He ought to go in and check on her.
He didn’t want to.
He swallowed and his throat still felt as if it was lined with mitten wool.
I’m not afraid of Gramma, he thought. If she held out her arms I’d go right to her and let her hug me because she’s just an old lady. She’s senile and that’s why she has “bad spells.” That’s all. Let her hug me and not cry. Just like Buddy.
He crossed the short entryway to Gramma’s room, face set as if for bad medicine, lips pressed together so tightly they were white. He looked in, and there lay Gramma, her yellowwhite hair spread around her in a corona, sleeping, her toothless mouth hung open, chest rising under the coverlet so slowly you almost couldn’t see it, so slowly that you had to look at her for a while just to make sure she wasn’t dead.
Oh God, what if she dies on me while Mom’s up to the hospital?
She won’t. She won’t.
Yeah, but what if she does?
She won’t, so stop being a pussy.
One of Gramma’s yellow, melted-looking hands moved slowly on the coverlet: her long nails dragged across the sheet and made a minute scratching sound. George drew back quickly, his heart pounding.
Cool as a moose, numbhead, see? Laying chilly.
He went back into the kitchen to see if his mother had been gone only an hour, or perhaps an hour and a half—if the latter, he could start reasonably waiting for her to come back. He looked at the clock and was astounded to see that not even twenty minutes had passed. Mom wouldn’t even be into the city yet, let alone on her way back out of it! He stood still, listening to the silence. Faintly, he could hear the hum of the refrigerator and the electric clock. The snuffle of the afternoon breeze around the corners of the little house. And then—at the very edge of audibility—the faint, rasping susurrus of skin over cloth… Gramma’s wrinkled, tallowy hand moving on the coverlet.
He prayed in a single gust of mental breath: PleaseGoddon’ tletherwakeupuntilMomcomeshomeforJesus’ -sakeAmen.
He sat down and finished his cookie, drank his Quik. He thought of turning on the TV and watching something, but he was afraid the sound would wake up Gramma and that high, querulous, not-to-be-denied voice would begin calling Roo-OOTH! RUTH! BRING ME M’TEA!
TEA! ROOO-OOOOOTH!
He slicked his dry tongue over his drier lips and told himself not to be such a pussy. She was an old lady stuck in bed, it wasn’t as if she could get up and hurt him, and she was eightythree years old, she wasn’t going to die this afternoon.
George walked over and picked up the phone again.
“—that same day! And she even knew he was married! Gorry, I hate these cheap little corner-walkers that think they’re so smart! So at Grange I said—” George guessed that Henrietta was on the phone with Cora Simard. Henrietta hung on the phone most afternoons from one until six with first Ryan’s Hope and then One Life to Live and then All My Children and then A* the World Turns and then Search for Tomorrow and then God knew what other ones playing in the background, and Cora Simard was one of her most faithful telephone correspondents, and a lot of what they talked about was 1) who was going to be having a Tupperware party or an Amway party and what the refreshments were apt to be, 2) cheap little corner-walkers, and 3) what they had said to various people at 3-a) the Grange, 3-b) the monthly chufch fair, or 3-c) K of P Hall Beano.
“—that if I ever saw her up that way again, I guess I could be a good citizen and call—” He put the phone back in its cradle. He and Buddy made fun of Cora when they went past her house just like all the other kids—she was fat and sloppy and gossipy and they would chant, Cora-Cora from Bora-Bora, ate a dog turd and wanted more-a! and Mom would have killed them both if she had known that, but now George was glad she and Henrietta Dodd were on the phone. They could talk all afternoon, for all George cared. He didn’t mind Cora, anyway. Once he had fallen down in front of her house and scraped his knee—Buddy had been chasing him—and Cora had put a Band-Aid on the scrape and gave them each a cookie, talking all the time.
George had felt ashamed for all the times he had said the rhyme about the dog turd and the rest of it.
George crossed to the sideboard and took down his reading book. He held it for a moment, then put it back. He had read all the stories in it already, although school had only been going a month. He read better than Buddy, although Buddy was better at sports. Won’t be better for a while, he thought with momentary good cheer, not with a broken leg.
He took down his history book, sat down at the kitchen table, and began to read about how Cornwallis had surrendered up his sword at Yorktown. His thoughts wouldn’t stay on it. He got up, went through the entryway again. The yellow hand was still. Gramma slept, her face a gray, sagging circle against the pillow, a dying sun surrounded by the wild yellowish-white corona of her hair. To George she didn’t look anything like people who were old and getting ready to die were supposed to look. She didn’t look peaceful, like a sunset. She looked crazy, and…
(and dangerous) … yes, okay, and dangerous—like an ancient she-bear that might have one more good swipe left in her claws.
George remembered well enough how they had come to Castle Rock to take care of Gramma when Granpa died. Until then Mom had been working in the Stratford Laundry in Stratford, Connecticut. Granpa was three or four years younger than Gramma, a carpenter by trade, and he had worked right up until the day of his death. It had been a heart attack.
Even then Gramma had been getting senile, having her “bad spells.” She had always been a trial to her family, Gramma had. She was a volcanic woman who had taught school for fifteen years, between having babies and getting in fights with the Congregational Church she and Granpa and their nine children went to. Mom said that Granpa and Gramma quit the Congregational Church in Scarborough at the same time Gramma decided to quit teaching, but once, about a year ago, when Aunt Flo was up for a visit from her home in Salt Lake City, George and Buddy, listening at the register as Mom and her sister sat up late, talking, heard quite a different story. Granpa and Gramma had been kicked out of the church and Gramma had been fired off her job because she did something wrong. It was something about books. Why or how someone could get fired from their job and kicked out of the church just because of books, George didn’t understand, and when he and Buddy crawled back into their twin beds under the eave, George asked.
There’s all kinds of books, Senor El-Stupido, Buddy whispered.
Yeah, but what kind?
How should I know? Go to sleep!
Silence. George thought it through.
Buddy?
What! An irritated hiss.
Why did Mom tell us Gramma quit the church and her job?
Because it’s a skeleton in the closet, that’s why! Now go to sleep!
But he hadn’t gone to sleep, not for a long time. His eyes kept straying to the closet door, dimly outlined in moonlight, and he kept wondering what he would do if the door swung open, revealing a skeleton inside, all grinning tombstone teeth and cistern eye sockets and parrot-cage ribs; white moonlight skating delirious and almost blue on whiter bone. Would he scream? What had Buddy meant, a skeleton in the closet? What did skeletons have to do with books? At last he had slipped into sleep without even knowing it and had dreamed he was six again, and Gramma was holding out her arms, her blind eyes searching for him; Gramma’s reedy, querulous voice was saying, Where’s the little one, Ruth? Why’s he crying? I only want to put him in the closet…
with the skeleton.
George had puzzled over these matters long and long, and finally, about a month after Aunt Flo had departed, he went to his mother and told her he had heard her and Aunt Flo talking.
He knew what a skeleton in the closet meant by then, because he had asked Redenbacher at school. She said it meant having a scandal in the family, and a scandal was something that made people talk a lot. Like Cora Simard talks a lot? George had asked Redenbacher, and Redenbacher’s face had worked strangely and her lips had quivered and she had said, That’s not nice, George, but… yes, something like that.