Nobody's Fool

I’m sorry you don’t approve.”
    â€œIf she makes you happy, Clive, then I approve. I just thought I’d point out for the record that I’m not the only one in this kitchen who can be snookered.”
    Clive Jr. seemed to honestly consider this sad possibility, shaming Miss Beryl, who seldom gave much real consideration to her son’s views and advice.
    â€œYou always see things going wrong, Ma,” her son said. “I see them going right.”
    Miss Beryl decided not to argue the point. It was true that they sawthings differently and always had. She could tell by the way her son massaged the yearbook that when he looked at the dreadful Joyce woman, he saw the eighteen-year-old of the photograph. And he wasn’t kidding when he said he could see the Gold Coast from her front window. He seemed to see that past and the future with stunning clarity. The present just wasn’t there for him somehow.
    â€œI wonder if I should look in on her?” he said, pushing back his chair. He seemed so desperately unsure of whether this would be the right thing to do that Miss Beryl, having deposited the last of their dishes in the sink, felt less like being mean. “Let her sleep,” she suggested. “I’ll have her call you at the bank later.”
    â€œI should go on in, I guess,” Clive Jr. admitted, looking at his watch. “It’s only seven, but if I’m going to take the afternoon …” His voice trailed off as he stood and hitched his pants, preparatory to visiting the bathroom. Clive Jr.’s last official act before leaving was always to relieve himself.
    Miss Beryl thought about doing up the few dishes now, then decided to just let them soak. The Joyce woman would probably have something when she finally roused herself, and Miss Beryl decided she’d do them all together. At the sink she caught a glimpse through the kitchen doorway of Clive Jr. standing outside the spare bedroom, listening, no doubt, for some auditory signal that his fiancée was awake. And perhaps because Clive Jr. so resembled his father in outward appearance, and also because he looked so pitiful standing there, Miss Beryl thought her heart would break at the sight. When Clive Jr. noticed her observing him, he straightened guiltily and shrugged, then disappeared into the bathroom, shutting the door quietly behind him.
    Since he’d left the yearbook in the center of the kitchen table, Miss Beryl opened it again with the intention of having another look at the Joyce woman, this time out from under her son’s needy, watchful gaze. Instead, the book fell open naturally to a page that had been mutilated with a ballpoint pen that had been pressed into the glossy paper with such force that it had come through the other side, leaving an inky blotch on the page beneath. It took Miss Beryl a moment to realize that the defaced picture was of Sully. She was still staring at it when the toilet flushed in the next room.
    Shutting the book and pushing it away before Clive Jr. emerged was easy, but what to do about the tears that had filled her eyes? How could she banish these when she didn’t even know who they were for? What didit mean that at age eighty she suddenly seemed unable to decide who she was angry at, who was deserving of pity and understanding?
    In the living room, waiting for her son to emerge from the bathroom, Miss Beryl avoided entering into imaginary conversations with either of her advisers, unwilling to listen to her husband’s pleading on behalf of their son, the natural consequence of their love for each other, or Driver Ed’s subversive whispers from the opposite wall. “Pipe down, both of you,” she warned softly. In the lonely silence that ensued, the old woman peered out her front window at the street where she had lived all her mature life, the street where Clive Sr. had brought her to spend her days, a pretty street really, a comfortable street, the kind of street where she and her husband should have been able to raise a son less profoundly unhappy than she had always suspected Clive Jr. to be. She looked up into the black tangle of branches of the elms and then down the street in the direction of Mrs. Gruber’s house. It didn’t look like the Gold Coast, but no branches had fallen during the night, and Miss Beryl was about to conclude that God had lowered the boom on no one when a small movement caught her attention.