Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“How about putting that over on the sink,” his father suggested. “Help Grandma out, okay?”

Will did as he was told. “Is Grandma sick?” he said. He knew something had his grandmother all upset, and he hoped that soon somebody would explain why. It had something to do with the telephone and somebody who kept calling his father and talking to Grandma Vera instead. And it had something to do with the fact that they weren’t living with Mommy and Wacker and Andy anymore. And it had something to do with Daddy telling Grandma Vera last night that maybe he wouldn’t go back to his teaching after Christmas. Maybe they’d stay and he’d work with Grandpa Sully. Grandma Vera had gotten maddest at that. She was still mad. Mad at Daddy and at Grandpa Sully and Grandpa Ralph for not being on her side. She was mad at Mommy for leaving. About the only person she wasn’t mad at was Will himself, for which he was grateful, except she kept asking Daddy, “What’s going to happen to this child? What’s going to happen to your family?” Which made Will wonder if she could see some danger coming that he was unaware of.

When Will took his cereal bowl and placed it on the drainboard, Peter said to his stepfather, “Why don’t you come along and grab a cup of coffee at the diner?”

“I better not,” Ralph said.

Peter shook his head. “I’d sure get out of here for a while,” he said. “You’re going to bear the brunt of this if you’re handy.”

Ralph shrugged, followed them out to the back porch, where Peter and the boy donned their heavy coats and gloves. “I’m used to it,” he said, his voice prudently low. Actually, it was more than prudence that caused Ralph not to say it too loudly. There was also guilt. Saying “I’m used to it” felt like an admission, as if to suggest that they both saw Vera in the same unflattering light, which wasn’t true. Ralph wouldn’t have gone so far as to say that his wife was wrong to be upset. He’d have been upset himself if it had been any of his business, which it wasn’t, none of it. People would get themselves into fixes, was the way Ralph looked at it. Peter had gotten himself into one, and that was all there was to it. And since it was the kind of fix Ralph had no real experience with, he considered it morally imperative not to suggest a resolution. Probably he’d suggest exactly the wrong thing. Vera, on the other hand, seemed to know what Peter should do, which was typical. His wife’s strong suit was providing other people a sense of direction, and this was what Ralph was really acknowledging when he said he was used to it. What he was used to was his wife knowing what to do next and making sure it got done.

“Your mother just wants what’s best for you, is all,” he said.

“I know,” Peter said, zipping Will’s jacket. The little boy, who had apparently had his throat zipped into his zipper at some point, always put his mittened hand beneath his chin to prevent it from happening again. Sully was right, of course, Peter reflected, the boy was scared of just about everything. “And that would be fine if she didn’t always assume she knew what was best for me. Me and everybody else,” he added, to indicate he understood that Ralph too suffered her certainty.

“Heck,” Ralph shrugged. “It’s only love, is all it is.”

Peter shook his head. “No, Pop, you’re wrong. It’s love, all right, but it’s not only love.”

Ralph wasn’t sure he followed Peter’s distinction, but never mind. “Anyhow,” he said. “Don’t pay no attention to what she said. You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need to. This house is part mine too, and as long as it is, you and yours …”

Ralph discovered he was unable to continue, his voice having suddenly constricted with complex and powerful affection for all concerned. Constricted with love. With only love.

Peter studied his stepfather. “How do you do it, Pop?” he wondered. “How do you put up with it?”

Ralph was grateful for the appreciation but had no idea how to respond to Peter’s question without seeming to grant another admission. “I’ll handle things here,” he said. “She never stays like this long. By tonight …” He let the statement trail off when he remembered who he was talking to. He might have been able to convince a stranger that things would be better by evening. But Peter knew his mother, and therefore he knew better. In truth, Ralph himself had never seen Vera more down than she was now. “I just hope we don’t get no more phone calls.”

Peter looked down at the garage floor. “I have no idea how she got the number.” Actually, this was not true. It had occurred to him late last night that he’d called Deirdre collect over Thanksgiving. The number had probably appeared on her phone bill. Concerned as he was by the phone calls, they weren’t his worst fear, which was that Didi herself might show up, which she had in fact threatened to do.

“How’d you ever go and meet somebody like her?” Ralph asked. This was the question that had been puzzling him since the previous afternoon when he had taken the last of the calls and wished he hadn’t. Ralph had no firsthand experience with academic people, but he imagined them to be like the people he saw on the Albany educational channel on the cable. Vera liked watching that channel and was always contemptuous of Ralph when he had to confess after watching one of those drama shows for a full hour that he wasn’t too sure he understood what was going on. The way he figured it, everybody at Peter’s university probably talked the way they did on educational TV, and so he was not prepared when the young woman on the telephone who kept calling and demanding to talk to Peter and who apparently refused to believe that he wasn’t there said to Ralph, “Okay, but just ask when he gets home, okay? Just ask him. Do I, or do I not, give the best head on the East Coast.”

“I met her at a poetry reading,” Peter told him in answer to his question.

Ralph nodded soberly, feigning comprehension. “The women who go to those things all like her?”

Peter couldn’t help but grin. “A surprising number.”

Ralph shook his head. He’d never been to a poetry reading. The reason he’d never gone to one — that people would be reading poetry there — had always seemed sufficient, but now he had another reason if he ever needed one. Vera’d never asked him to attend a poetry reading, but it was the sort of thing she might do someday if she got annoyed at him and was searching for a punishment and was tired of the educational channel. The good news was that there weren’t any poetry readings in Bath, but Schuyler Springs wasn’t very far away and they probably had them there. Maybe Albany, for all he knew. It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry readings and not know it.

Ralph had been too embarrassed to pass along to Peter the young woman’s question about whether she did or did not give the best head on the East Coast. Ralph would no more have repeated what the young woman said to him than he would have confessed to having, when he was a young man, once been the recipient of a blow job. It had happened in South Carolina, where it had been against the law, and not just the fact that they’d paid for it, either. Like most horrible experiences, Ralph had not been able to forget it. What had he been thinking of, to go along? Now, at fifty-eight, he asked himself the same question he’d asked himself as an eighteen-year-old. And answered it the same way. That he hadn’t known what it would be like until it was too late to back out. Ralph had imagined, for one thing, that they would each have a girl. And a room. A different girl and separate rooms. That was the way he’d thought it would go. Not the same girl for all of them and all of them crowded into a hot, dark little room. It was a private act he’d imagined, not a public performance. And pleasure, not some vague distant rumbling, like a churning stomach. He’d imagined two naked people, not a fully dressed girl servicing six men who dropped their trousers down around their ankles when it was their turn and pulled them up again as soon as they were finished. He had not imagined performing to a gallery, accepting advice, criticism and finally applause. How had he allowed himself to take part in something so sordid?