Too Much Happiness (22 page)

“Well, have you got Chinese checkers in the house?”

Roxanne directed this question at Old Mrs. Crozier, who first said she had no idea, then wondered if there might be a board in a drawer of the dining room buffet.

So I was sent down to look and came back with the board and the jar of marbles.

Roxanne set the board up over Mr. Crozier’s legs, and she and I and Mr. Crozier played, Old Mrs. Crozier saying she had never understood the game or been able to keep her marbles
straight. (To my surprise she seemed to offer this as a joke.) Roxanne might squeal when she made a move or groan whenever somebody jumped over one of her marbles, but she was careful never to disturb the patient. She held her body still and set her marbles down like feathers. I tried to learn to do the same, because she would widen her eyes warningly at me if I didn’t. All without losing her dimple.

I remembered Young Mrs. Crozier, Sylvia, saying to me in the car that her husband did not welcome conversation. It tired him out, she said, and when he was tired he could become irritable. So I thought, If ever there was a time for him to become irritable, it is now. Being forced to play a silly game on his deathbed, when you could feel his fever in the sheets.

But Sylvia must have been wrong. He had developed greater patience and courtesy than she was perhaps aware of. With inferior people—Roxanne was surely an inferior person—he had made himself tolerant, gentle. When all he must want to do was lie there and meditate on the pathways of his life and gear up for his future.

Roxanne patted sweat off his forehead, saying, “Don’t get excited, you haven’t won yet.”

“Roxanne,” he said. “Roxanne. Do you know whose name that was, Roxanne?”

“Hmm?” she said, and I broke in. I couldn’t help it.

“It was Alexander the Great’s wife’s name.”

My head was a magpie’s nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

“Is that so?” said Roxanne. “And who was that supposed to be? Great Alexander?”

I realized something when I looked at Mr. Crozier at that moment. Something shocking, saddening.

He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.

·  ·  ·

On the first day she had worn shorts, as I did, but the next time and always after that Roxanne wore a dress of some stiff and shiny light green material. You could hear it rustle as she ran up the stairs. She brought a fleecy pad for Mr. Crozier, so he would not develop bedsores. She was dissatisfied with the arrangement of his bedclothes, always, had to put them to rights. But however she scolded, her movements never irritated him, and she made him admit to feeling more comfortable afterwards.

She was never at a loss. Sometimes she came equipped with riddles. Or jokes. Some of the jokes were what my mother would call smutty and would not allow around our house, except when they came from certain of my father’s relatives who had practically no other kind of conversation.

These jokes usually started off with serious-sounding but absurd questions.

Did you hear about the nun who went shopping for a meat grinder?

Did you hear what the bride and groom went and ordered for dessert on their wedding night?

The answers always coming with a double meaning, so that whoever told the joke could pretend to be shocked and accuse the audience of having dirty minds.

And after she had got everybody used to her telling these jokes Roxanne went on to the sort of jokes I didn’t believe my mother knew existed, often involving sex with sheep or hens or milking machines.

“Isn’t that awful?” she always said at the finish. She said she wouldn’t know this stuff if her husband didn’t bring it home from the garage.

The fact that Old Mrs. Crozier snickered shocked me as much as the jokes themselves. I thought that she maybe didn’t get the point but simply enjoyed listening to whatever Roxanne
said. She sat with that chewed-in yet absentminded smile on her face as if she’d been given a present she knew she would like, even if she hadn’t got the wrapping off it yet.

Mr. Crozier didn’t laugh, but he never laughed, really. He raised his eyebrows, pretending to scold, to find Roxanne outrageous but endearing all the same. This could have been good manners, or gratitude for all her efforts, whatever they might be.

I myself made sure to laugh, so that Roxanne would not put me down as being full of priggish innocence.

The other thing she did, to keep things lively, was tell about her life. Coming down from some lost little town in northern Ontario to Toronto to visit her older sister, then getting a job at Eaton’s, first cleaning things up in the cafeteria, then being noticed by one of the managers because she worked fast and was always cheerful, and suddenly finding herself a salesgirl in the glove department. (I thought she made this sound something like being discovered by Warner Brothers.) And who should come in one day but Barbara Ann Scott, the skating star, who bought a pair of elbow-length white kid gloves.

Meanwhile Roxanne’s sister had so many boyfriends that she would flip a coin to see who she would go out with almost every night, and she employed Roxanne to meet the rejects regretfully at the front door of the rooming house, while she herself and her pick sneaked out the back. Roxanne said maybe that was how she had developed such a gift of the gab. And pretty soon some of the boys she met this way were taking her out on her own, instead of her sister. They did not know her real age.

“I had me a ball,” she said.

I began to understand that there were certain talkers—certain girls—whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable
and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people—people like me—who didn’t concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.

Mr. Crozier sat propped up on his pillows and looked for all the world as if he was happy. Happy just to close his eyes and let her talk, then open his eyes and find her there, like a chocolate bunny on Easter morning. And then with his eyes open follow every twitch of her candy lips and sway of her sumptuous bottom.

Old Mrs. Crozier would rock slightly back and forth in her curious state of satisfaction.

The time Roxanne spent upstairs was as long as she spent downstairs, giving the massage. I wondered if she was being paid. If she wasn’t, how could she afford to take the time? And who could be paying her but Old Mrs. Crozier?

Why?

To keep her stepson happy and comfortable? I doubted it.

To keep herself entertained in a curious way?

One afternoon when Roxanne had left his room, Mr. Crozier said he felt thirstier than usual. I went downstairs to get him some water from the pitcher that was always in the refrigerator. Roxanne was packing up to go home.

“I never meant to stay so late,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to run into that schoolteacher.”

I didn’t understand for a moment.

“You know. Syl-vi-a. She’s not crazy about me either, is she? She ever mention me when she drives you home?”

I said that Sylvia had never mentioned Roxanne’s name to me, during any of our drives. But why should she?

“Dorothy says she doesn’t know how to handle him. She says I make him a lot happier than what she does. Dorothy says that. I wouldn’t be surprised she even told her that to her face.”

I thought of how Sylvia ran upstairs into her husband’s room every afternoon when she got home, before she even spoke to me or her mother-in-law, her face flushed with eagerness and desperation. I wanted to say something about that—I wanted somehow to defend her, but I didn’t know how. And people as confident as Roxanne often seemed to get the better of me, even if it was only by not listening.

“You sure she never says anything about me?”

I said again that no, she didn’t. “She’s tired when she gets home.”

“Yeah. Everybody’s tired. Some just learn to act like they aren’t.”

I did say something then, to balk her. “I quite like her.”

“You qwat like her?” mocked Roxanne.

Playfully, sharply, she jerked at a strand of the bangs I had recently cut for myself.

“You ought to do something decent with your hair.”

Dorothy says.

If Roxanne wanted admiration, which was her nature, what was it Dorothy wanted? I had a feeling there was mischief stirring, but I could not pin it down. Maybe it was just a desire to have Roxanne in the house, her liveliness in the house, double time.

Midsummer passed. Water was low in the wells. The sprinkler truck stopped coming and some stores had put up sheets of what looked like yellow cellophane in their windows to keep their goods from fading. Leaves were spotty, grass dry.

Old Mrs. Crozier kept her garden man hoeing, day after day. That’s what you do in the dry weather, hoe and hoe to bring up any moisture that you can find in the ground underneath.

Summer school at the college would end after the second week of August, and then Sylvia Crozier would be home every day.

Mr. Crozier was still glad to see Roxanne, but he often fell asleep. He could fall asleep without letting his head fall back, during one of her jokes or anecdotes. Then after a moment he would be awake, he would ask where he was.

“Right here, you sleepy noodle. You’re supposed to be paying attention to me. I should bat you one. Or how ’bout I try tickling you instead?”

Anybody could see how he was failing. There were hollows in his cheeks like an old man’s and the light shone through the tops of his ears as if they were not flesh but plastic. (Though we didn’t say “plastic” then; we said “celluloid.”)

The last day of my working there, Sylvia’s last day of teaching, was a massage day. Sylvia had to leave early for the college, because of some ceremony, so I walked across town, arriving when Roxanne was already there. Old Mrs. Crozier was also in the kitchen, and they both looked at me as if they had forgotten I was coming, as if I had interrupted them.

“I ordered them specially,” said Old Mrs. Crozier.

She must have meant the macaroons sitting in the baker’s box on the table.

“Yeah, but I told you,” said Roxanne. “I can’t eat that stuff. Not no way no how.”

“I sent Hervey down to the bakeshop to get them.”

Hervey was the name of our neighbor, her garden man.

“Okay let Hervey eat them. I’m not kidding, I break out something awful.”

“I thought we’d have a treat, like something special,” said Old Mrs. Crozier. “Seeing it’s the last day we’ve got before—”

“Last day before she parks her butt here permanently, yeah, I know. Doesn’t help me breaking out like a spotted hyena.”

Who was it whose butt was parked permanently?

Sylvia’s. Sylvia.

Old Mrs. Crozier was wearing a beautiful black silk wrapper,
with water lilies and geese on it. She said, “No chance of having anything special with her around. You’ll see.”

“So let’s get going and get some time today. Don’t bother about this stuff, it’s not your fault. I know you got it to be nice.”

“I know you got it to be nice,” imitated Old Mrs. Crozier in a mean mincing voice, and then they both looked at me, and Roxanne said, “Pitcher’s where it always is.”

I took Mr. Crozier’s pitcher of water out of the fridge. It occurred to me that they could offer me a golden macaroon out of those sitting in the box, but apparently it did not occur to them.

I expected him to be lying back on the pillows with his eyes closed, but Mr. Crozier was wide awake.

“I’ve been waiting,” he said, and took a breath. “For you to get here,” he said. “I want to ask you—do something for me. Will you?”

I said sure.

“Keep it a secret?”

I had been worried that he might ask me to help him to the commode that had recently appeared in his room, but surely that would not have to be a secret.

Yes.

He told me to go to the bureau across from his bed and open the left-hand little drawer, and see if I could find a key there.

I did so. I found a large heavy old-fashioned key.

He wanted me to go out of this room and shut the door and lock it. Then hide the key in a safe place, perhaps in the pocket of my shorts.

I was not to tell anybody what I had done.

I was not to let anybody know I had the key until his wife came home, and then I was to give it to her. Did I understand?

Okay.

He thanked me.

Okay.

All the time he was talking to me there was a film of sweat on his face and his eyes were bright as if he had a fever.

“Nobody is to get in.”

“Nobody to get in,” I repeated.

“Not my stepmother or—Roxanne. Just my wife.”

I locked the door from the outside and put the key in the pocket of my shorts. But then I was afraid it could be seen through the light cotton material, so I went downstairs and into the back parlor and hid it between the pages of
I Promessi Sposi
. I knew that Roxanne and Old Mrs. Crozier would not hear me because the massage was going on, and Roxanne was using her professional voice.

“I got my work cut out for me getting these knots out of you today.”

And I heard Old Mrs. Crozier’s voice, full of her new displeasure.

“… punching harder than you normally do.”

“Well I gotta.”

I was headed upstairs when some further thoughts came to me.

If he and not I had locked the door—which was evidently what he wanted the others to think—and I had been sitting on the top step as usual, I would certainly have heard him and called out and roused the others in the house. So I went back down and sat on the bottom step of the front stairs, a place from which it could have been possible for me not to hear a thing.

The massage seemed to be brisk and businesslike today; they were evidently not teasing and making jokes. Pretty soon I could hear Roxanne running up the back stairs.