Tell Me a Riddle (15 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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Page 60
nia: of course. (The money, the money, dwindling!) Los Angeles first for sun and rest, then to Lennie's in San Francisco.
He told her the next day. ''You saw what Nancy wrote: snow and wind back home, a terrible winter. And look at youall bones and a swollen belly. I called Phil: he said: 'A prescription, Los Angeles sun and rest.'"
She watched the words on his lips. "You have sold the house," she cried, "that is why we do not go home. That is why you talk no more of the Haven, why there is money for travel. After the children you will drag me to the Haven."
"The Haven! Who thinks of the Haven any more? Tell her, Vivi, tell Mrs. Suspicious: a prescription, sun and rest, to make you healthy. . . . And how could I sell the house without
you?"
At the place of farewells and greetings, of winds of coming and winds of going, they say their good-byes.
They look back at her with the eyes of others before them: Richard with her own blue blaze; Ann with the nordic eyes of Tim; Morty's dreaming brown of a great-grandmother he will never know; Dody with the laughing eyes of him who had been her springtide love (who stands beside her now); Vivi's, all tears.
The baby's eyes are closed in sleep.
Good-bye, my children.
III
It is to the back of the great city he brought her, to the dwelling places of the cast-off old. Bounded by two lines
 
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of amusement piers to the north and to the south, and between a long straight paving rimmed with black benches facing the sandsands so wide the ocean is only a far fluting.
In the brief vacation season, some of the boarded stores fronting the sands open, and families, young people and children, may be seen. A little tasselled tram shuttles between the piers, and the lights of roller coasters prink and tweak over those who come to have sensation made in them.
The rest of the year it is abandoned to the old, all else boarded up and still; seemingly empty, except the occasional days and hours when the sun, like a tide, sucks them out of the low rooming houses, casts them onto the benches and sandy rim of the walkand sweeps them into decaying enclosures once again.
A few newer apartments glint among the low bleached squares. It is in one of these Lennie's Jeannie has arranged their rooms. ''Only a few miles north and south people pay hundreds of dollars a month for just this gorgeous air, Grandaddy, just this ocean closeness."
She had been ill on the plane, lay ill for days in the unfamiliar room. Several times the doctor came byleft medicine she would not take. Several times Jeannie drove in the twenty miles from work, still in her Visiting Nurse uniform, the lightness and brightness of her like a healing.
"Who can believe it is winter?" he asked one morning. "Beautiful it is outside like an ad. Come, Mrs. Invalid, come to taste it. You are well enough to sit in here, you are well enough to sit outside. The doctor said it too."
 
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But the benches were encrusted with people, and the sands at the sidewalk's edge. Besides, she had seen the far ruffle of the sea: ''there take me," and though she leaned against him, it was she who led.
Plodding and plodding, sitting often to rest, he grumbling. Patting the sand so warm. Once she scooped up a handful, cradling it close to her better eye; peered, and flung it back. And as they came almost to the brink and she could see the glistening wet, she sat down, pulled off her shoes and stockings, left him and began to run. "You'll catch cold," he screamed, but the sand in his shoes weighed him downhe who had always been the agile oneand already the white spray creamed her feet.
He pulled her back, took a handkerchief to wipe off the wet and the sand. "Oh no," she said, "the sun will dry," seized the square and smoothed it flat, dropped on it a mound of sand, knotted the kerchief corners and tied it to a bag-"to look at with the strong glass" (for the first time in years explaining an action of hers)and lay down with the little bag against her cheek, looking toward the shore that nurtured life as it first crawled toward consciousness the millions of years ago.
He took her one Sunday in the evil-smelling bus, past flat miles of blister houses, to the home of relatives. Oh what is this? she cried as the light began to smoke and the houses to dim and recede. Smog, he said, everyone knows but you. . . . Outside he kept his arms about her, but she walked with hands pushing the heavy air as if to open it, whispered: who has done this? sat down suddenly to vomit at the curb and for a long while refused to rise.
 
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One's age as seen on the altered face of those known in youth.
Is this they he has come to visit? This Max and Rose, smooth and pleasant, introducing them to polite children, disinterested grandchildren, ''the whole family, once a month on Sundays. And why not? We have the room, the help, the food."
Talk of cars, of houses, of success: this son that, that daughter this. And
your
children? Hastily skimped over, the intermarriages, the obscure work"my doctor son-in-law, Phil"all he has to offer. She silent in a corner. (Car-sick like a baby, he explains.) Years since he has taken her to visit anyone but the children, and old apprehensions prickle: "no incidents," he silently begs, "no incidents." He itched to tell them. "A very sick woman," significantly, indicating her with his eyes, "a very sick woman." Their restricted faces did not react. "Have you thought maybe she'd do better at Palm Springs?" Rose asked. "Or at least a nicer section of the beach, nicer people, a pool." Not to have to say "money" he said instead: "would she have sand to look at through a magnifying glass?" and went on, detail after detail, the old habit betraying of parading the queerness of her for laughter.
After dinnerthe others into the living room in men- or women-clusters, or into the den to watch TV the four of them alone. She sat close to him, and did not speak. Jokes, stories, people they had known, beginning of reminiscence, Russia fifty-sixty years ago. Strange words across the Duncan Phyfe table:
hunger; secret meetings; human rights; spies; betrayals; prison; escapeinterrupted
by one of the grandchildren: "Commercial's on; any Coke left? Gee, you're missing a real hair-raiser." And then a granddaughter (Max proudly: "look at her, an American queen") drove them home on
 
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her way back to U.C.L.A. No incidentexcept that there had been no incidents.
The first few mornings she had taken with her the magnifying glass, but he would sit only on the benches, so she rested at the foot, where slatted bench shadows fell, and unless she turned her hearing aid down, other voices invaded.
Now on the days when the sun shone and she felt well enough, he took her on the tram to where the benches ranged in oblongs, some with tables for checkers or cards. Again the blanket on the sand in the striped shadows, but she no longer brought the magnifying glass. He played cards, and she lay in the sun and looked towards the waters; or they walkedtwo blocks down to the scaling hotel, two blocks backpast chilihamburger stands, open-doored bars, Next-to-New and perpetual rummage sale stores.
Once, out of the aimless walkers, slow and shuffling like themselves, someone ran unevenly towards them, embraced, kissed, wept: ''dear friends, old friends." A friend of
hers,
not his: Mrs. Mays who had lived next door to them in Denver when the children were small.
Thirty years are compressed into a dozen sentences; and the present, not even in three. All is told: the children scattered; the husband dead; she lives in a room two blocks up from the sing halland points to the domed auditorium jutting before the pier. The leg? phlebitis; the heavy breathing? that, one does not ask. She, too, comes to the benches each day to sit. And tomorrow, tomorrow, are they going to the community sing? Of course he would have heard of it, everybody goesthe big doings they wait for all week. They have
 
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never been? She will come to them for dinner tomorrow and they will all go together.
So it is that she sits in the wind of the singing, among the thousand various faces of age.
She had turned off her hearing aid at once they came into the auditoriumas she would have wished to turn off sight.
One by one they streamed by and imprinted on herand though the savage zest of their singing came voicelessly soft and distant, the faces still roaredthe faces densened the airchorded into
children-chants, mother-croons, singing of the chained love serenades, Beethoven storms, mad Lucia's scream drunken joy-songs, keens for the dead, worksinging
while from floor to balcony to dome a bare-footed sore-covered little girl threaded the soundthronged tumult, danced her ecstasy of grimace to flutes that scratched at a cross-roads village wedding
Yes, faces became sound, and the sound became faces; and faces and sound became weightpushed, pressed
''Air"her hands claw his.
"Whenever I enjoy myself. . . ." Then he saw the gray sweat on her face. "Here. Up. Help me, Mrs. Mays," and they support her out to where she can gulp the air in sob after sob.
"A doctor, we should get for her a doctor."
"Tch, it's nothing," says Ellen Mays, "I get it all the time. You've missed the tram; come to my place. Fix your hearing aid, honey . . . close . . . tea. My view.

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