Seventeen Against the Dealer

by Cynthia Voigt

  Back in the truck, heading home along the highway, Dicey looked over at her grandmother. “Are you all right?”

  Gram nodded her head without opening her eyes. “I’ll be glad to get back to bed. Which is, I trust, our destination.”

  “Doctor’s orders,” Dicey answered. “Then I’ll call her office and take care of everything.”

  “You drape yourself over this plate,” Gram said slowly. “Jaybird naked. Which is a strange phrase, now I think of it, since jays have feathers. The young woman wouldn’t even stay in the same room with that machine. It’s as if medicine were as dangerous as disease.”

  “James explained to me once that the principle is to figure out how to poison the disease without killing off the host body,” Dicey said. She looked at Gram, waiting for her opinion on that—although she could guess what huffing and puffing response Gram’s commonsensical mind would have. Her grandmother, head leaning back, didn’t say anything. Her profile—forehead, nose, chin; cheekbones and eyebrows, eyelids closed down over her eyes—“You’re as pretty as Maybeth,” Dicey said. She’d never realized that before. If she hadn’t thought Gram was asleep, she wouldn’t ever have said it out loud.

  “I was, in my day,” Gram answered. She opened one eye, turning her head slightly toward Dicey. “I’d be obliged if you’d watch the road.”

  * * *

  Gram got herself back into bed while Dicey called Dr. Landros’s office. The receptionist answered her question—yes, it was pneumonia, in the left lung; the doctor had called in two prescriptions to the drugstore and they should be picked up right away; no, Gram was in no danger, no immediate danger, but she had to stay in bed for a week, and in the house for at least two weeks after that, until her lung cleared up; the doctor would stop by after office hours this afternoon; and how was James doing? Dicey, not surprised that the news was good but still relieved, looked in on Gram, who was asleep. She wrote a note saying where she’d be going. She put the note, folded to stand up, on the table by the glass of fresh ice water she’d brought in, in case Gram woke up thirsty, and went downtown to have the prescriptions filled, getting there and back fast.

  By the time Maybeth and Sammy came home, Dicey had washed the kitchen windows, made two bowls of Jell-O, begun the slow simmering of a chicken for creamed chicken, and ironed four shirts. She didn’t know which of the shirts belonged to which of her siblings, as she set them onto hangers and hung them off a doorknob.

  “It’s pneumonia for sure,” she greeted them.

  “Is that good?” Maybeth asked.

  “They know how to treat pneumonia,” Sammy explained. “I’m starving,” he announced, opening the refrigerator door. “There’s mail for you,” he told Dicey. “Jell-O? Is this Jell-O?”

  “It’s for Gram.”

  “Do you think she’ll share?” Sammy asked.

  “You might as well open this door.” They heard Gram’s voice. “Now you’ve woken me up.”

  Sammy looked at Maybeth and Dicey. He was grinning. “Good-o,” he greeted his grandmother’s complaint.

  Dicey’s mail was from Claude, a check for $839. The note he sent with it answered her question at the size of the check. “The rate you’re going, you’ll have the next ten done before you get this. I’ve included the fourteen dollars for the window. Temperature down here was seventy-two at noon yesterday. Eat your heart out.”

  Dicey wasn’t about to eat her heart out; a temperature of seventy-two degrees in February was unnatural. She had a check for $839 to deposit into her account. The bank would be closed by now, but she had the check. So that was okay. And Gram had pneumonia and they’d have to keep her in bed, which wouldn’t be easy, but that was okay, too. Jeff wasn’t okay, or that wasn’t, but that was her own stupid fault.

  In the evening, while Sammy and Maybeth did homework in the kitchen, Dicey called Cisco, who assured her that everything was going along fine. Then she called James. “Gram’s got pneumonia,” she told her brother, “but it’s fine now, she’s taking medicine. Dr. Landros said.”

  “I’m glad she had the sense to call a doctor,” James’s voice announced. Then it smiled. “Or someone did.”

  “It was someone,” Dicey said, “and only after a while, but we’ve learned our lesson. We’re going to have to keep her in bed, and in the house, for a long time, which won’t be easy, but we’ll gang up on her. Anyway, that’s our news. How’s school?” Before James could tell her, she remembered, “James? What did you do about that course, with the professor who liked you?”

  “Didn’t they tell you?”

  “I haven’t been around all that much.”

  “I wish I were home. It makes me worry, Gram getting pneumonia.”

  “I know. I think even she got worried. She’s being pretty cooperative.”

  “Dr. Landros does say everything’s all right?”

  “I wouldn’t lie.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. What you’d do is not call me up to tell me something was wrong.”

  “I’ve called you now, James,” she reminded him. “Anyway, what did happen?”

  “I’m auditing the course. My adviser worked it out for me. She told me I should tell Professor Browning I couldn’t handle all the work, but that I wanted to continue attending. So I dropped it.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Mind what? It got me out of a bind.”

  “Mind saying you couldn’t handle it. Or did you tell your friends the truth?”

  “Cripes, Dicey, I couldn’t do that. What if it got back to him? No, I didn’t tell anyone, except my adviser, and she’ll keep it quiet. My friends all just think I’m not the hotshot I was cracked up to be, which never hurts. I mean, it never hurts to have people think you’ve failed. They like you to have an Achilles’ heel, right? But I have to take six courses this semester, to make up the credit, and I’m working like crazy—so they’ll learn better. Because it never hurts to let people know how good you are, does it?”

  James’s brain never rested from following twists and turns. “Boy, do you like things complicated,” Dicey told him.

  “Machiavellian,” he answered, “that’s me. You know Machiavelli?”

  “No, but I know someone who does, I bet.” Cisco knew just about everything; she’d ask him, the next time she got in to the shop.

  “Can I say hello to Sammy and Maybeth before you hang up? We shouldn’t talk, because it costs money. Dicey? I’m really glad Gram’s okay, even if I didn’t know ahead of time. I might even be glad you didn’t tell me ahead of time—I had two tests and a paper in the last week.”

  Midmorning on Tuesday, Dicey went into Gram’s bedroom. She was bringing in a fresh glass of water. Gram sat up in bed, not doing anything. “Can I get you a book?” Dicey asked.

  “I don’t seem to have the energy to read,” Gram told her.

  That wasn’t like Gram. Dicey put down the water glass. “Are you taking your medicine?”

  “Yes, and I’m feeling better for it.” Gram almost snapped that at her. “So save your worrying. I just sit here and think—how much better I feel. I don’t feel any too good right now, but—I’ve been thinking. It was like having a weight dropped on me, or like being felled, like a tree being felled.”

  Dicey sat down on the edge of the bed. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Now I can get up and go to the bathroom and come back to bed—without having to lie down and take a rest during the process. Not once do I have to rest. Two days ago, I’d get into the bathroom, and sitting down wasn’t good enough. Do you have any idea how cold it is lying on a bathroom floor, girl?”

  “No idea at all.”

  “It’s cold,” Gram told her. “Why don’t you leave me be in here? I’m thinking,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re doing with yourself—”

  “Cleaning, laundry—we’ve gotten behind—”

  “But it’s so quiet. You’re being pretty quiet about it. What about the shop?”

  “It’s fi
ne.”

  “You don’t have to stay here mollycoddling me,” Gram told her.

  “I’m not.” Dicey knew what Gram would say next so she didn’t give her a chance. “This isn’t mollycoddling, as you very well know. Mollycoddling is—toast in hot milk, and flowers on a tray. What I’m doing is just reasonable care.”

  She stood up. Gram pulled the blanket up over the sweater she was wearing in bed. Dicey looked at her grandmother and her grandmother looked back at her. Dicey could see trouble, in about one day, when Gram started wanting to get out of bed and back to work. She didn’t know how she was going to keep the woman in bed. She didn’t know how she was going to make her stubborn grandmother obey the doctor’s orders.

  “I know what you’re thinking, girl,” Gram said, “and I’ve learned my lesson. I didn’t have to be as stupid as I was. So go on to whatever you’re doing, and give me some quiet to think in.”

  So Gram wasn’t trying to get up. Dicey knew that now. And Gram knew that Dicey wasn’t about to leave her alone in the house, with no one to take care of her if she needed care. Dicey left the room, contented.

  CHAPTER 20

  That afternoon, after Sammy and Maybeth got home from school, Dicey took the truck and went downtown. She didn’t know where the idea had come from, but she thought it was a good idea, so she bought a machine to play cassette tapes. It was on sale for $99—probably because it was pink and nobody wanted it, or maybe because it was shaped like one of those old railroad-car diners and nobody wanted it. For Dicey, the important thing was that it sounded good. It had a radio, too, which she didn’t think Gram would ever use, and a shoulder strap in case you wanted to carry it around with you, which she was sure Gram wouldn’t. Dicey opened her checkbook, stuck Claude’s check into the back, and paid for the tape player, $103.95 with the tax. That got her down to $11.77, but as soon as she could get to the bank she’d have lots of money.

  She went to the library next, to pick out some tapes. That was the great thing, the library had tapes you could check out. She didn’t know anything about music, so she went for big names—Mozart, Beethoven, Bach. Then her eye was caught by a name she’d never heard, Vivaldi. She liked that name, and she liked the name of the music, The Four Seasons. She wondered about how you went about turning the seasons of a year into music, and then she wondered how, if it wasn’t a song that had words, you understood the meaning just from the notes. Probably, she thought, driving home, eager to give Gram her present, there was a kind of language of music that if you studied it you could understand. Dicey felt pretty good, driving along—she had a surprise for Gram, who was really getting better, as anyone would see. The fields spread around her, spreading out from the road. Long, whitened grasses spread out over the ground, like frost. The sky above it all looked like a smudged charcoal drawing. Dicey’s eyes looked around her, to see winter lying on the land, when snowflakes started to fall.

  Snow was so sudden, the way it started. Even these wide, flat wet flakes, plopping onto the windshield, were just suddenly there. They hadn’t been there and then they were, all at once. Dicey smiled to herself, thinking of how Sammy would be outside, hoping that school would close. She thought that if there was no school she and Maybeth would have an extra day to get ready for the history test. At least, she thought, feeling how she was feeling, she was doing all right by her family.

  In the evening, while her brother and sister worked in the kitchen, because the snow had stopped as suddenly as it had started, after she had called Cisco and been assured that she needn’t keep calling up to nag, she went into Gram’s room, closing the door behind her so as not to disturb the two golden heads bent over schoolwork at the table. Gram had one of the tapes playing. A half-eaten bowl of Jell-O was on her table. “This toy,” Gram said. “I don’t know why you went and bought a thing like that.”

  Dicey sat down on the bed. Gram shifted over to give her room. “You do, too. You know perfectly well . . .”

  “All right, I do, and I take that for granted, or, as granted. Since I can, I do. There’s no need to go buying me a present.”

  “I know. I wanted to.”

  “Presents don’t prove love,” Gram pointed out.

  “I know.”

  “Although the right present at the right time can show . . . I’ve been thinking,” Gram said. “About your grandfather. John. No, more about marriage. Or the two together, since that’s my experience of it. At first, I thought I’d failed—and I blamed him for that. Then, I thought he was failing—and I blamed him. It wasn’t for years that I figured out that we failed, we were the ones failing, it took the two of us. I don’t think he ever understood that. I think he was stuck like a pendulum in that back-and-forth blame, me to her to me . . . I don’t wonder he was a bitter man.”

  “I’d feel better if I’d ever met him,” Dicey said.

  “Oh, no, you wouldn’t,” Gram told her. “I met him, and however much of the fault was mine, I still felt much the worse for it. Some horses just can’t pull together in harness, and it’s unkind to yoke them. Do you know how many years it took me to get over my fear of books, after that man?”

  “Of course not. How could I?” Dicey demanded.

  “You know,” Gram said, “if you’re not going to marry your young man, you should tell him. You should make up your mind. He might want to marry Maybeth.”

  “He doesn’t love Maybeth.”

  “He could.”

  Dicey didn’t want to think about Jeff. She hadn’t thought about Jeff since—“Not and love me. We’re entirely different.”

  Gram just shook her stubborn head.

  “Besides, he doesn’t want to anymore.” She made herself say it right out: “Jeff said he didn’t want to get married, the last time I talked to him.”

  For a long time, Gram didn’t say anything. The music washed around the room, all the different instruments separate but also melded together. Then Gram said, “Whoever does know about these things? It’s so hard to love someone—”

  “Hard to live up to love,” Dicey agreed.

  “Then there’s time, too. Who knows. Certainly not me. I wondered why we hadn’t been hearing from him,” Gram said.

  That was more than Dicey thought she had to listen to. “You could have asked.”

  “If I had, you wouldn’t have told me. And I’d like to know what else you haven’t told me about.”

  Dicey didn’t know how Gram knew.

  “I may be sick, and weak, and old, but I’m not dead, girl.”

  And a good thing, too, Dicey thought. She guessed she might as well tell Gram. “Remember that man I told you had ordered a boat? He canceled the order. I gave him his money back, but Claude has paid me, so I’m fine.”

  She didn’t know what Gram would say to that. She wanted to leave the room, but if Gram had anything to say she ought to stay and listen. She wanted to hear whatever it was Gram had to say, if Gram wanted to say anything.

  “I thought I was dying,” Gram said. “I did, truly. Not a heartening perception. Well, I was coughing blood. Not much, but . . . I didn’t know what horrible disease it was; each one I thought of was more horrible than the one before—but I thought how much I’d miss you, all of you, miss our time together, miss finding out how the songs end, how the stories come out. But mostly, the truth is, I thought how much I’d miss me.”

  Gram stopped speaking and closed her eyes. “It’s not very nice, but it’s true, I’m who I’ll miss most.”

  Dicey didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what to say.

  Gram opened her eyes, and a smile swam across her face. “Not that I intend to die any too soon, now that I feel so much better. I ask you, Dicey, how can I feel so bad and have it be so much better?”

  “I dunno. But I don’t feel all that bad myself, and I should.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that, girl.”

  Dicey laughed and got up from the bed. “I’m not sure of anything,” she promised her grandmother.


  She wanted to call Jeff and tell him Gram was better. He hadn’t known Gram was sick, but the gladness of Gram being better was something she wanted to talk with Jeff about. Also, she would enjoy the sound of his voice in her ear, she admitted that. And why shouldn’t she call him? she asked herself. Wasn’t Jeff their friend? He thought a lot of Gram, as she did of him, and a friend should know about good news. Dicey went into the living room, before she could think another thought, and dialed the number. The phone was answered right away, but not by Jeff. “Roger?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Dicey. Is Jeff there?”

  There was a hesitation she wouldn’t have heard if she hadn’t been listening so eagerly. Then Roger said, “He’s left.”

  “Left?”

  “For interviews, you know. Graduate schools. I’m not sure exactly where—Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire—he didn’t leave an itinerary. He didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  She didn’t even know where Jeff was. She couldn’t place him in any known geography, and she didn’t know enough to even guess what he might be doing at any given moment. She hadn’t realized how accustomed she was to knowing where he probably was, at any given point of the day.

  “He probably wrote it down for you, it’s probably in the mail, but that’s pretty funny. He’s been pretty distracted with these applications, Dicey.”

  So Jeff hadn’t told Roger how Dicey didn’t matter in his life anymore. “Tell him, when he gets back—”

  “Not until Tuesday or Wednesday next week. He’s driving. He’s looking at a lot of places.”

  “That’s okay, just tell him my grandmother has pneumonia and is getting better. That’s all I called to say.”

  “Will do. Do you want him to call you?”

  Yes, Dicey did, but she couldn’t say that. She couldn’t say no, either, because that would be a lie. She found a truth to tell: “I just wanted to tell him about Gram. I figured he’d want to know that.”