Just Bill

by Barry Knister

  “Was he a border collie?”

  Glenda holds her fork poised before her mouth. She smiles, wearing her yoga leotard. “Why the fuck does that make me feel happy? Oh God—” Hand over her mouth, she shakes her head.

  “My dad says that,” Ruby tells her. “After he talks to my mom on the phone. They’re divorced.”

  Glenda takes her hand away, still shaking her head. “I don’t know anything about kids,” she says. “I never had a child. Please don’t tell your grandfather, okay?” Ruby promises. “Where was I?”

  “On the beach. You saw a man with a dog.”

  “Right, thank you. Well, Ruby, you had to be there. We had maybe I think it was seven models and three cameramen. Plus makeup and all that. We’re on the beach—you know, you see it on TV. Running on the beach, in the surf acting super life-is-great. They tell you just that kind of thing—‘More life-is-great, Glenda, more I-can’t-get-enough-of this—’ Anyway, this dog, Ruby—I don’t know how else to say it. He rounded us up. He corralled all of us between the sailboards we had for props, and the changing cabanas. You should’ve seen it.”

  There’s been no one to tell this or anything else to. Cliff died and was cremated, but it wasn’t the end of anything. Now, Glenda pours out her heart, slipping several times with bad words, apologizing. Opening a bottle of wine, she tells how, that day, Cliff had come and gotten Hotspur. “The dog really hit on me,” she says. “If you want the truth, the dog was the first thing. You know these ads, some super macho stud holding a baby? I later told Cliff it was sort of like that. You know, sort of flattering him.”

  When they finish the spaghetti, she goes to the refrigerator and looks in. In the crisper she finds wrinkled apples, some unappetizing-looking grapes. She closes the door and opens the freezer. Eclairs, purchased in the shopping trip to Publix that Cliff made the morning he died, rest on a bag of his hash browns. Glenda ponders the foggy interior. She’s kept everything from that trip, unwilling to use Cliff up. With Ruby, the moment has come. She gets out the eclairs and puts them on plates.

  WHEN THE GIRL comes back at two, Glenda is doing yoga.

  Bill is eating. If a dog with such big jaws could be said to nibble, that’s what he’s doing with flaked tuna. But when he drinks water, the sound is exactly the same as Ruby remembers—a big-dog sloshing, lapping sound, water splashing on the floor. Done, Bill turns away and steps slowly to the glass doorwall. He doesn’t sit, just stands looking out. She remembers how he sat and looked out at grandpa’s, so alert. Vigilant, grandpa called it. Now he is just looking, like someone in front of a fish aquarium thinking something else.

  She goes to him and rests her hand on his back. “I think he should go out,” she says. Reflected in the glass, Glenda sits in the lotus position. Eyes closed, palms up on her knees, she nods. Ruby pulls on the doorwall and slides it past Bill. His nose works. His ears. Several seconds pass, but she can see he recognizes the change. Now he steps down onto the cement deck.

  Ruby doesn’t follow. What if he gives up and comes back in? The sultry air coming through the opening worries her. Her grandparents talk about people dying of heatstroke in houses where the air conditioning failed. Her father used a word, hyper-something, reading about street people in New York who died from the cold. Bill is so weak and thin, moving like the sick horse in—she can’t remember the movie’s name. Any little thing that burdens his body might do it. It’s wrong, she thinks. You made a mistake. Germs grow everywhere in weather like this.

  “Bill—” She watches him moving around the end of the oval pool. On the far side he stops and looks out. Her heart is pounding. She has done the wrong thing again, failed. Now the dog will die. Germs, heat. Another storm, she thinks. What if he has a heart attack? Dad won’t scold her this time, but she’ll know. What if he has an attack like Mr. Gilmore? Glenda has told her about it. They were playing Frisbee, she said. Those are his ashes—she pointed to a vase thing on the stand next to her big TV. Please don’t tell your grandparents. I had Hotsie cremated, too. He’s in the box. Promise, Ruby. It’s really crazy, how do I know what’s in there? But that might be true for Cliff. Don’t tell, okay?

  Since the time the baby fell, whenever they ask her to watch it, rock it, hold the baby for more digital pictures to send on the computer to dad wherever he’s working—she remembers. And it will always be that way, every morning when she gets up, every afternoon when she comes back from some stupid new school—

  Glenda is standing next to her. Bill sits before the screen cage, facing the eleventh fairway. “God, he’s noble,” Glenda says.

  “We should make him come in.”

  “He’ll know when. He really is noble. Even in bad shape, he looks…”

  Ruby looks back at the dog. “Handsome,” she says

  “Handsome. You’re right.” Glenda nods. “Ruggedly handsome. Taking in his kingdom. Hotsie used to sit out there just like that. Just checking it out, like a general.”

  “Like a security guard.”

  “No, not some poor flunky in a mall. Like an admiral.”

  “Or a cowboy looking over his ranch,” Ruby says. “Or a head waiter.” Glenda laughs. “That’s what grandpa says he looks like.”

  BEYOND HAVING DONE a good job of reading the needs and anticipating the questions of vinyl-siding customers, Ruby’s grandfather has never thought of himself as having good people skills. He knows enough to avoid political subjects with his more opinionated golf partners, he can tell a joke. But even after all this time—what? forty-four years next February—he still gets things wrong often enough with the missus.

  Letting Ruby stay nights at Glenda Gilmore’s represents a significant decision. He knows what his wife would say. He considers her smarter than himself in most things. But he sticks with his decision. When he walks along the back path and looks, the two are in the living room, talking. Glenda is showing Ruby yoga. The second time he passes, Ruby is washing the glass slider, talking behind the glass and not seeing him until he waves. She waves back, but doesn’t open the doorwall. What’s going on inside belongs to her. He’s smart enough to see it, and keeps going.

  The degree of his confidence in the decision manifests itself each time he speaks to his wife. Failing so often to successfully bend or sidestep the truth with her, he long ago gave up trying. Not now. “You’re going to be impressed,” he tells her. “I know I am. I think she has talent, I went up and watched yesterday. The woman they have running the class came over. You know when someone’s just being polite or encouraging. There was none of that.”

  “I wish I was there. Are you taking pictures?”

  He winces. “She says it distracts them. She asked everyone to hold off until the exhibition.”

  “Oh, I wish I was there. What’s Ruby making?”

  He’s ready for this. “Horses and dogs. I think maybe she and Ronald should have a puppy.”

  “Well, the yard at the new house is supposed to be fenced. Tell me who else has kids down.” He names three people they aren’t close to and invents others, anonymous renters, to fill out the “class.” “I thought the Kriegers were in Massachusetts.”

  He’s ready for this, too. “The storm. Larry was watching on the Weather Channel. He just wanted to be sure.”

  “How I wish I was there. I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “I miss you more.” She always says this when they’re separated.

  “Guess what? The Babbitts had to sell the house in Minnesota. The boat, too. They’re still here.”

  “Uh oh. You always thought they were over-extended.” Good. He’s relieved to move on from fiction to hard news. It doesn’t last long. “All right, then,” she says. “But Fred, I really do want to speak to her on the next call. What time does she go to the club?”

  Make it late, he thinks. Give yourself time for rehearsal. “Nine.”

  “Good. Call at breakfast, before you take her up.”

  HE WALKS THE path, already sweating
as he nears the Gilmores’. He loves Naples. For him, wintering here represents perfection. But he leaves willingly in June. The only good thing about Naples in the summer comes from something missing—thousands of snowbirds like himself. Without them, road congestion disappears, restaurant hostesses practically fall at your feet, tradesmen actually show up when they should. Otherwise, the sauna atmosphere is oppressive.

  When he stops at the back of the cage, Bill is looking out. He sees Vinyl and barks. It heartens him. He goes to the screen door and lets himself in. Hearing the dog, he moves to the slider. Glenda is unwinding from her yoga mat. Ruby’s on the floor, too, with her knitting. As the slider rolls open Bill barks again but now smells him. He lowers his head and comes to what was once the source of all good things. Vinyl bends and holds the dog’s head. He scratches his neck. “You look a little better, Old Scout,” he says. “Old timer.”

  He eats lunch with them, Bill on the floor next to him. Peanut butter sandwiches and blender smoothies Glenda makes with frozen fruit. He lets them do the talking. Bill’s been walking around the house, Glenda tells him. Just now? That was his first bark. He whined this morning to be let out. For the first time, the dog peed on the deck, not in the house. “And he pooped,” Ruby says, something that must be of special importance to grownups, owing to the canisters of Metamusil at her grandparents, and detailed discussions about the new baby’s “production.”

  “If you could stay with Bill for about an hour, we need to do some grocery shopping,” Glenda says. She is rinsing dishes at the sink. “We made a list.”

  “Could you go alone? I need to talk to Ruby.” Glenda looks over her shoulder at him. She seems fearful. “Just until you get back,” he says. “Bill needs his regular team and I have some chores.” Reassured, she nods and turns back. “You know, Ruby could be washing those,” he says.

  “Ruby cleaned the bathroom. She did an ace job, as Cliff would say. She helped me wash down Bill’s area when he was on the deck. We’re getting this place shipshape.”

  After she leaves, the two sit on the floor. Glenda has moved the coffee table away from the sectional sofa. Bill’s crate now occupies the space. “It’s there if he wants it,” Ruby explains. “Glenda thinks it gives him security. But he mostly sleeps on the rug.”

  A Midwesterner in mind and spirit, Ruby’s grandfather doesn’t like lies. Not that Midwesterners don’t lie with the best of them. They just tend to live where conventional notions still persist. When they lie, they feel guilty. It’s wrong and they know it. That’s why his wife always catches him at it.

  “I’ve done something I’m not proud of,” he says. “I made up a story about you taking a pottery class down here. It’s hard to explain. It has to do with Glenda.”

  “You did it because Grandma hates her,” Ruby says. “She told me all the ladies think she hits on their husbands. They think she just married Cliff for his money, but she didn’t. I mean she did, she said they weren’t totally wrong about that. She didn’t think she would’ve married him if he was poor. But she says that wasn’t the biggest reason. And she never went cruising for other action.”

  A lot has been going on here in the old Pottery Barn, he thinks. “Grandma doesn’t hate her,” he says. “I don’t think she hates anyone. It mostly has to do with Glenda being young.”

  “And because she still has her figure and was a model,” Ruby says. He sees she has started a new scarf. This one’s orange, a color he now notices in the drapes, and the sectional couch. “What’s wrong with being a model?” she asks.

  “I have no idea. No, I guess I do. Some people think making money off your looks is tacky. They think models aren’t smart.”

  “Bimbos.”

  “Yes. I happen to think they’re being dishonest,” he says, watching Ruby knit. “Models just sell things. That’s pretty much what everyone is doing all the time anyway. In one way or another.”

  “What about me?”

  A delicate moment. He doesn’t want to break their bond, but sees a chance to make a point. “I would say you’re the buyer,” he says. “A certain person is trying to sell herself, but you keep saying no.” That’s enough, he thinks. Don’t push. “Back to the pottery class,” he says. “I didn’t want grandma to know you were staying here. Or about Bill. I said you were in this class, making pottery horses and dogs. She wants to talk to you tomorrow at breakfast.”

  “And we should get our story straight.”

  Ten years old, he thinks. She knows too much already. “All right, yes.”

  “When I’m at Mom’s and dad calls, we do it all the time.”

  “I don’t want to know. And promise not to tell Glenda,” he adds, hearing himself, then seeing himself in free fall down a moral slippery slope.

  WHEN GLENDA RETURNS, Vinyl walks back to his house. He sets about repairing the screen door Bill has torn. His stepdaughter helps Glenda put away the groceries. She resumes her knitting, sitting next to Bill who now and then eats from one of the bowls. Glenda repositions her mat and begins stretching exercises. “Isn’t that boring after a while?” Ruby asks.

  “Only if you’re doing something wrong.” Glenda has always been supple and wants to stay that way. Stretching, she watches Ruby’s flying fingers. The girl is seated cross-legged, her right hip touching Bill’s side. He’s going to make it, she thinks.

  “Would your folks let you have a dog?” she asks. “I think it would be good.”

  “They’re afraid because of the baby.”

  Glenda stands on one foot and assumes the tree pose. After a minute, she extends herself in the warrior pose. “People with dogs,” she says. “They don’t all give them away when they have a baby.” Or, maybe they do, she has no idea. Friends in the business own little dogs, like the ones here. They take them on assignments. Sleep with them, make decisions about boyfriends based on the dog’s response. She believes some of them would first give up the father or the baby. In the three days here, Ruby has done a lot of talking. About teachers, about school friends in Brooklyn Heights she won’t see now except weekends, about her brother who can swim and run better than she can, but who’s knitting just because she does. She is close to her mother, the administrative assistant for “someone big” at an ad agency. Even though she travels a lot and has boyfriends, the mother hasn’t fallen out of favor. But Ruby adores her father. She shows Glenda wallet photos taken at the lake in Michigan. “He can’t ski very well,” she says. “He says trying is the important thing.”

  “You should work on them about a dog,” Glenda says.

  “I think we should take Bill for a walk.” Ruby gets up. “We can try it, and if he gets tired we’ll come back.”

  Glenda finishes her exercises. She goes in the bedroom and changes into conservative golf shorts and a baggy camp shirt, clothes that will keep anyone looking through a window from foaming at the mouth. She gets Hotspur’s lead and fastens it to Bill’s collar. “What do you think?” she says. “Are you ready?” Maybe not. He stays flat on the floor. She drops the lead and moves to the foyer where Ruby is waiting. When she opens the door, he looks slowly left. Right. He’s looking for Fred, she thinks. But now Bill stands. He shakes himself with weak-legged, old-dog slowness, then walks toward them. No running or prancing, but he comes.

  “I KNEW THIS Japanese model. We were in Hawaii, we shared a room. She set up this little altar on the writing table. I asked about it, she said it honored her ancestors and the emperor. I always wondered about all that stuff with an emperor. I thought he was like a king. No, she said. More like a god. I asked was the emperor immortal, she said just his soul. But don’t you believe everyone has one? She says, his soul is the soul of the Japanese people. He unites us. Everyone’s loyal to the emperor, not just to themselves. Don’t you think that’s interesting?”

  Is Ruby thinking about it, or something else? They are walking slowly, Bill between them. He steps now off the pavement, to a lamppost. Glenda follows, holding the lead. He sniffs then squats ins
tead of raising his leg. It moves her out of all proportion.

  “I thought about that story a lot,” Glenda says, waiting for him to finish. “Especially since Cliff died. Hotspur was like our emperor. He united us. We cared about Hotsie together and it worked sort of the same way.” She laughs, wiping her eyes but amused, too. “That’s something else don’t tell your grandpa.”

  “We studied Greeks last year,” Ruby says. “All the gods and goddesses.”

  “You’ll have to tell me. I don’t know any of that.”

  As they resume the walk, men ahead are coming from a house. Their truck stands at the curb. Flexing between them, boards of some kind sway with their movements. “That’s Lydia Stafford’s house,” Glenda says. “Do you know her?”

  “No.”

  “She was always decent to me.” Reaching the workers, she asks after the owner. She has moved, they don’t know where. The work order calls for them to take up the flooring, all of it Dade County pine and cypress. They are to truck it to an address in Palm Beach. She thanks them and looks down at Bill. Head now lowered, he is panting. “Let’s go back,” she says. Walking again, Glenda shakes her head. “I didn’t even know. I wonder when she left. She had a dog, a poodle.”

  “Brown?”

  “That’s it. Cliff said it was a very smart dog. Everyone here calls the owner Madame. That was her husband’s name for her, before he died. I think she liked me because she didn’t feel very plugged in here, either,” Glenda says. “You know, not connected. She stopped playing golf after her husband died. She only played it for him, she didn’t like the game. Didn’t play cards. Hated mahjongg, she said. I always felt like I let her down. We’d meet her with Hotspur, she’d be out with Emma I think was the name. She’d tell us about the book she was reading. I’m not much of a reader, so I never knew it.”