Seventeen Against the Dealer

by Cynthia Voigt

  “I’m not hungry, anyway,” Sammy announced from behind them.

  “Eggs and toast?” Dicey suggested.

  “An omelette,” Maybeth said, as if she had just discovered the word. “With spaghetti sauce, from leftover, and I’ll make biscuits—will you turn on the oven for me, Dicey? To four hundred.”

  Until she saw her sister find something to do, find work for her hands and a reason to do the work, Dicey didn’t fully understand how tense and quiet Maybeth had been. Understanding that, she looked at her brother. His eyes were fixed on a page of a chemistry textbook, but his eyes never moved and he looked the way he looked when he was waiting to receive serve from an opponent he respected.

  “Look,” Dicey said, “all we can do is wait for Dr. Landros to call.”

  They both obeyed to the extent of turning to look at her.

  “She could have called by now. Maybe we should have called her sooner,” Sammy asked.

  Dicey didn’t argue. Maybe they should have, but they hadn’t.

  “It’s taking her a long time,” Maybeth said, and big tears rolled out of her eyes.

  “Not so long, it just seems long,” Dicey told them.

  “I know,” Maybeth said, “but it is long. Because I’m worried.”

  “So am I,” Dicey admitted. “We all are. Maybe even Gram.”

  “I think so,” Sammy said. “That’s what really worries me. That”—he smiled, but it wasn’t a smile for gladness—“and when you cry, Maybeth.”

  “I’m sorry.” Maybeth wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I feel better when I cry,” she apologized.

  “That sure cheers me up a lot,” Sammy joked.

  The biscuits were on the table and the omelette was cooking in its pan when they heard a car drive up. They all forgot supper. Dr. Landros came into the kitchen.

  Dr. Landros was a thick, square woman. She wore workboots and worn, old gray-flannel trousers, a bright yellow plaid hunter’s jacket; her hair was pulled back from her square-jawed face. She carried her doctor’s bag in her hand. “I was chopping wood,” she explained. “What’s the trouble with Ab?”

  “How did you know?” Sammy wondered.

  “She’s not out here waiting for me, with anxiety all over her face.”

  “Because she’s in bed,” Maybeth said.

  “Then she really must be sick.” Dr. Landros took off her jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. “Which is her room?”

  “She’s asleep,” Dicey said.

  “She’s got a temperature,” Sammy said.

  “She’s had a cough, for weeks,” Maybeth offered.

  “Let me ask her myself, all right? You three go on ahead with your dinner.” Dr. Landros knocked on the door but didn’t wait for an answer. She went in, shutting the door behind her. They all sat down at the table, as quiet as they could be, listening to the occasional murmur of voices in Gram’s bedroom. When the bedroom door finally opened, Dicey turned around.

  “It’s all right,” the doctor told them, before anyone could ask a question. “Can I join you for a biscuit, and maybe a cup of tea?”

  Maybeth got up to start water, Sammy got up to get a plate and knife, Dicey sat in her chair savoring those words—“all right.”

  When she was seated, and had food in front of her, Dr. Landros explained. “I can’t be sure until she’s had an X ray, but my diagnosis is pneumonia.”

  Once it had a name, and the name wasn’t something like cancer, Dicey felt better.

  “Pneumonia is serious, isn’t it?” Maybeth asked.

  “Serious enough, especially for older people.”

  “But how did she get it?”

  “I gather she had bronchitis, which she neglected.” The doctor looked sternly around at all of them.

  “But she told us she was getting better,” Sammy protested. “We kept asking and she kept saying.”

  “You know she’d say that, regardless. You should have known better. James would have. Am I right in assuming that you didn’t call James?”

  They nodded. Dicey felt about ten years old, being scolded like that and knowing she deserved it.

  “You take such good care of each other,” Dr. Landros said, but her voice sounded matter-of-fact now, not scolding, “but you have to admit that sometimes you need to call in outside help. You can’t do everything yourselves. I wouldn’t be surprised if—you’re so ferociously independent—I wouldn’t put it past you to do open-heart surgery yourselves, on this very table.”

  “We would not,” Sammy said. “That would be stupid.”

  “So is letting your grandmother bully you into not calling me,” Dr. Landros said. “And could someone please pass me the biscuits again?” She split and buttered a biscuit, spread jam over each half, and then folded it back together. The jam oozed down the sides and onto her fingertips. “Take her up to Salisbury tomorrow for an X ray. I’ll tell them you’re coming. I’ve given her some penicillin and cough medicine for now; stop by my office or call when you get back, and I’ll write out prescriptions for what you’ll need. There’s fluid in her lung, but—it should be all right. I want you to promise to call me if her temperature goes up too high, especially in the morning. It shouldn’t, it probably won’t, but—and call my home number, you have it. None of this shilly-shallying around. I’d rather lose an hour’s sleep than a friend. I don’t have so many friends.”

  They nodded and nodded.

  “I don’t think that will happen, I don’t think it’s near serious enough for hospitalization, that’s my professional opinion, but—”

  “We’ll take good care of her,” Maybeth promised.

  “You’ve already taken good care of her,” Dr. Landros said. “You’ve done everything right so far—except for not calling me sooner, but then, you could have called me even later, so I’m not going to complain. Keep up the liquids, don’t let her out of bed, dress her warmly tomorrow—it’s getting cold again—and call me when you’re back. I’ll have the X ray results by then. Thanks for the supper.” Dr. Landros got up and put on her jacket.

  “How did she get it?” Sammy asked.

  Dr. Landros answered slowly. “Pneumonia isn’t something you get. It’s more something you get to. But I’ll tell you this—I’ve never known anyone come down with it who wasn’t overextended, somehow—overtired. When she’s better I plan to tell Ab that, that she needs better self-management. I should tell her now when she’s too weak to argue, but that doesn’t seem fair. Does it?”

  She was teasing them, letting them know she wasn’t anxious. But after she’d left, the three of them looked at one another, without saying anything. Dicey didn’t know about Sammy and Maybeth, but she was feeling a mix of relief and guilt. “We’ll have to do more, all of us,” she said. “I guess. I guess I can.”

  “Me, too,” they both agreed.

  “I guess I don’t mind, either.” Dicey thought of the way she had been living exclusively for her own work. “As long as Gram gets better, and stays better. It’s only pneumonia,” she said. Pneumonia had a name, and a cure.

  Maybeth’s smile was like the sun dancing along the tops of the waves. “Is anyone else hungry? I’ll make us supper.”

  “You already did,” Sammy reminded her. He went over to the stove and picked up the omelette, limp and brown, like a rag that had been used to scrub a filthy floor. He looked at it, where it hung down from his hand. “Maybe,” he said, starting to laugh, “maybe with sauce we won’t notice?” It wasn’t as funny as he thought it was, but Sammy continued to laugh, until his knees gave way and he leaned against the stove, waving the omelette gently, and watching it fall to pieces of its own weight.

  “I was worried,” he said. “And now I’m not.”

  Sammy picked up the mess he’d made on the floor, Dicey rinsed out the pan, Maybeth got out more eggs and whisked them with a fork; they ate supper hungrily. Gram slept, but that seemed right to them now. Maybeth announced, after they’d washed their dishes, and drie
d them, and put everything away, that she wanted to make a cake.

  “It’s late,” Sammy told her.

  “What about your homework?” Dicey asked her.

  “It’s only eight-thirty and I’ve done it all, and—I want to make a cake.”

  “Chocolate?” Sammy asked. “With chocolate frosting?”

  “Yes. But I don’t want you in here. You get in the way.”

  Dicey and Sammy withdrew to the living room. Dicey built a fire, lit it, and watched the flames rising from the paper catch at the logs, turning into thin rising trails of smoke. She felt as if her mind, and her attention, had been caught in a vise of worry, and now it had been released. She knew why Maybeth was out there putting together a cake. “I’ve got to make a phone call,” she announced. Sammy, who had been tinkering at the piano, put his hands in his lap and turned around. Dicey dialed the shop, pulling the disk around then letting it go, hearing the rapid rat-a-tat of its turning in the receiver. Cisco answered on the third ring. “Tillerman Boats,” his voice said.

  “It’s me.”

  “Miss Tillerman. I expected to see you today.”

  “That’s why I called,” Dicey said. “Did everything go okay?”

  “Why shouldn’t it? Do you mean, were there any armed bandits, come to remove your worldly goods? Or assault your virtue, or mine, since I was the one here, although they’d have been disappointed. You have,” he explained with mocking solemnity, “a great deal more virtue to assault than I do. In either case, there weren’t.”

  Dicey smiled. Cisco’s mind never rested, or at least his tongue didn’t. “How’s your grandmother?” he asked.

  “The doctor says it’s pneumonia. I don’t expect to be in tomorrow, either.”

  “I’ll stand the watches here,” Cisco said.

  “Good. Thanks. I just wanted to be sure everything was going okay.” Dicey hung up. When Claude did pay her, she would give Cisco part of it.

  “I thought you’d call Jeff,” Sammy said. “To tell him.”

  Dicey, staring at the phone, shook her head.

  Sammy waited for her to say something, then when she didn’t he suggested, “Or James.”

  “I thought we’d call James tomorrow, when we have the X ray results and have talked to Dr. Landros. I’ll take Gram up to Salisbury tomorrow morning. You’ll have to take the bus to school.”

  “No problem.”

  “Because there’ll be prescriptions to fill.” Her mind got busy with plans. She’d better be sure Gram brought her checkbook, to cover what Medicare didn’t. “Is there gas in the truck?” She wished she knew how to call Claude and find out if that money was in the mail yet. Just so if she needed it there would be some there, for medicine or other expenses, because if you needed money to be sick with, you really needed it.

  “Did you and Jeff have a fight or something?” Sammy wondered.

  Dicey shook her head. “Jeff doesn’t fight.” He didn’t; he went silent and withdrawn. She remembered how he’d done that once, the worst time she’d seen, before she’d known him long. She’d asked him, later, what had happened, and all he’d said was, “My mother has that effect on me.” Jeff, when things went wrong, moved away into himself, the opposite of the way a potted plant leans toward the sun, drawing away with the same kind of silence. You’d look one day and see, like with a plant, how he leaned. And like a plant, he’d just go on with his own growing, the best he could do in whatever the circumstances were.

  “Neither does Maybeth,” Sammy said.

  Why did Sammy say that? “Is Maybeth having a fight with someone?”

  “Not with me. I never would.” Sammy grinned. “No, I was just thinking—do you know why I think she didn’t have a date last night?”

  “Because Gram’s sick.”

  “No. Well, yes, but—she hasn’t been out on a Saturday for almost a month.”

  Dicey sat down on the desk beside the phone. “I’ll bite. Why not?”

  “Because of Phil.”

  “Phil Milson?”

  “If he’s going to be home, it’ll be on Saturday. She wants him to call her, and he hasn’t.”

  “You’re that sure she wants him to?”

  Sammy nodded. Dicey didn’t question his accuracy. Sammy knew his sister, and understood her. “I kind of want him to, too. But he might not. Maybeth—never complains, but it doesn’t seem to me that there are so many things she wants, not for herself.”

  “Even so, I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” Dicey said. Maybeth endured failures like a patch of marsh grass, rooted in the mud, letting the water wash over it. She stayed planted while the water moved in its strong way, then when it was finished she’d sort of lift her head to see what was there. What the water had left. That was the same way Maybeth did school, like marsh grass, being there, being what she was, high tide or low tide, winter cold or summer warmth, being who she was.

  Dicey admired Maybeth. “We don’t always get what we want,” she reminded Sammy.

  “Tell me about it,” he said. “But with me, if I can’t get something one way I try another. I figure, if I do well in state matches this summer, get into the state championships, play eighteen-and-under along with sixteen-and-under, I think I’ll be good enough for that, then I can apply for a scholarship next summer and have a chance. Especially,” he grinned, “if I’m the champion.”

  “Can you do that?” Dicey asked him. She believed in Sammy, but high hopes like that—what would he do if he cooked up such high hopes and they didn’t work out? “Why does it matter so much anyway, this camp?”

  “Because I’ve been thinking that I’ll want to study engineering, aeronautical engineering, and if you’re at a good school, with an athletic scholarship . . . I’m not smart like James but I’m smart enough for what I want, so if I can get in with an athletic scholarship, I could do the work at a good school. Then I’d have a good chance of being admitted to the space program.” His eyes lit up with hope and laughter. “You’ve gotta admit it would be fun, Dicey. Being in space. Exploring.”

  “It’s not like in the movies,” Dicey said. “In the movies, there’s always oxygen when they go exploring, on the planets.”

  “Yeah, I know, or, anyway, part of me knows. The other part just gets excited. It can’t possibly be like I imagine, but—imagine it, Dicey.”

  “And what if it doesn’t work out? The camp. The scholarship. The space program.”

  “I’ll be a tennis pro, or coach, or something. That would be okay. Or I could be a farmer here, I could work the farm, because farmers don’t make much money, but they almost always make enough for food and shelter. I really like growing things,” Sammy told her.

  “You’ve got it all worked out,” Dicey said. He did, and it was just like Sammy. He was right about himself, he was a tryer, he’d keep on trying different things until something worked out.

  “Besides, you can never tell what’ll happen. Other things turn up. Things I haven’t even thought of.” Sammy sounded like that possibility was exciting, too.

  Dicey looked at her brother and felt a slow smile spreading over her face. She envied him, and she wondered if she could ever learn to look at things that way, as if it wasn’t losing something you wanted, but making room for something new to come in. She didn’t know about herself, but she admired Sammy. And liked him, too, mostly, just—liked him. “How about,” she asked, “a game of checkers? How would you like to take me on in a game of checkers? I may be rusty, but you’ve never beaten me yet.”

  “Not true. I did once, when I was in eighth grade. You remember it. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten.”

  “Okay, I do, so we’ll play four games out of seven. It’ll be a tournament match. And the winner—” She tried to think of something. The sweet chocolate smell from the kitchen gave her an idea. “The winner will get the last piece of Maybeth’s cake.”

  “I usually get that in any case,” Sammy pointed out.

  “Then what’ve you got to
lose?”

  “No, you’ve got it all wrong. The question is, What have I got to win?”

  CHAPTER 19

  The next morning, when Dicey knocked on the door of Gram’s room, Gram sat up in bed, her shoulders supported by pillows. She had eaten half of a piece of toast, and finished the mug of tea. Dicey half-expected Gram to try to talk her way out of the X ray, and she wasn’t planning to take any guff. “We have to go to Salisbury,” she said, giving Gram no time to say anything. “You need to get dressed. I’ll warm up the truck.”

  “I wouldn’t hurry,” Gram advised her. “It’ll take me a while. And no, I don’t want help. I can dress myself.”

  It was half an hour before Gram came out of her room. Dicey had washed the dishes and wiped down all the counters. She had swept the floor. She had gotten the cab of the truck warm. She had dried the dishes and put them away. She had just begun to wonder if she should worry, or knock on Gram’s door again, when that door opened.

  Gram looked pale, and old. She moved as if she wasn’t sure her legs would hold her up for long. She wore her rubber boots and a skirt, and a thick sweater buttoned down over the skirt. Her body looked thick and round, but her face looked thin. Dicey got up to get her coat, and hat, and gloves, and finally a scarf. “Are you wearing something warm next to your skin?” she asked.

  “No, and I won’t. They’re just going to tell me to get undressed when I get there—if I haven’t boiled to death on the way up.”

  Dicey didn’t argue. Some things weren’t worth arguing about.

  They drove up in silence. Gram leaned her head back against the seat and kept her eyes closed. Dicey left her off at the main entrance to the hospital. “Go sit in a chair. I’ll be right there.” Gram just nodded.

  At the X-ray department they waited, and waited, side by side on a sofa. Their shoulders touched as they sat, waiting to be called. After Gram went off with a nurse, Dicey waited alone. She felt as if the morning stretched out endlessly, before her and behind her. She felt as if she had fallen into some time sack, hanging off time’s usual line of tightly twisted minutes, and was just hanging there, outside of time. When Gram reappeared, buttoning her sweater, Dicey got up. She held out her grandmother’s coat and then put an arm around her bulky shoulders, as if to help her walk. Gram didn’t protest.