“Don’t you look at me! “she cried in that same wild voice.
“Don’t you dare My makeup’s a mess! I put it on special for my son and daughter-in-law… they came for breakfast… we were going to spend the morning… ’We’ll have a nice time, Ma,” Harold said. but the reason they came… you see, the real reason-” Communication broke down in a fresh spate of weeping. Ralph groped in his back pocket, came up with a handkerchief which was wrinkled but clean, and put it in one of Lois’s hands. She took it without looking at him.
“Go on,” he said, “Scrub up a little if you want, although you don’t look bad, Lois; honest you don’t.”
A little raccoon all, he thought. He began to smile, and then the smile died. He remembered the day in September when he had set off for the Rite Aid to check out the over-the-counter sleep aids the p h e n and had encountered Bill and Lois standing outside the park, talking about the doll-throwing demonstration which Ed had orchestrated at WomanCare. She had been clearly distressed that day-Ralph ing that she looked tired in spite of her excitement remembered think and concern-but she had also been close to beautiful: her considerable bosom heaving, her eyes flashing, her cheeks flushed with a maid’s high color. That all but irresistible beauty was hardly more than a memory today; in her melting mascara Lois Chasse looked like a sad and elderly clown, and Ralph felt a quick hot spark of fury for whatever or whoever had wrought the change.
“I,” Lois said, applying Ralph’s handkerchief vigorously look horrible.
“I’m alright.”
“No, ma’am. Just a little smeary.
Lois at last turned to face him. It clearly took a lot of effort with her rouge and eye makeup now mostly on Ralph’s handkerchief.
“How bad am I?” she breathed. “Tell the truth, Ralph Roberts, or I’ll cross your eyes He bent forward and kissed one moist cheek. “Only lovely, Lois.
You’ll have to save ethereal for another day, I guess.”
She gave him an uncertain smile, and the upward movement of her face caused two fresh tears to spill from her eyes. Ralph took the crumpled handkerchief from her and gently wiped them away.
“I’m so glad it was you who came along and not Bill,” she told len “I would have died of shame if Bill had seen me crying in. public,” Ralph looked around. He saw Rosalie, safe and sound at the bottom of the hill-she was lying between the two Portosans that stood down there, her muzzle resting on one paw-but otherwise this part of the park was empty. “I think we’ve got the place pretty much to ourselves, at least for now,” he said.
“Thank God for small favors.” Lois took the handkerchief back and went to work on her makeup again, this time in a rather more businesslike manner. “Speaking of Bill, I stopped into the Red Apple on my way down here-that was before I got feeling sorry for myself and started to bawl my silly head off-and Sue said you two had a big argument just a little while ago. Yelling and everything, right out in your front yard.”
“Nah, not that big,” Ralph said, smiling uneasily, “Can I be nosy and ask what it was about?”
“Chess,” Ralph said. It was the first thing to pop into his mind.
“The Runway 3 Tournament Faye Chapin has every year. Only ’ really wasn’t about anything. You know how it is-sometimes people get out of bed on the wrong side and just grab the first excuse.”
“I wish that was all it was with me,” Lois said. She opened her purse, managing the clasp effortlessly this time, and took out her compact. Then she sighed and stuffed it back into the bag again without opening it. “I can’t. I know I’m being a baby, but I just can’t.”
Ralph darted his hand into her purse before she could close it, removed the compact, opened it, and held the mirror up in front of her.
“See? That’s not so bad, is it?”
She averted her face like a vampire turning away from a crucifix.
“Ugh,” she said. “Put it away.”
“If You promise to tell me what happened.”
“Anything, just Put it away.”
He did. For a little while Lois said nothing but only sat and watched her hands fiddle restlessly with the clasp of her purse. He was about to prod her when she looked up at him with a pitiful expression of defiance.
“ “it just so happens you’re not the only one who can’t get a decent night’s sleep, Ralph,”
“What are you talking ab-”
“Insomnia!”
she snapped. “I go to sleep at about the same time I always did, but I don’t sleep through anymore.
And it’s worse than that. I wake up earlier every morning, it seems.”
Ralph tried to remember if he had told Lois about that aspect of his own problem. He didn’t think he had.
“Why are you looking so surprised?” Lois asked. “You didn’t really think you were the only person in the world to ever have a sleepless night, did you?”
“Of course not!” Ralph responded with some indignation but had it it often felt as if he were the only person in the world to have n that particular kind of sleepless night? Standing helplessly by as his good sleep-time was eroded minute by minute and quarter hour by quarter hour? It was like a weird variant of the Chinese water-torture.
“When did yours start?” he asked.
“A month or two before Carol died.”
How much sleep are you getting?”
“Barely an hour a night since the start of October.” Her voice was calm, but Ralph heard a tremor which might have been panic just below the surface. “The way things are going, I’ll have entirely quit sleeping by Christmas, and if that really happens, I don’t know how I’ll survive it, I’m barely surviving now.”
Ralph struggled for speech and asked the first question to come into his mind: “How come I’ve never seen your light?”
“For the same reason I hardly ever see yours, I imagine,” she said.
“I’ve been living in the same place for thirty-five years, and I don’t need to turn on the lights to find my way around. Also, I like to keep my troubles to myself. You keep turning on the lights at two in the morning and sooner or later someone sees them. It gets around, and then the nosybirds start asking questions. I don’t like nosybird questions, and I’m not one of those people who feel like they have to take an ad out in the paper every time they have a little constipation.”
Ralph burst out laughing. Lois looked at him in round-eyed perplexity for a moment, then Joined in. His arm was still around her? (or had it crept back on its own after he had taken it away Rap I didn’t know and didn’t really care), and he hugged her tightly. This time she pressed against him easily; those stiff little wires had gone out of her body. Ralph was glad.
“You’re not laughing at me, are you, Ralph?”
“Nope. Absolutely not.”
She nodded, still smiling, “That’s all right, then. You never even saw me moving ing around in my living room, did you?”
“No.”
“That’s because there’s no streetlamp in front of my house. But there’s one in front of yours. I’ve seen you in that ratty old wing chair of yours many times, sitting and looking out and drinking tea,” I always assumed I was the only one, he thought, and suddenly a question-both comic and embarrassing-popped into his head.
How many times had she seen him sitting there and picking his nose? Or picking at his crotch?
Either reading his mind or the color in his cheeks, Lois said, “I really couldn’t make out much more than your shape, you know, and you were always wearing your robe, perfectly decent. So you don’t have to worry about that. Also, I hope you know that if you’d ever started doing anything you wouldn’t want people to see you doing, I wouldn’t have looked. I wasn’t exactly raised in a barn, you know.” He smiled and patted her hand. “I do know that, Lois. it’s just…
“I was sitting there and you know, it was a surprise. To find out that while I was watching the street, somebody was watching me.”
She fixed him with an enigmatic smile that might have said, Don’t worry, Ralph-you were just another part of the scenery to me.
He considered this smile for a moment, then groped his way back to the main point. “So what happened, Lois? Why were you sitting here and crying? JUST sleeplessness? If that’s what it was, I certainly sympathize. There’s really no just about it, is there?”
Her smile slipped away. Her gloved hands folded together again in her lap and she looked somberly down at them. “There are worse things than insomnia. Betrayal, for instance. Especially when the people doing the betraying are the people you love.”
She fell quiet. Ralph didn’t prompt her. He was looking down the hill at Rosalie, who appeared to be looking up at him. At both of them, maybe.
“Did you know we share the same doctor as well as the same problem, Ralph?”
“You go to Litchfield, too?”
“Used to go to Litchfield. He was Carolyn’s recommendation.
I’ll never go to him again, though. He and I are quits.” Her upper lip drew back. “Double-crossing son of a bitch!”
“What happened?”
“I went along for the best part of a year, waiting for things to get better by themselves-for nature to take her course, as they say.
Not that I didn’t try to help nature along every now and then. We probably tried a lot of the same things.”
“Honeycomb?” Ralph asked, smiling again. He couldn’t help it.
What ’ an amazing day this has been, he thought. What a perfectly amazing day… and it’s not even one in the afternoon yet.
“Honeycomb? What about it? Does that help?”
“No,” Ralph said, grinning more widely than ever, “doesn’t help a bit, but it tastes wonderful.”
She laughed and squeezed his bare left hand in both of her gloved ones. Ralph squeezed back.
“You never went to see Dr. Litchfield about it, did you, Ralph?
“Nope. Made an appointment once, but cancelled it.”
“Did you put it off because you didn’t trust him? Because you felt he missed the boat on Carolyn?”
Ralph looked at her, surprised.
“Never mind,” Lois said. “I had no right to ask that.”
“No, it’s okay. I guess I’m just surprised to hear the idea from someone else. That he… you know… that he might have misdiagnosed her.”
“Huh!” Lois’s pretty eyes flashed. “It crossed all our minds!
Bill used to say he couldn’t believe you didn’t have that fumble-fingered bastard in district court the day after Carolyn’s funeral. Of course back then I was on the other side of the fence, defending Litchfield like mad. Did you ever think of suing him?”
“No. I’m seventy, and I don’t want to spend whatever time I have left flogging a malpractice suit. Besides-would it bring Carol back?”
