Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  The General started for the door, expecting to hear a great burst of opera. None came, and just before he went out he glanced back over his shoulder. Aurora was standing at the sink with her hands on her hips, smiling at him. Abruptly the General did an about-face and marched back toward her. He had heard her say several times how much she liked surprises; perhaps it was just the right time to kiss her.

  “That’s not the way to your house,” Aurora said happily. She reached behind her and turned on her water faucet, which had a hose-and-nozzle attachment for washing dishes. Just as the General reached out to grab her shoulders she sidestepped and squirted him with quite a lot of water.

  “Gotcha,” she said, and laughed loudly for the third time that morning.

  “Now you don’t look so neat,” she added.

  The General was absolutely dripping. Aurora was swishing the nozzle back and forth, getting her kitchen floor quite wet. At that moment, as if to mock him, she let out the burst of opera he had been expecting.

  “Shut up!” he yelled. “Don’t sing!” No one that he could remember had ever taken him less seriously than she did. She seemed to have no concept of order at all. The look in her eye suggested that if he tried to come any closer she wouldn’t hesitate to use her little nozzle again; but his pride was challenged and with no more hesitation he rushed in and after a brief struggle wrested the nozzle from her and squirted it at her to make her stop singing.

  Aurora kept singing anyway, despite the soaking that she was getting, indifferent to his dignity and her own. Still, the General wouldn’t relent. She had to be shown. While he was showing her she reached back and shut off the water, reducing the squirt to a drip. They were both quite wet, despite which Aurora had somehow managed to retain a certain magnificence. The General quite forgot that he was on his way home; he quite forgot his missing driver.

  “What’s the meaning of this? What’s the meaning?” he said. “Let’s go—I want to see your Renoir.”

  “Ho, ho, I bet you do,” Aurora said. “Why this euphemism?” She flipped a little water at him. Her hair seemed filled with dew, and she was clearly about to laugh at him again.

  “What?” he said, made suddenly cautious by the realization that he was standing on a slick floor.

  “Yes, you prude,” Aurora said, flicking more drops of water at him. She shook a bit of the water out of her hair. Then she shook the nozzle at him, rather suggestively. She even made it balance upright for a moment, but then it fell and dangled from her hand.

  “Goodness, I hope this isn’t a portent, Hector,” she said with a wicked gleam in her eye. “But then with your great interest in art I don’t suppose it would matter much to you. Show me your Renoir indeed!”

  “But that’s what you said the other time,” the General said. His anger was gone, his passion confused, and he was beginning to feel helpless, in the main.

  “Yes, but I’m well known for my flare for metaphor,” Aurora said. “I know how sensitive you military men are. I’m careful not to put things crudely. You won’t find me calling a nozzle a nozzle, I can tell you that.”

  “Stop it!” the General said. “Stop talking! I wish you lived in Tunisia!”

  “That’s the most original thing you’ve said all day, Hector,” Aurora said. “It’s amazing the things that pop out when your back is against the wall. Keep yelling. You’ve almost succeeded in reawakening my interest.”

  “No,” the General said. “You don’t mean a word you say. You just mock me.”

  “Well, another nice thing about you is that your face isn’t flabby,” Aurora said. “It’s too bad you chose to stop making advances just at the moment when my interests were beginning their recovery.”

  “It’s because of the goddamn floor,” the General said. “You’ve wet it. You know how I hate wet floors. I could fall down and break my hip. You know how easily hips break at my age.”

  Aurora shrugged lightly and gave him a friendly, taunting smile. “I never said we had to stand here,” she said. “I no longer feel like an omelette.” She picked up the large tray of fruits and exotic leftovers that she had already prepared and, looking him in the eye, walked straight across the wettest part of the floor, making loud squishy splats with her bare feet. She went right on out of the kitchen, without once looking back. She didn’t ask the General to follow, nor did she forbid it.

  In a minute, not very confidently, the General followed.

  CHAPTER XV

  1.

  THE MORNING after the General had his annual checkup was, from Aurora’s point of view, much like any other morning, only better. It was sunny and warm, but then it was usually sunny and warm. What made it better was that the General’s man from Brooks Brothers was in town. That meant that the General had to spend the morning getting fitted for new suits and new shirts. With much difficulty Aurora had got him to promise to branch out a little from his beloved charcoal gray. Since the General was tied up downtown, Aurora found herself with a whole morning free, a state of things that had become increasingly rare since the change in their lives.

  She meant to take full advantage of the luxury and spend the morning as she had once spent all mornings, lying in her window nook talking on the phone, paying bills, and reading the array of magazines she had managed to accumulate. She rushed the General so that he scalded his tongue on his coffee and went off in a grumpy mood. Aurora didn’t care. All she wanted was a little peace and quiet, a few hours to herself.

  “It’s amazing how omnipresent men become,” she said when Rosie came in to begin to clean the bedroom. Since Royce’s return Rosie had worn a pinched look, and she was moving nervously around the bedroom looking more pinched than ever.

  “How what?” she asked.

  “Omnipresent,” Aurora said, looking up from her Vogue. “You know, once you give them the slightest privilege they always seem to be around.”

  “That’s the God’s truth,” Rosie said. “That’s just what’s driving me crazy. You ought to have one with a broke ankle sometime.”

  “I don’t think I’d live with one who had anything broken,” Aurora said. “I’ve always kept myself in working order, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t. How is Royce?”

  “Worst and worst,” Rosie said. “It’s getting to me, bad. All he does is lie on his back and drink beer and think up dirtiness to bother me with.”

  “Dirtiness?”

  “It ain’t fit to talk about,” Rosie said. “That slut’s made a prevert out of my husband, that’s all.”

  Rosie was staring into the bedroom closet, as if she thought General Scott might be hiding in it. She had a disgusted expression on her face.

  “The General’s not in there, if that’s what you’re worrying about,” Aurora said. “I got rid of him for once.”

  “I know the General better than to think he’d hide in a closet,” Rosie said.

  “Well, it’s pervert, not prevert and I don’t see how Royce could be one,” Aurora said. “Not if I follow what you’re referring to.”

  “I may not know how to pronounce it, but I know it when I see it waved in my face,” Rosie said fiercely, turning an accusatory eye on her boss.

  “Don’t glare at me. I’m merely trying to help. It doesn’t do to bottle these things up, you know. I never bottle things up and I’m certainly a lot happier than you seem to be.”

  “Talk’s cheap,” Rosie said.

  “Some talk. It can also be quite valuable. If you won’t talk to me I’d like to know who you expect to talk to.”

  “Nobody,” Rosie said. Tight-lipped, she began to strip the bed.

  “That’s a foolish attitude,” Aurora said. “I know you’re under a strain and I’d like to help, but I don’t see what I can do unless you give me some clue as to what the trouble is.”

  Rosie continued to strip the bed.

  Aurora sighed. “Look,” she said. “You’re not the first woman in the world to have such problems. Millions of men take mistresses, you k
now. The fact that your husband took one for a while is not quite the end of the world, that I can see. Men have never distinguished themselves for sexual fidelity. The poor things have short attention spans.”

  “Your husband never took up with no slut,” Rosie said. “You was married a long time too.”

  “True, but mine had very little initiative,” Aurora said. “Probably he just never happened to meet a woman who cared to supply it. I don’t kid myself that it was my undying charms that kept him home.”

  “It sure wasn’t,” Rosie said. “He’d have taken up with a slut too, if he hadn’t been so timid.”

  “Oh, Rud wasn’t especially timid. He was just lazy, like me. Both of us had a healthy capacity for idleness. We happened to like to stay in bed. If you were a little lazier you might not have the problems you’re having now.”

  “Some people have to work,” Rosie said hotly. “Don’t lay there an’ tell me I ought to have been lazy! You know I could never afford it.”

  “You work compulsively,” Aurora said. “You always have, and in my opinion you’d work compulsively if you were a millionairess. It’s all you want to do, you know. You didn’t even particularly like raising your children. All I’ve ever seen you do is pick on Royce, and now you’re accusing him of perversity. Probably his mistress was somewhat less strait-laced than you are, that’s all. Probably she didn’t pick on him. Maybe all he wanted was a little peaceful sex.”

  “Yeah, the dirty kind,” Rosie said bitterly.

  “No kind is exactly impeccable,” Aurora said. “What are you talking about?”

  “She sits on it,” Rosie mumbled. “On Royce, I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” Aurora said.

  “I don’t know what I’m living for anymore, to tell the honest truth,” Rosie said. “Royce has got it into his head I oughta be like her, and now my daughter’s husband has taken up with a slut. He thinks if Royce can get away with it he can too. He drove right past Elfrida’s house with her, not three days ago.”

  “Elfrida should never have married that boy, and we both know it,” Aurora said. “She should divorce him at once, in my opinion. Royce has had twenty-seven years in which to get restless and that boy’s only had about five. Frankly I’m surprised he isn’t in jail by now. Don’t you go mixing Elfrida’s troubles up with your own. That won’t help. Go wash my sheets and let me think about all this. Maybe I’ll have something helpful to say afterwhile.”

  Unfortunately, Rosie was more wrought up than either of them knew. Without suspecting she was near it, Rosie suddenly reached her breaking point. Thirty years of confusion were pressing her down. She tried to remember when somebody had been really good to her, but she couldn’t. Her life, it seemed to her, was nothing but work, disappointment, and constant combat—it was too unfair. She would have liked to let go and beat everybody in it, particularly Royce, particularly Shirley, and maybe even Little Buster, who thought his daddy was so wonderful; but they were all elsewhere. The only person around was Aurora, smiling, buxom, and happy, as she had always been, it seemed to Rosie.

  It was too much. Pain swelled in her breast like a balloon, until she couldn’t breathe, and she flung the armful of bedclothes at Aurora’s dressing table. Aurora looked up just in time to see a great wad of sheets and spreads strike her dressing table, knocking bottles and sprays every which way.

  “Stop it,” she yelled, and the next thing she knew Rosie came charging around the bed like a berserk person and began to beat at her with a pillow.

  “It’s your fault, it’s your fault!” Rosie cried. “It’s your fault.”

  “What?” Aurora said, completely confused as to what she might have done. Before she could scoot back into the depths of the window nook or get to her feet or even ask a question, Rosie hit at her again with the pillow. Aurora was wide-eyed with surprise at the attack, and the tip of the pillow hit her right in the eye. The eye watered instantly, and she moaned and clasped her hand to it.

  “Stop it!” she said. “Stop, you hit me in the eye.”

  But Rosie was far too wrought up to stop. She didn’t hear Aurora, didn’t notice that she had hit her in the eye. In her own mind’s eye all she saw was Royce sitting in Aurora’s kitchen pretending to eat, when all he was really doing was watching Aurora drift around.

  “Your fault!” she said, striking again. “Your fault. You was the one that got him thinkin’, in the first place … All these years …”

  She stopped, not knowing what she wanted to say or do, but still filled with pain. She lost her breath again, thinking about the sorry mess she was in.

  “All right,” Aurora said. “All right, just stop. I can’t see …” Though even with one eye she could see the fury in Rosie’s face.

  “All right, I give up,” she added. “You can go, you’re fired, whatever you want. Anything. Just get away from me.”

  “You ain’t firing me, ’cause I quit,” Rosie said, throwing the pillow at the dressing table. “I double quit! I wisht I’d never seen this house. I wisht I’d never done none of it. Maybe something in my life would be right.”

  “I don’t know why you think so,” Aurora said, but Rosie had already stalked out of the bedroom. She stalked straight out of the house. Aurora looked out the window with her one good eye and watched her walk along the sidewalk to the bus stop. Rosie did not look up. She took her place stiffly at the bus stop, and before she had been there thirty seconds a bus came up, as if by prearrangement. A few more seconds and Rosie was gone.

  Aurora hobbled over and got a mirror in order to look at her stinging eye. Then she crawled back into her window nook and waited, touching her eyelid now and then with a fingertip. It caused a flood of tears to flow down one cheek. She found, though, that she was quite calm. Indeed, everything was quite calm. The house was silent, no vacuum cleaner going, no General grumping around; and except for the twitter of a bird and the occasional sound of an insect bumping into the window screen, nature was silent too. The morning had no sound, only a feel—the feel of heat slowly gathering in the air. In contrast to that feel the coolness of the bedroom was even more delightful, but the fact remained that she had just been in a dreadful scene and had fired her maid.

  After a time she called Emma. “Rosie and I have had a dreadful fracas,” she said. “She went rather crazy all of a sudden. She smashed my dressing table and hit me in the eye with a pillow. I’m not hurt, but I’m afraid in the confusion I fired her.”

  “That’s terrible,” Emma said.

  “I didn’t mean it, of course,” Aurora said. “I was just trying to get her to stop beating me. Our old friend Rosie is not happy just now, you know.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing, until this afternoon. By then she’ll have calmed down, if she’s ever going to. Perhaps she’ll agree to a truce. She seems to feel it’s all my fault.”

  “Oh, because you used to flirt with Royce,” Emma said.

  Aurora looked out the window. Her idle morning had not worked out as planned.

  “Yes,” she said. “To tell the truth, I can scarcely remember Royce. I flirt with everybody. It’s been my way of life. What’s a girl to do? Royce has never spoken a whole sentence in my presence in all the years I’ve known him. I suppose I ought to take the veil, or something. I never meant anything with Royce. I don’t even mean anything with Hector, to tell you the truth.

  “Why, after all these years, do people still think I mean anything?” she asked. “I never have, and I no longer expect to get to. I just like a little pleasant banter. Would you please call Rosie this afternoon and assure her I want her back?”

  “Sure,” Emma said. “Maybe everything will be calmer by the afternoon.”

  2.

  BY THE time she got on the bus, Rosie knew she had been hasty. Quitting a job to make a point was one thing, but what it really meant was that she had to go home and cope with Royce and Little Buster. She felt rather sorry for having hit Aurora, since i
t wasn’t Aurora’s fault that she was buxom and happy rather than skinny and miserable. She started to get off at the next bus stop and walk back, but she saw F.V. watering the General’s lawn and the sight was enough to keep her on the bus. If there was any trouble she didn’t need, it was trouble with F.V.

  She rode across Houston feeling blank. The only thing about life that was still normal was the weather, which was hot. Everything else was askew, and when she stepped off the bus onto the sidewalks of Lyons Avenue nothing seemed right. She was supposed to step off the bus there in the late afternoon, when the asphalt was beginning to cool and when jukebox music could be heard through the open door of every bar. Now it was so early that the asphalt wasn’t even very hot, and most of the bars still had their doors closed.

  She walked down Lyons Avenue listlessly, not particularly wanting to walk, but not particularly wanting to get home either. On the way she passed Pioneer Drive-In Number 16 and noticed a sign saying “Carhop Wanted.” The Pioneer Number 16 was one of the roughest places in Houston, catering, as it did nightly, to Negroes, Mexicans, and rednecks; but seeing the sign reminded Rosie that she had a husband who was both crippled and unemployed, and children to feed and clothe. In short, she had a living to earn.

  A fat woman in a blond wig was inside the shell of the drive-in cleaning out the Dixie-cream machine. Her name was Kate, and Rosie knew her slightly from having bought Little Buster a good number of milkshakes and Lou Ann a great number of corn-dogs—a food she particularly loved.

  “What are you lookin’ so draggy for?” Kate asked when she saw Rosie leaning on the counter.

  “I ain’t draggy,” Rosie said.

  “What have you done with that little boy of mine?” Kate asked. “I can’t hardly get through the day without some sugar from Little Buster.”

  “Maybe I can bring him later,” Rosie said. “Your carhop job still open?”

  “More open than ever,” Kate said. “We had another elopement last night.”