Beginners Page 13
“I’m all right,” she said and picked up her coffee. “No, I guess I should tell you, Jimmy. I don’t want to worry you, though.” She took a sip of her coffee and waited. Then she said, “I’m spotting again.”
“Spotting?” he said. “What do you mean, Edith?” But he knew what she meant, that at this age and happening with the kind of pain she’d said it did, it might mean what they most feared. “Spotting,” he said quietly.
“You know,” she said, picking up some cards and beginning to sort through them. “I’m menstruating a little. Oh dear,” she said.
“I think we should go home. I think we’d better leave,” he said. “That isn’t good, is it?” He was afraid she wouldn’t tell him if the pain started. He’d had to ask her before, watching to see how she looked. She’d have to go in now. He knew it.
She sorted through some more cards and seemed flustered and a little embarrassed. “No, let’s stay,” she said after a minute. “Maybe it’s nothing to worry about. I don’t want you to worry. I feel all right, Jimmy,” she said.
“Edith.”
“We’ll stay,” she said. “Drink your coffee, Jimmy. It’ll be all right, I’m sure. We came here to play bingo,” she said and smiled a little.
“This is the worst bingo night in history,” he said. “I’m ready to go anytime. I think we should go now.”
“We’ll stay for the blackout, and then it’s just forty-five minutes or so. Nothing can happen in that time. Let’s play bingo,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.
He swallowed some coffee. “I don’t want my cookie,” he said. “You can have my cookie.” He cleared away the cards he was using and took two cards from the stack of bingo cards that weren’t in use. He looked over angrily at the hippies as if they were somehow to blame for this new development. But the fellow was gone from the table and the girl had her back to him. She had turned in her chair and was looking toward the stage.
They played the blackout game. Once he glanced up and the hippie was still at it, playing a card he hadn’t paid for. James still felt he should call the matter to someone’s attention, but he couldn’t leave his cards, not at a dollar a card. Edith’s lips were tight. She wore a look that could have been determination, or worry.
James had three numbers to cover on one card and five numbers on another card, a card he’d already given up on, when the hippie girl began screaming. “Bingo! Bingo! Bingo! I have a bingo!”
The man clapped and shouted with her. “She’s got a bingo! She’s got a bingo, folks! A bingo!” He kept clapping.
Eleanor Bender herself went to the girl’s table to check her card against the master list of numbers. Then she said, “This young woman has just won herself a ninety-eight-dollar jackpot. Let’s give her a round of applause. Let’s hear it for her.”
Edith clapped along with the rest of the players, but James kept his hands on the table. The hippie fellow hugged the girl. Eleanor Bender handed the girl an envelope. “Count it if you want to,” she said with a smile. The girl shook her head.
“They’ll probably use the money to buy drugs,” James said.
“James, please,” Edith said. “It’s a game of chance. She won fair and square.”
“Maybe she did,” he said. “But her partner there is out to take everyone for all he can get.”
“Dear, do you want to play the same cards again?” Edith said. “They’re about to start the next game.”
They stayed for the rest of the games. They stayed until the last game was played, a game called Progressive. It was a bingo game whose jackpot was increased each week if no one had bingoed on a fixed amount of numbers. If no one had hit a bingo when the last number was called, that game was declared closed and more money, five dollars, was added to the pot for the next week’s game, along with another number. The first week the game had started, the jackpot was seventy-five dollars and thirty numbers. This week it was a hundred and twenty-five dollars and forty numbers. Bingos were rare before forty numbers had been called, but after forty numbers you could expect someone to bingo at any time. James put his money down and played his cards without any hope or intention of winning. He felt close to despair. It wouldn’t have surprised him if the hippie had won this game.
When the forty numbers had been called and no one had cried out, Eleanor Bender said, “That’s bingo for tonight. Thank you all for coming. God bless you, and if He’s willing we’ll see you again next Friday. Good night and have a nice weekend.”
James and Edith filed out of the hall along with the rest of the players, but somehow they managed to get behind the hippie couple, who were still laughing and talking about her big jackpot. The girl patted her coat pocket and laughed again. She had an arm around the fellow’s waist under his buckskin jacket, fingers just touching his hip.
“Let those people get ahead of us, for God’s sake,” James said to Edith. “They’re a plague.”
Edith kept quiet, but she hung back a little with James to give the couple time to move ahead.
“Good night, James. Good night, Edith,” Henry Kuhlken said. Kuhlken was a graying heavyset man who’d lost a son in a boating accident years before. His wife had left him for another man not long afterwards. He’d turned to serious drinking after a time and later wound up in AA, where James had first met him and heard his stories. Now he owned one of the two service stations in town and sometimes did mechanical work on their car. “See you next week.”
“ ’Night, Henry,” James said. “I guess so. But I feel pretty bingoed out tonight.”
Kuhlken laughed. “I know just exactly what you mean,” he said and moved on.
The wind was up and James thought he could hear the surf over the sound of automobile engines starting. He saw the hippie couple stop at the van. He might have known. He should have put two and two together. The fellow pulled open his door and then reached across and opened the door on the woman’s side. He started the van just as they walked by on the shoulder of the road. The fellow turned on his headlamps, and James and Edith were illumined against the walls of the nearby houses.
“That dumbbell,” James said.
Edith didn’t answer. She was smoking and had the other hand in her coat pocket. They kept walking along the shoulder. The van passed them and shifted gears as it reached the corner. The streetlamp was swinging in the wind. They walked on to their car. James unlocked her door and went around to his side. Then they fastened the seat belts and drove home.
—
Edith went into the bathroom and shut the door. James took off his windbreaker and threw it across the back of the sofa. He turned on the TV and sat down and waited.
In a little while Edith came out of the bathroom. She didn’t say anything. James waited some more and tried to keep his eyes on the TV. She went to the kitchen and ran water. He heard her turn off the faucet. In a minute she came to the kitchen doorway and said, “I guess I’ll have to see Dr. Crawford in the morning, Jimmy. I guess something’s happening down there.” She looked at him. Then she said, “Oh, damn it, damn it, the lousy, lousy luck,” and began to cry.
“Edith,” he said and moved to her.
She stood there shaking her head. She covered her eyes and leaned into him as he put his arms around her. He held her.
“Edith, dearest Edith,” he said. “Good Lord.” He felt helpless and terrified. He stood with his arms around her.
She shook her head a little. “I think I’ll go to bed, Jimmy. I am just exhausted, and I really don’t feel well. I’ll go to see Dr. Crawford first thing in the morning. It’ll be all right, I think, dear. You try not to worry. If anyone needs to worry tonight, let me. Don’t you. You worry enough as it is. I think it’ll be all right,” she said and stroked his back. “I just put some water on for coffee, but I think I’ll go to bed now. I feel worn out. It’s these bingo games,” she said and tried to smile.
“I’ll turn everything off and go to bed too,” he said. “I don’t want to stay up tonight either, n
o sir.”
“Jimmy, dear, I’d rather be alone right now, if you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s hard to explain. It’s just that right now I want to be alone. Dear, maybe that doesn’t make any sense. You understand, don’t you?”
“Alone,” he repeated. He squeezed her wrist.
She reached up to his face and held him and studied his features for a minute. Then she kissed him on the lips. She went into the bedroom and turned on the light. She looked back at him, and then she shut the door.
He went to the refrigerator. He stood in front of the open door and drank tomato juice while he surveyed its lighted interior. Cold air blew out at him. The little packages and cartons of foodstuffs on the shelves, a chicken covered in plastic wrap, the neat foil-wrapped bundles of leftovers, all of this suddenly repelled him. He thought for some reason of Alice, that spot on her neck, and he shivered. He shut the door and spit the last of the juice into the sink. Then he rinsed his mouth and made himself a cup of instant coffee which he carried into the living room where the TV was still playing. It was an old Western. He sat down and lit a cigarette. After watching the screen for a few minutes, he felt he’d seen the movie before, years ago. The characters seemed faintly recognizable in their roles, and some of the things they said sounded familiar, as things to come often did in movies you’d forgotten. Then the hero, a movie star who’d recently died, said something—asked a hard question of another character, a stranger who’d just ridden into the little town; and all at once things fell into place, and James knew the very words that the stranger would pick out of the air to answer the question. He knew how things would turn out, but he kept watching the movie with a rising sense of apprehension. Nothing could stop what had been set in motion. Courage and fortitude were displayed by the hero and the townsmen-turned-deputies, but these virtues were not enough. It took only one lunatic and a torch to bring everything to ruin. He finished the coffee and smoked and watched the movie until its violent and inevitable conclusion. Then he turned off the set. He went to the bedroom door and listened, but there was no way of telling if she was awake. At least there was no light showing under the door. He hoped she was asleep. He kept listening. He felt vulnerable and somehow unworthy. Tomorrow she’d go to Dr. Crawford. Who knew what he would find? There’d be tests. Why Edith? he wondered. Why us? Why not someone else, why not those hippies tonight? They were sailing through life free as birds, no responsibilities, no doubts about the future. Why not them then, or someone else like them? It didn’t add up. He moved away from the bedroom door. He thought about going out for a walk, as he did sometimes at night, but the wind had picked up and he could hear branches cracking in the birch tree behind the house. It’d be too cold anyway, and somehow the idea of a solitary walk tonight at this hour was dispiriting.
He sat in front of the TV again, but he didn’t turn on the set. He smoked and thought of the way the hippie had grinned at him across the room. That sauntering, arrogant gait as he moved down the street toward his van, the girl’s arm around his waist. He remembered the sound of the heavy surf, and he thought of great waves rolling in to break on the beach in the dark at this very minute. He recalled the fellow’s earring and pulled at his own ear. What would it be like to want to saunter around like that fellow sauntered, a hippie girl’s arm around your waist? He ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head at the injustice. He recalled the way the girl looked as she yelled her bingo, how everyone had turned enviously to look at her in her youth and excitement. If they only knew, she and her friend. If he could only tell them.
He thought of Edith in there in bed, the blood moving through her body, trickling, looking for a way out. He closed his eyes and opened them. He’d get up early in the morning and fix a nice breakfast for them. Then, when his office opened, she would call Dr. Crawford, set a time for seeing him, and he would drive her to the office and sit in the waiting room and page through magazines while he waited. About the time Edith came out with her news, he imagined that the hippies would be having their own breakfast, eating with appetite after a long night of lovemaking. It wasn’t fair. He wished they were here now in the living room, in the noontime of their lives. He’d tell them what they could expect, he’d set them straight. He would stop them in the midst of their arrogance and laughter and tell them. He’d tell them what was waiting for them after the rings and bracelets, the earrings and long hair, the loving.
He got up and went into the guest room and turned on the lamp over the bed. He glanced at his papers and account books and at the adding machine on his desk and experienced a welling of dismay and anger. He found a pair of old pajamas in one of the drawers and began undressing. He turned back the covers on the bed at the other end of the room from his desk. Then he walked back through the house, turning off lights and checking doors. For the first time in four years he wished he had some whiskey in the house. Tonight would be the night for it, all right. He was aware that twice now in the course of this evening he had wanted something to drink, and he found this so discouraging that his shoulders slumped. They said in AA never to become too tired, or too thirsty, or too hungry—or too smug, he might add. He stood looking out the kitchen window at the tree shaking under the force of the wind. The window rattled at its edges. He recalled the pictures down at the center, the boats going aground on the point, and hoped nothing was out on the water tonight. He left the porch lamp on. He went back to the guest room and took his basket of embroidery from under the desk and settled himself into the leather chair. He raised the lid of the basket and took out the metal hoop with the white linen stretched tight and secured within the hoop. Holding the tiny needle to the light, he threaded the eye with one end of the blue silk thread. Then he set to work where he’d left off on the floral design a few nights before.
When he’d first stopped drinking he’d laughed at the suggestion he’d heard one night at AA from a middle-aged businessman who said he might want to look into needlework. It was, he was told by the man, something he might want to do with the free time he’d now have on his hands, the time previously given over to drinking. It was implied that needlework was something he might find good occupation in day or night, along with a sense of satisfaction. “Stick to your knitting,” the man had said and winked. James had laughed and shaken his head. But after a few weeks of sobriety when he did find himself with more time than he could profitably employ, and an increasing need for something to do with his hands and mind, he’d asked Edith if she’d shop for the materials and instruction booklets he needed. He was never all that good at it, his fingers were becoming increasingly slow and stiff, but he had done a few things that gave him satisfaction after the pillowcases and dishcloths for the house. He’d done crocheting too—the caps and scarves and mittens for the grandchildren. There was a sense of accomplishment when a piece of work, no matter how commonplace, lay finished in front of him. He’d gone from scarves and mittens to create little throw rugs which lay on the floor of every room in the house now. He’d also made two woolen ponchos which he and Edith wore when they walked on the beach; and he’d knitted an afghan, his most ambitious project to date, something that had kept him busy for the better part of six months. He’d worked on it every evening, piling up the small squares, and had been happy with the feeling of regular industry. Edith was sleeping under that afghan right now. Late nights he liked the feel of the hoop, its taut holding of the white cloth. He kept working the needle in and out of the linen, following the outline of the design. He tied little knots and clipped off bits of thread when he had to. But after a while he began to think about the hippie again, and he had to stop work. He got mad all over again. It was the principle of the thing, of course. He realized it hadn’t helped the hippie’s chances, except maybe by a fraction, just by cheating on a single card. He hadn’t won, that was the point, the thing to bear in mind. You couldn’t win, not really, not where it counted. He and the hippie were in the same boat, he thought, but the hippie just didn’t know it yet.