Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Is it All-Souls?” asked Dennis, who never looked at a calendar any more. What’s a day, more or less? “It is not,” said Rosaleen, “draw up your chair now.” Dennis made another guess it was Christmas, and Rosaleen said it was a better day than Christmas, even. “I can’t think what,” said Dennis, looking at the glossy baked goose. “It’s nobody’s birthday that I mind.” Rosaleen lifted the curtain of the corner shelves and brought out a cake like a mound of new snow blooming with candles. “Count them and see what day is this, will you?” she urged him. Dennis counted them with a waggling forefinger. “So it is, Rosaleen, so it is.” They went on bandying words. It had slipped his mind entirely. Rosaleen wanted to know when hadn’t it slipped his mind? For all he ever thought of it, they might never have had a wedding day at all. “That’s not so,” said Dennis. “I mind well I married you. It’s the date that slips me.”

“You might as well be English,” said Rosaleen, “you might just as well.” She glanced at the clock, and reminded him it was twenty-five years ago that morning at ten o’clock, and tonight the very hour they had sat down to their first married dinner together. Dennis thought maybe it was telling people what to eat and then watching them eat it all those years that had taken away his wish for food. “You know I can’t eat cake,” he said. “It upsets my stomach.”

Rosaleen felt sure her cake wouldn’t upset the stomach of a nursing child. Dennis knew better, any kind of cake sat on him like a stone. While the argument went on, they ate nearly all the goose which fairly melted on the tongue, and finished with wedges of cake and floods of tea, and Dennis had to admit he hadn’t felt better in years. He looked at her sitting across the table from him and thought she was a very fine woman, noticed again her red hair and yellow eyelashes and big arms and strong big teeth, and wondered what she thought of him now he was no human good to her. Here he was, all gone, and he had been so for years, and he felt guilt sometimes before Rosaleen, who couldn’t always understand how there comes a time when a man is finished, and there is no more to be done that way. Rosaleen poured out two small glasses of homemade cherry brandy. “I could feel like dancing itself this night, Dennis,” she told him. “Do you remember the first time we met in Sligo Hall with the band playing?” She gave him another glass of brandy and took one herself and leaned over with her eyes shining as if she was telling him something he had never heard before.

“I remember a boy in Ireland was a great step-dancer, the best, and he was wild about me and I was a devil to him. Now what makes a girl like that, Dennis? He was a fine match, too, all the girls were glad of a chance with him, but I wasn’t. He said to me a thousand times, ‘Rosaleen, why won’t ye dance with me just once?’ And I’d say, ‘Ye’ve plenty to dance with ye without my wasting my time.’ And so it went for the summer long with him not dancing at all and everybody plaguing the living life out of him, till in the end I danced with him. Afterwards he walked home with me and a crowd of them, and there was a heaven full of stars and the dogs barking far off. Then I promised to keep steady with him, and was sorry for it the minute I promised. I was like that. We used to be the whole day getting ready for the dances, washing our hair and curling it and trying on our dresses and trimming them, laughing fit to kill about the boys and making up things to say to them. When my sister Honora was married they took me for the bride, Dennis, with my white dress ruffled to the heels and my hair with a wreath. Everybody drank my health for the belle of the ball, and said I would surely be the next bride. Honora said for me to save my blushes or I’d have none left for my own wedding. She was always jealous, Dennis, she’s jealous of me to this day, you know that.”

“Maybe so,” said Dennis.

“There’s no maybe about it,” said Rosaleen. “But we had grand times together when we was little. I mind the time when my great-grandfather was ninety years old and on his deathbed. We watched by turns the night—”

“And he was a weary time on it,” said Dennis, to show his interest. He was so sleepy he could hardly hold up his head.

“He was,” said Rosaleen, “so this night Honora and I were watching, and we were yawning our hearts out of us, for there had been a great ball the night before. Our mother told us, ‘Feel his feet from time to time, and when you feel the chill rising, you’ll know he’s near the end. He can’t last out the night,’ she said, ‘but stay by him.’ So there we were drinking tea and laughing together in whispers to keep awake, and the old man lying there with his chin propped on the quilt. ‘Wait a minute,’ says Honora, and felt his feet. ‘They’re getting cold,’ she says, and went on telling me what she had said to Shane at the ball, how he was jealous of Terence and asks her can he trust her out of his sight. And Honora says to Shane, ‘No, you cannot,’ and oh, but he was roaring mad with anger! Then Honora stuffs her fist in her mouth to keep down the giggles. I felt great-grandfather’s feet and they was like clay to the knees, and I says, ‘Maybe we’d better call somebody’; but Honora says, ‘Oh, there’s a power of him left to get cold yet!’ So we poured out tea and began to comb and braid each other’s hair, and fell to whispering our secrets and laughing more. Then Honora put her hand under the quilt and said, ‘Rosaleen, his stomach’s cold, it’s gone he must be by now.’ Then great-grandfather opened the one eye full of rage and says, ‘It’s nothing of the kind, and to hell with ye!’ We let out a great scream, and the others came flying in, and Honora cried out, ‘Oh, he’s dead and gone surely, God rest him!’ And would you believe it, it was so. He was gone. And while the old women were washing him Honora and me sat down laughing and crying in the one breath… and it was six months later to the very day great-grandfather came to me in the dream, the way I told you, and he was still after Honora and me for laughing in the watch. ‘I’ve a great mind to thrash ye within an inch of your life,’ he told me, ‘only I’m wailing in Purgatory this minute for them last words to ye. Go and have an extra Mass said for the repose of me soul because it’s by your misconduct I’m here at all,’ he says to me. ‘Get a move on now,’ he said. ‘And be damned to ye!’”

“And you woke up in a sweat,” said Dennis, “and was off to Mass before daybreak.” Rosaleen nodded her head. “Ah, Dennis, if I’d set my heart on that boy I need never have left Ireland. And when I think how it all came out with him. With me so far away, him struck on the head and left for dead in a ditch.”

“You dreamed that,” said Dennis.

“Surely I dreamed it, and it is so. When I was crying and crying over him”—Rosaleen was proud of her crying—“I didn’t know then what good luck I would find here.”

Dennis couldn’t think what good luck she was talking about. “Let it pass, then,” said Rosaleen. She went to the corner shelves again. “The man today was selling pipes,” she said, “and I bought the finest he had.” It was an imitation meerschaum pipe carved with a crested lion glaring out of a jungle and it was as big as a man’s fist. Dennis said, “You must have paid a pretty penny for that.” “It doesn’t concern ye,” said Rosaleen. “I wanted to give ye a pipe.” Dennis said, “It’s grand carving, I wonder if it’ll draw at all.” He filled it and lit it and said there wasn’t much taste on a new one, for he was tired holding it up. “It is such a pipe as my father had once,” Rosaleen said to encourage him, “and in no time it was fit to knock ye off your feet, so this’ll be a fine pipe some day.”