teaching in the fall. It is not going to be easy to teach painting, with my right arm gone. Still, one remembers Matisse in his last years. Where there’s a will, et cetera. My department head has sent flowers twice (mixed and tulips), and the dean himself has written a message on a get-well card. There is a bunny on the card, looking at a rainbow. Banks is the only one who really tempts me to go back to work. The others, Banks tells me, are “full of it.”
Now I have a visitor. Danielle, John’s wife, has come up to see me. John is my brother. She brings an opened beer and sets it on the windowsill without comment. Danielle is wearing a white dress with small porpoises on it, smiling as they leap. Across that chest, no wonder.
“Are you feeling blue today or just being rotten?” she asks.
The beginnings of many of Danielle’s sentences often put me in mind of trashy, romantic songs. Surely someone has written a song called “Are You Feeling Blue?”
“Both,” I say. I usually give Danielle straight answers. She tries to be nice. She has been nice to my brother for five years. He keeps promising to take her back to France, but he never does.
She sits on the rug, next to my chair. “Their rotten lawn parties,” she says. Danielle is French, but her English is very good.
“Pull up a chair and watch the festivities,” I say.
“I have to go back,” she says, pouting. “They want you to come back with me.”
Champagne glasses clinking, white tablecloth, single carnation, key of A: “They Want You Back with Me.”
“Who sent you?” I ask.
“John. But I think Lorna would like it if you were there.”
“Lorna doesn’t like me anymore. Mary’s turned her against me.”
“Ten is a difficult age,” Danielle says.
“I thought the teens were difficult.”
“How would I know? I don’t have children.”
She has a drink of beer, and then puts the bottle in my hand instead of back on the windowsill.
“You have beautiful round feet,” I say.
She tucks them under her. “I’m embarrassed,” she says.
“Our talk is full of the commonplace today,” I say, sighing.
“You’re insulting me,” she says. “That’s why John wouldn’t come up. He says he gets tired of your insults.”
“I wasn’t trying to be insulting. You’ve got beautiful feet. Raise one up here and I’ll kiss it.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” Danielle says.
“Really,” I say.
Danielle moves her leg, unstraps a sandal and raises her right foot. I take it in my hand and bend over to kiss it across the toes.
“Stop it,” she says, laughing. “Someone will come in.”
“They won’t,” I say. “John isn’t the only one tired of my insults.”
I have been taking a little nap. Waking up, I look out the window and see Danielle below. She is sitting in one of the redwood chairs, accepting a drink from my father. One leg is crossed over the other, her beautiful foot dangling. They all know I am watching, but they refuse to look up. Eventually my mother does. She makes a violent sweep with her arm—like a coach motioning the defensive team onto the field. I wave. She turns her back and rejoins the group—Lorna, John, Danielle, my Aunt Rosie, Rosie’s daughter Elizabeth, my father, and some others. Wednesday was also Elizabeth’s birthday—her eighteenth. My parents called and sang to her. When Janis Joplin died Elizabeth cried for six days. “She’s an emotional child,” Rosie said at the time. Then, forgetting that, she asked everyone in the family why Elizabeth had gone to pieces. “Why did you feel so bad about Janis, Elizabeth?” I said. “I don’t know,” she said. “Did her death make you feel like killing yourself ?” I said. “Are you unhappy the way she was?” Rosie now speaks to me only perfunctorily. On her get-well card to me (no visit) she wrote: “So sorry.” They are all sorry. They have been told by the doctor to ignore my gloominess, so they ignore me. I ignore them because even before the accident I was not very fond of them. My brother, in particular, bores me. When we were kids, sharing a bedroom, John would talk to me at night. When I fell asleep he’d come over and shake my mattress. One night my father caught him doing it and hit him. “It’s not my fault,” John hollered. “He’s a goddamn snob.” We got separate bedrooms. I was eight and John was ten.
Danielle comes back, looking sweatier than before. Below, they are playing the first game. My father’s brother Ed pretends to be a majorette and struts with his mallet, twirling it and pointing his knees.
“Nobody sent me this time,” Danielle says. “Are you coming down to dinner? They’re grilling steaks.”
“He’s so cheap he’ll serve Almaden with them,” I say. “You grew up in France. How can you drink that stuff ?”
“I just drink one glass,” she says.
“Refuse to do it,” I say.
She shrugs. “You’re in an awful mood,” she says.
“Give back that piggy,” I say.
She frowns. “I came to have a serious discussion. Why aren’t you coming to dinner?”
“Not hungry.”
