The Evening Star (20 page)

At that a dangerous light came into Aurora’s eyes, and the General noticed.

“Well, maybe I can get one of them down anyway,” he said hastily. Aurora set the tray down and carefully lifted one of the eggs out of the egg cup. He had a feeling she might be going to throw it at him, but instead she held it over his head and squeezed it until the yellow ran into his hair. Then she picked up the tray and went back downstairs, taking the other improperly broken egg, as well as a lot of other food he would have been perfectly happy to have eaten. The General tried to throw his crutch at her but by this time egg yolk was dripping down his face, and he missed.

Aurora didn’t say a word, though she heard the crutch hit the railing. She went back to her kitchen and ate every bite
of the breakfast she had prepared for the General, minus only the egg she had squeezed over his head. Then she ate the breakfast she had prepared for herself, and was rather guiltily beginning to annex portions of the breakfast she had made for Rosie when Rosie made a shaky entrance.

“Good, I was about to eat your English muffins and now I won’t have to—you can eat them yourself,” Aurora said.

“I’m sick, I can’t eat a bite. Besides, I lost my apron,” Rosie said, dropping into a chair. Actually, the English muffins did look delicious. She particularly liked them with marmalade, and a nice pot of marmalade was handy on the table.

“No, I rescued your apron,” Aurora said. “I was afraid a bird might carry it away. Why are you sick?”

“Because nothing I do ever works out,” Rosie said, digging a knife into the marmalade. “Seventy years of not having a thing work out is a lot of years of nothing working out.”

“Rosie, I’d like to point out something to you,” Aurora said. “You have seven children, am I correct?”

“Yeah, seven,” Rosie admitted.

“I’d like to point out to you that all seven of your children have turned out splendidly,” Aurora said. “They grew up, they pursued educations, all but two of them married—and I’m sure those two will get around to it eventually. They’re responsible citizens, several of them own their own businesses, and for all we know they may all get rich.”

“Oh, yeah, true,” Rosie said.

“Well, here I sit, listening to you complain,” Aurora said. “My daughter is dead, and not a single one of my grandchildren has done even as well as the least successful of your children. How dare you sit at my breakfast table and tell me that nothing you’ve ever done has turned out right! It looks to me like everything you’ve ever done has turned out rosy, no pun intended.”

“Well, it’s true, I’ve got my kids to be proud of, I guess I overlooked that part,” Rosie said.

“Overlooking seven successful, healthy children is like overlooking Mount Everest,” Aurora said. “You have no idea how happy I’d be if even one of my grandchildren exhibited
the kind of competence your children have. I’d think I was in heaven.

“But I’m not in heaven,” she said, looking down. She had long been shamed and puzzled by the achievements of Rosie’s children in contrast to the failures of her own.

Rosie knew that Aurora envied her her healthy, reliable children—anyone who had raised children and knew what the odds were
would
be likely to envy her, she knew. They
were
her children, she had raised them, in anxiety and strife, and yet nowadays she could rarely sense her own hand in their lives or their successes. Somehow it had just happened; one by one they had left her behind and gone on to inhabit worlds where she herself would never live. The kids had once been a part of her, but, for the life of her, she could no longer feel a part of them, and when she thought of them now it was mainly to be glad that they weren’t miserable, as she was.

“Do you see what I’m getting at?” Aurora asked, shaking off the bitter mood that had been about to sweep over her.

“I see,” Rosie said. “You’re right. I’m luckier than you. I’m luckier than anybody. I ought to be the happiest old woman on earth. That’s one of the reasons I’m so damn miserable. I ought to be happy but I ain’t—I ain’t at all.”

“Well, I’m not either, don’t look at me,” Aurora said. “I squeezed an egg over Hector’s head. He’s upstairs, snarling and flailing about even as we speak. He’ll probably shoot me with his army pistol in my own bedroom if I’m not careful.”

Between the marmalade, the muffin, Aurora’s lecture, and the surprising news about the General and the egg, Rosie began to feel a little better.

“You squuz an egg over his head?” she asked in wonderment. Aurora’s capacity for inspired retaliation had always amazed her. Why hadn’t she thought to cook an egg and squeeze it on C.C.’s head? It would have surprised him so much he would probably have croaked on the spot. The thought made her smile.

“That’s better,” Aurora said. “However, I must inform you
that there’s no such word as ‘squuz.’ There ought to be, but there isn’t.”

“I guess there is, if I said it,” Rosie commented—Aurora’s pickiness about words often annoyed her. Still, she was feeling a great deal better suddenly and she slavered a great hunk of marmalade on the next English muffin.

“That’s not a correct attitude, but never mind,” Aurora said. “May I ask what happened to make you so unhappy?”

“Oh, well,” Rosie said. “I’d like to forget it, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course I mind,” Aurora said. “Did you and C.C. have sex in the car, or am I mistaken?”

“Oh, no, you did see—I knew you’d see!” Rosie said. She dropped the muffin—it hit on its edge and rolled several feet across the kitchen floor—and buried her face in her hands. She’d been discovered, and now she’d never, never live it down.

“Now, now, I didn’t see,” Aurora said, wishing she had. “It’s merely that I inferred that such practices might be taking place. You surely don’t think I’d peek on your intimacies, do you?”

“I sure do think you’d peek,” Rosie said. “I
know
you’d peek. Who wouldn’t? I told him you’d peek. Now I want to kill myself.”

“Rosie, please don’t overdramatize,” Aurora said. “I’m the one who gets to overdramatize. We can’t both get away with it, and I’ve had a lot more practice.”

Rosie kept her face in her hands. She
knew
Aurora would see! She had told C.C. Aurora would see! But he begged, she gave in, Aurora
did
see, and now she would never live it down.

“The one thing I’m not is prudish,” Aurora assured her, when Rosie had hidden her face and held her silence for a considerable while.

“People fortunate enough to have active lovers can have sex wherever they want to without a word of complaint from me,” she added. “When I was younger and luckier I had it in a wide variety of places myself, as I informed Pascal the other
evening, in no uncertain terms. Surely you’re not thinking I’d begrudge you your good luck?”

Rosie put little stock in Aurora’s tolerant stance. Besides that, she had no intention of sitting still for the suggestion that what had happened to her amounted to good luck—what had transpired between herself and C.C. that morning was anything but lucky, in her view.

“What good luck?” she asked, raising her face briefly. “The fact that C.C.’s got this weird thing about doing it in cars is the curse of my life. It ain’t good luck at all, and if you think it is, try it sometime!”

“It’s odd that I never suspected that you were suffering under this curse until today, when I happened to look out my window just at the right moment,” Aurora said. “I didn’t even know C.C. was weird—I just thought he was lazy, like Hector and Pascal.”

Rosie looked disgusted, but didn’t answer.

“Why does he like doing it in cars especially?” Aurora asked, after a decent interval.

“Because that’s where he done it with his first girlfriend,” Rosie said. “When they got married, C.C. was a boomer and they traveled around a lot and kept on doing it in cars. C.C. got in the habit and now he can’t break it. What you got to remember is that C.C. still thinks like a teenager, even if he is sixty-eight years old.”

“He’s by no means the oldest teenager in the world,” Aurora pointed out. “The one that threw the crutch at me this morning is even older.”

“I don’t know,” Rosie said. She felt that she would never enjoy even one day free of confusion in her whole life.

“Don’t know what?” Aurora asked.

Rosie sighed. “Maybe it’s just that C.C. was raised in cars,” she said. “He’s just about worthless once you get him in the house.”

“Hector is nearly worthless too, and he wasn’t raised in cars,” Aurora said—she thought it was about time to switch the conversation back to
her
problems.

“I get nervous in cars,” Rosie admitted, ignoring Aurora’s
ploy. “I mean, I oughtn’t—it’s the same thing you’re doing, whether you’re doing it in a car or a bed. But I get nervous and then I try to hurry and you know what happens when you try to hurry.”

“The men hurry faster, that’s what happens,” Aurora said, remembering that Rosie had not looked exactly replete when she stepped out of the station wagon. “Believe it or not I was confronted with the same phenomenon this very day,” she added.

Rosie peeked through her fingers at the floor she had mopped so often. Fortunately, at the end of its roll across the floor, her English muffin had landed marmalade side up. She retrieved it and took another bite.

“Since all you seem to want to talk about is sex, let me ask you a question,” Aurora said. “On a scale of one to ten, how would you score your little frolic in C.C.’s station wagon?”

“What?” Rosie asked. “Score it?”

“Sure, score it,” Aurora said. “Why not?”

Rosie suspected a trap of some sort. If she were to give her morning’s lovemaking a grade such as one got in school, she would undoubtedly give it an F, but F happened to be the letter a certain four-letter word started with. Was Aurora trying to trick her into saying the word, and if so, why?

Then, remembering her nervousness and her frustration, she ceased to care about Aurora’s motive.

“On a scale of one to ten I’d give it a zero,” she said bitterly. “All I got out of it was a raw back from C.C.’s old scratchy seat covers, and besides that I gouged myself on a screwdriver he left on the seat. Even a zero might be putting it too high. It was more like a minus two.”

“No wonder you cried,” Aurora said. “I suppose I fared somewhat better, although not much.”

Rosie had thought Aurora looked sort of cheerful. “Does that mean the General finally perked up?” she asked.

“Slightly, but only slightly,” Aurora said.

Rosie considered that it was just one more unfair instance of Aurora getting more than she herself did of life’s pleasures. In the forty years she had been with Aurora there had been thousands of such instances, but that didn’t mean she
had stopped resenting them. That Aurora had done better with the General, who was
really
old, than she had done with C.C., who wasn’t, was no cause for joy; and, besides that, if Aurora had seen the station wagon shaking, the whole neighborhood had probably seen the station wagon shaking.

“Seventy years of keeping up a decent reputation, and now it’s gone,” she said. “I wish I could just quit and go live in a neighborhood where people don’t start looking out their windows before it even gets light.”

“Oh, hush,” Aurora said. “I didn’t see a thing, and no one else did, either. I’m just a good guesser. Hector wanted to look but he couldn’t find his crutches in time, so you’re quite safe. Anyway, if you would devote yourself to the study of history even for a few minutes you’ll find that even the most respectable people do ridiculous things now and then. I’ve done several ridiculous things myself, and no one’s more respectable than I am.”

Rose finished her muffin—life had to go on, or at least it hadn’t yet stopped going on. Someday, she knew, it
would
stop, for her if not for others, and that would be that. Her main hope was that she’d be fully clothed when she died. Now and then, in low moods, she found herself worrying that she might die naked, in the bathtub or somewhere. That would be too much—she cringed at the thought. But it hadn’t happened yet, and perhaps it wouldn’t happen; meanwhile, all she and Aurora could find to talk about anymore was sex. For most of the years that she had worked for Aurora they had rarely mentioned sex; now they rarely mentioned anything else.

“I’ve heard old women get nasty-minded,” she said, wishing she had another English muffin. “I sure never thought it would happen to us.”

“Me neither,” Aurora admitted. She picked up her hairbrush and proceeded to give her hair a thoughtful stroke or two.

“On the other hand, I’m sure neither of us supposed we’d be making do with what we’re making do with, either,” she said.

“Right, a nudist and a maniac who can’t keep it up unless
he’s in a backseat,” Rosie said. “We deserve better. If there’s anything I hate, it’s starting the day with a minus two.”

She noticed that, in fact, Aurora didn’t look all
that
cheerful.

“How about you, on a scale of one to ten?” she inquired. She had never asked her employer such a question, but since they couldn’t seem to stop talking about sex, she thought she might as well.

“Oh, I don’t know—perhaps a one and a half,” Aurora said, brushing more listlessly. “Certainly no higher than a two.”

The phone rang. Aurora ignored it.

“Want me to get it?” Rosie asked. “It could be Melly. They could have had a car wreck.”

“No, it’s Hector, I’m sure,” Aurora said. “I don’t wish to speak to him, but you may if you like.”

Some months before, after weeks of quarreling, she had consented to the installation of a second phone line. The General complained that she spent so much of her time on the phone that he could barely squeeze in his business calls. Also, as he often reminded her, the day might come when he could no longer manage the stairs—he wanted to be able to call down to the first floor, in case there was an emergency of some sort. Now he was in the habit of calling down eight or nine times a day, mainly to inform them that he was lonely.

“Hi, General,” Rosie said, picking up the phone.

“Am I to be left here to starve just because I complained about my eggs?” the General asked, in moderate tones.