Terms of Endearment (23 page)

“Not today,” Vernon said. He had been brooding on the matter of a present for Aurora, and it occurred to him that maybe Babe might have an idea.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said, fidgeting on his stool. “I met this lady, you know, an’ she was right nice to me. What if I was to get her some kind of present, you know, sort of to pay her back?”

Bobby came out of his lapse suddenly and slapped Vernon on the back. “Well, what’ya know, Babe,” he said. “Think about that. You mean you finally done went an’ got laid?”

Vernon blushed and Babe leapt to his defense.

“Shut your dirty mouth, Bobby,” she said. “Vernon wasn’t raised that way and you know it. All these years I been feedin’ him he ain’t never even had an idea, that I could tell. You just shut up an’ let Vernon do the talkin’ now.”

Vernon had done the talking, though. He had no more to say. “She fixed me dinner, was what it was,” he said. “I been thinkin’ a present would be the right thing to do, but I don’t know what to get.”

“How about a diament ring,” Babe said. “I been wantin’ one all my life. Course if you give her a diament ring she’s gonna think you got ideas.”

“Well, if you never got laid I ain’t interested,” Bobby said, stirring his coffee some more. “You an’ Babe work it out.”

Babe was cooking Vernon’s traditional sausages and smiling, briefly enjoying the fantasy that she herself was going to receive a wonderful gift from Vernon.

“Well, there’s diament rings an’ fur coats an’ candy and flowers,” she said. “Mums is pretty. Chocolate-covered cherries. Bobby even bought me some of them one time in a weak moment.”

“Is she fancy?” Bobby asked, more interested than he cared to let on. “Why don’t you bring her in an’ let us have a look at her? Me an’ Babe can tell you in a minute if she’s good enough for you.”

“Aw, she is,” Vernon said.

“You got as much business courtin’ a fancy woman as I got ownin’ a Cadillac automobile,” Bobby said, getting up and leaving. “I’m takin’ a nap.”

Babe was still musing on the question of the present. “How about a pet of some kind?” she said. “I’ve always wanted a pet, but Bobby’s too sorry to let me have one. How about a goat? A feller over in the trailer camp’s got the sweetest little goat you ever saw, and he wants to sell it too. It’d be unusual. Ever’
woman’s got a problem of what to do with scraps, an’ a goat would sure take care of that.”

Vernon liked the idea immediately. The nicest thing about it was that the present was handy. He could buy it and take it right over. He gave Babe a dollar tip, more because she helped him solve his problem than because the sausage was anything special.

“You’re gonna spoil me yet, Vernon,” Babe said, looking at the dollar. “Bobby thinks I’m sweet on you now, if you want the truth. I guess it’s a good thing you finally dug you up a girl friend. I’m too old to have Bobby beatin’ on me like he used to whenever somebody happened to give me a dollar tip.”

Vernon walked around amid the house trailers until he found one with a goat tied outside. It was a small brown and white goat, and a sleepy lady in a pink bathrobe sold it to him for thirty dollars, without really even waking up. By seven o’clock the Lincoln was parked in front of Aurora’s house, with the goat and Vernon both in the front seat. Vernon was fidgeting badly. The hopelessness of it all seemed more obvious the longer he thought about it, and he had also begun to have second thoughts about the goat, which kept trying to nibble his maroon seat covers.

While he was fidgeting Aurora stepped out her front door. She was barefooted and wore a bright blue dressing gown. She was evidently in search of her morning paper, and she got halfway across her wet lawn before she noticed the Lincoln sitting at the curb. The sight didn’t seem to surprise her. She smiled in a way that Vernon had never seen anyone smile, at least not at the sight of him.

“Why there you are, Vernon,” she said. “What an active man you are. Is that little goat for me by any chance?”

“You don’t have to take it,” Vernon said, abashed that she had spotted it so quickly.

“Now, now,” Aurora said. “There’s no reason for you to act apologetic about such a charming goat. I don’t think you ought to keep it cooped up in that car. Let it see how it likes my lawn.”

She stretched out her hands and Vernon handed it out the window to her. Aurora set it on the lawn. The little goat stood stock still in the wet grass, as if it might fall off the world if it
took a single step. Aurora spotted her newspaper and walked over to pick it up, and the goat tiptoed after her.

Aurora opened her paper to the comics and scanned them quickly to see if anything crucial was happening. Since nothing was, she picked up the little goat and started for the house.

“Are you coming, Vernon?” she said. “Or did you spend the night having second thoughts? I bet that’s it. You probably just ran by to fob this goat off on me before you set out for Alberta, or wherever it was.”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” Vernon said, getting out of the car. How she had figured out that the goat was a farewell present was beyond his understanding. Her eyes were flashing, though thirty seconds before she had been smiling as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

“Excuse me, but you’re not being very convincing,” Aurora said. “Obviously you’ve come to regret your words. It’s quite all right, I’m sure. You needn’t look so hangdog. As I said quite frankly yesterday, I’m a terror. You practical men soon get enough of me. Evidently I do something to your little brains that interferes with the making of money, or whatever you do. I can’t say I’m not somewhat disappointed, though. You sounded for a time like a man who stood behind his statements, and I hadn’t expected you to be ready to scamper away quite so soon.”

Vernon felt the same thing happening that had happened in the car the day before. Confusion and fear filled him. “I ain’t backing out,” he said. “I ain’t going to Canada. I meant ever’thing.”

Aurora looked at him silently, and he felt that she could see everything that he was thinking; it was as if she were in the process of translating his thoughts into her kind of English the instant they formed in his brain, though it didn’t feel like anything was forming in his brain anymore but in some center of pressure somewhere in his chest.

“I mean I am,” he said. “Just like yesterday. I still am.”

Aurora nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, but you’re poised to retreat at the slightest setback, aren’t you?” she said. “I’m afraid that makes me rather scornful, Vernon. You’ve spent the night deciding
there’s no hope, if I’m not mistaken. Retreats and apologies are hardly the sort of actions that make a woman feel wanted. If you’re not going to take the trouble to believe in yourself for a few days, then you might as well go on hiding in your car. No harm can come to you there. I’m not likely to crawl into your car and try to make you speak good English, am I? Nor can I see to it that you stop hunkering over your food like a crab when you eat, if you’re going to eat out of the back end of a Lincoln. Your habits are a little disgusting, if you want the truth, and I was ready to expend some energy helping you replace them with something resembling healthy behavior, but if you’ve no more enthusiasm for me than you’ve exhibited this morning, then I don’t suppose I’ll get the chance.”

She stopped and looked at him, waiting. Vernon had a feeling she was going to wait all day, until he spoke.

“If we was better acquainted I’d do things better,” he said. “I ain’t had no time to learn. Don’t that make sense?”

To his great relief Aurora smiled, almost as gaily and mysteriously as she had smiled at him when she first saw him sitting at the curb. Another storm appeared to have passed.

“Yes, that makes a certain sense,” she said. “What did you have in mind for us to do today?”

Vernon had nothing in mind. “Eat breakfast,” he said, though he had just eaten one.

“Of course, breakfast can be assumed,” Aurora said. “That will hardly be sufficient for a day’s amusement, though. I take a great deal of amusing, I can tell you that.”

“Well, I know a lot of card games,” Vernon said. “I don’t guess you like to play cards?”

To his astonishment Aurora took him by the arm and began to shake him vigorously. He didn’t know whether to resist or not, and looked very puzzled. Still shaking, she began to laugh, and then took his arm and tucked it into hers and began to walk across the lawn. The lawn had been mowed the day before and her bare feet were covered with wet pieces of grass.

“I
see “I’ll just have to shake you out of these diffident spells,” she said. “For a woman of my temperament they’re quite unendurable. Fortunately for you, I’m excessively fond of cards. If
you’ll really stay and play cards with me I’m quite likely to forgive you everything.”

“That’s my plan for the day,” Vernon said, although it hadn’t been two minutes before.

“Then I’m very nearly ecstatic,” Aurora said. His arm still tucked in hers, she led him into the house.

CHAPTER IX

1.

A
T SEVEN-THIRTY
that morning Emma’s phone rang, but as she was getting out of bed to go answer it, or, in other words, to go see what her mother wanted, Flap grabbed her ankle and wouldn’t turn loose.

“You’re not going,” he said, though his eyes were still shut.

“Why not?” she asked.

“You’re just not,” he said, keeping a tight grip on her ankle. She had one foot off the bed and got tired of being spraddled, so she eased back in bed. Flap turned loose of her ankle and put his arm tightly around her waist. The phone rang ten or twelve times and stopped, and then after a pause rang ten or twelve more times and stopped again.

“I wish you were a little less gutless,” he said. “You don’t have to pop up every morning at dawn, you know.”

“Well, you’ve found out how to keep me from it,” Emma said.
“I’d rather lie in bed and be criticized than to stand in the kitchen and be criticized.”

“If you’d tell her to fuck off once or twice you could lie in bed and not be criticized,” he said.

“Sure,” Emma said. “I haven’t heard you tell Cecil that when he wants you to do some little errand for him. If you’ll start doing it I’ll start doing it.”

Flap ignored her retort, but he kept his arm around her. “If you’re not going to let me talk to Mother, then you ought to wake up and talk to me,” she said.

Instead of commenting, Flap went back to sleep. It was a warm, still morning and she slipped back into drowsiness herself. She had sat up until two-thirty reading
Adam Bede—a
book she had begun because Flap said she had to read something by George Eliot and it had looked, at first glance, shorter than
Middlemarch.
It could not have been shorter by much, she decided, because even by reading until two-thirty two nights in a row she hadn’t been able to finish it.

“I like it but I don’t know why I’m reading it right now,” she said at about the halfway point. “Why couldn’t I have saved George Eliot for my old age?”

“Read her so we can talk about her,” Flap said. “We’re running out of things to talk about, after only two years. You have to read more so our marriage won’t flag.”

Before the day got really hot she awakened from her drowse to find her husband on top of her. Emma was just as glad; the morning had seldom dawned when she wouldn’t have rather made love than cook breakfast.

It was only some while after they had that Emma felt a little strange. Something had changed. Sex was happening a lot oftener, and she didn’t know why. She told herself she was a fool to question God’s plenty, now that she had it, but she couldn’t help wondering what was working on Flap to make him want her so often.

It seemed to her to have started after he read Danny’s book. “I’m intimidated,” he said when he finished it. “Because it’s good?” she asked. “Even if it wasn’t good I’d be intimidated,” he
said. “At least he
did
it.” Then he walked off to the library and didn’t say another word about Danny. She had told him Danny came by—she had to, since her mother knew—and he didn’t say much about that either, or ask much, which was strange. His and Danny’s friendship had always been rich in mutual curiosity. Perhaps it didn’t tie into sex—she didn’t know—but the part that was slightly worrisome was that oftener and longer didn’t seem to add up to happier, at least not for Flap. It didn’t leave him looking as pleased as it had, and she felt that their balance was tipping just a little. Life was getting different and she was not one to sit quietly and let it get different without her knowing why.

“How come I’m suddenly getting all this nice attention?” she said, tapping on his back with her fingernails.

Flap pretended to be in a deep post-coital slumber, but she knew better. He had never been a post-coital slumberer.

“Come on,” she said. “No playing possum. Tell me.”

Flap suddenly got up and walked off to the bathroom. “You always want to talk about everything,” he said, glancing back at her. “Can’t you ever let anything just happen?”

Emma sighed and got up and divided what was left of her bedside glass of water between two flowerpots. Some mothers gave their daughters cast-off clothes, but her mother gave her cast-off flowers instead, though usually only petunias or begonias or flowers that didn’t require very complex attention. She had been promised a wonderful geranium that her mother had been coddling for years, but that promise, like the promise of the Klee, seemed to depend upon them living somewhere they couldn’t afford to live. When Flap came back in the bedroom she was feeling angry.

“You didn’t need to put me down that hard,” she said. “We are married, aren’t we? I have a right to be curious about changes in our life.”

“Stop trying to put me on the defensive,” he said. “I hate to feel defensive on an empty stomach.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “I just asked a simple question.”

“You know what I think?” Flap said, putting on his shirt.

“What?”

“I think you majored in the wrong thing,” he said. “I think you should have majored in psychology. I think you should be a psychiatrist, in fact. Then you’d have answers for everything. Whenever I changed some little habit you could get out your notebook and write down the Freudian explanation and the Jungian explanation and the Gestaltist explanation, and then you could take your pick, like a multiple-choice examination.”