Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

But who was this too carefully dressed, bosomy woman, her hands nervously aflutter as she sat, her thick knees and anklebones touching, as she waited to be introduced? Miss Beryl immediately pegged her as some kind of social worker, or perhaps the proprietress of a nursing home. Clive Jr. had more than once alluded to the eventual necessity of her moving into “a nice safe environment when the time came,” and even offered to “screen some of the literature” for her, an offer Miss Beryl had emphatically declined. She’d been indulging a great many suspicions about Clive Jr. of late, and so, when she saw that Clive Jr. was accompanied by a nervous, rather prim-looking woman of advanced middle age, she concluded that, in her son’s view at least, the time had come.

This erroneous conclusion, having gotten lodged in Miss Beryl’s brain, she’d been unable to dislodge, despite her son’s careful, labored introduction. Much to her eventual embarrassment, Miss Beryl had continued to glare menacingly at the increasingly agitated woman. “My fiancée , Ma,” Clive Jr. kept repeating, but the word refused to compute. Why would Clive Jr. be engaged to a social worker? Miss Beryl had given up on her son marrying years ago, and now she was being asked to believe this absurd coincidence — that he was going to marry some nursing-home proprietress. Only later was she able to sort it out, that this woman’s connection to social work and nursing homes had existed only in her own imagination.

And so, this morning, Miss Beryl was still furious with Clive Jr., and with the dreadful Joyce woman, but during the long sleepless night she’d also begun to entertain again the terrible possibility that the time had come, that she no longer had any business living alone. She was no longer safe on the interstate. She got confused going places she’d been to a hundred times before. She was becoming suspicious and paranoid. Miss Beryl had always believed that she herself would know “when the time came” for her to give up her independence. But what if she didn’t? What if everybody else knew already? Miss Beryl, who had always suffered the cruelty of her eighth-graders’ jokes, had no desire to become a legitimate figure of fun for these same children, now age forty.

And so, just before dawn she’d made up her mind to apologize to both her son and his fiancée, a resolution she began to entertain second thoughts about at first light. These seconds thoughts had evolved into reluctance by the time the sky outside her bedroom window had become white. Clive Jr.’s appearance, before she’d even made her tea, put the resolution to rout. Now, watching him ineffectually trying to match the splintered pieces of the Queen Anne had the effect of causing her to wonder what had possessed her to even consider yielding territory to her son.

“Joyce feels terrible about the chair, Ma,” Clive Jr. said, as if he suspected her decision to tough things out.

Actually, Miss Beryl had mixed feelings about the Queen Anne. The chair’s destruction afforded her the opportunity to continue her instinctive dislike for Clive’s fiancée, who was mouthy and full of silly opinions about subjects of which she was wholly ignorant, the length and breadth of which had been discussed during the course of what had been for Miss Beryl one of the longest evenings of her life. Among the dreadful Joyce woman’s devotions was the president, newly elected to a second term. Having lived in California, the Joyce woman said, of course she knew Mr. Reagan far better than non-Californians. She had campaigned for him there and, of course, again here in New York when he ran for president. Fixing Miss Beryl rather unpleasantly with her doughy eyes, the Joyce woman had stated, without apparent irony, that the only thing that concerned her was the president’s age, a man that old, doing a job which aged you so. “He seems so tired ” the Joyce woman said seriously, as if she had a personal relationship with the president, feared not just for the office, but for the man, “but I truly think he’s sharp as ever.”

“So do I.” Miss Beryl had fixed her savagely and excused herself from the room under the pretext of scrounging up a plate of cookies and some coffee.

“Decaf?” the Joyce woman had pealed. “Oh, I’d love some decaf.”

Clive Jr., who’d lapsed into comatose silence during the Joyce woman’s soliloquy, followed Miss Beryl into the kitchen. “I wish you’d quit glaring as if you meant to murder her,” he complained.

“I can’t help it,” she told him. “I have what’s called an open face.”

Handing her son the plate of cookies, Miss Beryl shooed him out of the kitchen, then searched out the instant coffee in a remote cupboard. It took her a few minutes to boil the water, arrange the coffee cups on a tray, compose herself and return to the living room, where the Joyce woman was brushing cookie crumbs from her ample bosom. The plate was empty.

“Mmmm,” the woman cooed when she sipped her coffee. “I’m sorry to be such trouble, but honestly , if I have caffeinated after five, I’m up all night long! ”

And then she was off again, explaining how she had always adored coffee, had always drunk twenty cups a day and never had problems until recently. But now, lord , it was simply tragic what coffee did to her. There was no other word for it besides tragic, but wasn’t that the way with all the good things, the things you really loved . Everything good was either immoral or fattening, she added, apropos of nothing, and then cackled as if the cleverness of this observation were attributable to herself.

While the woman talked, Miss Beryl sank comfortably into her seat and tried not to glare, taking what solace there was in the fact that the coffee she’d given her guest was not decaf. Slender consolation, since the fool woman was probably as wrong about caffeine as she was about everything else. Thinking she’d drunk decaf, she’d sleep like the dead, like the president she admired, all three of their shared ideas rattling around in their otherwise empty heads, unassailed by doubt or caffeine.

In this, it turned out, Miss Beryl had been wrong. She’d heard the dreadful Joyce woman get up to use the bathroom at midnight, then again at two, and finally at four-thirty. Each time, Miss Beryl had muttered “Good!” in the dark.

One of the other things she’d been slow on the uptake about was that Clive Jr. had planned for the Joyce woman to spend the night in the spare bedroom rather than return to Lake George, where she lived. Even after she caught her son’s drift, she wasn’t sure what his intention meant, or was supposed to mean. Was it simply Clive Jr.’s plan for the two women to get to know each other? Or were Clive Jr. and his fiancée trying to reassure her that they were not sleeping together? Was this propriety for show or for real? Poor Clive Jr., either way, Miss Beryl thought.

When the Queen Anne buckled, the two brittle back legs had splintered lengthwise and it was a matter of great good fortune, Miss Beryl supposed, that the Joyce woman had not been impaled. As it was, she’d hit the floor hard enough to shake the walls. Driver Ed had come crashing down from his wall, denting his chin, which made him look even more dour and disapproving. Also a little like Kirk Douglas. The look that had come over the Joyce woman’s face, more of mortification than pain, had been horrible. She’d looked at Clive Jr. as if he’d played a practical joke on her by seating her, or allowing her to be seated, on a trick chair. Her bottom lip had begun to quiver and then her whole face came apart in the kind of grief that Miss Beryl associated with the sudden, violent loss of a loved one, not a momentary loss of dignity. Clive Jr. had ushered her, choking and sobbing, into the bathroom, where she stayed for nearly half an hour. In the living room, Clive Jr. and Miss Beryl had spoken in whispers, each pretending to ignore the ebb and flow of sorrow on the other side of the bathroom door.