Terms of Endearment (7 page)

“I thought you never got lost,” Rosie said. “That’s what you always claim.”

“Lost is not the right word,” Aurora said. “It’s just that I sometimes don’t arrive very directly. I don’t see that it’s nice of you to bring it up anyway. I’m sure Royce doesn’t want to hear us argue while he’s eating.”

“Let me worry about my own husband,” Rosie said. “Royce could eat in an earthquake and never miss a bite.”

Aurora fell silent in order to consume the gumbo. “I really do think I’m allergic to stockings,” she said when she finished. “I never feel quite well when I have them on. Probably they inhibit my circulation, or something of that nature. How is your circulation these days, Royce?”

“Pretty well,” Royce said. When pressed about almost any aspect of his personal well-being, Royce might commit himself to a “pretty well,” but that was his absolute limit.

He probably wouldn’t have said much more if he had dared, but the truth was he didn’t dare. Twenty years of watching Aurora bumble around the kitchen in hundreds of dressing gowns, always barefooted and usually only haphazardly coiffed,
had filled Royce with a vast doomed lust. She kept a large pile of blue pillows in a particularly sunny corner of the kitchen, and she usually ended up flopped on them, eating gumbo and singing little snatches of opera while she looked out the window and admired the yellow roses in her garden, or watched the midget TV from which she was seldom long separated. She had bought the little TV the minute she had seen it, and considered that she used it to “keep up,” something she had always felt obliged to do. Usually she plopped it on a pillow of its own so she could keep up and admire her roses at the same time.

The minute she finished the gumbo she put her cup in the sink and went over and piled the blue pillows as high as they would go. “I think I’ll sit for two minutes,” she said, sitting. “I don’t like to go out when I’m not feeling quite settled, and I’m certainly not feeling very settled.”

Rosie was properly disgusted. “You’re the biggest sissy I ever seen,” she said. “Besides, you’re already late.”

“You hush,” Aurora said. “I have a right to look at my own yard for a moment, don’t I? I’m gearing myself up for my stockings.”

She looked at her stockings and sighed. Then she started to put one on but got only as far as her calf before she lost her impetus. Once she lost her impetus with a stocking there was very little hope, and she knew it. She began to feel very melancholy, as so often happened just before her luncheon dates. Life was far from romantic, luncheon dates or no. She stuffed her stockings in her purse, feeling very fitful. Then she sang a snatch of Puccini, hoping it would improve her mood. “I should have done more with my singing,” she said, sure that no one cared.

“Well, you better not do no more with it in my kitchen,” Rosie said. “If there’s one thing I ain’t in the mood for today it’s I-talian music.”

“Very well then, you’ve driven me out,” Aurora said, rising. She snatched up her shoes. In fact, the singing
had
improved her mood. “Goodbye, Royce,” she said, pausing at the table to give him a big smile. “I hope your meal hasn’t been spoiled by all this dissension. You know my car, of course. If you should see that
I’ve had a flat I do hope you’ll stop and help me. I don’t think I could do very much with a flat, do you?”

“Uh, no, ma’am, uh, yes, ma’am,” Royce said, not quite sure which question he was supposed to reply to, or in what order. He was so bedazzled by Aurora’s presence that he could scarcely remember anything. He was smitten, and he had been smitten for years—hopelessly, of course, but deeply. She passed out the back door, full of impetus again, but her fragrance lingered near the table for a bit. She was just the size woman Royce had always meant to marry. Rosie was not much more buxom than a door-jamb—a freckled doorjamb—and not much more yielding either. Royce had kept himself going for longer than he could remember with the entirely ignoble fantasy that someday Rosie might be killed, tragically but as painlessly as possible, and that Aurora Greenway, bound to him by twenty years of gumbo and unanswered questions, might accept him, countrified though he was.

More practically, he also, unbeknownst to everyone, kept himself going with the favors of a part-time barhop named Shirley, who was more nearly Aurora’s girth. Unfortunately she neither talked as nice nor smelled as good, and their exertions didn’t affect Aurora’s place in his fantasy life. There her place was secure.

Rosie, for her part, was not five one and an East Texan for nothing. She had no inkling of Shirley, but she knew perfectly well that her husband had been peeking at her boss underneath his soup spoon for years. She resented every ounce over ninety pounds that Aurora weighed, and there were a lot of them. She had no intention of dying, certainly not before Royce, but if she did anyway she meant to leave him so encumbered with debts and children that he would have little chance to enjoy life without her—not, in any case, with a woman who did little more than traipse around from one pile of pillows to another all day long.

Rosie’s theology was hardbitten and oriented toward punishment rather than reward. In her world view, contented indolence was the worst abomination of all, and Rosie, whether the Lord did or not, knew that Aurora Greenway was about as contentedly indolent as anyone alive. Nothing brought out the vengeance-seeking streak in Rosie like watching her husband spill gumbo on
his pants because he happened to be watching Aurora loaf around the kitchen watching TV and singing Italian songs.

She had told Royce many times precisely what she meant to do to him spiritually, financially, and anatomically if she ever caught him emerging from one of Aurora’s dressing gowns. As soon as the back door closed she marched over to the table and told him again.

“Whut?” Royce said. He was a large, indecisive man and looked aggrieved at his wife’s accusation. He offered to swear on the Bible that he had never in his life entertained the one thought that he had entertained almost constantly for two decades.

“I don’t know why a grown man would sit there an’ offer to swear to a lie,” Rosie said. “Then you got me and the Lord both against you, and havin’ me against you is bad enough. Aurora ain’t worth it, even if she was to cotton to you, which she don’t.”

“I ain’t said she did, Rosie,” Royce said with a pained look in his eye. He wished his wife wouldn’t so bluntly destroy his one remaining dream.

“Hell, we got seven kids,” he added. He always added it—it was his major defense. “Why don’t you look at it that way?”

“Because it don’t impress me no more than snappin’ peas,” Rosie said. She had gone back and perched herself on a stool by the sink and was at that moment snapping peas.

“Nice kids,” Royce added hopefully.

“I don’t know what makes you think so,” Rosie said. “You know how lowlife they are. We’re lucky they ain’t all in the pen, or reform school, or runnin’ whorehouses or something. Don’t stand there looking at me with your thumbs in your belt. If you got some time to spare you can help me snap these peas.”

“Seven kids ought to mean somethin’,” Royce insisted. He did take his thumbs out of his belt.

“Yeah, seven accidents,” Rosie said. “Means you can’t hold your liquor, or nothin’ else either. We’ve had seven car wrecks too—maybe more. An’ for the same reason.”

“Whut reason?” Royce inquired. He looked out at Aurora’s large sunny back yard and thought somberly of how nice it would be to be living in her house with her rather than in his house with Rosie. He and Rosie and the two kids that were still
underfoot lived in a four-room frame crackerbox in the Denver Harbor area in North Houston, not far from the Ship Channel. Every morning, almost, the Ship Channel sent its terrible smells their way. It was a citybilly section, full of bars and liquor stores and dangerous alleys that were likely to come out in black neighborhoods or Mexican neighborhoods—places where tipsy rednecks were often deprived of their wallets and their consciousnesses, and sometimes deprived of their lives. It was a wonder to him that Rosie had escaped a tragic death as long as she had in such a neighborhood.

“For the reason that you ain’t got a precaution in you after eight or nine beers,” she went on, snapping vigorously.

“I guess you never wanted a one of ’em, did you?” Royce said. “I guess it’s ever’ bit been my fault.”

“Why no,” Rosie said. “I ain’t above enjoyin’ an accident now an’ then, specially if it happens after dark. Of course I wanted kids. You know how afraid I was of endin’ up an old maid. What I was pointin’ out to you, Royce, is that seven kids don’t mean we’re still sweethearts, like we was at first, and it sure don’t mean you wouldn’t take a little shine to Aurora if she was to get sweet on you.”

Royce Dunlup would have been the first to admit that he didn’t know much, but he did know that he couldn’t outtalk his wife.

“Ain’t nobody been sweet on me in a hunnert years,” he said gloomily, looking into Aurora’s refrigerator. He even liked her refrigerator better than any other refrigerator.

“Quit moonin’ an’ pay attention to me,” Rosie said. “I got my hair set this mornin’ and you never said a word.”

Royce looked, but it had been so long since he had noticed Rosie’s hair that he could not remember how it might have looked before she had it set. In any case he couldn’t think of a word to say about it.

“Well, I guess all this will keep till suppertime,” he said. “I got to get to Spring Branch.”

“That’s fine, Royce,” Rosie said. “I just got one thing to say to you, and that’s if you see any Cadillacs with flats with fat women
sittin’ in them, just play like you got a gnat in your eye and keep on truckin’, okay? You owe me that.”

“Why?” Royce asked. Rosie was always suddenly calling in debts he didn’t know he had accumulated.

Rosie didn’t answer. The only sound in the kitchen was the sound of peas snapping.

“Rosie, I swear,” Royce said. “You just make me feel at a total loss.” He made the mistake of looking for about one second into two steely gray East Texas eyes—they were squinting slightly, and they held no mercy.

“Gotta go,” he said faintly, quelled, as usual, before he had done anything to be quelled for.

Rosie stopped squinting, confident, for the afternoon at least, that she had him. She left off snapping for a minute and made a nice kissing sound for her bewildered spouse. “Bye-bye, honey,” she said. “That’s sweet, you droppin’ in for lunch.”

3.

M
R. EDWARD JOHNSON
, first vice-president of the most tasteful little bank in River Oaks, was trying to think of some way to keep from looking at his watch so often. It was not really seemly for a bank officer to look at his watch every thirty seconds, particularly not when he was standing in the foyer of the most exclusive French restaurant in Houston, but that was what he had been doing for almost forty minutes. It was only a matter of time, and not much of it, before he would start looking at his watch every fifteen seconds, or even every ten seconds; the people coming in would see his wrist keep jerking up and would probably think he had some kind of muscular disorder. That was not good at all. No one wanted a banker to seem spastic. He kept telling himself he ought to contain himself, but he couldn’t contain himself.

He had spoken to Aurora that morning and she had seemed almost affectionate. Her tone at times had been a tone to stir hopes, but of course that had been three hours ago, and Aurora
had always felt free to change her plans as abruptly as a cricket, though of course in all other respects she was nothing like a cricket at all. Still, Edward Johnson knew there was absolutely no reason to assume that she hadn’t suddenly had a change of heart. She might, that very morning, have decided to marry any one of his rivals. She might have eloped with the old general, or the rich yachtsman, or one of the oil men, or even the completely disreputable old singer who continued to tag her around. It was conceivable that some of her suitors had dropped out without his knowledge, but then it was just as likely that new ones had already been added to replace them.

Such thoughts were not easy to live with in the foyer of an exclusive restaurant, under the annoyed eye of a maitre d’ who had been grimly holding a table for forty minutes. The only way Edward Johnson could have kept his wrist from jerking up would have been to clench it between his legs, which struck him as being even less seemly than having it jerk. It was not a happy position to be in, and the moment came when he could bear it no longer. He waited until the maitre d’ was busy with the wine steward and quickly stepped outside, hoping against hope to spot Aurora.

To his immense relief he did just that. The first thing he saw was her familiar black Cadillac, parked well away from the curb in the nearest bus zone. His heart swelled—for once his timing had been superb. Aurora loved little attentions, like having her car door held for her.

All cares forgotten, Edward Johnson rushed to hold it for her. He ran into the street, yanked the door open, and looked down on the object of his fondest hopes and strongest desires—only to note, too late, that she was in the process of putting on her stockings. One was on and the other one was halfway up her leg. “Aurora, you look lovely,” he said, a second before he realized he was looking down upon her partially naked lap—more naked lap, at least, than he had so far been allowed to see. The blood that had been rushing to his head at the prospect of pleasing her made a sudden U-turn and vanished completely.

To make matters worse, a very large bus bore down upon him, honking furiously. The Cadillac, of course, was parked in its
zone. When the bus driver saw that he couldn’t dislodge the Cadillac he pulled up adjacent to it and stopped barely eighteen inches away. Edward Johnson, thinking for a moment that he was about to be crushed, tried desperately to crowd closer to the car without actually falling into the lap of his date. The front door of the bus whooshed open, and two hefty Negro women managed to squeeze their way between the two vehicles and onto the bus. The driver, a lanky white boy, looked down at Edward Johnson with dull, passionless annoyance. “You-all got your fuckin’ nerve,” he said. “Whyn’t you get a motel room or somethin’?” Then the door whooshed shut and the bus roared away, filling the air with brown exhaust.