shoe. There’s plenty of times you wanted it different, if you can scrape your brains together enough to remember. And quit pretending Ed here is some kinda new acquaintance. You’ve known Ed since the flood. For Christ’s sake. You look at him now like you never saw him before.”
A sound intrudes from the outside, a train whistle. That’s from the weedy triple railway line on the other side of Route One. “Hear that lonesome whistle / Sounding on the trestle,” says, or rather, sings, my dad. He has a nice tenor voice. He supplies the chorus, “Ah—whooee, ah—whooee.”
Egon bangs a little gong for more wine.
“I really like those trains,” says my father.
I’m inspired to a speech. Maybe this isn’t a good time, but I need to make it.
“Scott, you’re being mean to Rita; she’s off-base but she’s vulnerable, she’s like . . .” I’m about to say,
Like a snail without a shell
, when Rita turns such a poisonous glance my way that I cancel that. “I don’t care about your history with her. Nobody cares, so cut it out. And cut it out with my dad, too.” I’m not sure what I’m talking about here, so I slow down some. “If you knew my dad sometime in the past, it’s unkind of you—not just unkind, cruel—not to act like you know him. You don’t understand how often he stumbles along and doesn’t say things because he thinks maybe he’s wrong. I’ll bet anything he looked at you and wondered,
Hey do I know him
, and then he just . . .” I’m amazed to hear my voice faltering. I don’t want to emote for these people.
“Okay,” says Scott, sounding muffled. “Point taken. I apologize. And I guess I better have some of this chicken, because nobody else is going to.”
We chew for a while, until Egon announces that cappuccino and dessert will be served in the small exhibit hall.
“Well, another eventful day at Sunny Dell Acres,” says Scott, rising to fold his menu into a neat square and stash it in his pocket. He looks thoughtful. “Can you pluck from the mind its rooted sorrow?” he asks.
I say, “Oh, shut up.” I’m irked by people who revert to literary stuff in tense moments.
Apparently I’ve found a way to become the most popular girl in the dorm.
Raise a fuss during dinner. But I doubt if it always works. My first visitor tonight is Bunny. She taps on my bedroom door and says, “Hello, dear, I wanted to tell you, I just had to say . . .”
I have to urge her to come in. She is a large lady and she fills up the whole door.
“What I mean,” she exhales, settling into an ivory-slip-covered armchair. “Boy, these rooms are real nice, aren’t they?”
She says no, she doesn’t exactly live at the museum; she has a room down the hall for when she works late, but she
lives
in “one of those houses in Conestoga, in back of Main Street, y’know?”
But that’s not what she wants to talk to me about. “I thought you were great for tackling that asshole,” she says. “And he is one. A real sure-of-himself bastard. And if he knew your little dad. And didn’t admit it. Well. That is real bad.
“And your dad is someone you got to side with. Know what I mean?”
I tell her
uh-huh
. I wait. Bunny has the look of a lady who wants to go on talking.
“Anyway, dear, you’re a smart girl. College girl, I guess, right?
“And you’re stickin’ with your dad, which is great. And I haven’t really been able to talk to anybody, y’know?”
She looks at me triumphantly.
Apparently she thinks she has piled up enough criteria to make me a confidante. “So I just thought I’d come here and ...”
She shifts and tries to find something to delay action. She moves her legs. Long ago, I guess, when she was thinner, she would have crossed them; now they are too wide to get one thigh on top of the other.
“Do you want a cup of tea?” I ask. Tea was the conversation-priming device at the Manor; Egon has supplied all the necessaries, including a professional display of tea bags.
“Dear, you just let me do that.” Bunny won’t listen to my protests that I’m the hostess here. She sets out, being extremely efficient, which cheers her up.
While she’s pouring hot water, she says, “What makes it kinda hard to say is, well, I don’t know exackly. I mean, it’s about him, that trustee. When I went to help him that first time. When he was supposed to be dead.”
Each of us sits down. There’s a rhythmic clink of stirring.
“I dunno,” Bunny says. “Something was weird.”
“Well, sure,” I say. “He looked dead. But he wasn’t. That’s weird.”
Bunny grunts and takes a large slurp. “Sure, but. Like, when you remember back and say, this happened and that happened and then, whoa, peculi-ar.”
After a pause she adds, “I gave him mouth-to-mouth, y’know.”
“I remember.” I’d been especially impressed by the mouth-to-mouth.
“It was somethin’ special,” Bunny says. “It keeps hangin’ there on the edge of me catching it, like what happens when you want to remember a dream. Y’know?”
Yes, I do know. “Try to think,” I say. “Think about how his face looked. What color sweater he had.”
But this gets us nowhere.
We veer off into talking about dreams and then about Bunny’s two girls, one of whom dreams a lot. She’s fifteen. And then we talk some about living in Conestoga, which I’m interested in, although Bunny claims it’s just like living anywhere. “I mean, it’s the place where you are, know what I mean?”
We have a good visit, and when Bunny leaves, she says she’s glad she talked to me; it made her feel better. “I kept thinking I ought to do something, know what I mean?”
After she leaves, I go down the hall to check on Daddy, who is wrestling with the details of the new television remote. “Ah,” he says, when I drill him on its procedures, “the little
quiet
button is
here
instead of
there
.” He likes the TV set, which has a bigger screen than the one we left behind at the Manor.
I scan him for signs that this move has been disturbing, but the signs all point in the opposite direction. He looks good; his eyes are bright; his hair stands up, fluffy and white.
A year ago I thought he was on the verge of something bad, a steep Alzheimer’s slide, but now he seems stable. They tell you Alzheimer’s is like that. There are plateaus; there are moments of brightness. Hang on to them, the books all say. Be in the moment.
Back in my room, I think I’m ready for bed, but I’m wrong. I have a second visitor. Rita.
Rita isn’t tentative about wanting to see me. The minute I open the door, she slips in, heads for the ivory-colored armchair, and curls up in it, feet under her. “Do you smoke?”
“Nope.”
“Neither do I. Do you mind?” She pulls a small gold cigarette pack out of her pocket; it opens to expose black cigarettes with gold tips. She lights one with a cigarette lighter and looks around. Of course, there are no ashtrays in Egon’s good hotel. I get a saucer for her.
“This is so damn much trouble.” She waves a hand at the cigarettes and lighter. “Special stuff all the way around, fags, lights, too pain-in-the-neck; I hate it; I’ve quit.”
She flips her head back, and her dark hair bounces; she exhales a neat smoke ring. “So next I’ll have to start drinking. A lot. Vodka with brandy chasers.”
She exhales another smoke ring and practices crossing her eyes as she watches the smoke ascend. “Neat, huh?
“What I wanted to ask you,” she says, “is, what do you think Scott is up to?”
“Something,” I agree. “But he seems like a guy who usually has an agenda.”
This time she lets the smoke come out through her nostrils. “Believe it or not, he and I were extra close. For a while. A while ago.”
“I thought maybe.”
“That was in Thebes, where your dad was. I guess maybe now Scotty’s ashamed of it, but he’s had some other tarts since then he could be more ashamed of. Know what I mean?
“I mean, I’m a prominent woman. Crazy or not, I’ve done things. Degrees all over the fucking universe. I teach at Brown, for Christ’s sake. That’s way better than Yale for some stuff.”
I agree with her that Brown could be better than Yale in some areas. Academic gossip is funny. I don’t remember the details, but the general feeling of it has rubbed off on me. I understand about Yale, and Brown, and Chicago, and UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley was where my dad was.
“And what in hell is Scott the Stud doing here?” she asks. “I came to get away from the world for private personal psychiatric reasons—a suitcase full of meds and my shrink on the long-distance phone every day and Egon kind of protects me. Better on my record than the Menninger Clinic. But I don’t think Scott’s faced with a psychiatric meltdown. Do you?”
“No.”
“Which leaves, why is he here? It didn’t just happen; he engineered it. This Scholars’ Institute is an invented entity, like we say in criticism, and Scott invented it and then invited himself to be in it. He wasn’t figuring on Egon inviting me, too.”
She taps off her cigarette ash. The room is getting full of smoke. “So what do you think?”
“Does it have anything to do with the Hartdale Grant?”
Rita sits up. She looks triumphant. “Socko!”
“You mean it does?”
“I dunno. But I thought it did. And then I couldn’t figure out how. Because, believe me, that Hartdale Committee, whoever they are—Archbishop Tutu, Einstein’s ghost, and God, whoever—they met a long time ago and whoever gets tapped for this year is already chosen and no terrific thing anybody discovers now is gonna change that. So.”
“And Scott is supposed to be one of the recipients?”
She scowls. “Wanta bet he started that rumor?”
I shrug. Yes, it seems possible Scott started the buzz about himself and the Hartdale. But I’m having a Junior Moment of feeling guilty about Scott. I’ve been on his case, nagging him about everything for a whole day now. I’ve told myself the reason is my bad history with the Habitat boyfriend, but a likelier reason is Rob. Or Rob and Cherie. I get another throb of righteous fury when I think of them. Rob. Cherie. How can he?
Rita squashes out her cigarette.
The room now stinks as bad as our apartment in Santa Cruz used to. Rob’s and my apartment.
“Rita,” I say, “what made you so sure about my dad? That he was trying to kill Mr. Broussard?”
Rita frowns. She reaches for another cigarette, and then seems to think better of it. She pushes the top of the package down, firmly stows it in her pocket. “You ever been seriously depressed?”
I think about this. Of course I’ve been depressed, but not the way she means. Not the completely gone depression that sends you to the hospital. “No.”
“Well, it louses up everything—the way you sit, how you stand, breathe, think—everything. What you hear, how you hear it, what you see. And especially what you read. It all seems terrible. So maybe most of it is, anyway, terrible. But if you’re depressed, it’s extra, super, drag-down awful. Take just one phrase.
Walk, don’t walk
. That thing they flash at intersections. The epitome of neutral, you’d say. But if you’re depressed? Whammo. Not neutral. Seems like a command from outer space. Negative. Controlling. Sinister. Threatening. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“So I was like that. Everything’s awful; everything’s a threat; along comes this little poem on the Internet:
Day is death / Day is destruction
—got it?”
“Well, I guess.”
“It was presented like a couple of lines from that series of Middle Kingdom prediction poems—you know the ones, the
Prophecies
,
Complaints
, and
Admonitions
, about how awful everything is going to be . . .”
I don’t tell Rita I’m flattered by her assumption that I know the poems. I’ll take her word on them.
“For me,” she goes on, “that
Day
in the poem was your dad, Edward Day. He had just come here to the museum and I’d seen him. And I used to love him a lot, back when. We used to joke—me and the other people on the dig—about his name, Day, and him being so sunny and bright. Most archaeologists don’t have much personality.”
“And you thought the poem meant something about him?”
“Well, it was crazy; I was crazy. I thought it meant he wasn’t a saint anymore; he was the devil. And then, while I was thinking that, I saw your dad on the floor with Marcus.