The Lottery and Other Stories (31 page)

He was wearing a blue suit and he looked tall; she could not focus her eyes to see any more.

“You want coffee?” he asked.

She nodded and he pointed to the counter in front of her where a cup of coffee sat steaming.

“Drink it quickly,” he said.

She sipped at it delicately; she may have put her face down and tasted it without lifting the cup. The strange man was talking.

“Even farther than Samarkand,” he was saying, “and the waves ringing on the shore like bells.”

“Okay, folks,” the bus driver said, and she gulped quickly at the coffee, drank enough to get her back into the bus.

When she sat down in her seat again the strange man sat down beside her. It was so dark in the bus that the lights from the restaurant were unbearably glaring and she closed her eyes. When her eyes were shut, before she fell asleep, she was closed in alone with the toothache.

“The flutes play all night,” the strange man said, “and the stars are as big as the moon and the moon is as big as a lake.”

As the bus started up again they slipped back into the darkness and only the thin thread of lights along the ceiling of the bus held them together, brought the back of the bus where she sat along with the front of the bus where the driver sat and the people sitting there so far away from her. The lights tied them together and the strange man next to her was saying, “Nothing to do all day but lie under the trees.”

Inside the bus, traveling on, she was nothing; she was passing the trees and the occasional sleeping houses, and she was in the bus but she was between here and there, joined tenuously to the bus driver by a thread of lights, being carried along without effort of her own.

“My name is Jim,” the strange man said.

She was so deeply asleep that she stirred uneasily without knowledge, her forehead against the window, the darkness moving along beside her.

Then again that numbing shock, and, driven awake, she said, frightened, “What’s happened?”

“It’s all right,” the strange man—Jim—said immediately. “Come along.”

She followed him out of the bus, into the same restaurant, seemingly, but when she started to sit down at the same seat at the end of the counter he took her hand and led her to a table. “Go and wash your face,” he said. “Come back here afterward.”

She went into the ladies’ room and there was a girl standing there powdering her nose. Without turning around the girl said, “Cost’s a nickel. Leave the door fixed so’s the next one won’t have to pay.”

The door was wedged so it would not close, with half a match folder in the lock. She left it the same way and went back to the table where Jim was sitting.

“What do you want?” she said, and he pointed to another cup of coffee and a sandwich. “Go ahead,” he said.

While she was eating her sandwich she heard his voice, musical and soft, “And while we were sailing past the island we heard a voice calling us….”

Back in the bus Jim said, “Put your head on my shoulder now, and go to sleep.”

“I’m all right,” she said.

“No,” Jim said. “Before, your head was rattling against the window.”

Once more she slept, and once more the bus stopped and she woke frightened, and Jim brought her again to a restaurant and more coffee. Her tooth came alive then, and with one hand pressing her cheek she searched through the pockets of her coat and then through her pocketbook until she found the little bottle of codeine pills and she took two while Jim watched her.

She was finishing her coffee when she heard the sound of the bus motor and she started up suddenly, hurrying, and with Jim holding her arm she fled back into the dark shelter of her seat. The bus was moving forward when she realized that she had left her bottle of codeine pills sitting on the table in the restaurant and now she was at the mercy of her tooth. For a minute she stared back at the lights of the restaurant through the bus window and then she put her head on Jim’s shoulder and he was saying as she fell asleep, “The sand is so white it looks like snow, but it’s hot, even at night it’s hot under your feet.”

Then they stopped for the last time, and Jim brought her out of the bus and they stood for a minute in New York together. A woman passing them in the station said to the man following her with suitcases, “We’re just on time, it’s five-fifteen.”

“I’m going to the dentist,” she said to Jim.

“I know,” he said. “I’ll watch out for you.”

He went away, although she did not see him go. She thought to watch for his blue suit going through the door, but there was nothing.

I ought to have thanked him, she thought stupidly, and went slowly into the station restaurant, where she ordered coffee again. The counter man looked at her with the worn sympathy of one who has spent a long night watching people get off and on buses. “Sleepy?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

She discovered after a while that the bus station joined Pennsylvania Terminal and she was able to get into the main waiting-room and find a seat on one of the benches by the time she fell asleep again.

Then someone shook her rudely by the shoulder and said, “What train you taking, lady, it’s nearly seven.” She sat up and saw her pocketbook on her lap, her feet neatly crossed, a clock glaring into her face. She said, “Thank you,” and got up and walked blindly past the benches and got on to the escalator. Someone got on immediately behind her and touched her arm; she turned and it was Jim. “The grass is so green and so soft,” he said, smiling, “and the water of the river is so cool.”

She stared at him tiredly. When the escalator reached the top she stepped off and started to walk to the street she saw ahead. Jim came along beside her and his voice went on, “The sky is bluer than anything you’ve ever seen, and the songs….”

She stepped quickly away from him and thought that people were looking at her as they passed. She stood on the corner waiting for the light to change and Jim came swiftly up to her and then away. “Look,” he said as he passed, and he held out a handful of pearls.

Across the street there was a restaurant, just opening. She went in and sat down at a table, and a waitress was standing beside her frowning. “You was asleep,” the waitress said accusingly.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. It was morning. “Poached eggs and coffee, please.”

It was a quarter to eight when she left the restaurant, and she thought, if I take a bus, and go straight downtown now, I can sit in the drugstore across the street from the dentist’s office and have more coffee until about eight-thirty and then go into the dentist’s when it opens and he can take me first.

The buses were beginning to fill up; she got into the first bus that came along and could not find a seat. She wanted to go to Twenty-third Street, and got a seat just as they were passing Twenty-sixth Street; when she woke she was so far downtown that it took her nearly half-an-hour to find a bus and get back to Twenty-third.

At the corner of Twenty-third Street, while she was waiting for the light to change, she was caught up in a crowd of people, and when they crossed the street and separated to go different directions someone fell into step beside her. For a minute she walked on without looking up, staring resentfully at the sidewalk, her tooth burning her, and then she looked up, but there was no blue suit among the people pressing by on either side.

When she turned into the office building where her dentist was, it was still very early morning. The doorman in the office building was freshly shaven and his hair was combed; he held the door open briskly, as at five o’clock he would be sluggish, his hair faintly out of place. She went in through the door with a feeling of achievement; she had come successfully from one place to another, and this was the end of her journey and her objective.

The clean white nurse sat at the desk in the office; her eyes took in the swollen cheek, the tired shoulders, and she said, “You poor thing, you look worn out.”

“I have a toothache.” The nurse half-smiled, as though she were still waiting for the day when someone would come in and say, “My feet hurt.” She stood up into the professional sunlight. “Come right in,” she said. “We won’t make you wait.”

There was sunlight on the headrest of the dentist’s chair, on the round white table, on the drill bending its smooth chromium head. The dentist smiled with the same tolerance as the nurse; perhaps all human ailments were contained in the teeth, and he could fix them if people would only come to him in time. The nurse said smoothly, “I’ll get her file, doctor. We thought we’d better bring her right in.”

She felt, while they were taking an X-ray, that there was nothing in her head to stop the malicious eye of the camera, as though the camera would look through her and photograph the nails in the wall next to her, or the dentist’s cuff buttons, or the small thin bones of the dentist’s instruments; the dentist said, “Extraction,” regretfully to the nurse, and the nurse said, “Yes, doctor, I’ll call them right away.”

Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her; it was the important creature which must be recorded and examined and gratified; she was only its unwilling vehicle, and only as such was she of interest to the dentist and the nurse, only as the bearer of her tooth was she worth their immediate and practised attention. The dentist handed her a slip of paper with the picture of a full set of teeth drawn on it; her living tooth was checked with a black mark, and across the top of the paper was written “Lower molar; extraction.”

“Take this slip,” the dentist said, “and go right up to the address on this card; it’s a surgeon dentist. They’ll take care of you there.”

“What will they do?” she said. Not the question she wanted to ask, not: What about me? or, How far down do the roots go?

“They’ll take that tooth out,” the dentist said testily, turning away. “Should have been done years ago.”

I’ve stayed too long, she thought, he’s tired of my tooth. She got up out of the dentist chair and said, “Thank you. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” the dentist said. At the last minute he smiled at her, showing her his full white teeth, all in perfect control.

“Are you all right? Does it bother you too much?” the nurse asked.

“I’m all right.”

“I can give you some codeine tablets,” the nurse said. “We’d rather you didn’t take anything right now, of course, but I think I could let you have them if the tooth is really bad.”

“No,” she said, remembering her little bottle of codeine pills on the table of a restaurant between here and there. “No, it doesn’t bother me too much.”

“Well,” the nurse said, “good luck.”

She went down the stairs and out past the doorman; in the fifteen minutes she had been upstairs he had lost a little of his pristine morningness, and his bow was just a fraction smaller than before.

“Taxi?” he asked, and, remembering the bus down to Twenty-third Street, she said, “Yes.”

Just as the doorman came back from the curb, bowing to the taxi he seemed to believe he had invented, she thought a hand waved to her from the crowd across the street.

She read the address on the card the dentist had given her and repeated it carefully to the taxi driver. With the card and the little slip of paper with “Lower molar” written on it and her tooth identified so clearly, she sat without moving, her hands still around the papers, her eyes almost closed. She thought she must have been asleep again when the taxi stopped suddenly, and the driver, reaching around to open the door, said, “Here we are, lady.” He looked at her curiously.

“I’m going to have a tooth pulled,” she said.

“Jesus,” the taxi driver said. She paid him and he said, “Good luck,” as he slammed the door.

This was a strange building, the entrance flanked by medical signs carved in stone; the doorman here was faintly professional, as though he were competent to prescribe if she did not care to go any farther. She went past him, going straight ahead until an elevator opened its door to her. In the elevator she showed the elevator man the card and he said, “Seventh floor.”

She had to back up in the elevator for a nurse to wheel in an old lady in a wheel chair. The old lady was calm and restful, sitting there in the elevator with a rug over her knees; she said, “Nice day” to the elevator operator and he said, “Good to see the sun,” and then the old lady lay back in her chair and the nurse straightened the rug around her knees and said, “Now we’re not going to worry,” and the old lady said irritably, “Who’s worrying?”

They got out at the fourth floor. The elevator went on up and then the operator said, “Seven,” and the elevator stopped and the door opened.

“Straight down the hall and to your left,” the operator said.

There were closed doors on either side of the hall. Some of them said “DDS,” some of them said “Clinic,” some of them said “X-Ray.” One of them, looking wholesome and friendly and somehow most comprehensible, said “Ladies.” Then she turned to the left and found a door with the name on the card and she opened it and went in. There was a nurse sitting behind a glass window, almost as in a bank, and potted palms in tubs in the corners of the waiting room, and new magazines and comfortable chairs. The nurse behind the glass window said, “Yes?” as though you had overdrawn your account with the dentist and were two teeth in arrears.

She handed her slip of paper through the glass window and the nurse looked at it and said, “Lower molar, yes. They called about you. Will you come right in, please? Through the door to your left.”

Into the vault? she almost said, and then silently opened the door and went in. Another nurse was waiting, and she smiled and turned, expecting to be followed, with no visible doubt about her right to lead.

There was another X-ray, and the nurse told another nurse: “Lower molar,” and the other nurse said, “Come this way, please.”

There were labyrinths and passages, seeming to lead into the heart of the office building, and she was put, finally, in a cubicle where there was a couch with a pillow and a wash-basin and a chair.

“Wait here,” the nurse said. “Relax if you can.”