Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  Men, she thought. Surely they were a different species. Only their essentially alien nature could account for any sane woman’s attraction to and affection for a male. Had any woman ever looked at a man and felt kinship? Miss Beryl doubted it. Ironically, though, only an alien would be so understandable. Compared to women’s, men’s needs were so simple. What’s more, men seemed unable to conceal them. Sully was an exaggeration, of course—a man with even fewer needs than most men, the male principle taken to some outlandish extreme—but Clive Sr. had not been so different. He’d liked thick, fleece-lined sweatshirts and soft chinos, considering these the greatest perk of his position as football coach since he was allowed to wander around the high school dressed pretty much the same way he dressed at home (except that at school he wore a whistle around his neck), while his colleagues suffered (he imagined, since he would have suffered) in jackets and ties and sharply creased dress pants. Keeping Clive Sr.’s sweatshirts soft and fluffy, replacing them when they got thin and scratchy, had been one of the few demands her husband had ever made upon her. When his sweatshirts felt good, so did he, and whenever Miss Beryl bought him a new one and slipped it into his dresser drawer, she could count upon his coming up behind her in the kitchen and giving her a big, affectionate hug. When she asked him what it was for, he’d always reply “Nothing,” and in fact she was never able to tell for sure whether Clive Sr. was able to trace his sudden affection to her love—the source of these simple gifts—or whether the fleecy sweatshirt itself fulfilled a basic need in him, his affection for her the mere by-product of his satisfaction. She was never quite sure how she was to feel about a man whose affection, whose inner contentment, could be purchased for the price of a sweatshirt and then maintained with fabric softener. What she felt for her husband was love, then and now, but she had her doubts she’d be able to justify this reaction to another woman. Or at least to another woman who’d known Clive Sr.

  And it was even harder to imagine any woman being able to justify love for Sully, Miss Beryl had to admit as she returned to her tenant’s front room. He had, according to gossip, a longtime paramour, a married woman who apparently sustained her affection by never visiting his flat. Standing in the middle of Sully’s front room, Miss Beryl tried to think of what these surroundings reminded her of, and finally it dawned on her. Sully’s rooms looked like those of a man who had just gone through a ruinous divorce, whose wife had taken everything of value, leaving her ex-husband to furnish the place with the furniture they had long ago consigned to their damp cellar and forgotten. Maybe it was his sofa that was responsible for the fishy odor. Miss Beryl went over and sniffed a cushion tentatively. It was redolent of old, slept-in clothing, but not fish.

  Maybe, Miss Beryl considered, what she was sniffing was the odor of her own perfidy. Driver Ed had advised her not to betray Sully with this sneak inspection. And it did no good to rationalize that Sully would not mind, that he trusted her with his affairs. He knew that she screened his mail, thrusting at him items she felt he should open. He probably was even aware that she retrieved and opened envelopes he’d consigned to her trash can that had contained disability checks and reimbursements for medication. He probably did not suspect that she kept a large manila envelope marked “SULLY” that contained important documents he might someday need, but she doubted he’d mind if he did, and besides, Miss Beryl never felt guilty about surreptitiously guarding her tenant’s interests. But this was a different kind of intrusion, and she knew it. She had not intended to follow up on Clive Jr.’s suggestion to inspect Sully’s flat for herself until she was actually on the stairs, and now that she was here, she wished that she had followed her usual rule of thumb and dismissed Clive Jr.’s advice on general principle. How had he managed to convince her to invade her longtime tenant’s privacy? Was Clive Jr. becoming more persuasive? Or was she becoming, in her advancing age, more uncertain and susceptible to persuasion? She feared it could well be the latter and wondered if it might be a good idea to make, for future reference, a list of things she should never agree to do at her son’s urging. That way, if she became more uncertain or weak-willed, if she woke up some morning and discovered that Clive Jr.’s advice suddenly made sense, she could consult her list, made when she was still in command of her faculties. Everything would be right there on paper:

  1. Don’t invest in any of Clive Jr.’s sure things.

  2. Don’t tell him how much money you have. It would not be good for him to know this until you are dead and it’s his.

  3. Don’t sell Clive Jr. your house, because then it will be his house. Don’t listen to his reasons, because they’re good ones.

  4. Don’t let him convince you to vote Republican. This would not be in your spiritual best interest.

  The question was whether to add number five:

  5. Don’t let Clive Jr. talk you into evicting Sully, who is fond of you, just as you are fond of him. If Sully burns your house down with you in it, he will not have meant to.

  Miss Beryl frowned at her mental list. Each item on it struck her as dubious, and number five was especially unconvincing. At bottom, the other four represented a failure of generosity to Clive Jr., not to mention a near total collapse of any natural maternal instinct to accord one’s children more credit than they are due. They were Driver Ed speaking, not herself.

  So deeply was Miss Beryl plunged into these interior considerations that she did not hear footsteps on the stair outside or notice that she was no longer alone. And when the intruder spoke, the old woman nearly jumped out of her skin, not so much out of surprise to discover that she was not alone as because for a split second it seemed to her that the new voice, one she recognized vaguely, was in her head. What this new voice said was: “Six. Quit talking to yourself. Everybody will think you’re nuts.”

  Miss Beryl could not take her eyes off the little girl, who sat perfectly still, staring without apparent comprehension at Miss Beryl, her tiny legs hanging over the cushion, not quite touching the floor. Another child would have swung her legs, banged the backs of her shoes against the sofa. But this child’s legs remained preternaturally still. Which wasn’t even the most amazing part. Her mother had declined to be seated on the sofa next to her daughter, planting herself on the floor, back braced against the sofa arm, as if in sad acknowledgment of unworthiness. But once she got situated, Miss Beryl learned why the child’s mother had settled herself at her daughter’s feet, for, without actually looking at her mother, the girl’s small right hand found her mother’s upper arm, then the fingers traveled lightly along the shoulder and up the young woman’s neck until they located her ear. Miss Beryl watched, fascinated, as the child gently caressed her mother’s earlobe between her thumb and forefinger. The young woman even helped the little girl locate it by brushing back her hair with her opposite hand and holding it until the tiny fingers had located the lobe, explaining, “Birdbrain here likes to keep in touch, don’t you, Birdbrain?”

  The child did not react to this observation, though, Miss Beryl noticed, she now looked more relaxed and tranquil as she caressed the lobe of her mother’s ear. Miss Beryl also saw once again that the little girl had a migrating eye, and since she had located her mother’s earlobe, the bad eye had wandered more noticeably, glancing off at the ceiling while the good eye continued to fix Miss Beryl, who suspected the little girl might literally be blind in the wandering eye. Perhaps she was blind in both, Miss Beryl considered, there was so little recognition or expression in either. The way she sat there, so still, gently massaging her mother’s earlobe, as if she could only ascertain her mother’s presence by touch, she might have been both blind and deaf.

  “Anyhow,” the young woman continued, “I’m sorry about the other day. I was just pissed at the world. You ever have days where you don’t know whether to shit or go blind?”

  Miss Beryl chose to ignore this question, guessing that it must be rhetorical.

  “What’s your name?” Miss Beryl said, looking first at the girl,
then at her mother. “I assume ‘Birdbrain’ is a term of endearment?”

  “It’s a perfect description, is what it is,” the young woman said matter-of-factly, cocking her head just slightly to wink up at her daughter. “Tina’s her real name, isn’t it, Birdbrain? Tiny Tina Two Shoes.”

  Tina kept after the earlobe. Otherwise, nothing.

  “We’ve been doing this ever since we finally stopped breastfeeding, haven’t we,” the young woman explained. “I hope it don’t go on too much longer, either. It’s like wearing a forty-pound, vibrating earring.”

  Miss Beryl focused on the little girl’s good eye and addressed the child slowly. “Would you like a cookie, Tina?”

  “She’d probably eat about twelve if we were home. I doubt she’d eat one of yours, though.”

  The little girl was silent.

  “She’s not much of a talker, as you probably guessed. Some days there’s just nobody home, is there, Birdbrain?”

  Miss Beryl rose, too angry with the young woman to stay in the room. “Let’s see about a cookie anyway. I had a houseguest last night who ate a whole plateful, so I know they’re good.”

  In the kitchen Miss Beryl could hear the little girl’s mother, her voice lowered only slightly, talking to the little girl. “This here is some place, huh, Birdbrain? You ever see so much shit in one place? It’s kind of like that museum I took you to in Albany, isn’t it? Look at that big old Victrola over there. Music used to play out of that. How about that guy on the wall with the horns and the beak?”

  There was a pause. Had the little girl spoken?

  “You remember the big museum? Remember how we saw the Indians? How they all sat around the fire? You remember the fire? That was your favorite. Remember the big dinosaur? All those bones standing up so tall?”

  “Dear God,” Miss Beryl whispered to herself in much the same fashion as she had that morning when she saw old Hattie heading up Main into the wind, her housecoat billowing out behind her. What a crazy thing life was. Returning to the living room with the plate of cookies, she set them on the coffee table. Neither of the child’s eyes located them.

  The young woman took one. “Sometimes if I go first,” she explained, taking a bite, chewing and finally swallowing thoughtfully. “Some guy ate a whole plate of these?” Incredulity.

  “A woman,” Miss Beryl said. “I’m sorry you don’t like them.”

  “No, they’re okay,” the young woman said. “I’d puke if I ate a whole plateful of them, though.”

  “Now there’s an expression I haven’t heard in about twenty years,” Miss Beryl said.

  The young woman grinned mischievously. “Yeah, I remember you weren’t too fond of it.” Then, “You don’t remember me at all, do you.”

  In fact, now that she thought about it, the young woman did look vaguely familiar to Miss Beryl. But so did nearly everyone in Bath between the ages of twenty and sixty, which represented the span of her tenure as the eighth-grade English teacher.

  “Don’t worry, I looked like a boy then,” the girl explained. “These came in ninth grade,” she added, indicating her enormous breasts with her two index fingers.

  “Donnelly,” Miss Beryl said, the girl’s family name taxiing back to her suddenly. “I also attempted to teach your father, Zachary. I see the resemblance now.”

  Janey Donnelly’s eyes narrowed. “You’re sure.”

  Miss Beryl was reasonably sure. Having taught several generations of many North Bath families, she considered herself something of a reluctant expert on the local gene pool and its predictable eddies. “The mouth and chin mostly,” Miss Beryl said. It had occurred to her that she might have insulted the girl by recognizing Zachary Donnelly in her features. “And I’m relieved to learn that I didn’t allow you to use the term ‘puke’ in my classroom.”

  “You wished you had at the time,” the girl recalled. “I said I was sick and needed to go to the can so I could puke. You didn’t think much of the word ‘can’ either. You said I could just stand there until I came up with ‘synonyms suitable for a decent audience.’ ” She mimicked Miss Beryl rather effectively here, without malice.

  Miss Beryl vaguely remembered the incident now. And Janey Donnelly had looked like a boy, her hair chopped severely, her features and carriage and language all distressingly masculine. Where the other eighth-grade girls had all been experimenting with makeup to vulgar excess, Janey’s pale features were sadly unhighlighted.

  “I got ‘bathroom’ right away,” Janey recollected, “but I puked before I could come up with “regurgitrate.’ ”

  The young woman was clearly enjoying herself, and for some reason Miss Beryl was less angry with her. “Regurgitate,” she corrected.

  “Whatever,” the girl said, having turned her attention to her daughter.

  “How about it, Birdbrain? You want some cookie or not?”

  No response.

  “Just the ear, huh? How about we take a couple for later?”

  Janey Donnelly took two of the cookies, wrapped them in a napkin and deposited them in her purse. “This okay?”

  “I insist,” Miss Beryl said.

  “I guess they probably miss you over at the junior high,” the girl continued. “I don’t know who they got to be the hard-ass after you quit.”

  Miss Beryl couldn’t help but smile. “It’s my understanding that they decided to do without one.”

  Janey Donnelly shrugged. “Too bad,” she said. “I still like to read stories, in case you’re interested. I never get the chance, but I like to. I bet Birdbrain here will like it too if she ever learns. She’s nuts about anything she can do on her own, aren’t you, Two Shoes?”

  “How old are you, Tina?” Miss Beryl said to the child, who was still staring at her with one eye.

  “She just turned five,” her mother answered. “Kindergarten in the fall, though I have my doubts. School in the fall, right, Birdbrain? No more Mommy’s earlobe then. We’ll have to sit you next to somebody with big ears, huh. Put the desks right together.” Then, to Miss Beryl, “If life ain’t an adventure, what the hell is it?”

  The young woman consulted her watch. “Would it be okay if I used your phone? It’d just be local.”

  Miss Beryl gestured to the phone, the same one the girl had previously insulted. “Sorry there’s no place to sit. I used to have a chair over there,” she told the young woman. “Something happened to it.”

  “That’s okay,” Janey assured her, turning to face her daughter and gently removing the little girl’s thumb and forefinger from her earlobe. “Why don’t you just sit here and look at these magazines, okay? You listenin’ to me, Two Shoes? See all the pretty magazines the old lady’s got here? Look at all the pictures. You look ’em all over and when I come back you can tell me which one’s your favorite. How’d that be? Maybe we could find you a pair of scissors so you could cut out pictures like you do at home. How’d that be?”

  She opened one of Miss Beryl’s magazines to a two-page insert of holiday pastries and set it on the little girl’s lap. “Oh boy,” she said. “Those there look yummy, don’t they? We could eat all of them, just the two of us, huh? You look at all these pictures for a minute while Mommy makes a phone call, okay? I’m just gonna be right over there by the door, okay? Right where you can see me, okay? That okay with you?”

  During this entire performance the little girl’s expression never changed, though she did finally consent to look at the picture before her. “You let Mommy make her phone call, then we’ll go back to Grandma’s.”

  The Donnelly girl was on her knees facing her daughter as she pleaded, unnecessarily, it seemed to Miss Beryl, since the child now seemed lost in contemplation of the pastries. Why didn’t the young woman just get up and go make her call?

  “Mommy’s only gonna be gone a minute. You look at this picture, and before you’re done I’ll be back, okay, Tina? I’ll be right over there. See where the phone is? I’m gonna call Grandpa, and then I’ll be right back, okay?
You stay right here and look at the pictures, and maybe we can find you some scissors.” Here she looked pleadingly at Miss Beryl, who was less than thrilled with the idea of the child cutting up her magazines.

  When the Donnelly girl got to her feet, she just stood there a moment, staring down at her daughter, then turned and made for the phone across the long room. As soon as she was out of the little girl’s peripheral vision, the magazine slid from the child’s knees and she stood up, clearly intending to follow her mother, who spun around angrily.

  “Tina, you sit your ass right back down there this minute!” she shouted, stopping the little girl in her tracks. The child did not sit back down, though. Her mother was halfway across the room, and it was as if, somewhere in the little girl’s brain, she was measuring the distance between them and gauging that she could not sit down without risking her mother’s loss. There was nothing Miss Beryl could do but watch, fascinated and horrified.

  “This here’s the shit that drives me stark raving,” the young woman said to Miss Beryl, as if she were glad to have a witness. “You ever see anything like it? Watch this.”

  She turned and took a step toward the phone, stopped and spun around again. The little girl, without actually looking up at her mother, had also taken a step, then stopped when her mother turned.