concentration, she stepped down to get on it. She scrutinized a chair across the room and then headed for it, putting her feet carefully one before the other.
“You should be in a wild-west show!” Laverne Watts said. “You’re a howl!”
Ruby reached the chair and then edged herself onto it. “Shut up,” she said hoarsely.
Laverne sat forward, pointing at her, and then fell back on the sofa, shaking again.
“Quit that!” Ruby yelled. “Quit that! I’m sick.”
Laverne got up and took two or three long strides across the room. She leaned down in front of Ruby and looked into her face with one eye shut as if she were squinting through a keyhole. “You are sort of purple,” she said.
“I’m damm sick,” Ruby glowered.
Laverne stood looking at her and after a second she folded her arms and very pointedly stuck her stomach out and began to sway back and forth. “Well, what’d you come in here with that gun for? Where’d you get it?” she asked.
“Sat on it,” Ruby muttered.
Laverne stood there, swaying with her stomach stuck out, and a very wise expression growing on her face. Ruby sat sprawled in the chair, looking at her feet. The room was getting still. She sat up and glared at her ankles. They were swollen! I’m not going to no doctor, she started, I’m not going to one. I’m not going. “Not going,” she began to mumble, “to no doctor, not…”
“How long you think you can hold off?” Laverne murmured and began to giggle.
“Are my ankles swollen?” Ruby asked.
“They look like they’ve always looked to me,” Laverne said, throwing herself down on the sofa again. “Kind of fat.” She lifted her own ankles up on the end pillow and turned them slightly. “How do you like these shoes?” she asked. They were a grasshopper green with very high thin heels.
“I think they’re swollen,” Ruby said. “When I was coming up that last flight of stairs I had the awfulest feeling, all over me like…”
“You ought to go on to the doctor.”
“I don’t need to go to no doctor,” Ruby muttered. “I can take care of myself. I haven’t done bad at it all this time.”
“Is Rufus at home?”
“I don’t know. I kept myself away from doctors all my life. I kept—why?”
“Why what?”
“Why, is Rufus at home?”
“Rufus is cute,” Laverne said. “I thought I’d ask him how he liked my shoes.”
Ruby sat up with a fierce look, very pink and purple. “Why Rufus?” she growled. “He ain’t but a baby.” Laverne was thirty year old. “He don’t care about women’s shoes.”
Laverne sat up and took off one of the shoes and peered inside it. “Nine B.” she said. “I bet he’d like what’s in it.”
“That Rufus ain’t but an enfant!” Ruby said. “He don’t have time to be looking at your feet. He ain’t got that kind of time.”
“Oh, he’s got plenty of time,” Laverne said.
“Yeah,” Ruby muttered and saw him again, waiting, with plenty of time, out nowhere before he was born, just waiting to make his mother that much deader.
“I believe your ankles are swollen,” Laverne said.
“Yeah,” Ruby said, twisting them. “Yeah. They feel tight sort of. I had the awfulest feeling when I got up those steps, like sort of out of breath all over, sort of tight all over, sort of—awful.”
“You ought to go on to the doctor.”
“No.”
“You ever been to one?”
“They carried me once when I was ten,” Ruby said, “but I got away. Three of them holding me didn’t do any good.”
“What was it that time?”
“What you looking at me that way for?” Ruby muttered.
“What way?”
“That way,” Ruby said, “—swagging out that stomach of yours that way.”
“I just asked you what it was that time?”
“It was a boil. A nigger woman up the road told me what to do and I did it and it went away.” She sat slumped on the edge of the chair, staring in front of her as if she were remembering an easier time.
Laverne began to do a kind of comic dance up and down the room. She took two or three slow steps in one direction with her knees bent and then she came back and kicked her leg slowly and painfully in the other. She began to sing in a loud guttural voice, rolling her eyes, “Put them all together, they spell MOTHER! MOTHER!” and stretching out her arms as if she were on the stage.
