Terms of Endearment (43 page)

There was a minute of horribly tense silence, in which Flap and Emma held themselves in and Patsy pretended to look out the window. They all pretended to look out the window. In order to have something to do Emma got up and made some more tea, which the others accepted silently. Patsy was wondering if she left a scent. The notion was slightly repellent but slightly sexy. She opened her purse, got a comb, and began to comb her hair. She was imagining marriage, something she often did. In her vision marriage was mostly a house, beautifully furnished and appointed, like Mrs. Greenway’s, in which she lived with a neat, polite young man. She could never envision the young man very clearly, but insofar as she saw him at all she saw him as neat, blond, and kind. He certainly wouldn’t be a sloppy, sullen, sarcastic person like Flap Horton.

Flap only noticed that Patsy’s arms weren’t chubby like his wife’s.

Emma, well aware that she was everything her husband no longer wanted, was chewing the lemon from her tea and looking at the same hot green lawn she had looked at every day for many months. She had stopped feeling hostile. What she felt was that it would be nice not to be pregnant anymore.

Patsy stopped combing her hair the minute she noticed that Flap was watching her. Actually she felt rather put off by both the Hortons. There was something violent in their attitude toward one another that she didn’t like and didn’t want to think about. Probably it had to do with sex, something else she didn’t want to think about. In her fantasies of marriage sex was seldom more than a flicker on the screen of her mind. It had not happened to her very many times yet, and she was not sure about it at all.

“Why are we all sitting here staring?” Flap asked. Long silences made him uncomfortable.

“Because there’s nothing else to do,” Emma said. “I interrupted a poetry reading and made everyone uncomfortable.”

“Don’t apologize,” Patsy said.

“I hadn’t.”

“No, but you were about to. You have a tendency to assume the sins of the world.”

“Let her assume them,” Flap said. “She commits enough of them.”

“I’m leaving,” Patsy said. “I don’t know why you got her pregnant if you didn’t intend to be nice to her.”

“These things happen,” Flap said.

Patsy was hyperventilating, as she always did when she was upset. “Boy, they’re not happening to me,” she said. She smiled at Emma and left.

“We made her cry,” Flap said the minute she was out of earshot.

“So what?” Emma said. “She cries constantly. She’s just the crying sort.”

“Unlike you,” Flap said. “You would never want to give anyone the satisfaction of having affected you that much.”

“No,” Emma said. “I’m made of stern stuff. The fact that my husband lusts after my best friend isn’t going to get my goat. Maybe if you try real hard you can seduce her while I’m in the hospital having the baby.”

“Oh, shut up,” Flap said. “I was just reading her poetry. Her mind could stand some improving.”

Emma flung the tea glass. It missed Flap and hit the wall behind him. “Would you like a divorce?” she said. “Then you could devote all your time to improving her mind.”

Flap stared at her. He had passed from fantasies of escape with Patsy into the strange state of contentment that sometimes came with the realization that he really didn’t have to do what he had been fantasizing. Before he could even sort out his wishes a tea glass had sailed past his head and his wife was looking at him out of deep, unfathomable green eyes.

“That was an asshole thing to do,” he said. He had a sinking feeling. There was never any knowing what would happen.

“Would you like a divorce?” Emma repeated.

“Of course not. Will you try to be rational for a moment?”

Emma was satisfied. She would have liked to throw the table. “Don’t ever talk to me about improving her mind again,” she said. “That wasn’t what you were thinking about.”

“It’s fun to talk about literature to someone who listens,” Flap said. “You don’t listen.”

“I don’t even like literature anymore,” Emma said. “All I’m really interested in is clothes and sex, just like my mother. Unfortunately I can’t afford clothes.”

“You seem so scornful,” Flap said. He stopped trying to argue and just sat not looking at her, presenting an entirely passive surface. Passivity was his only defense at such times. With no anger of his own, he was no match for his wife. Emma saw what he was doing and got up and went and showered. When she came out Flap was sitting on the couch reading the same book he had been reading Patsy. Her tension had drained away; she no longer felt hostile. Flap wore the meek look he often wore when he had been made to feel guilty or had been bested in a fight.

“Stop looking that way,” she said. “I’m not mad at you anymore.”

“I know, but you’re looming over me,” he said. “You really are immense.”

Emma nodded. Outside, the evening had begun, and the spaces between the trees were already dark. Emma went to latch the screen door. In her mind there was only one certainty: that she would soon have a child. Its weight pulled at her as she stood and watched the shadows in her yard.

2.

A
CROSS HOUSTON
, in the stinking, oily evening air of Lyons Avenue, Emma’s greatest champion, Rosie Dunlup, was standing at her own front door saying goodbye to a life, if it was a life, if it had ever been a life. Rosie wasn’t sure. All she planned to carry away of it, though, was what she had in the two cheap suitcases that were sitting on her tiny porch. The children weren’t there.
Once again Lou Ann and Little Buster had been dispatched to their aunt’s, where there were so many children underfoot that two more wouldn’t matter, not for a few days anyway, and in a few days Rosie planned to be settled back in Shreveport, Louisiana, the city of her birth.

She scratched around in her purse and found her housekey but she had no real desire to lock her house and in fact would have liked to walk away and leave it open. The washing machine she had saved so long to buy was about the only thing in it she wanted that she couldn’t get in the two suitcases. It was a poor house and most of the furniture was broken; it had never been much good anyway. Leave it to whoever wants it, Rosie thought. Let the Negroes and Mexicans and thieving restless street kids that she had spent twenty years locking out come in and take what they pleased. Let them gut it, for all she cared; she didn’t mean to come back and try to make a life amid such cheap objects, not anymore. She was finished with Lyons Avenue and all that went with it, and in fact it would have suited her fine to see someone drive up with a house-moving rig and a few jacks and steal the house itself, leaving nothing but a space and some dirt and a few pieces of junk in the back yard to show where her life had been lived. It had been a junky life anyway, Rosie thought and it would serve Royce right if someone just drove up and stole the house itself.

But habit was strong; even though she didn’t want anything that was left in the house and never meant to return to it again, she searched until she found her key and locked the front door. Then she picked up her suitcases and walked over to the bus stop by Pioneer Number 16. Kate was out sweeping up the day’s debris to make room for the debris that evening would bring.

“Going on your vacation?” she asked, noticing the suitcases.

“Yeah, permanent,” Rosie said.

“Aw,” Kate said. “Stood it long enough, have you?”

“That’s it,” Rosie said.

The news embarrassed Kate, who couldn’t think of a thing else to say. It was obviously a momentous event, but as it happened, her mind was really elsewhere—specifically, it was on the fact
that her lover wanted her to get a tattoo. Her lover was named Dub. She didn’t want a tattoo, but he was being persistent and had even agreed to let her get it on her upper arm instead of her behind, which is where he originally hoped to see it. All it was supposed to say was Hot Momma, inside a heart; Dub’s would say Big Daddy, inside another. She had promised him a decision that evening, in fact; and with that on her mind and the drive-in to run, it was hard to work up much of anything to say to Rosie, even if she
was
leaving forever.

“One of these days, after it’s done too late, he’s gonna wisht he hadn’t been such a fool, honey,” she said finally, just as Rosie stepped onto her bus.

Kate waved, but Rosie didn’t see it. The bus had nobody in it but six tough-looking white kids. They stared at Rosie insolently and she sat behind the small barricade of two cheap suitcases and thought how funny it would be if after twenty-seven years on Lyons Avenue she suddenly got raped and murdered just as she was leaving. Such things often happened, she knew. The fact that she had managed to live so long in such a dangerous neighborhood without being raped was only an indication of how unattractive she was anyway. Plenty of people had been raped right on her own block, including a woman ten years older than her. The youths stared and Rosie looked away.

She got out at the Continental Trailways station, bought a ticket to Shreveport, and then sat silently by her suitcases. A lot of people in the bus station were sitting just as silently as she was. The people who rode buses, it seemed, were mostly like herself—too beaten down to have much to say.

What had beaten Rosie down was another month of Royceless life, during which nothing at all had happened except that Little Buster had at one point managed to wander into a wasp nest. He had been bitten all over and had scratched so badly that half the bites became infected. During the month that he had been gone, Royce had called only once, and that had been to tell her to be careful and not wreck the truck, since, as he put it, he might be needing it. What that meant Rosie didn’t know; when she asked him he said, “You’d argue in a sandstorm,” and hung up.

Insomnia settled on her, and her nights were filled with nothing more comforting than the sound of Little Buster bumping against his crib and moaning slightly, or of Lou Ann complaining that he’d wet his bed. Rosie tried TV, but anything of a family nature caused her to burst into tears.

She took to lingering at Aurora’s longer and longer every day, not because she had anything to do but because she didn’t want to go home. Aurora and the General were getting along happily and her house was a jolly place to be, but almost every day, on the bus ride back across Houston from the quiet palaces of River Oaks to the stews of the Fifth Ward, her spirits gradually sank. At night she had so little that she could hardly recognize herself. After keeping her fight for forty-nine years, she had finally lost it. Fortunately Little Buster and Lou Ann had a repertory of only three bedtime stories, and once Rosie had droned through one or two of them she was free to be as spiritless as she felt and to sit on her bed and sip cups of coffee most of the night. It was no life, she thought, night after night, and yet her only options were to take it or leave.

Rosie looked around the dingy bus station, in which forty or fifty people were sitting in separate silences, and reflected that the new thing about her life was that it had become sort of like the bus station—silent. She had always had plenty to say about everything; but suddenly she was finding that though she still had plenty to say she had no one to say it to. Her sister Maybelline was too married and too religious to be much help. All she ever did was quote the Bible and suggest that Rosie think of some way to get Royce to church more often. “Fine, Maybelline. All he’s ever done in church his whole life is to go to sleep and snore,” Rosie said. Maybelline had been married thirty-four years to her twenty-seven, and to the most stable man in the world, Oliver Newton Dobbs, who managed a shoe polish factory on Little York Road and had never missed a day’s work since he left the oil fields in 1932. With a man that steady there was no use talking to Maybelline about marital problems.

Nor could she talk to Aurora, in good conscience, because Aurora had already heard about her problems with Royce fifty
times, and had already advised her to divorce him. Rosie agreed that that was what she ought to do, but somehow she never quite got around to calling a lawyer. She had not told Aurora that she was leaving, or why. Aurora didn’t understand how it was to bounce across Houston every afternoon to a house on Lyons Avenue that she had never liked anyway and two kids that weren’t being raised well. Lou Ann and Little Buster were a constant reproach to her; they just weren’t getting the raising the other five kids had had. Kids deserved parents with some enthusiasm, and she no longer had much. That was why she was going home to Shreveport—maybe there, away from all thoughts of Royce and his slut, she could shake off her blues and become the enthusiastic person she had always been. It was home, after all—Shreveport—and home was supposed to count for something.

She stared at the row of telephone booths across from her and wondered if she dared call Aurora, just to let her know. If she wasn’t told something she would worry herself into a frenzy, but if she was told too soon she would just try to stop her from going. Then she thought of Emma. She didn’t feel strong enough to deal with Aurora, but dealing with Emma was no problem.

“It’s me,” she said when Emma answered the phone.

“I believe I recognize the voice,” Emma said. “What’s happening?”

“Oh, honey,” Rosie said. “I don’t know why I even called you. I’m just scared to call your momma, I guess. I got to get out of here before I go plumb crazy. I’m going home to Shreveport tonight, and I ain’t comin’ back.”

“Oh, dear,” Emma said.

“Yeah, I stay too tore up here,” Rosie said. “It ain’t fair to the kids. Royce ain’t comin’ back an’ there just ain’t a whole lot to stay for.”

“There’s us,” Emma said.

“I know, but you and your momma got your own lives to live.”

“All right, but you’re part of them,” Emma said. “How can you leave when I’m finally about to have my baby?”

“Because I’m here at the bus station an’ I got my nerve up,” Rosie said. “I might not never get it up agin.” The very sound of Emma’s voice made her want to stay. Part of her felt that it was insane to leave the few people who really cared about her, but another part felt that nothing could be more insane-making than another night on Lyons Avenue.