Terms of Endearment Read online

  All she had was a sullen coldness, and the secret of Danny. Flap could have found out the secret if he had read the morning paper as attentively as her mother had, but he had only glanced at the headlines and read the sports page. He knew he was going away fishing and hadn’t even looked to see what was on at the movies. At two or three points during breakfast Emma had almost confessed what she knew, not exactly out of loyalty but because a strange wavery apprehension came over her and went away and then came over her again. If Flap had ever once looked at her right, she would have come right out with Danny, but she could tell from the happy way he was whistling “The Wabash Cannonball” that he was not going to be thinking about her much for a couple of days. She made no effort to look any way but hostile as they were leaving, but it made only a dim impression on him.

  “You look sort of resentful,” he said, pausing a moment on the steps. The tone he used was the tone he would have used if all he had said was “Nice weather.”

  “I am,” Emma said.

  “Why?” he asked politely.

  “It’s not my place to say,” Emma said. “If you really care, then it’s your place to find things out.”

  “Well, you’re just impossible,” he said.

  “I don’t agree,” Emma said. “I’m possible when I’m handled with a little care.”

  Flap was in perfect spirits. He didn’t want to fight, and didn’t answer; nor did he notice that when he waved to her from the car she didn’t wave back.

  Cecil didn’t notice her omission either. He too was feeling very good. “That girl’s the cat’s meow,” he said. “Marrying her was the smartest thing you’ve done with yourself yet. Hope we can bring her some good fish to cook.”

  2.

  THE GIRL who was the cat’s meow went in and attempted to arm herself against the alternating senses of anger and futility, emptiness and apprehension that had invaded her heart and spoiled her pleasure in what she had thought might be a wonderful morning. All she had wanted was for Flap to face up to her for a minute—maybe just look really friendly, and not friendly-guilty, as he had looked. He knew what a pushover she was, how easy she was to please. Two nice minutes would have done it, and it seemed disgraceful to her that he had married her and yet didn’t care enough to produce two nice minutes when she needed them.

  She pushed the dirty dishes out of the way and sat down by the window where she had sat the night before to listen to the rain. For weapons she had coffee and cigarettes, the want ads and the crossword puzzle, and even her old shabby copy of Wuthering Heights. The book was one of her unfailing comforts in life, but for once it failed her. She couldn’t lose herself in it, and all it did was remind her of what she already knew too well: that in her life nothing that total would ever be at stake. No one would ever think she was that crucial—not truly or absolutely, not life or death, commit or die.

  While she was staring at the want ads the phone rang.

  “You again,” she said, knowing perfectly well who it was.

  “Of course. You didn’t let me have the last word,” her mother said. “That was rather selfish of you, dear. You know how much I enjoy the last word.”

  “I was busy,” Emma said. “Also, I was thinking of your fellows.”

  “Oh, them,” Aurora said. “Emma, you still sound resigned. Honestly. Here you are about to have a nice baby and you don’t even sound happy. You have your whole life before you, dear.”

  “You’ve been telling me that for ten years,” Emma said. “Some of it must be behind me by now. That’s what you told me when I got braces, as I recall. It’s also what you told me when I got engaged.”

  “Only to bring you to your senses,” Aurora said. “Unfortunately, I failed.”

  “Maybe I’m just a resigned person,” Emma said. “Ever think of that?”

  “I’m hanging up,” Aurora said. “You’re very unrewarding today. I don’t think you like me when I sound gay. I may have erred on occasion in my life, but at least I’ve kept a healthy attitude. You have responsibilities now. No child wants a mother who’s resigned. If you ask me you’d do well to diet.”

  “You’d better stop picking on me,” Emma said flatly. “I’ve had enough. You weigh more than I do anyway.”

  “Humph,” Aurora said, and hung up again.

  Emma stared at the want ads, quivering slightly. She had stopped feeling angry at Flap; what she could not stop feeling was disappointed. Life had far too little of Wuthering Heights. Now carelessly, now meticulously, she peeled an orange, but it lay on the table uneaten until late that afternoon.

  CHAPTER III

  1.

  BY TEN A.M., after a short nap to calm her nerves, Aurora had made her way downstairs and onto her patio. Rosie, her maid for twenty-two years, found her there, recumbent on a chaise.

  “How come all the phones in this house is off the hook?” Rosie asked.

  “Well, it’s not your house, is it?” Aurora said defiantly.

  “No, but the world could be comin’ to an end,” Rosie said serenely. “Nobody could call an’ tell us. Maybe I’d like to get a runnin’ start.”

  “I can see the world from where I’m lying,” Aurora said, glancing at it. “It does not appear to be coming to an end. You’ve been listening to your preachers again, haven’t you?”

  “I still don’t see no point in having four phones if you’re gonna go around leavin’ them off the hook,” Rosie said, ignoring the question. Rosie was five one, freckled all over, and weighed ninety pounds, sometimes. “I might not be no bigger than a chicken, but I got fight,” she often said. “I ain’t afraid to work, I can tell you that.”

  Aurora knew that. She knew it only too well. Once Rosie let herself loose on a house, nothing was ever quite as it had been. Old and familiar objects disappeared forever, and those that were allowed to remain were consigned to places so unlikely that it was sometimes months before she came across them. Having Rosie for a maid was an appalling price to pay for cleanliness, and it was perpetually unclear to Aurora why she paid it. The two of them had never got on; they had fought tooth and nail for twenty-two years. Neither of them had ever intended for the arrangement to last more than a few more days, and yet years passed and no good stopping place appeared.

  “So?” Rosie inquired. It was her way of inquiring if it was all right to hang up the phones.

  Aurora nodded. “I was punishing Emma, if you must know,” she said. “She hung up on me twice and was not apologetic. I don’t regard that as forgivable.”

  “Aw, I do,” Rosie said. “My kids hang up on me left and right. That’s just kids for you. Kids don’t know what manners is.”

  “Well, mine knows,” Aurora said. “Emma didn’t grow up in the street, like some people’s children.” She lifted her eyebrows and looked at Rosie, who squinted back at her undaunted.

  “All right, just keep off my younguns,” Rosie said. “I’ll light into you like a rat terrier, first thing you know. Just because you was too lazy to have but one doesn’t mean other people ain’t got a right to a normal-sized family.”

  “I’m certainly glad all Americans don’t share your view of what’s normal,” Aurora said. “If they did we’d be standing on top of one another right now.”

  “Seven ain’t a one too many,” Rosie said. She snatched several pillows off the chaise and began to pound them. Aurora seldom moved without eight or ten of her favorite pillows. Trails of pillows often led from her bedroom to whatever part of the house she came to rest in.

  “Can’t you leave me my pillows?” she yelled. “You’re no respecter of a person’s comfort, I must say. I didn’t like your tone just now, either. You’re a fifty-year-old woman and I don’t intend to see you through another pregnancy.”

  Rosie’s fecundity was a source of constant apprehension to both of them, but particularly to Aurora. The youngest child was only four, and there seemed reason to doubt that the tide had really been stemmed. Rosie herself was ambivalent. She scarcely gave her
children a thought for months on end, but when she did give them a thought she found it difficult to give up the notion of having another one. It had pepped her up too many times. She moved around Aurora in a crouch, snatching every pillow she could reach. Those that had pillowcases she instantly stripped.

  “Emma was probably just washing her hair and never wanted to talk,” she said to divert Aurora’s attention. “Anyhow, she’s got a heavy cross to bear. That sickly dog of a husband of hers ain’t fit to kick off the porch.”

  “I’m glad we agree on something,” Aurora said, kicking out at her idly. “Straighten up. You’re far too short as it is. No one wants a maid who’s two feet tall.”

  “Got a date for lunch yet?” Rosie asked.

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” Aurora said. “If you don’t stop hovering around me I’m going to swat you.”

  “Well, if you’re goin’ out I’m having Royce in then,” Rosie said. “I just thought I’d clear it with you.”

  “Of course,” Aurora said. “Have him in. Make free with my food. I don’t know why I don’t just deed the house to you. I’d probably be happier in an apartment anyway, now that I’m an aging widow. At least no one would snatch my pillows.”

  “That’s just talk,” Rosie said, still grabbing and shucking. Naked pillows lay everywhere—the only ones that weren’t naked were the three Aurora was lying on.

  “In point of fact it’s not just talk,” she said. “In point of fact” was one of her favorite phrases. “I ought to move. I don’t know what’s to stop me, unless I marry, and this is far from likely.”

  Rosie snickered. “You may marry but you ain’t gonna move,” she said. “Not unless you marry some old coot with a mansion. You got too many doodads. There ain’t an apartment in Houston that’d hold this many doodads.”

  “I’m not listening to any more of your twaddle,” Aurora said, rising and clutching her three remaining pillows to her. “You’re as difficult as my daughter and your grammar is worse. Now that you’ve spoiled my rest I have no choice but to go outside.”

  “I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t get in the way of my work,” Rosie said. “You can go poo-poo in the frog pond for all I care.”

  “No choice,” Aurora muttered, abandoning the field. It was another of her favorite expressions, and also one of her favorite states. As long as she could feel robbed of all choice, then nothing that went wrong could be her fault, and in any case she had never really enjoyed choosing, unless jewels and gowns were involved.

  She kicked several naked pillows out of the way and left the patio with as bad a grace as possible to go out in the sunny back yard and inspect her bulbs.

  2.

  WHEN SHE came down from her bedroom two hours later, dressed for her luncheon date—or nearly so—Rosie was in the kitchen having lunch with her husband, Royce Dunlup. In Aurora’s view Royce was even less inspired than Rudyard had been, and it was a wonder to her that Rosie had somehow prompted him to seven kids. He drove a delivery truck for a company that sold packaged sandwiches, pigs’ feet, barbecue chips, and other horrible foods. Somehow or other he always managed his deliveries so as to be in the Greenway neighborhood at lunchtime, so Rosie could feed him a home-cooked meal.

  “There you are, Royce, as usual,” Aurora said. She was carrying her shoes in one hand and her stockings in the other. Stockings were one of the banes of her existence, and she only put them on at the last minute, if at all.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Royce said. He stood in great awe of Aurora Greenway, and had remained in awe of her despite having eaten lunch in her kitchen almost every day for twenty years. If she was home, she was usually still in her dressing gown at lunch-time—indeed, it was her custom to change dressing gowns frequently during the course of the morning, more or less as a prelude to serious dressing. Often, proceeding quite frankly on the premise that any man is more interesting than none, she would descend to the kitchen and attempt to get a conversation out of Royce. It never worked, but at least she got to consume her rightful share of whatever Rosie had cooked—usually an excellent gumbo of some sort or another. Rosie was from Shreveport and had a fine touch with shellfish.

  “You’re looking thinner, Royce. I hope you’re not working too hard,” she said, smiling at him. It was her traditional opener.

  Royce shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said without taking his nose out of his gumbo.

  “My that looks good,” Aurora said. “I believe I’ll just have a cup to bolster me before I start. Then if I get lost on the way to the restaurant I won’t have to drive around feeling hungry.”

  “I thought you never got lost,” Rosie said. “That’s what you always claim.”

  “Lost is not the right word,” Aurora said. “It’s just that I sometimes don’t arrive very directly. I don’t see that it’s nice of you to bring it up anyway. I’m sure Royce doesn’t want to hear us argue while he’s eating.”

  “Let me worry about my own husband,” Rosie said. “Royce could eat in an earthquake and never miss a bite.”

  Aurora fell silent in order to consume the gumbo. “I really do think I’m allergic to stockings,” she said when she finished. “I never feel quite well when I have them on. Probably they inhibit my circulation, or something of that nature. How is your circulation these days, Royce?”

  “Pretty well,” Royce said. When pressed about almost any aspect of his personal well-being, Royce might commit himself to a “pretty well,” but that was his absolute limit.

  He probably wouldn’t have said much more if he had dared, but the truth was he didn’t dare. Twenty years of watching Aurora bumble around the kitchen in hundreds of dressing gowns, always barefooted and usually only haphazardly coiffed, had filled Royce with a vast doomed lust. She kept a large pile of blue pillows in a particularly sunny corner of the kitchen, and she usually ended up flopped on them, eating gumbo and singing little snatches of opera while she looked out the window and admired the yellow roses in her garden, or watched the midget TV from which she was seldom long separated. She had bought the little TV the minute she had seen it, and considered that she used it to “keep up,” something she had always felt obliged to do. Usually she plopped it on a pillow of its own so she could keep up and admire her roses at the same time.

  The minute she finished the gumbo she put her cup in the sink and went over and piled the blue pillows as high as they would go. “I think I’ll sit for two minutes,” she said, sitting. “I don’t like to go out when I’m not feeling quite settled, and I’m certainly not feeling very settled.”

  Rosie was properly disgusted. “You’re the biggest sissy I ever seen,” she said. “Besides, you’re already late.”

  “You hush,” Aurora said. “I have a right to look at my own yard for a moment, don’t I? I’m gearing myself up for my stockings.”

  She looked at her stockings and sighed. Then she started to put one on but got only as far as her calf before she lost her impetus. Once she lost her impetus with a stocking there was very little hope, and she knew it. She began to feel very melancholy, as so often happened just before her luncheon dates. Life was far from romantic, luncheon dates or no. She stuffed her stockings in her purse, feeling very fitful. Then she sang a snatch of Puccini, hoping it would improve her mood. “I should have done more with my singing,” she said, sure that no one cared.

  “Well, you better not do no more with it in my kitchen,” Rosie said. “If there’s one thing I ain’t in the mood for today it’s I-talian music.”

  “Very well then, you’ve driven me out,” Aurora said, rising. She snatched up her shoes. In fact, the singing had improved her mood. “Goodbye, Royce,” she said, pausing at the table to give him a big smile. “I hope your meal hasn’t been spoiled by all this dissension. You know my car, of course. If you should see that I’ve had a flat I do hope you’ll stop and help me. I don’t think I could do very much with a flat, do you?”

  “Uh, no, ma’am, uh, yes, ma’am,” Royce
said, not quite sure which question he was supposed to reply to, or in what order. He was so bedazzled by Aurora’s presence that he could scarcely remember anything. He was smitten, and he had been smitten for years—hopelessly, of course, but deeply. She passed out the back door, full of impetus again, but her fragrance lingered near the table for a bit. She was just the size woman Royce had always meant to marry. Rosie was not much more buxom than a door-jamb—a freckled doorjamb—and not much more yielding either. Royce had kept himself going for longer than he could remember with the entirely ignoble fantasy that someday Rosie might be killed, tragically but as painlessly as possible, and that Aurora Greenway, bound to him by twenty years of gumbo and unanswered questions, might accept him, countrified though he was.

  More practically, he also, unbeknownst to everyone, kept himself going with the favors of a part-time barhop named Shirley, who was more nearly Aurora’s girth. Unfortunately she neither talked as nice nor smelled as good, and their exertions didn’t affect Aurora’s place in his fantasy life. There her place was secure.

  Rosie, for her part, was not five one and an East Texan for nothing. She had no inkling of Shirley, but she knew perfectly well that her husband had been peeking at her boss underneath his soup spoon for years. She resented every ounce over ninety pounds that Aurora weighed, and there were a lot of them. She had no intention of dying, certainly not before Royce, but if she did anyway she meant to leave him so encumbered with debts and children that he would have little chance to enjoy life without her—not, in any case, with a woman who did little more than traipse around from one pile of pillows to another all day long.