The steps were a thin black rent in the middle of the house, covered with a mole-colored carpet that looked as if it grew from the floor. They stuck straight up like steeple steps, it seemed to her. They reared up. The minute she stood at the bottom of them, they reared up and got steeper for her benefit. As she gazed up them, her mouth widened and turned down in a look of complete disgust. She was in no condition to go up anything. She was sick. Madam Zoleeda had told her but not before she knew it herself.
Madam Zoleeda was the palmist on Highway 87. She had said, “A long illness,” but she had added, whispering, with a very I-already-know-but-I-won’t-tell look, “it will bring you a stroke of good fortune!” and then had sat back grinning, a stout woman with green eyes that moved in their sockets as if they had been oiled. Ruby didn’t need to be told. She had already figured out the good fortune. Moving. For two months she had had a distinct feeling that they were going to move. Bill Hill couldn’t hold off much longer. He couldn’t kill her. Where she wanted to be was in a subdivision—she started up the steps, leaning forward and holding onto the banisters—where you had your drugstores and grocery and a picture show right in your own neighborhood. As it was now, living downtown, she had to walk eight blocks to the main business streets and farther than that to get to a supermarket. She hadn’t made any complaints for five years much but now with her health at stake as young as she was what did he think she was going to do, kill herself? She had her eye on a place in Meadowcrest Heights, a duplex bungalow with yellow awnings. She stopped on the fifth step to blow. As young as she was—thirty-four—you wouldn’t think five steps would stew her. You better take it easy, baby, she told herself, you’re too young to bust your gears.
Thirty-four wasn’t old, wasn’t any age at all. She remembered her mother at thirty-four—she had looked like a puckered-up old yellow apple, sour, she had always looked sour, she had always looked like she wasn’t satisfied with anything. She compared herself at thirty-four with her mother at that age. Her mother’s hair had been gray— hers wouldn’t be gray now even if she hadn’t touched it up. All those children were what did her mother in—eight of them: two born dead, one died the first year, one crushed under a mowing machine. Her mother had got deader with every one of them. And all of it for what? Because she hadn’t known any better. Pure ignorance. The purest of downright ignorance!
And there her two sisters were, both married four years with four children apiece. She didn’t see how they stood it, always going to the doctor to be jabbed at with instruments. She remembered when her mother had had Rufus. She was the only one of the children who couldn’t stand it and she had walked all the way in to Melsy, in the hot sun ten miles, to the picture show to get clear of the screaming, and had sat through two westerns and a horror picture and a serial and then had walked all the way back and found it was just beginning, and she had had to listen all night. All that misery for Rufus! And him turned out now to have no more charge than a dish rag. She saw him waiting out nowhere before he was born, just waiting, waiting to make his mother, only thirty-four, into an old woman. She gripped the banister rail fiercely and heaved herself up another step, shaking her head. Lord, she was disappointed in him! After she had told all her friends her brother was back from the European Theater, here he comes—sounding like he’d never been out of a hog lot.
He looked old too. He looked older than she did and he was fourteen years younger. She was extremely young looking for her age. Not that thirty-four is any age and anyway she was married. She had to smile, thinking about that, because she had done so much better than her sisters—they had married from around. “This breathlessness,” she muttered, stopping again. She decided she would have to sit down.
There were twenty-eight steps in each flight—twenty-eight.
She sat down and jumped quickly, feeling something under her. She caught her breath and then pulled the thing out: it was Hartley Gilfeet’s pistol. Nine inches of treacherous tin! He was a six-year-old boy who lived on the fifth floor. If he had been hers, she’d have worn him out so hard so many times he wouldn’t know how to leave his mess on a public stair. She could have fallen down those stairs as easy as not and ruined herself! But his stupid mother wasn’t going to do anything to him even if she told her. All she did was scream at him and tell people how smart he was. “Little Mister Good Fortune!” she called him. “All his poor daddy left me!” His daddy had said on his death bed, “There’s nothing but him I ever given you,” and she had said, “Rodman, you given me a fortune!” and so she called him Little Mister Good Fortune. “I’d wear the seat of his good fortune out!” Ruby muttered.
The steps were going up and down like a seesaw with her in the middle of it. She did not want to get nauseated. Not that again. Now no. No. She was not. She sat tightly to the steps with her eyes shut until the dizziness stopped a little and the nausea subsided. No, I’m not going to no doctor, she said. No. No. She was not. They would have to carry her there knocked out before she would go. She had done all right doctoring herself all these years—no bad sick spells, no teeth out, no children, all that by herself. She would have had five children right now if she hadn’t been careful.
She had wondered more than once if this breathlessness could be heart trouble. Once in a while, going up the steps, there’d be a pain in her chest along with it. That was what she wanted it to be—heart trouble. They couldn’t very well remove your heart. They’d have to knock her in the head before they’d get her near a hospital, they’d have to—suppose she would die if they didn’t?
She wouldn’t.
Suppose she would?
She made herself stop this gory thinking. She was only thirty-four. There was nothing permanent wrong with her. She was fat and her color was good. She thought of herself again in comparison with her mother at thirty-four and she pinched her arm and smiled. Seeing that her mother or father neither had been much to look at, she had done very well. They had been the dried-up type, dried up and Pitman dried into them, them and Pitman shrunk down into something all dried and puckered up. And she had come out of that! A somebody as alive as her! She got up, gripping the banister rail but smiling to herself. She was warm and fat and beautiful and not too fat because Bill Hill liked her that way. She had gained some weight but he hadn’t noticed except that he was maybe more happy lately and didn’t know why. She felt the wholeness of herself, a whole thing climbing the stairs. She was up the first flight now and she looked back, pleased. As soon as Bill Hill fell down those steps once, maybe they would move. But they would move before that! Madam Zoleeda had known. She laughed aloud and moved on down the hall. Mr. Jerger’s door grated and startled her. Oh Lord, she thought,
He peered at her coming down the hall. “Good morning!” he said, bowing the upper part of his body out the door. “Good morning to you!” He looked like a goat. He had little raisin eyes and a string beard and his jacket was a green that was almost black or a black that was almost green.
“Morning,” she said. “Hower you?”
“Well!” he screamed. “Well indeed on this glorious day!” He was seventy-eight years old and his face looked as if it had mildew on it. In the mornings he studied and in the afternoons, he walked up and down the sidewalks, stopping children and asking them questions. Whenever he heard anyone in the hall, he opened his door and looked out.
“Yeah, it’s a nice day,” she said languidly.
“Do you know what great birthday this is?” he asked.
“Uh-uh,” Ruby said. He always had a question like that. A history question that nobody knew; he would ask it
