Jane Smiley - Some Luck

“If she doesn’t stop after this one, I will,” said Rosanna.

“When’s it due?”

“Lois is February, so Lillian is January, and Andy is March.”

“I keep expecting Henry to pop in and say he’s found the girl.”

“In the library,” said Rosanna. “Sleeping on a shelf and waiting for the prince to kiss her, and Henry’s the only person to enter that section in a hundred years.”

“Sounds about right,” said Walter.

So it was a pleasant conversation. A bit later, Claire came down and asked if she could play the tune she was practicing on the recorder, and she did — Rosanna barely made out that she was getting at “Amazing Grace,” and then there was another one by Bach, and she and Walter clapped. The recital, Claire informed them, was in two weeks. Then Walter finished reading the rest of the Saturday Evening Post that had Eisenhower on the cover, and Rosanna finished the row she was knitting in the sweater she was making for Lois’s baby — she had already finished the one for Lillian’s baby, and would do Andy’s next.

They went up the steep stairs. Joe had put a railing on either side, and they both held on. Walter seemed to haul himself from step to step. Yes, she knew she was fifty-two and a half, and that made him fifty-seven and a half. Up was easier than down — some days her right knee hurt so that she had to bob down the steps, holding the railing and sort of lurching right and left. No running up and down looking for this little thing and that anymore.

In the bedroom, Rosanna sat on the seat of her dressing table and took the pins out of her hair, then brushed it and braided it loosely for the night. Walter sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his feet and separating his toes. Then he put his hand behind his neck and held it there while he opened his mouth and twisted his head, right, left, up, down. Then he blew his nose. Well, maybe there was a reason her mother locked her door, and it had only to do with the sad noises that old married people made. At least they had their, or most of their, teeth. Rosanna’s grandmother (not Oma, but Grandma Charlotta Kleinfelder) had an itinerant dentist take out all her teeth, because they were too much trouble, and she ate soups for the rest of her life.

“Oh my,” said Rosanna. She turned out her little light and stood up. Funny to think that for years she had gotten ready for bed by kerosene. Those lamps they had used were lined up in the barn, as if they might use them again. “Someday,” she went on, “this house will have an upstairs bathroom.”

“We can move our things down to the boys’ old room.”

“Chilly in there,” said Rosanna.

“Chilly in here,” said Walter.

They did what they did every night, which was roll toward the lowest part of the mattress, the center, and arrange themselves as comfortably as they could. Every night, Rosanna swore she was going to buy a new mattress, and every day, she forgot about it. She pulled up the sheet, and then the comforter she had made. Walter had on a nightshirt, and she could feel his hairy calves and bony feet move over and clamp her inside her flannel nightgown. It wasn’t yet time for bedsocks, but soon it would be. She pulled the sleeves of her nightgown down over her hands and pushed her head into the feather pillow. It was cold. Walter began to snore, and she shifted him onto his side.

When he came under her nightgown, it was in the usual way — more as if he was looking for warmth than looking for satisfaction — but as she rose to wakefulness, she realized that he was trying to kiss her, an unusual thing, and that his member was stiff, pressing against her side and then her thigh. The room was so dark that the moon must have set. She said, “Walter! Walter! Are you awake? You’re lying on my arm.”

He continued to lift her nightgown, and then he kissed her smack on the lips, a pushy but cushiony kiss, and, well, she reciprocated, which just made him worse. Moments later, he had her nightgown unbuttoned and over her head, and she had to disentangle her own arms. But she wasn’t so cold anymore, and neither was he. She pressed her breasts and stomach against his hairy chest and shoulders, and it was comforting, as it always had been. His hand came around and opened at the small of her back. He kept kissing her. He might or might not be awake. Sometimes he insisted that he was much more passionate in his sleep than awake, though why he would tell this story, Rosanna didn’t know. She lifted her leg up over his hip, and he found her and pressed into her. Now he was kissing the base of her neck, where it met the shoulder. Rosanna tingled. The hollow in the mattress seemed to deepen enough for them to break through and hit the floor, but it didn’t, though the bedstead creaked and complained.

It went on for a minute or two. At the end, Walter was coughing with the exertion, and finally had to sit up and take a sip of water. Rosanna put on her nightgown again and smoothed it over her hips and legs. She handed Walter his nightshirt, which had draped itself over the headboard. She straightened the pillows and the quilt. Walter had stopped coughing and blew out a large breath. “Oh me,” she said.

When they’d rearranged themselves in the center of the bed, and Walter had fallen asleep, Rosanna yawned a couple of times and then, secretly, just for herself, touched her husband’s forehead, gently, affectionately, amused at that expression about making her bed and lying in it. Yes, indeed. It was a strange thing, eight or nine hours day after day, every day they were alive. So many things that took place during the day drew them apart, and then there were these nights in this room, this very bed, warm and almost wordless, that had kept them together.

ELOISE AND ROSA SHOWED UP in Iowa City the morning Henry had a big exam in his Eighteenth Century Novel class, and he was so busy finishing Clarissa (fifteen hundred pages) that he hadn’t thought much about either cleaning up his room or where he could take Eloise and Rosa for lunch before they drove him back to the farm for Christmas break. Clarissa , of course, had not been assigned, nor had The History of Sir Charles Grandison —only Pamela —but Henry enjoyed rounding out his exam essay on Pamela by referring with casual savoir faire to the other two novels, and he made sure to refer to a passage at the end of Clarissa , just so Professor Macquart would know that he had read the whole thing. He had also, of course, read many other unassigned works of the eighteenth century, including Justine and Juliette . And all the boys read Fanny Hill , even if they had no idea what they were reading. He rather liked eighteenth-century literature, though it was awfully easy to read, and more suited to enjoyment than to scholarship. His preferred text was the type that was missing a lot of lines, one where you had to infer what the faceless author might have been getting at rather than having it all sitting there before you. And he liked poetry more than prose.

Rosa was at college, too. Maybe she was at Berkeley. Wherever it was, it was someplace enviable, but at least it wasn’t Harvard. He hadn’t seen Rosa in four years or more, not since they came that Thanksgiving — Andy’s first Thanksgiving, when the house was jammed with people and he had to sleep on the sofa so Frank and Andy could have his room. And so it was surprising to see her coming toward him down North Clinton and then cutting across the lawn in front of Schaeffer Hall (where he had just taken his exam). That would be Eloise beside her, talking, of course, just like Mama, but taller than Mama, and better dressed — Eloise waved when she saw him. Rosa was slender, in slacks and boots and a jacket like a navy peacoat. She was dark; her black hair fell in a thick wave down her back, as if she didn’t care a thing about it. She had a long, thin face and a large, mobile mouth, and was eye level with him, and he was considered to be tall (though not as tall as Frank — that wasn’t allowed in their family). Eloise put her arms around him and said, “Darling Henry! You are so grown up now!”