by Unknown
“Oh, George, I raised you children here! It’s my home! I would die if I had to live in some little dinky apartment!”
“Dad did it, for a while,” George said.
“Well, that was your dad’s own choice,” she said huffily. “Besides, he’s a man. Men don’t have the same feeling for houses.”
George was making sure he had his billfold, the way he always did when he was getting ready to go. She could read him like a book. She said, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“I can fix it in a jiffy. Or a soft drink? Juice? A beer?”
“The kids will be expecting me,” he said. He chuckled. “That puppy’s a handful.”
“What about now, where your dad’s living now?” she asked in a rush. “Anna’s house. Is it homey?”
“Hmm?”
“Does it feel like, you know, a family house, warm and comfy and lived in?”
“It feels fine,” he said, turning his gaze toward the kitchen window.
“Because I’ve always thought—correct me if I’m wrong—that Anna’s not that domestic. I can’t picture how she would decorate a home. Are there knickknacks and photos and afghans? Or is it more, how would you put it, sterile. Does she go for any particular period of furniture?”
“Oh, Mom, I don’t know,” George said. He was moving toward the dining room now, heading for the foyer. “I don’t know one furniture period from another,” he said. “It’s just a house, is all.”
“But you must have some impression of it,” she said as she followed close on his heels. “You must get some sort of feeling when you enter it—alienated or out of place or dislocated or . . . what? You can’t have absolutely no opinion!”
He turned at the front door and stooped to brush her cheek with his lips. “Along about, say, five-fifteen,” he said, “check and see if you’ve got hot water.”
He opened the door and walked out.
Sometimes she could just stomp on George.
She did have hot water, finally. She took a long, soaking shower and then she blow-dried her hair and put on a pale-blue dress and blue pumps. (She wasn’t sure where Dun was taking her to eat. She figured a dress would be safest.) Last, she applied her new cosmetics: ivory foundation, a touch of pink blush, rose lipstick, and pale-blue eye shadow almost exactly the color of her dress. The woman who gazed out of her mirror was pink-and-gold, her hair a blond mobcap around her face. Pauline didn’t hope anymore to look beautiful. She was trying instead for acceptable, unobjectionable, likable. She remembered how when she was a girl, the sight of an older woman who’d gone to the effort of lipstick and finger waves had filled her with grateful relief. There was no necessity, then, for pity.
She was just getting into her blazer when the doorbell rang. It was six o’clock precisely, which she found encouraging. Punctuality signified eagerness. (Or was it only that lack of punctuality signified lack of eagerness?) When she opened the door Dun Osgood was already smiling, as if he had been practicing—a wide, fixed, determined smile, shaky at the corners. He was a tall man with an apologetic stoop to his shoulders and an appealingly craggy face topped by a fan of straight gray hair. “Well, hi there!” he said. “How’re you doing?”
“I’m fine, Dun. How are you?”
“Got an awfully nice evening for this. You sure you’re going to be warm enough?”
“I’m sure.” She took her purse from the cobbler’s bench and stepped out the door and shut it behind her. Dun, she saw, was dressed up to about the same degree she was—a sport coat over an open-collared white shirt and good gray trousers. When they started down the walk he took light hold of her arm just above the elbow, and he opened the car door for her and made certain she’d tucked her hem inside before he closed it.
“Think you’re going to like the place we’re going to,” he said as they pulled away from the curb. “Pincers. Have you been?”
She shook her head.
“I used to eat there every Wednesday night with Mattie. Wednesday night is dessert night. Order one dessert, get another of equal or lesser price for free. Mattie would order the Boston cream pie and I’d have the chocolate nut cake.”
“That sounds lovely,” Pauline said.
“Although tonight is not a Wednesday, of course.”
“That’s all right,” Pauline said. “I’ve never been a huge dessert-eater.”
“You don’t mean to say!” Dun exclaimed, astonished beyond all proportion, in Pauline’s opinion. He came to a halt at a four-way stop sign and embarked on a lengthy after-you dance with the other driver before he started up again. “Well, you and Mattie wouldn’t have much in common, then,” he said. “Mattie had such a sweet tooth! At home she always fixed a dessert even when it was just the two of us for dinner. Pies like you wouldn’t believe, flakiest crusts in the world.”
Pauline summoned up a mental image of Mattie Osgood, who had, in fact, seemed the pie type—soft but not fat, with a sun-speckled, cozy face. “You must miss her very much,” she said.
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.”
His o’s were Minnesota o’s, rounder-sounding than most, quaint and naive and sincere.
“There are times I forget she’s not with me,” he said. “I think, I should tell Mattie such and such! or Wait till Mattie hears this! Then it all comes back to me.”
“Or that feeling you get when you’re walking down the street,” Pauline said, “that the person you’ve lost is walking beside you. This warm, accompanied feeling along one side of your body, and then you recollect, and your whole side goes cold and sort of breezy.”
“I’ve had that!” Dun said. He sent her a quick, darting glance.
They traveled for several minutes in silence, Pauline allowing him his private thoughts. The light was fading now and the countryside was losing its colors. The pink blossoms on the trees were a bleached white, the white houses a pearly gray.
“Tell me, Dun,” she said when she felt a suitable time had elapsed. “How did you come by your name? ‘Dun’ is so unusual.”
“Well, that would be from my mother’s folks,” he said. “Dunniston, they were. But I’ve always been just Dun myself.”
“I think it’s very attractive.”
“Why, I like your name, too,” he said.
She settled deeper into her seat, contentedly. They turned east and merged with a stream of other cars. It felt good to be a part of the Saturday-night celebrations. She loved the rituals of dating—the dressing up, the little flutter of anticipation, the process of leading somebody from small talk to real discussion. Dun Osgood’s awkwardness just made him more of a challenge. And anyhow, she’d never cared for a man who was too smooth.
She said, “I don’t think I’ve asked you, Dun. Do you have children?”
“No, no.” Those o’s again, sorrowful-sounding now. “We wanted them,” he said, “but you don’t always get what you want in this world.”
“Isn’t that the truth!” she said.
“It wasn’t so hard on me personally, but I know Mattie was disappointed. She just doted on her nephews. Doted.”
“And do her nephews live nearby, so they can give you some company now?”
“Oh, no.”
She waited.
“Well, I have a son and two daughters, myself,” she offered finally.
“Is that a fact!” He pulled into a parking lot, beside a restaurant with a neon crab above the door. “Daughters are what Mattie would have liked, I know,” he said. “She believed that daughters would stick by you more than sons.”
“Did she really,” Pauline said. She considered debating the point, but she decided to wait for some other topic on which he was better informed.
The restaurant was spookily, unnaturally quiet—not even any canned music—and so dark that the hostess had to lead them to their table with a flashlight. They passed only a few other diners, some of them sitting alone, most nursing cocktails garnished with maraschino cherries or slices of fruit. An old people
’s restaurant, then. Pauline was familiar with those. This would be its busiest time—five till six-thirty or so. She settled comfortably onto the banquette and accepted an enormous laminated menu. The table was made of some rough, dark wood and laid with paper place mats. A candle shaded by a little tin hat flickered in the middle. She tilted the hat to shed light on what the menu offered. Caesar salad, crab cakes, strip steak, surf ‘n’ turf . . . She smiled across at Dun. “Isn’t this nice!” she told him. She spoke barely above a whisper, but even so her voice was the loudest sound in the room.
“You think you can find something you’re able to eat?” Dun asked.
“Why, yes.”
“Mattie, you know, she couldn’t eat seafood. It seemed like such a waste, moving to the East Coast and then not able to take advantage of that good fresh crab and fish. But she had all these digestive troubles. She did enjoy the strip steak, though. You might want to order that.”
“No, I think I’ll have the crab cake,” Pauline said firmly.
“And to drink?” a waitress asked, standing over them with a pad and pencil.
Pauline hadn’t realized she was actually placing an order. She had counted on a little slower tempo. “Well, um . . . a glass of white wine?” she said. She looked at Dun to see if he would suggest they get a bottle, and when he didn’t, she told the waitress, “The house brand will be fine.”
“Just tomato juice for me,” Dun said.
Pauline said, “Oh. Are you not having a cocktail?”
“Puts me right to sleep,” Dun said. “But you go ahead; don’t mind me. And the strip steak,” he told the waitress, “well done, with fries and the salad, French dressing.”
“What vegetables for you, hon?” the waitress asked Pauline. She was still a very young girl, gawky and ponytailed, but already she had that maternal, waitressy tone of voice.
Pauline said, “Oh . . .” She peered again at the menu. “Coleslaw? And the string beans?”
She waited till the girl was out of earshot before she said, “I didn’t have to have wine. I could just as well have had juice.”
“Oh, now, I want you to enjoy yourself,” Dun told her. “And what I said earlier about the desserts: I hope you won’t hold back from ordering one just because it’s not Wednesday. Why, I plan to get one! Half-price or not! Make the most of life while you’re able, I always say!”
“Let’s just see whether I have the space for it,” Pauline told him.
“Oftentimes, you know what we’d do? Mattie and I? We’d splurge and get a third dessert and split it. What Mattie always said was, it wasn’t like we were paying for three. On Wednesday nights, that is. But we could even do that tonight! It’s a special occasion!”
Pauline looked directly into his eyes and said, “It is an occasion, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sirree,” he said.
“It’s our first time going out together, just the two of us alone.”
His gaze slid toward the waitress, who was approaching with their drinks. He watched intently as Pauline’s chunky wineglass was set in front of her. He watched as his little tumbler of tomato juice arrived, a tree of celery jutting out of it at a slant.
“Cheers,” Pauline said, lifting her glass.
“Yes, cheers,” he said.
They sipped and set their drinks down.
“You know what I like to ask people?” Pauline said. She leaned toward him confidingly, the fingers of one hand curled around her wineglass stem. (She was good at this. She had to be. Other women—long-married and taking too much for granted—could afford to sit back passively and let a conversation drift, but Pauline had had to learn to be entertaining and thought-provoking.) “It’s a little sort of personality test,” she said, “when I’m trying to get to know somebody. I ask about their house dream.”
“Their dream house?”
“No, their . . . See, I believe that almost everyone dreams now and then about the house they’re living in. They dream that one day they climb a set of stairs they hadn’t noticed before or open a door that wasn’t there before and, presto! They find a whole new room! An undiscovered room that they never knew existed! Have you ever dreamed that dream?”
“Well,” Dun said, “it does sound kind of familiar, now that you bring it up.”
“And here’s what I’ve observed: half of the people think, Isn’t this wonderful! Someplace new to explore! And the other half thinks, Just what I need: another maintenance problem. This room has not been tended in years and now I can see daylight through the ceiling.”
Dun knotted his forehead.
“Which do you say?” Pauline asked him.
“Oh, why . . .”
“Would you look at that room as a gift, or a burden? Because I feel it’s very revealing, don’t you?”
The waitress set their plates in front of them. “Anything else I can get you?” she asked.
“Not a thing,” Dun said. “Unless you, Pauline . . .”
“No, thanks,” she said. “Don’t worry; there’s not a right or wrong answer. It’s just a . . . symbol, you know? A symbol of which style of person you are.”
“Actually,” Dun said, “I’m not sure I’ve had that dream after all.”
Pauline said, “Oh.”
“But it’s an interesting question.”
He cut into his steak and examined it. Helpfully, Pauline tilted the candle shade to send him better light. “Me,” she said, “I get this sense of possibility. A brand-new room! A new adventure! But my husband, on the other hand . . . His version of the dream was, he discovered a second story when, as you know, our house is a ranch house, and the floor was puddled with water and snakes were swimming around in it.”
“How could that have happened, though?” Dun asked her.
“What? Well, it was only a dream.”
“Was your loss a very recent loss?”
“My . . . ?”
“Your husband. When was it he passed?”
“He didn’t. We’re divorced,” Pauline said.
“Oh, I hadn’t realized.”
“We parted ways thirteen years ago,” Pauline said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Dun told her.
“Don’t be sorry! I’m over it!” She took a bite of her crab cake. Her words seemed to hang in the air a moment; she heard a ring of bravado that she hadn’t intended. “It was all very friendly and civilized,” she said, softening her voice. “No long-drawn-out court battles or anything like that.”
“Well, still,” Dun said, “I can guess it must have been painful. I don’t know what I’d have done if Mattie’d asked me for a divorce! Would you believe she and I never had a serious quarrel? I don’t mean we didn’t disagree—she’d want the thermostat higher and I’d be sweating; she’d want to go to some shindig and I’d prefer to sit home. But we never what you’d call fought; we never regretted we were married to each other. I consider myself lucky that way. I feel I’ve been very fortunate.”
“Yes,” Pauline said, “you are lucky. Yes, not many can say that.”
She was overcome, suddenly, by a sense of boredom so heavy that she envisioned it as a vast gray fog seeping soundlessly through the room.
So when the crash came—a heart-stopping wham! and a clatter and a series of tinkles—she welcomed the diversion. She straightened in her seat and glanced hopefully over Dun’s shoulder. In the open, tiled space just in front of the hostess’s podium, their waitress slapped her own cheeks and stared down at a mangle of crockery. “Mercy sakes!” Dun said, but Pauline said, “Don’t look!”
“Pardon?”
“That’s what my daughter tells me—Karen. She once took a hostess job to help with her law-school expenses and to this day, if we’re in a restaurant and someone drops something, she tells me, ‘Don’t look, whatever you do! Pretend you haven’t noticed.’ That poor waitress; she must be mortified.”
“I thought there’d been an explosion,” Dun said, returning obediently to his steak. He cut himse
lf another piece while behind him, the waitress tucked her skirt up and knelt to gather half-moons of plates and cups missing their handles. Chink-chink, they landed on her tray. The other diners watched with interest, but Pauline gazed tactfully to her left where, she suddenly noticed, a white coffee cup sat all by itself in the center of the aisle. Dun was saying, “You have a daughter who’s a lawyer?”
“Yes, she works for this advocacy group that helps people who are on welfare,” Pauline told him. The cup stood right side up, a single flash of white in the gloom, and as far as she could see it wasn’t even chipped. This made it appear to have been set there for some purpose. Should she point the cup out to the waitress? Or would that be interfering? She forced herself to look again at Dun, who was saying, “I’ll bet you’re proud of her.”
“Proud?”
“Having a lawyer in the family.”
“Well, yes, though you’d never know she was family, because she’s changed her name to Antonczyk.”
Dun stopped chewing and asked, “Why would she do that?”
“Isn’t it the limit?” she said. All right, she would gather the energy to try one more time. She laughed and shook her head. “That was my husband’s last name two or three generations ago. They changed it to Anton, I don’t know when, and now here she is, Antonczyk, back to her roots and so forth. We all said, ‘Who?’ We said, ‘What?’ But that’s Karen—a mind of her own.”
“One of Matties nephews did the exact same thing,” Dun said.
“He did?”
“Only he changed his first name. He changed it from Peter to Rock.”
Pauline thought this over.
“He said it meant the same thing and it had a more snazzy sound, but I don’t know; the family was pretty upset. Mattie told him that someday he would want to change it back. He mentioned that to me at her funeral. He said, ‘Already I’m starting to want to. Aunt Mattie was right.’ He thought the world of her; all of them did. She never forgot a birthday. She sent them cards for every occasion, Christmas and Easter and Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving and Labor Day, even.”
Over Dun’s left shoulder, Pauline saw a very old couple entering the restaurant. They paused at the hostess’s podium, but the hostess was nowhere in sight. They looked at each other. The man advanced a few steps and glanced back at his wife. She seemed doubtful. The man had a felt hat in his hands and he turned it nervously by the brim as he advanced yet another step and another, while behind him, his wife ventured a step or two herself. The man gathered speed; he seemed focused on a certain table somewhere to Pauline’s rear, and he kept his eyes fixed on it as he walked smack into the white cup. Ching! It rang against the tiles and took off, spinning like a top, with a circular, metallic sound that brought the hostess rushing up out of nowhere. The couple froze and then pivoted in unison and stumbled toward the door. The expression on the husband’s face in the instant before he turned—pure bewilderment; how in heaven’s name to explain such a strange faux pas?—struck Pauline’s funny bone and she got the giggles. She tried to keep quiet, of course. She tucked her chin down, shielding her mouth with one hand. But she was laughing so helplessly that she made a kind of honking sound, and tears began running down her cheeks. Dun, who had started slightly at the first ching but (perhaps recalling her instructions) remained facing forward, seemed not to notice her behavior. Or maybe he was being diplomatic. At any rate, he went on talking. “Even May Day; remember May Day? Most people don’t. I can’t figure what happened to May Day. Folks used to hang baskets of flowers on people’s doorknobs and Mattie still did, the prettiest little baskets she bought in bulk at the crafts supply and trimmed with ribbon. I’ll be so broken up when May Day comes this year. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”