Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

The source of her wooziness established, Miss Beryl decided that the best way to proceed was to treat the virus the way you’d treat the person it came from. That is, ignore it the best she could and hope it’d go away. Make your morning tea, old woman, she told herself, and put on a pair of good warm socks. So she did, and this too made her feel a little better, even though the strange feeling of distance from her extremities seemed to increase as she navigated her bright kitchen, making her tea. Now, she thought, bouncing her teabag in the steaming water. There. That’s done. You’ve made your tea, and you don’t feel any worse. Take the tea into the front room and check the street for wandering old women and fallen tree limbs. See if God has lowered the boom on anyone while you were asleep, the sneaky booger.

It was when she got to the front window and opened the blinds that she noticed it was snowing and remarked the strange, glittery quality to the snow. It was as if it were snowing with the sun out, each flake igniting as it fell. The street was alive with dancing, firefly snowflakes, and Miss Beryl sat down to watch the performance with quiet wonder, perplexed too that the cup of hot tea in her hands did so little to warm her fingers. It seemed beyond her ability to wiggle her toes in her socks, and those toes seemed very far away. It made no sense. At scarcely five feet tall, Miss Beryl was not very far from her toes.

And this was the way Sully found her when he came downstairs, poked his head in for the first time in a week, saw that his landlady was indeed up and dressed and seated with her back to him, staring out the front window into the street. “All right, ignore me,” he said when she didn’t respond to his usual observation that she wasn’t dead yet.

But she didn’t respond to this either, and when he raised his voice to inquire if she was all right and Miss Beryl still did not respond, he went over to her and peered around at the old woman suspiciously, as he might have inspected a store mannequin he suspected of being a real person practicing mime.

Miss Beryl, who had not heard him come in or speak, was delighted to discover her tenant’s face in her peripheral vision. It had been Sully, after all, who’d been praying for this snow, and Miss Beryl was pleased that his modest prayer had been answered. She just hoped that this strange snow, igniting as it did on its way to earth, would accumulate in sufficient quantity to require removal. She would have liked to tell Sully that she wished him well in this way, indeed in all ways, that having done him wrong, he retained a place in her affections, but her voice seemed as far off as her toes and fingers. “Look,” she finally managed, her voice sounding as if it belonged to someone else, Mrs. Gruber maybe, “at all the lovely snow.”

Sully would have liked nothing better than to see snow, but in fact the street outside Miss Beryl’s front window was bathed in bright winter sunshine. His landlady’s chin, her neck, the front of her robe and nightgown were bathed in blood.

“Which way?” Sully said.

“Up!” Hattie thundered. They were standing at the edge of the single stair, the old woman clutching onto Sully’s arm for support and balance. She looked strangely like a child learning how to ice-skate, feet wide apart, knees almost touching. Her hands were swollen from pounding on the apartment door. Sully had been late getting to the diner, unwilling to leave Miss Beryl until he was sure she was all right. When she’d first spoken, the old woman had seemed to be in some kind of a trance, but then she’d snapped right out of it, maintaining that she’d simply had another “gusher” of a nosebleed. She insisted that he not worry about it and was particularly adamant that he not mention the matter to Clive Jr., which Sully had reluctantly agreed not to do. In fact, she did seem fine, scurrying between the kitchen and the front room, cleaning up the mess she’d made. He promised to look in on her midmorning when he finished at Hattie’s, and she had promised to get checked out by her doctor, but the sight of Miss Beryl, glistening with hemorrhaged blood, was still with him, especially with old Hattie teetering on him. If he lost her, she could end up in the same condition. How did the world get so full of old women, was what he wanted to know.

“Yeah?” Sully said. “Well, the stair goes down, so that’s the direction we better go, unless you can fly.”

“Down!” Hattie agreed, and together they took the step, teetering.

“There,” Sully said when they had come to terms with down. “That’s the most dangerous thing I do all day,” he added as they made their way into the diner. “Someday you’re going to try to go up, and we’re both going to go down and stay down.”

“Down is to hell,” the old woman observed.

“I don’t plan to follow you that far,” Sully assured her.

Hattie did not strictly comprehend this discourse, Sully knew. Since Thanksgiving her hearing had failed, and you could tell the old woman no longer had the capacity to follow conversations whole. She’d catch a word or two and make do, which was why he took her through their morning “up” and “down” ritual. He suspected that she enjoyed the sound of these two words in her own mouth and that she appreciated being engaged in dialogue, even a monosyllabic one. The words exploded from the old woman’s mouth with terrific energy and satisfaction.

“Make ’em pay,” she muttered as they made their way between the lunch counter and the table along the wall. Cass, who had not given them so much as a glance as they made their slow way, now looked up at the old woman homicidally.

“What’d she say?”

Her daughter’s voice registered with the old woman, who turned to face it. “Make ’em PAY!” she bellowed.

Cass looked like it might be her intention to vault the lunch counter and throttle the old woman. “Ma!” she shouted back. “Listen to me now. I’m not going to put up with that all day. You hear me? Not again today. If you don’t behave, you’re going back to your room. You’ll be locked in, do you understand?”

Hattie turned away, resumed her course. “Make ’em pay,” she muttered again.

“She’ll be all right,” Sully assured Cass, then said to Hattie, “Don’t you worry, old girl. We’ll make every one of ’em pay. We’ll make ’em pay twice. How’s that?”

“Pay,” Hattie agreed.

“There you go,” Sully said when he had the old woman situated in her booth. “Sit up straight, now. No slouching.”

“No slouching,” Hattie repeated. “Make ’em pay.”

Sully grabbed an apron and joined Cass behind the counter. Cass was still glaring at her mother with what appeared to be genuine menace. Yesterday had not been good. For months the diner’s monstrous cash register, which was nearly as old as Hattie herself and had been part of the establishment since the beginning, had been acting temperamental, its cash drawer often refusing to open. Finally it had fused shut and Cass had ordered a new register from a restaurant supplier in Schuyler Springs. Yesterday, it had been installed during the lull between the breakfast and lunch crowds.

The problem was that the old register had been full of noisy clangs and bangs, sounds that over the years had become part of old Hattie’s world, increasingly so as her cataracts got worse. The loud, discordant music of the register penetrated her deafness, evidence that commerce was taking place. The new register offered no such reassuring sounds. If you happened to be standing next to it, you might detect some insectlike whispers, but the designers of the machine had apparently considered quiet a virtue. In the absence of the usual clanging and banging, Hattie watched the shapes and shadows of her customers file into and out of the diner and apparently concluded that her daughter was giving away free food, an idea that had enraged her completely. As the lunch customers continued to file past Hattie’s booth near the door, she’d begun to screech, “Make ’em pay! Make ’em pay!” The old woman’s fury had been comic at first, but the look on her face was so ferocious and her rage so consuming that even large men gave her wide berth on their way out, as they might a small, rabid dog on a thin leash.