Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  Half an hour before dinner, she got Ralph to help her slip the leaf into the dining room table, and together they covered it with the white linen tablecloth she saved for holidays. She set the table with the family silver she had inherited from her mother, who had died when Vera was a child. At each end of the table she set two candles, which she lit, then dimmed the lights before calling the family to the table. She instructed each person where to sit, an annoyance, she could tell, Peter and Charlotte exchanging glances, Wacker refusing to vacate a chair at the head of the table until horsey Charlotte physically removed him. She could tell that Peter disapproved not only of the concept of a seating plan in general but of her seating plan in particular, which called for her father to take the head and Peter the foot, and leaving Ralph, whose table it was, somewhere in the middle, though Ralph could have cared less, provided he was close to the platter of turkey.

  And so, when the table was full of food and Vera’s family had come together, and Vera herself had the satisfaction of knowing that she’d skillfully accomplished a difficult task, when the image she’d borne in her imagination had been replicated as faithfully as possible in her dining room, her father, looking healthier than she’d seen him in months and having left his oxygen set up in the next room, anchoring one end of the table and Peter, looking handsome and only a little imperious at the other, when the family had begun to pass in the candlelight the food she’d prepared, only then when the doorbell did not ring and Sully did not show up at this perfect moment and spoil everything, only then did Vera have the leisure to note that the perfect moment, so long awaited and planned for, was a lie. As the platters of food got passed, Vera felt the truth rise in her throat, and she knew she would not be able to swallow so much as a mouthful. Only Ralph, who never noticed anything, seemed oblivious to this truth as he ladled gravy over everything on his plate, including the cranberries. Her father, she suddenly realized, had left his oxygen behind not because he didn’t need it but because he thought it would spoil everyone’s dinner. She could hear him wheezing, gasping really, as he awaited the turkey, and when it came, his hand shook so that he was unable to spear a slice and had to be meted a portion by horsey Charlotte, who gave him dark meat, not knowing his preference for white, and he was too tired to say anything. “Everything is delicious, Mom,” Peter said, looking down at his plate. Twice that day he and Charlotte had gone into the bedroom they used during these visits, and Vera had heard their angry, lowered voices and understood fully what she’d suspected for some time, that theirs was a worse-than-loveless marriage and that it would not hold together another year, maybe not even another month. “Yes … Vera,” her father managed. “Very … fine.” But he hadn’t the strength to say more, and she felt powerfully that he would not last the year, either. Neither of the men in her life had looked at her when he spoke, and she understood that neither was able to face her, or wanted to face her. What they needed from her was for this to be over, and neither looked up even when she did not respond to their compliments, her throat constricting with bitter truth, rising dangerously. Only Will, her grandson, seemed aware of her distress, and he watched her so fearfully that she wished there was a way to reassure him that this feeling would pass, that truth was something she’d always been able to swallow and keep down.

  She was not surprised when her father pushed back his chair and rose unsteadily. “I’m … so … sorry … Vera,” he said, turning away from the table and heading for the living room.

  She rose quickly to help him, but with the leaf in the table the room was crowded and horsey Charlotte and the horrid little Wacker were between them, and anyway, he didn’t need her. What he needed was oxygen. Air.

  Outside Vera’s kitchen window the pickup truck at the curb continued to belch thick fumes, though it had grown dark enough now that the pollution was not clearly defined. Dark had overtaken dark, it occurred to her. As she watched, the street lamp kicked on, to little effect. She became aware of Peter then, and when she turned he was studying her from the doorway. He was carrying the cutting board that contained the turkey carcass. She’d bought a larger bird than necessary, and Peter had carved only half of it. Now, the way he held the cutting board, the uncarved portion facing her, the golden brown bird appeared intact, as if no one had eaten, as if her offering were being returned to her untouched, spurned. Peter, seeing there was no room on the counter around the sink, set the board and carcass down on the dinette table. “I told the boys to get started on their baths, if that’s okay,” he told her.

  “Why wouldn’t it be okay?” Vera said, though she knew why. The single bathroom in Ralph and Vera’s house was always a bone of contention when they visited. Always occupied, never adequate to the traffic, impossible to keep stocked with clean towels, impossible to keep fresh with so much use. Foul humans walking in on each other in their foulest moments.

  “Would you like me to dry?” Peter said, joining her tentatively at the sink. “I’m not doing anything.”

  “I do better alone,” she said. Peter was rarely kind, it seemed to her, and he seemed to offer kindness only at times she was unable to accept it, when she was beyond kindness. “It’s an awfully small kitchen.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the kitchen, Mom,” Peter said, his voice laden with significance, an attitude of her son’s that she found almost impossible to bear. If anything was wrong, it was with her; that’s what he was saying.

  “Why don’t you keep your grandfather company?” she suggested. “I’m fine. Really.”

  Peter had taken a dish towel from the drawer. “He’s dozing,” he said. “He ate pretty well.”

  After hooking him back up to his tank, Vera had brought her father a plate of food and set it up for him on a TV tray while he sucked hard at his oxygen.

  “You’ve tried to do too much,” Peter said, adding, just as she knew he would, “as usual.”

  “Yes, no doubt,” she agreed. “I should have let him spend Thanksgiving in the VA home.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Peter sighed. “We’re the ones you shouldn’t have invited.” When she said nothing to this, he added, “Charlotte wants to leave in the morning.”

  Vera looked at him now, stunned.

  “It’s just—” Peter began.

  “What a hateful woman she is,” Vera interrupted. When dinner was barely over, Charlotte had left, claiming there were some things she had to get at the store, but Vera had overheard part of yet another angry conversation that had taken place behind the closed door of the spare bedroom. “That old man isn’t the only one strangling in this house,” she’d heard Charlotte say. “It’s like living inside a can of deodorant here. She’s got two air fresheners in every room. She runs in and sprays every time somebody uses the bathroom. No wonder you hate women.” Apparently Peter had found this amusing, because Charlotte had added, after a pause, “Don’t laugh. Fucking them isn’t the same as liking them.”

  Peter looked down at the dish towel now. “We’re not doing all that well, Charlotte and I,” he conceded. “Being here just makes everything worse.”

  “I make everything worse, you mean,” she said, scraping food from the side of the sink into the garbage disposal.

  Peter said nothing.

  “Go then,” she said. “By all means.”

  “I had a feeling you wouldn’t take this well,” Peter told her. “You always make it seem like people do things just to disappoint you. You should have seen yourself in the other room. As if Grandpa’s not being able to eat with us was just him being mean to you, messing up your plans.”

  “I’d be grateful if you didn’t analyze me,” she said, scraping the last of the plates into the sink. That done, she grabbed the bowl that contained the turkey stuffing and scraped it into the sink, then the remaining squash. “Especially about your grandfather. I know you’re educated and I’m not, but there are some things in this world that you don’t understand and never will.”

  Peter was staring at her now. �
��That’s good food,” he pointed out.

  She followed the squash with the potatoes and the green beans. “Why save them?” she said. “Who’s going to be here to eat leftovers?”

  “What about Ralph?”

  “What about him,” Vera said, turning on the disposal, which thundered into operation, shaking the sink. Apparently a bone had found its way in with the rest of the scrapings, and it rattled around the disposal like a stone. When Peter reached for the switch above the sink to turn it off, she grabbed his wrist, clutching it fiercely, refusing to let go, even when he tried to pull away. She surrendered him only when she’d regained a tenuous grip on herself and turned off the disposal. “You treat him as if he didn’t exist,” Peter said quietly.

  For a moment Vera was unable to respond. “I don’t mean to,” she finally managed. “I mean, I do mean to, but I don’t know why.”

  Neither said anything for some time.

  “Everything’s coming apart, isn’t it,” she said when she could finally locate her voice.

  “What, Mom?” Peter said, not bothering to disguise the frustration in his voice. “What’s coming apart?”

  “Me,” she told him, grinning now. “Can’t you tell?”

  She stared out the kitchen window into the street of her life. The street lamp was doing a better job now. It had to get really dark before such man-made illumination did any good. “Remember what a pretty street this used to be?” she asked her son. “Remember how it was when you were a boy growing up, how we could let you wander the neighborhood and be completely safe? Remember how it was before the invasion?”

  Peter was frowning at her. She didn’t even have to look at him to know that. “What invasion, Mom?”

  She made a sweeping gesture at the street, the world outside her kitchen. “The barbarians,” she explained. “Open your eyes.”

  Peter looked out the window, noticing the pickup truck at the curb for the first time. “Huh,” he said, puzzled, as if he might actually see her point. “That’s Dad, isn’t it?”

  That possibility had not occurred to her, and Vera was about to say no, it couldn’t be, when that certainty was replaced by its opposite. Of course, she thought, as her son pulled on his coat and started down the driveway to investigate. She watched Peter as he went around the truck to the driver’s side and peered in. She saw him knock on the window, then try the door, saw the truck rock gently in response to his efforts. Of course, she thought to herself. With the whole wide world to die in, and the days lined up all the way to eternity, wasn’t it just like Sully to die on Thanksgiving in the very shadow of the home she’d managed to build in his absence? This was a bitter, vengeful thought, and so the tears that welled up in her eyes took her by surprise.

  In Sully’s dream he and Rub and Carl Roebuck and a famous television judge were sitting naked in a tiny sauna, arguing. Sully explained all about the job he and Rub had done for Carl Roebuck last August, and also Carl’s steadfast refusal to pay them for it. When called upon, Carl admitted to nonpayment, but explained that Sully had hooked up the pipes all wrong. Anymore when they flushed the toilet, shit came out the water faucets. “It’s put a terrible strain on my marriage,” he added by way of explaining his countersuit. When the judge asked Rub what light he could throw upon the affair, Rub recited the Carnation Milk jingle flawlessly and challenged Sully to do the same. During the entire testimony, Sully had been distracted by someone banging for admittance at the sauna door, and, when challenged to repeat the jingle, Sully found himself unable to. He couldn’t remember how it went, despite the fact that Rub had just recited it. “I’m going to find for the defendant,” said the judge, who brought his gavel down hard on Sully’s knee. At this moment the sauna door flew open and Toby Roebuck appeared, also naked. Rub focused first on her breasts, then on her loins. He screamed. A gun materialized in Toby’s hand, and she pointed it at her husband. “Don’t take the law into your own hands,” the judge advised. “Take him to court.” Toby Roebuck, her face hard and unforgiving, her feet planted wide apart in a man’s stance, fired anyway, and it was Sully’s turn to scream.

  These screams had a strange sense of reality to them, perhaps because they were real. The first scream was not Rub’s. It belonged to Peter, Sully’s son, who was peering into the pickup’s window at his father. The second scream was Sully’s, starting awake. He was parked at the curb, in front of his ex-wife’s house, where he’d fallen asleep. It had been his intention merely to close his eyes for a minute, to gather himself and take a deep breath before going up the walk and knocking at the door of the house, where he expected a mixed reception. It was not immediately apparent how long he’d actually slept, but he suspected the sauna might have been only the last of a series of dreams. Also, it appeared that dusk was falling.

  “Jesus Christ, Dad,” Peter kept saying. He was now walking up and down alongside the pickup, shaking his head, holding one hand over his heart. “You realize you sleep with your eyes open?”

  Sully understood this to be true, though it was a fairly recent phenomenon. Ruth had witnessed and reported it with considerable irritation. It couldn’t have been the case when he was married to Vera, because his wife had kept a careful, detailed list of the things he did of which she disapproved, and she was not the sort of woman to hold anything back. She surely would have mentioned it if he’d slept with his eyes open.

  Sully tried to shake off some of the deep grogginess. “I must have dozed off,” he said.

  “With the motor running and door locked?”

  The motor was running. Sully turned it off. The door was not locked, but it was tricky. From the outside you had to pull up and out at the same time. Sully demonstrated for his son’s benefit. Way off he heard a siren, and, as he always did when he heard a siren, he tried to remember if he’d left a cigarette burning somewhere.

  Both men listened to the approach of the ambulance. “I knocked on the window, but I couldn’t get you to wake up,” Peter explained guiltily.

  Sully tried to make all this add up, but he still was too groggy from Jocko’s pills and the truck’s heater, and from breathing the pickup’s gasoline fumes. When the ambulance turned down their street and Peter flagged it, Sully looked at his ex-wife’s house and said, “Is somebody sick?”

  “You,” Peter explained, looking embarrassed now. “We thought you were dead.”

  Sully just sat with the door open and let the cold air bring him back while Peter explained as best he could to the ambulance crew, who were reluctant to believe that this could be an honest mistake. They kept looking over at Sully suspiciously, as if the verdict was still out on whether or not he’d died, as originally reported. In their expression they reminded him of the people who’d been told he died in the fire he’d started twenty years ago. This was twice now he’d cheated people out of a tragedy, and even his own son looked conflicted on the point of his continued existence, though this was probably due to the fact that his not being dead after all made Peter, who’d called for the ambulance, look like a fool.

  When Ralph came out, Sully was delighted to see him. “You ain’t dead after all,” Ralph said, beaming at him. Sully and Vera’s second husband had always gotten on fine and would have gotten along even better had they not both understood that Vera considered their inclination to like each other a betrayal. It seemed not to bother Ralph in the least that his wife had been intimate with Sully, had borne him a son. Worse, it seemed not to bother Sully that what had once been his now belonged to another man. It was as if they’d agreed she wasn’t worth fighting over. Indeed, it was more like they considered themselves fellow sufferers.

  “No, not yet, Ralph,” Sully said. “You wouldn’t mind too much if I threw up here in your gutter, would you?”

  Ralph shrugged. “I’d offer you the bathroom, except the boys are in there to take a bath.”

  “I wouldn’t make it anyhow,” Sully said, feeling the vomit rise in his throat. “Besides, I may not have learned much married to
Vera, but I know better than to throw up in her bathroom. Unless she’s changed, she doesn’t even like people to shit in it.”

  “She hasn’t changed,” Ralph admitted sadly. “She’s got about a dozen air fresheners opened up all over the house. We couldn’t even smell the turkey.”

  Just hearing about the smell of air fresheners did the trick, and Sully leaned forward and threw up into the street. Ralph looked away. Not having eaten all day, there wasn’t much, and Sully, who had been sweating in anticipation, immediately felt better. He thought he recognized the decomposed remains of the second of Jocko’s yellow pills.

  Seeing what he’d done, the two men from the ambulance, who’d given a form to Peter to sign, came over to where he sat. “You all right, pal?” the smaller man wanted to know. “You want us to take you back to the hospital?”

  “Nope, I sure don’t,” Sully told them. “I feel much better.”

  The man glanced at the vomit and looked away.

  “Sorry you had to come out here,” Sully said. “My son can’t tell dead people from sleeping ones. I guess that’s why they made him a doctor of history and not medicine.”

  Peter had come over in time to hear this.

  “If you’d breathed much more exhaust, you might be dead,” the ambulance driver said. “You should get checked out.”

  Sully stood to show that he was okay. “I’m fine,” he said. “I promise.”

  “Okay,” the man said, handing Sully a form. “Sign this. It proves we were here.”

  When Sully signed, the two men got back into the ambulance, burped their siren once and drove off. Sully, Peter and Ralph watched them go, and when the ambulance disappeared around the corner, all three men turned reluctantly to face house and home and family and explanation.

  “Well, son,” Sully addressed Peter, though it was Ralph he winked at. “Let’s go inside before our courage fails completely.”