Old Ladies Read online

  “You mean the heroine and the…” She was pretty sure she’d said army officer, but she didn’t want to take a chance. “…and her lover? They escape over the mountains to this exotic place.”

  “What place?” Ingrid asked.

  And Louise fetched it out of nowhere. “Samarkand.”

  “That’s a pretty exotic-sounding place all right.” Ingrid stood up. “You get a C for today.”

  “Why just a C?” When Louise heard her own plaintive question, she felt the heat rise into her face.

  “Reading a book is better than the newspaper but you sat on your backside all day. You’re too young to just curl up and die.” Ingrid drank off the last swig of tea. “Now you got to admit Earl Grey’s a hell of a lot better than that swill you were drinking. Samarkand, huh? Never heard of it. See you tomorrow.”

  Her story deserved more than a C, Louise thought as she watched Ingrid disappear into the study. What a great touch Samarkand had been, but where on earth had it come from? Samarkand. Tamerlane. And then it came thundering out of the past. Right after the Soviet Union had collapsed, Hewlett-Packard had sent Cal out to investigate putting a new plant in Samarkand. She had been envious that he was going to such an exotic place, and she had asked him not to forget a thing.

  When he came home, he brought her postcards of the rather shabby hotel where he had stayed and of the mausoleum where Tamerlane was buried. That was about it for Samarkand, he’d said—just shabby new stuff and beat-up old stuff. He had bought her a silk scarf from the tax-free shop at the Frankfurt airport. Yellow and blue with a chain design. She still had it someplace.

  ***

  As she finished supper that evening, Louise heard Thomas whistling. She decided that, just in case, she ought to let them know she was in the kitchen, and so she coughed as loud as she could. When she heard Thomas say, “O you beautiful doll, turn around so I can unleash those succulent melons,” she banged her knife and fork on her plate and went to the sink and dropped in the frying pan with a bone-shattering clatter. But they seemed utterly oblivious of her presence. Ingrid began to ooh and ahh, and the bedsprings began to clang and Ingrid moaned, “Oh, Thomas, Thomas,” and Louise ran out of the room.

  “She has this little weasel of a man,” Louise told Sibyl that evening. “I couldn’t help overhearing. They made such a racket they drove me out of my own kitchen.”

  “People do make love, you know,” Sibyl said, in her patient voice.

  “Decent people do not carry on when others are within earshot.”

  “I guess people were a bit more secretive about sex in your day.”

  Louise resented that, as though her day were a thousand years ago. She said, “It’s not the sex, it’s the noise. The bedsprings like a brass band. And the moaning and groaning. I’m going to tell her she can’t have him in the house.”

  “Suppose she leaves,” Sibyl said. “This is the third one.”

  “Third, tenth, twentieth, I will not have my peace of mind destroyed by pizza smells or lovelorn fools or sex fiends.”

  When the heavy sigh wafted over the telephone wire, Louise knew just how Sibyl looked: eyelids at half-mast, lips pressed into a thin line, shaking her head just a bit, displeased but forbearing. Of course Sibyl was worried, and Louise knew it and regretted it and even appreciated the concern, and for forty-one years she had loved pleasing Sibyl. But Sibyl wasn’t there to hear all that racket. Thomas had to go.

  ***

  Louise decided she’d go last with show and tell the next afternoon, because hers was going to be the ultimatum: no Thomas or no You. When Ingrid came into the kitchen Louise couldn’t help thinking about the noises the night before, and she felt herself flush. Ingrid didn’t notice. She was too busy jiggling a little pink box by its string. “Still warm from the bakery. I thought you’d like a change from those boring cookies of yours.”

  Louise thought, Well, they aren’t so boring you didn’t eat practically the whole package. But she wanted everything to go well for the ultimatum, so she just tore off the string and opened the box. “Oh my, blueberry muffins. My very favorite.” She set the muffins on a plate and poured the tea. “You’re so sweet, Ingrid.”

  “I wasn’t sweet to my kids today, I’ll tell you,” Ingrid said with a huge sigh. “Show and tell: I took twenty hyenas to the University’s art museum. It was bedlam, chaos. I yelled at them so much the guard told me either shut myself and them up or everybody leave. My kids are hard to control. They’re just at the age where their hormones are going off like Roman candles.”

  Last night, Louise thought, Ingrid’s hormones had gone off like Roman candles. And Thomas’s? Like firecrackers? Ingrid frowned. “You can laugh, but it wasn’t funny at the time,” she said. “Okay, your turn. Stay home all day?”

  Louise was determined to rise to the challenge. “I went to the library.” She hadn’t really been to the library since she used to take Sibyl to the children’s room where she had to sit in the tiny little chairs with her knees knocking against her chin. “I did some research on Tamerlane. He was the head man in Samarkand. Remember: War and Peace?”

  “Well going to the library was at least better than sitting around all day,” Ingrid said. “You know, I like carrot muffins better than blueberry. They’re crunchier.”

  “I’m not finished with my story.” Louise pressed her lips together and raised her chin.

  “Sorry,” Ingrid said. “What about this Tamerwho?” It was clear she wasn’t the least interested.

  “Oh, he’s not the point,” Louise said. “I saw a young man on the steps in front of the library. He was wearing blue jeans so raggedy you could see his skin through the holes.”

  Ingrid grinned. “I bet you followed him all around sneaking freebie looks at his bottom.”

  Louise drew back. “What an ugly thing to say.”

  “Why?” said Ingrid. “Was his bottom ugly?”

  Ingrid’s laughter was so cheerful, so abandoned, so rich and throaty that Louise could not help joining in. “He was pretty good-looking, actually,” she said, “though I suppose he was a druggie. Only about sixteen.”

  Ingrid sobered at once and looked at Louise with a kind of pained wonderment. “Not much older than my kids. What happened?”

  Louise said, “He looked starved and sick and so I gave him twenty dollars.” Once outside a movie theater when she was a little girl, her aunt had emptied her change purse into a bum’s filthy hands, and as the bum walked off Louise saw a dark stain on the seat of his pants and down his filthy pant leg. “The boy was so thrilled with the money that he wet his pants,” she said.

  “I’d sure hate to think of any of my kids out on the streets like that.” Ingrid’s face was flushed and her eyes filled. “It was awfully kind of you to give him the twenty dollars. Sometimes an act of kindness can turn a life around.”

  “Actually,” Louise began. She didn’t want to leave it like that, getting false credit for being generous and kind. “Actually,” she repeated, but she didn’t want to ruin the story either, “that’s just what he said. He told me he was going to use the money for a bus trip home.”

  “You sure are a good woman, Louise.” A car came to a noisy halt in the driveway, and Ingrid stood up. “There’s Thomas.”

  And she was gone before Louise remembered to say, No-more-Thomas.

  ***

  That evening Louise took her B, L, and T sandwich into the living room: one way to avoid getting run out of her own kitchen was to get out ahead of time. She turned the TV to the news on CBS. Something about nuns in Senegal, something about the side effects of a new drug, something about a senator and his secretary. I’d Rather not, she said and chuckling clicked to NBC and then on to ABC. Might as well have been the same handsome man reading the same news in the same portentous voice. She clicked to PBS. A man with shellacked hair spoke in sepulchral tones, and a woman with large square teeth kept interrupting him. It was amazing that she and Cal had listened every night to that boring
stuff.

  She turned off the television and took a bite of her sandwich. The bacon was cold and the lettuce was limp and the bread was soggy with tomato drippings. She might as well throw the thing away and get some crackers and cheese. Ingrid and Thomas were probably at it, but it was her kitchen, and she’d be damned if she’d be kept out of it.

  And they were at it. Ingrid was groaning, and the groans became a shout and then a yelp, and Thomas’s laughter vibrated like the cackle of a rooster. The proudest rooster in the barnyard, she thought. There was a long ooh and then Ingrid let loose a cannonade of joyous whoops. That little man causing that huge white body such frenzy, such turbulence, such pleasure. As Sibyl said, people do make love. Louise stood against the doorframe, listening. But when Ingrid shouted, “This is the best fuck yet,” Louise went back to the living room and turned the TV on as loud as it would go.

  Just think, a schoolteacher using that word. Not once had she heard Cal utter a four-letter word, even after he was non-compos when a lot of people would have taken the opportunity to let loose. She wouldn’t tolerate having anyone talk that way in her house. Now it wasn’t just Thomas but Ingrid herself who had to leave.

  Louise knew Ingrid wouldn’t just take the eviction the way Edward and Leo had—she’d demand to know why. Louise would have to make up some excuse—if she told the truth, they’d think she had been eavesdropping. She’d say she’d sold the house to a crazy Silicon Valley billionaire who was going to tear it down and build a fifty-million-dollar mansion. Or maybe that a long-lost brother had been found in a Burmese jungle and needed a home. Or maybe that she had been diagnosed with colon cancer like Cal’s and was moving to Seattle to spend her last days with Sibyl. She’d think of something.

  ***

  The next afternoon Ingrid bustled in right after school, bearing a nosegay of blue and white flowers. “I saw this in the florist’s window,” she said, pressing the flowers against Louise’s cheek, “and I immediately thought of you and your beautiful blue eyes.”

  Louise stepped back. How could she accept the flowers and then tell Ingrid she had to leave? “You keep them,” she said. She covered the words with a conciliatory smile. “They’ll look so nice in your room. You know: the blue blotter on the desk?”

  Ingrid abruptly sat down and cocked her head. A film of dark cloud dropped across her moon face. “To reject the gift is to reject the giver. Have I done something to be rejected for?”

  “Of course not.” Louise grabbed the nosegay from Ingrid and hid her face in it. “They’re lovely. It’s just I don’t want you to think you have to be bringing me things.”

  “Look here, lady, if I want to bring you a present, a little bit of a thing like you won’t stop me, so don’t try. Just go stick them in some water and I’ll make tea this time.” Ingrid patted the air as though calming Louise. “Now, now, I’m not saying it’ll be better than yours.” She roared out a laugh, and Louise thought that must be the way a lioness laughed.

  Once they were seated at the table, Ingrid sagged back against the chair and sighed. “Sometimes it’s hard to be a teacher.”

  She said that during one of those stupid state-wide exams, one of her kids vomited and ran out of the room and then all the kids sniggered and pretended to vomit and Ingrid had yelled that if they didn’t shut up she’d swat them so hard across their chops they’d really vomit and one smartass said teachers weren’t allowed to hit students and she had said, You want to bet, and he had said No and all the kids had shut up and gone back to the exam. They knew she wouldn’t hit them in a million years, but they hated for her to be mad at them.

  Ingrid’s story had churned up a memory from a long time ago. Sibyl had been about six then and they were walking through the park when a woman nearby had slapped her little boy across his face. The boy had let out a blood-curdling scream and Sibyl had begun to cry. Louise had grabbed Sibyl’s hand and raced across the park and straight home. “I drove in to San Francisco to Nordstrom this morning,” Louise said, “to buy a birthday present for my granddaughter, and I saw this woman slap her little boy right across his…chops.”

  “Some mothers ought to be shot,” Ingrid said. “Where were you?”

  Louise was startled. Was Ingrid trying to trap her? “Didn’t I say Nordstrom?”

  “Yeah, but I meant where in the store. You usually give me the whole picture.”

  “In the children’s department.” Louise had never been in the San Francisco Nordstrom—in fact, she hadn’t been to San Francisco since Cal had been diagnosed—but she remembered an ad she had noticed in the newspaper though she wasn’t sure which store—maybe Nordstrom, maybe Macy’s, maybe Sears. “Right near a rack of blue and purple imitation fur coats for toddlers, if you can believe they’d sell such a thing.” She paused to enjoy that nice touch. “Well, I certainly wasn’t going to sit still for child abuse. I went right up to the woman and said, ‘You shouldn’t slap that little boy that way.’ You should have seen the ugly look on her face.”

  “Wow. Catfight. So what’d she say?” Ingrid’s eyes and teeth lit up like jewels, and Louise knew she sure had her interest this time.

  “She said, It’s none of your…” Louise paused. “…fucking business.” She had never said that word in her life and to cover her confusion she rushed on. “And I said, It is my fucking business because he’ll grow up hating women and maybe rape my daughter, I mean, one of my granddaughters.”

  Ingrid gave a hoot of laugher and slapped both thighs, and Louise began to laugh, too. Yes, it was pretty funny, throwing that word back at the woman just as now she was throwing it back at Ingrid. It served them both right, using ugly words. And it did fit very well with her story.

  When their laughter had quieted down, Ingrid glanced at her watch and frowned, “I have to pick Thomas up ten minutes ago. We’re going over to Berkeley for the evening.” She patted Louise’s arm. “I just love our tea parties. If you ever want me to leave, Louise, you’ll have to dynamite me out of here.”

  And could Louise then say, I have cancer?

  When Ingrid left the room, Louise picked up the little glass vase with the nosegay. The flowers were lovely, so pretty and delicate. For the first year after she and Cal were married, he had brought her flowers every Saturday. She had been very happy that year. She had washed and starched and ironed his white shirts and brushed his dark suits and every morning sent him off like a warrior to do battle for Hewlett-Packard. A few years later when she was feeling neglected, she had asked him if now he took a weekly bouquet of flowers to HP. He had laughed hard at that, and soon she was laughing, and soon they were making love. But quietly. Not hollering and whinnying and braying.

  ***

  “How’re things going with the tenant?” Sibyl asked when she telephoned that night. “Still hot and heavy? Making out right this minute in Dad’s study?”

  This miffed Louise. “No, they’re not. They’re in Berkeley for the evening.”

  Sibyl said, “Ross thinks you ought to just tell her to leave if she’s bothering you so much.”

  “What business is it of Ross’s, please?”

  That took Sibyl aback. “Well, he just thought that by now you’re probably used to living alone and won’t be bothered by the noises.”

  “Nothing wrong with a little noise,” Louise said.

  “But I thought that was why you were willing to have someone live there.”

  “Oh,” Louise said. She had clean forgotten those other night noises. She sucked in her breath. “They might come back.”

  “Of course you could get someone else if you don’t like her.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like her. She’s very sweet. And every day we have wonderful talks.”

  Sibyl snorted. “About her sex life?”

  “Not her sex life, Sibyl,” Louise said in her testiest voice. “She tells me about school, and I tell her about my day. You’d be surprised at how much we have to talk about.”

  Sibyl said, “That’s n
ice,” a little condescendingly, Louise thought. Sibyl had always been a good daughter, no drugs or sex during her teen years, sent Louise’s birthday present so it arrived on her birthday, telephoned regularly, did all the right things, but sometimes Louise had thought that the other side of that was being a little unimaginative. She got that from Cal. Louise reverted to her favorite change of subject. “How are the kids?”

  “Great. Ross bought a new bright red SUV, and the girls are absolutely beside themselves. We’ll be able to pack us all in for a trip to Mount Rainier when you come up for Thanksgiving.”

  “We’ll have to see,” Louise said.

  ***

  The next afternoon when Ingrid appeared with two chocolate éclairs from the French bakery, Louise clapped her hands. “What a treat,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve had such a luscious dessert in forty years.”

  As soon as they had finished the éclairs and tea, Ingrid launched into her show and tell. She said the principal had come into her classroom to evaluate her teaching can you believe his nerve. She had picked him up by the seat of his pants so his toes barely touched the floor and ushered him out to the hall and told him not to come back without a warrant. She roared with laughter. “Skinny nerdy drink of water. The kids loved it. Okay, your turn.”

  Louise said, “I was over at the shopping center.” Since she went once a week for her groceries, talking about it wasn’t nearly as risky as San Francisco, and so she launched right into a description. “All the windows are beautiful with lovely fall colors. Glorious burnt oranges this year and a deep rich green.” She noticed that Ingrid was losing interest, and so she quickly shifted. “As I was waiting to cross over to the parking lot, a man stopped his bright red SUV right in front of me.” She paused, pleased at how smoothly the story had begun, but unsure where to go next.

  “So? What about him?” Ingrid asked. “Don’t stop now.”

  And suddenly she saw it all so clearly. “He leaned out the window and looked at me and said, ‘Girl of my dreams.’ It’s amazing, but I recognized him at once, though I haven’t seen him in at least forty-five years. That’s what he always called me. Girl of my dreams.” She paused and smiled. “My first lover.”