Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  “Aw,” Rosie said.

  “Yep,” Kate said. “Girls these days just don’t know how to keep their pants on, seems like.”

  “Well, I’m applyin’ for the job,” Rosie said.

  Kate was startled, but after looking Rosie over she decided not to ask any questions. “You got it, honey,” she said. “You want the day shift or the night shift?”

  “I’ll work both if you want me to,” Rosie said. “We got bills to pay, and I never was one to sit around the house.”

  “Honey, I know you’re tough, but you ain’t workin’ both,” Kate said.

  “I guess the night shift then,” Rosie said, trying to decide which would be the worst time to be around the house. She thanked Kate for the job and walked on up the street feeling a little more chipper. It was something, being employable—not much, maybe, but something.

  3.

  WHILE ROSIE was getting hired, Royce was having his midmorning conversation with Shirley. He had fallen into the habit of calling her frequently, to relieve the monotony of his day. Despite his husbandlike behavior in regard to Rosie, despite his hasty action and his broken ankle, Shirley still seemed to want him. Royce didn’t know it, but the main reason Shirley wanted him was because he was so easy to manage. Shirley considered herself a busy woman, and it was necessary for her to have a man who followed orders without complaint. Royce did just that, and Shirley spent an hour or two on the phone with him each day, priming him for a return to the comforts of her apartment on Harrisburg. She told him about a number of novel plans she had for his old thing, once she got it back within her jurisdiction, and Royce listened raptly, his old thing not much less hard than the cast on his ankle.

  He was lying on the bed in his underwear, watching his old thing stick up and trying to imagine some of the novel things Shirley was even at that moment whispering about in his ear, when with no warning whatever his wife Rosie walked through the bedroom door.

  “You’re at work,” Royce said, in his shock.

  “Naw, but I got to go in about five minutes, sugarpuss,” Shirley said in his ear, thinking the statement was meant for her.

  “Well, I ain’t, Royce, you can see that,” Rosie said.

  “It’s about that time agin,” Shirley said, yawning. She meant work time.

  “Who’s on the phone?” Rosie asked. “If it’s Aurora, let me talk to her.” On the walk home the joys of being employable had begun to fade and she was hoping Aurora would call so they could go about making up.

  She assumed it was Aurora, in fact, and held out her hand for the phone. Royce was so taken aback by her sudden appearance that once again his sense of reality deserted him, and instead of hanging up the phone he simply handed it to his wife.

  “Well, how’s your eye, you pore thing?” Rosie asked, growing remorseful at the memory of how startled her boss had been when she attacked her.

  “Royce? Operator?” Shirley said, thinking there had suddenly been a break in the connection.

  “What?” Rosie said. Poor Aurora had never been able to stand to be hated, or even disliked or, for that matter, even mildly disapproved of, and remembering suddenly all the kindnesses Aurora had done her over the years, Rosie had begun to feel that her own actions constituted a kind of Pearl Harbor in their relationship. She had struck without warning, and she wanted to be forgiven so badly that she didn’t even hear Shirley’s reply.

  “I don’t know, I guess I just went out of my head,” she said, before Shirley broke in.

  “Royce, can you hear me?” Shirley said. “Somebody else is on this line.”

  Then Rosie heard. She looked at Royce, thunderstruck, and dropped the phone as if it had been a cobra. The receiver dangled an inch above the floor, and Royce looked down at it in order to avoid Rosie’s eye.

  “Royce, I’m gonna hang up and call you right back,” Shirley said. “Don’t you call me, I’ll call you. Just hang up.”

  Royce looked intently at the dangling receiver, but he didn’t reach down to hang it up.

  “That was her, wasn’t it?” Rosie said. “You was talkin’ to her.”

  “Uh, Shirley,” Royce admitted. “Called about my broke ankle.”

  Then he happened to notice the member Shirley had really called about. Not realizing what trouble Royce was in, it had continued to maintain itself as it had been when Shirley was talking. That was embarrassing, but fortunately Rosie stalked out of the bedroom without seeming to notice. Then, before Royce could even hang up the phone, she marched back in carrying the garden shears. Before Royce could so much as move she bent over and neatly snipped the cord that held the receiver. It had begun to buzz, but when Rosie snipped the cord it fell to the bedroom floor and became silent.

  Rosie’s only regret was that snipping the cord had been so quick and easy. She would have liked to snip telephone cords for an hour or two, but there was only the one to snip and once she had done it she became confused. She sat down on the bedroom floor.

  “Hell, you cut the phone,” Royce said, the import of it just beginning to penetrate. “Why’d you cut the phone?”

  “So you can’t lay there talkin’ to that slut. Why’d you think?” Rosie said. “I go off and work myself ragged and you lay there talkin’ to a slut. Whyn’t you go on back an’ live with her if you like her that much?”

  “Can I?” Royce asked.

  Rosie began to jab the point of the garden shears into the bedroom floor. So far, she realized, she had spent the whole morning making matters worse for herself. With the phone out of commission there was not even any way Aurora could call and hire her back. Now Royce was talking of leaving again. That too had been at her suggestion.

  “I could take the bus,” Royce said. “You could have the truck, in case you wanted to drive the kids around. Take ’em to the zoo. You know how Little Buster loves the zoo.”

  “Royce, the truck don’t run,” Rosie said. “We ain’t had the money to get it fixed since you had the wreck.”

  She continued to jab the shears into the bedroom floor, which worried Royce a little. Rosie had unpredictable ways, and he would have been happier if she had left the shears outside or taken them back when she had finished cutting the phone. There was no telling where she might decide to jab them next.

  “All right, go on. Go back to her,” Rosie said. “I give up. It seems to me after twenty-seven years we ought to be able to find a few blessings to count, but I guess you don’t think so, do you Royce?”

  Royce was unable to think of any blessings.

  “Are we supposed to get a divorce, or what’s the deal?” Rosie asked.

  Shirley had raised the question of divorce a few times too, but Royce had never really got around to grappling with the concept. Living with Shirley had been task enough; divorcing Rosie was a little too much to think about.

  “Naw. You can still be my wife,” Royce said earnestly. “I wouldn’t wanta make you go through that.”

  “I don’t know,” Rosie said. “If you’re gonna live with a slut maybe I oughta get divorced and marry some decent feller. I done got a job carhoppin’—I’ll probably meet a decent feller some night if I keep my eyes open.”

  “Carhoppin’?” Royce said. “What about Miz Greenway?”

  “We had a fight,” Rosie said. “I got fired. I beat her up with a pillow.”

  “Hit Miz Greenway?” Royce said unbelievingly.

  “Yeah, Miz Greenway, that you been making me jealous with for twenty years,” Rosie said. “She was your idea of heaven until this slut come along.”

  In recent months Royce had all but forgotten Aurora Greenway. Suddenly a vision of her in a dressing gown swam before his inner eye.

  “She ain’t marrit yet, is she?” he asked, remembering that she had always been the woman of his dreams.

  “What’s it to you?” Rosie asked. “You’ll never see Aurora agin, now that I’m fired an’ you’re goin’ off to live with Shirley.”

  Royce’s head was in a spin. Too many
things were happening at once. Now that he had learned about fantasy, he would have preferred to lie in bed and have a fantasy about Mrs. Greenway, who, he remembered, smelled awfully good. Rosie was comparatively smell-less, and Shirley usually smelled as if she kept an onion in each armpit. Royce didn’t consider himself finicky, but the memory of Aurora, so talkative and fragrant, was hard to put down. His erection had gone away while Rosie was jabbing the shears into the floor, but at the memory of Aurora it came back.

  Rosie noticed and got to her feet. “If you’re just gonna lie there an’ point your old jigger at me I’m leavin’,” she said. “I’ll go visit my sister until you can get your things packed.”

  Then, hardly knowing what to think, she went over to her bureau and buried her head in her arms. She was not crying; she just didn’t want to look at anything for a while. What there was to look at wasn’t very cheerful. Unrewarding as Royce was, she didn’t want him to leave, because the house didn’t feel right with him gone. It left her with nothing but two argumentative kids and what few material possessions the other five kids hadn’t broken as they were growing up. She had just lost her nice job and had nothing to look forward to workwise except long evenings of carrying hamburgers and fried shrimp to carloads of teenagers. She rested with her head in her arms for a few minutes, doing her best not to think about it all.

  Then, with a sigh, she turned around to start getting on with the process of separation, only to find that Royce, exhausted by the complex developments of the morning, had fallen asleep, one hand under his underwear. Rosie tiptoed over for a closer look. In repose Royce and his youngest son, sweet Little Buster, looked exactly alike, except that Royce hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and had a large sagging belly and bowlegs. Even flat on his back his legs looked bowed. Lou Ann had drawn a kitty cat and some flowers on his cast, and Little Buster, unable to master kitty cats and flowers, had covered most of the rest with swirls and scribbles.

  Rosie looked down at her sleeping husband for a minute or two, unable to get clear in her head exactly why she wanted to keep him. Nothing visible to the eye was anything a sensible woman would want, and she did consider herself a sensible woman. It seemed to her it would be a good deal pleasanter to have a nice little man like Vernon around—someone neat and small, like herself. All her married life she had been slightly bothered by the fear that Royce might accidentally roll on top of her and suffocate her some night.

  Even so, she reached down and took Royce’s hand out his underwear. It would be more seemly in case the kids should suddenly come back. Just as she did it, someone began knocking on the front door. She hurried in and saw that it was her oldest daughter, Elfrida, who was supposed to be at her job, which was checking at Woolworth’s.

  “What in the world?” Rosie said. “Why ain’t you at work, honey?”

  Elfrida, a tiny thin blonde, burst into tears. “Aw, Momma,” she said. “Gene took our savings. All our savings. He come in drunk an’ demanded ’em. Said he give a hot check, but I bet he never. I bet he just took ’em to buy somethin’ for her. I know it was her put him up to it.”

  She flung herself into her mother’s arms, sobbing bitterly. Rosie led her daughter to the couch and let her cry it out, stroking her back in comfort. “How much was your savings, Elfrida?” she asked.

  “A hunnert an’ eighty dollars,” Elfrida sobbed. “We was gonna get a rug. We’d planned! I know it was her!”

  “A hunnert an’ eighty dollars ain’t the end of the world, hon,” Rosie said.

  “But we’d planned!” Elfrida sobbed, cruelly betrayed. “And he took it anyway.”

  “You should have told me you needed a rug, hon,” Rosie said. “Your daddy and I would of got you one. We don’t want you to be without. That ain’t no big deal.”

  “I know … but our savings … it was ours,” Elfrida sobbed. “What am I gonna do?”

  Rosie looked out the door. The asphalt on Lyons Avenue was heating up, and the traffic was heavy. “I ain’t right sure, Elfrida,” she said, letting her daughter sob. “Right now I ain’t right sure.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  1.

  AURORA HELD her peace until four in the afternoon; then she began calling Rosie. A fight was a fight, and so far as she was concerned that one was over with. Upon reflection she had concluded that perhaps she had been a bit too exuberant in some of her little exchanges with Royce, if exchanges was a fair word for any conversation involving Royce; and, aware of the strain that Rosie had been under, she was prepared to go to unusual lengths to humble herself and be apologetic.

  Then, to her intense annoyance, the only response she could get from Rosie’s telephone was a busy signal. After an hour and a half of the busy signal her apologetic mood was beginning to sour. Nothing was more frustrating than to be willing to bring herself to her knees and then not have the gesture appreciated. Besides, she was quite sure there was no one Rosie had any business talking to for an hour and a half, unless it was her.

  After another hour she began to feel paranoid. Perhaps it was Emma she was talking to. Perhaps the two of them were talking about what an awful, selfish person she was.

  Immediately she called Emma, who denied having heard from Rosie.

  “I don’t hear you denying that I’m an awful, selfish person,” Aurora said.

  “That would be pointless,” Emma said. “Maybe Rosie’s phone’s broken.”

  “There are lots of pay phones where she lives,” Aurora said. “She should have understood that I’d be frantic by now.”

  “If you’d flirted with my husband for twenty years I’d let you sweat a few hours, I think.”

  “It would be hard to flirt for eight seconds with your husband,” Aurora said. “He’s not good flirting material. Your friend Patsy can flirt with him if she likes. They’re ideal for one another—neither of them have any manners. Perhaps they’ll run off together and spare you a life of academic boredom.”

  “I don’t think the academic life is boring,” Emma said. “What an insulting thing to say.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t at Harvard, but few places are Harvard,” Aurora said, winking her eye to see if her eyelid still worked.

  “Snob,” Emma said.

  “Oh, hush,” Aurora said. “You’re a very young person. You haven’t lived the academic life. What you’ve lived is the student life. Wait until you’ve been a faculty wife for ten years and then tell me it isn’t boring. They’re the dreariest women in America, faculty wives. They have no taste and they couldn’t afford it if they had it. Most of them don’t have the sense to realize that all men aren’t as dull as their husbands. The ones that realize it go crazy in a few years, or else devote themselves to good works.”

  “What’s so bad about good works?” Emma asked. “Somebody has to do them.”

  “Sure, fine,” Aurora said. “Don’t bother me with them. I’ve not lost interest quite to that extent.”

  “I hope I never become arrogant, like you,” Emma said. “You dismiss whole classes with a wave of your hand. At least academic people take time to discriminate.”

  “Take time? Why, what else do they have to do, dear? I’ve noticed that mediocre people always pride themselves on their discrimination. It’s a vastly overrated ability, I can assure you. One creditable lover is worth a ton of discrimination, more or less. I discriminate instinctively, as it happens.”

  “Arrogantly, like I said,” Emma said.

  “Uh-huh, well, just be grateful that you’re grown,” Aurora said. “You’re spared the pains of living with me. I’m going to hang up and call Rosie.”

  She did and called Rosie, only to get the same busy signal. She called the phone company, who informed her that Rosie’s phone was out of order. She considered the information for a moment and called Emma.

  “She’s broken her phone,” she said. “That’s very inconvenient. I know how her mind works. She won’t call me because she’ll assume I’m still mad at her. That means this impasse will continue
until I actually go over there. It’s quite intolerable that it should continue, so I shall have to go over there at once.”

  “Your logic is relentless,” Emma said dryly.

  “The timing is most unfortunate,” Aurora said. “Hector will be returning any moment now, expecting a lot of praise and admiration for doing what any normal person would do as a matter of course. He’s going to be in a snit if I’m not here, but then that’s his lookout. I would like it if you would accompany me, just in case Rosie is in a mood to be difficult.”

  “Sure,” Emma said. “I haven’t seen Little Buster lately. My husband won’t like it, though. He’s due home too.”

  “So what. He’s not a general,” Aurora said. “He can open his own beer for once. Tell him your mother needed you.”

  “Surprisingly enough, he thinks his needs take precedence over yours.”

  “Goodbye. I’m hurrying,” Aurora said.

  2.

  AT SIX-THIRTY, when they arrived at Rosie’s door, most of the evening traffic had subsided, but Lyons Avenue was still choked with beat-up pickups and cars with crumpled fenders, many of them honking and competing recklessly for position.

  “Amazing,” Aurora said, watching a few of them go by. A mauve Cadillac with a little antenna on top flashed by, driven by a thin Negro in a huge pink hat.

  “Now where’d he get that?” Aurora asked, fanning herself.

  “By trafficking in human flesh,” Emma said. “If he sees us he may come back and try to traffic in us.”

  “It’s amazing that Rosie’s survived, isn’t it?” Aurora said, surveying the street. A Mexican dance hall was a few doors down from Rosie’s house, and a Negro liquor store right across the street. They got out and went to Rosie’s door, but their knocks brought no response.

  “She’s probably over at her sister’s, telling her what a bitch you are,” Emma said.

  “Royce had a broken ankle,” Aurora said. “Do you suppose that man has hobbled off to a bar?”