Fresh Complaint. Jeffrey Eugenides

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СКАЧАТЬ came home later that night, he got on her right away. “What is it with the two of you?” Clark said. “Christ. Like a couple of lezzies.”

      It wasn’t that. Not an overflow of forbidden desire. Just a way of compensating for areas of life that produced less contentment than advertised. Marriage, certainly. Motherhood more often than they liked to admit.

      There’s a ladies’ group Cathy has read about in the newspapers, a kind of late-life women’s movement. The members, middle-aged and older, dress up to the nines and wear elaborate, brightly colored hats—pink or purple, she can’t remember which. The group is known for these hats, in which its members swoop down on restaurants and fill entire sections. No men allowed. The women dress up for one another, to hell with everyone else. Cathy thinks this sounds like fun. When she’s asked Della about it, Della says, “I’m not dressing up and putting on some stupid hat just to have dinner with a bunch of people I probably don’t even want to talk to. Besides, I don’t have any good clothes anymore.”

      Cathy might do it alone. After she gets Della settled. When she’s back in Detroit.

      In the freezer, Cathy finds some bagels, which she defrosts in the microwave. There are also frozen dinners, and coffee. They can drink it black.

      Her face is still pretty banged up but otherwise Della feels fine. She is happy to be out of the hospital. It was impossible to sleep in that place, with all the noise and commotion, people coming in to check on you all the time or to wheel you down for some test.

      Either that or no one came to help you at all, even if you buzzed and buzzed.

      Heading off into a snowstorm seemed crazy, but it was lucky they left when they did. If they’d waited another day, they would never have made it to Contoocook. Her hill was slippery by the time they arrived. Snow covered the walk and back steps. But then they were inside the house and the heat was on and it felt cozy with the snow falling at every window, like confetti.

      On TV the weather people are in a state, reporting on the blizzard. Boston and Providence are shut down. Sea waves have swept ashore and frozen solid, encasing houses in ice.

      They are snowed in for a week. The drifts rise halfway up the back door. Even if they could get to the car, there’s no way to get down the drive. Cathy has had to call the rental agency and extend her lease, which Della feels bad about. She has offered to pay but Cathy won’t let her.

      On their third day as shut-ins, Cathy jumps up from the couch and says, “The tequila! Don’t we still have some of that?” In the cupboard above the stove she finds a bottle of tequila and another, half full, of margarita mix.

      “Now we can survive for sure,” Cathy says, brandishing the bottle. They both laugh.

      Every evening around six, just before they turn on Brian Williams, they make frozen margaritas in the blender. Della wonders if drinking alcohol is a good idea with her malady. On the other hand, who’s going to tell on her?

      “Not me,” Cathy says. “I’m your enabler.”

      Some days it snows again, which makes Della jumble up the time. She’ll think that the blizzard is still going on and that she’s just returned from the hospital.

      One day she looks at her calendar and sees it is February. A month has gone by. In the bathroom mirror her black eye is gone, just a smear of yellow at the corner remains.

      Every day Della reads a little of her book. It seems to her that she is performing this task more or less competently. Her eyes move over the words, which in turn sound in her head, and give rise to pictures. The story is as engrossing and swift as she remembers. Sometimes she can’t tell if she is rereading the book or just remembering passages from having read them so often. But she decides the difference doesn’t matter much.

      “Now we really are like those two old women,” Della says one day to Cathy.

      “I’m still the younger one, though. Don’t forget that.”

      “Right. You’re young old and I’m just plain old old.”

      They don’t need to hunt or forage for food. Della’s neighbor Gertie, who was a minister’s wife, treks up from her house to bring them bread, milk, and eggs from the Market Basket. Lyle, who lives behind Della, crosses the snowy yard to bring other supplies. The power stays on. That’s the main thing.

      At some point Lyle, who has a side job plowing people out during the winter, gets around to plowing Della’s drive, and after that Cathy takes the rental car to get groceries.

      People start coming to the house. A male physical therapist who makes Della do balance exercises and is very strict with her. A visiting nurse who takes her vitals. A girl from the area who cooks simple meals on nights when Della doesn’t use the microwave.

      Cathy is gone by that point. Bennett is there instead. He comes up on the weekends and stays through Sunday night, getting up early to drive to work on Monday morning. A few months later, when Della gets bronchitis and wakes up unable to breathe, and is again taken to the hospital by EMS, it is Robbie who comes up, from New York, to stay for a week until she’s feeling better.

      Sometimes Robbie brings his girlfriend, a Canadian gal from Montreal who breeds dogs for a living. Della doesn’t ask much about this woman, though she is friendly to her face. Robbie’s private life isn’t her concern anymore. She won’t be around long enough for it to matter.

      She picks up Two Old Women from time to time to read a little more, but she never seems to get through the whole thing. That doesn’t matter either. She knows how the book ends. The two old women survive through the harsh winter, and when their tribe comes back, still all starving, the two women teach them what they’ve learned. And from that time on those particular Indians never leave their old people behind anymore.

      A lot of the time Della is alone in the house. The people who come to help her have left for the day, or it’s their day off, and Bennett is busy. It’s winter again. Two years have passed. She’s almost ninety. She doesn’t seem to be getting any stupider, or only a little bit. Not enough to notice.

      One day, it snows again. Stopping at the window, Della is possessed by an urge to go outside and move into it. As far as her old feet will take her. She wouldn’t even need her walker. Wouldn’t need anything. Looking at the snow, blowing around beyond the window glass, Della has the feeling that she’s peering into her own brain. Her thoughts are like that now, constantly circulating, moving from one place to another, just a whole big whiteout inside her head. Going out in the snow, disappearing into it, wouldn’t be anything new to her. It would be like the outside meeting the inside. The two of them merging. Everything white. Just walk on out. Keep going. Maybe she’d meet someone out there, maybe she wouldn’t. A friend.

      2017

AIR MAIL

      Through the bamboo Mitchell watched the German woman, his fellow invalid, making another trip to the outhouse. She came out onto the porch of her hut, holding a hand over her eyes—it was murderously sunny out—while her other, somnambulistic hand searched for the beach towel hanging over the railing. Finding it, she draped the towel loosely, only just extenuatingly, over her otherwise unclothed body, and staggered out into the sun. She came right by Mitchell’s hut. Through the slats her skin looked a sickly, chicken-soup color. She was wearing only one flip-flop. Every few steps she had to stop and lift her bare foot СКАЧАТЬ