Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

So he had gone shopping with M, stopped her just as she was about to back the car out of the driveway, and gone along. . to a new Wal-Mart west across the Rio Grande, and while he shopped for a scratcher such as he had seen his neighbor use a few days ago, to combat weeds, and a beaded chain-pull to extend the ones from the ceiling fan and lamp, which he could no longer reach, and two tubes of Magic Glue for the price of one, yes, a bargain in Magic Glue. What else? An old-fashioned apple corer that M had been hunting for for some time. The apple, he said to himself sardonically, now costs more than its corer. Chatted in front of a gas grill on sale for $125 with a burly old Western type, gray-haired under his cowboy hat, who said he was a retired auto-body repairman. And when the good Lord gave him the call to stop smoking as He had already to stop drinking, he would. He was smoking over two packs a day, and it was killing him with coughing, but he couldn’t stop. He had been smoking so long, he couldn’t remember when he began, and he could remember all the way back to the age of three. His stepfather had given him cigarettes. “What do you do for a living?” he asked.

“Retired. I worked as a gauge-maker.” Ira fell back on the old subterfuge. “I worked in a toolroom years ago.”

“I thought you were some kind of an old perfessor,” said the new acquaintance.

“Well, I happened to be a math teacher once. A tutor.” One couldn’t deny the man the satisfaction of his perceptiveness.

“Ah, I thought so.” Vindicated in his appraisal, the other nodded contentedly.

They parted, smiling.

Meanwhile, M, who had stepped into Walgreen’s for his Valium which he had ordered by phone, stressing: generic Valium (the difference was about twelve dollars), then shopped for groceries to swell the larder sufficient to meet the added demands of son and grandson, guests beginning tomorrow; met him at Wal-Mart. “Ah, I found you right away.”

“Yeah?”

“I hate this store,” she said. “Not that there aren’t good things in it. It’s so cluttered.”

“What you hate is of no consequence. Look at the mobs in it. The clutter attracts the hoi polloi. They’d feel uncomfortable in a roomy, orderly store.”

“I feel uncomfortable in Kistler-Kollister.” She led the way to the checkout counter. “Even the clerks are better dressed than I am. I suppose that’s more or less the same thing in reverse.”

“That’s right. . The guy runs Wal-Mart knows what he’s doing.” And after a moment: “Personally, I don’t give a damn what it looks like.” And reaching the checkout counter, preceded only by a woman with a single cart, “They bait you into the place with a few bargains. That’s the thing to beware of. Those Circline fluorescents cost twice as much here as at Allwoods. But once in here, you get into a buying furor.”

They were out of the store, in the car again, M driving home.

“I’ve been thinking, what does my grandson mean to me, the little I see of him.” Ira gazed moodily at the chocolate-brown waters of the Rio Grande. “And what do I mean to him? Either one of us could disappear, and not make much difference to the other.”

“Oh, it would. It does.” M shifted her eyes from the plastic orange tubs that marked the street construction on their corner. “I’ll bet the El Vado Motel owner will be glad when those barrels are gone from in front of his place.”

Father and son were to stay at the El Vado, where M had made reservations. The El Vado, cheaper by far than the AAA Monterey, less expensive, but very decent, as the new East Indian owner assured M over the phone. And she was pleasantly surprised by the neatness and attractiveness of the decor when she went there to make an advance payment for the room.

“Why is Oliver coming to visit us?” she asked after she negotiated the left turn safely into the multipronged entrance to New York Avenue.

“Custom. The thing to do. To see his grandma, obviously.”

“Not his grandpa?”

“No. You love him. The best we can ever do is understand each other, and I don’t believe there’s that much time.”

And when they got home, and began unloading purchases from plastic and paper bags, and spreading items on the kitchen table, he saw what M had bought by way of drugs, his poor wife: she had bought Valium, proprietary Valium. “Well, for Christ’s sake!” Ira exploded. “I told them I wanted generic. Jesus Christ, on top of everything else! Don’t you look at the price?”

“I’m sorry,” said M. “I just gave them my Visa card. It never occurred to me to look at the price.”

“It’s just too much!” he stormed. “You can’t take a goddamn thing for granted.”

He went to the phone and called. “This is Ira Stigman. I ordered generic Valium yesterday, didn’t I?”

“Just a minute, sir. I’ll check,” said the female voice at the other end. And after a short conference with someone else, the pharmacist, most likely, “Yes, you did.”

“What happened? I’ve got the name brand.”

“It was a mistake,” said the voice.

“Yeah?”

“You asked for generic. But when we called Dr. Bennoah to okay the prescription, he said Valium. So then we called back to find out if you could have the generic. So he said, okay, generic. They were both down on the order, and we didn’t notice you were supposed to have generic—”

The only appropriate reply that came to mind was Brooklynese: all right already. It took an act of will for him to limit himself to merely, “Yes.”

“Please bring it in, and we’ll change it,” said the voice.

“Thanks.” He set down the cordless phone on the typing table opposite the monitor, got up, went back into the kitchen, and recounted his dialogue for M’s benefit.

“I feel I have to go change it,” M said. “Get it off my mind. It’ll just worry me otherwise.”

“I’m afraid to have you go. I’m afraid of compounding mistakes into worse. You be careful.”

He waited uneasily until she returned, about a half hour later. “Safely back,” she called cheerfully from the rear door.

“Thank goodness.” He waited until she came into the kitchen. “Big difference in price, wasn’t there?”

“Over twelve dollars. No wonder they had that notice on the back of the prescription telling you how much you saved. They meant you saved by buying the generic.”

“They make out a Visa credit slip for the difference?”

“No, they gave me cash.”

“They did? That’s a new one.”

“That’s what they did. Oh, I’m so dry. It’s the excitement. I’ve got to have a drink of something: herb tea.”

“And I’d better take half a Percocet, and get over this goddamn depression.”

“Perk up with a Percocet.” She reached a long arm to the shelf in the cabinet over the sink: a long arm in a blue knit sleeve with white and red stripes, of a knit shirt striped the same way. Ivory-gray hair with a gray fillet around it, a small yellow comb in back. In front, under her distinguished brow, dark, thick-framed glasses to conceal the folds under her eyes. With her, age took its toll in folds, rather than wrinkles.

While she set the splotched copper kettle over the gas flame, always too high — that’s why the copper kettle was splotched: she roasted it — he took out a Percocet tablet from the small vial he kept on the wooden tray of his medications, snapped the tablet in half down the cleavage line. “Only two things in this world are worth a damn: love and a sense of creating something worthwhile.” There was still a little cold coffee left in the cup on the table to down the half tablet with. “I’m going back to the computer.”

Where the time went? he thought as he crossed diagonally, the darkened path on the buff carpet, entered the hallway to his study: you will ask. . a year hence. . ten years hence. . just as others continually ask: where did the time go? Where did the time go? Not if you had a hundred secretaries, a thousand amanuenses, could you keep track of where the time went, act by act, each within its moment, glissando. If anyone asks — he sat down before the blue-dark monitor — tell ’em time went thataway. .