Fresh Complaint

That doesn’t mean anything, necessarily. The publishers have put out a new edition. The original cover, with the illustration of the two women sitting cross-legged in a wigwam, has been replaced by a color photograph of snowcapped mountains, and jazzier type.

A second later, Della exclaims, “Oh, hey! Our favorite!”

“Not only that,” Cathy says, pointing at the cover. “Look. ‘Twentieth-Anniversary Edition! Two Million Sold!’ Can you believe it?”

“Well, we always knew it was a good book.”

“We sure did. People should listen to us.” In a softer voice Cathy says, “I thought it might get you back to reading, Della. Since you know it so well.”

“Hey, right. Sort of prime the pump. The last book you sent me, that Room? I’ve been reading that for two months now and haven’t gotten further than twenty pages.”

“That book’s a little intense.”

“It’s all about someone stuck in a room! Hits a little close to home.”

Cathy laughs. But Della isn’t entirely joking and this gives Cathy an opportunity. Sliding off the daybed, she gesticulates at the walls, groaning, “Couldn’t Bennett and Robbie get you a better place than this?”

“They probably could,” Della says. “But they say they can’t. Robbie’s got alimony and child support. And as far as Bennett goes, that Joanne probably doesn’t want him spending any money on me. She never liked me.”

Cathy sticks her head in the bathroom. It’s not as bad as she expects, nothing dirty or embarrassing. But the rubberized shower curtain looks like something in an asylum. That’s something they can fix right away.

“I’ve got an idea.” Cathy turns back to Della. “Did you bring your family photos?”

“I sure did. I told Bennett I wasn’t going anywhere without my photo albums. As it is, he made me leave all my good furniture behind, so the house will sell. But do you know what? So far not a single person has even come through.”

If Cathy is listening, she doesn’t show it. She goes to the window and yanks up the blinds. “We can start by brightening things up a little in here. Get some pictures on the walls. Make this place look like somewhere you live.”

“That would be good. If this place wasn’t so pitiful-looking, I think I might feel better about being here. It’s almost like being—incarcerated.” Della shakes her head. “Some of the people in this place are sort of on the edge, too.”

“They’re edgy, huh?”

“Real edgy,” Della says, laughing. “You have to be careful who you sit next to at lunch.”

After Cathy leaves, Della watches the parking lot from her chair. Clouds are massing in the distance. Cathy said the storm won’t get here until Monday, after she’s gone, but Della, feeling apprehensive, reaches for the remote.

She points it at the TV and presses the button. Nothing happens. “This new TV Bennett got me isn’t worth a toot,” she says, as though Cathy, or someone, is still there to listen. “You have to turn on the TV and then this other box underneath. But even when I manage to get the darn TV on, I can never find any of my good shows.”

She has put down the remote just as Cathy emerges from the building, on the way to her car. Della follows her progress with perplexed fascination. Part of why she discouraged Cathy from coming out now wasn’t about the weather. It’s that Della isn’t sure she’s up to this visit. Since her fall and the hospital stay, she hasn’t felt too good. Sort of punky. Going around with Cathy, getting caught up in a whirlwind of activity, might be more than she can handle.

On the other hand, it would be nice to brighten up her apartment. Looking at the drab walls, Della tries to imagine them teeming with beloved, meaningful faces.

And then a period ensues where nothing seems to happen, nothing in the present, anyway. These interludes descend on Della more and more often lately. She’ll be looking for her address book, or making herself coffee, when suddenly she’ll be yanked back into the presence of people and objects she hasn’t thought about for years. These memories unsettle her not because they bring up unpleasant things (though they often do) but because their vividness so surpasses her day-to-day life that they make it feel as faded as an old blouse put through the wash too many times. One memory that keeps coming back lately is of that coal bin she had to sleep in as a child. This was after they moved up to Detroit from Paducah, and after her father ran off. Della, her mom, and her brother were living in a boardinghouse. Her mom and Glenn got regular rooms, in the upstairs, but Della had to sleep in the basement. You couldn’t even get to her room from inside the house. You had to go out to the backyard and lift doors that led down to the cellar. The landlady had whitewashed the room and put in a bed and some pillows made from flour sacks. But that didn’t fool Della. The door was made of metal, and there weren’t any windows. It was black as pitch down there. Oh, did I ever hate going down into that coal bin every night! It was like walking right down into a crypt!

But I never complained. Just did what I was told.

Della’s little house, in Contoocook, was the only place that was ever hers alone. Of course, at her age, it was getting to be a headache. Making it up her hill in the winter, or finding someone to shovel the snow off her roof so it didn’t cave in and bury her alive. Maybe Dr. Sutton, Bennett, and Robbie are right. Maybe she’s better off in this place.

When she looks out the window again Cathy’s car is nowhere to be seen. So Della picks up the book Cathy brought her. The blue mountains on the cover still baffle her. But the title’s the same: Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival. She opens the book and flips through it, stopping every so often to admire the drawings.

Then she goes back to page one. Focuses her eyes on the words and tracks them across the page. One sentence. Two. Then a whole paragraph. Since her last reading, she’s forgotten enough of the book that the story seems new again, yet familiar. Welcoming. But it’s mostly the act itself that brings relief, the self-forgetfulness, the diving and plunging into other lives.

Like so many books Della has read over the years, Two Old Women came recommended by Cathy. After she left the College of Nursing, Cathy went to work at a bookstore. She was remarried by then and had moved with Clark into an old farmhouse that she spent the next ten years fixing up.

Della memorized Cathy’s schedule and stopped in during her shifts, especially on Thursday evenings when customers were few and Cathy had time to talk.

That was the reason Della chose a Thursday to tell Cathy her news.

“Go on, I’m listening,” Cathy said. She was pushing a cart of books around the store, restocking, while Della sat in an armchair in the poetry section. Cathy had offered to make tea but Della said, “I’d just as soon have a beer.” Cathy had found one in the office refrigerator, left over from a book signing. It was after seven on an April night and the store was empty.

Della started telling Cathy how strangely her husband had been acting. She said she didn’t know what had got into him. “For instance, a few weeks ago, Dick gets out of bed in the middle of the night. Next thing I know, I heard his car backing down the drive. I thought to myself, ‘Well, maybe this is it. Maybe he’s had enough and that’s the last I’ll see of him.’”

“But he came back,” Cathy said, placing a book on a shelf.

“Yeah. About an hour later. I came downstairs and there he was. He was down on his knees, on the carpet, and he’s got all these road maps spread out all over.”

When Della asked her husband what on earth he was doing, Dick said that he was scouting for investment opportunities in Florida. Beachfront properties in undervalued areas that were reachable by direct flights from major cities. “I told him, ‘We’ve got enough money already. You can just retire and we’ll be fine. Why do you want to go and take a risk like that now?’ And do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Retirement isn’t in my vocabulary.’”

Cathy disappeared into the self-help section. Della was too engrossed in telling her story to get up and follow. She hung her head dejectedly, staring at the floor. Her tone was full of wonder and outrage at the ideas men latched on to, especially as they got older. They were like fits of insanity, except that the husbands experienced these derangements as bolts of insight. “I just had an idea!” Dick was always saying. They could be doing anything, having dinner, going to a movie, when inspiration struck and he stopped dead in his tracks to announce, “Hey, I just had a thought.” Then he stood motionless, a finger to his chin, calculating, scheming.

His latest idea involved a resort near the Everglades. In the Polaroid he showed Della, the resort appeared as a charming but dilapidated hunting lodge surrounded by live oaks. What was different this time was that Dick had already acted on his idea. Without telling Della, he’d taken a mortgage on the place and used a chunk of their retirement savings as a down payment.

“We are now the proud owners of our own resort in the Florida Everglades!” he announced.

As much as it pained Della to tell Cathy this, it gave her pleasure as well. She held her beer bottle in both hands. The bookstore was quiet, the sky dark outside, the surrounding shops all closed for the night. It felt like they owned the place.

“So now we’re stuck with this doggone old resort,” Della said. “Dick wants to convert it into condos. To do that, he says he has to move down to Florida. And as usual he wants to drag me with him.”

Cathy re-emerged with the cart. Della expected to find a look of sympathy on her face but instead Cathy’s mouth was tight.

“So you’re moving?” she said coldly.

“I have to. He’s making me.”

“Nobody’s making you.”

This was spoken in Cathy’s recently acquired know-it-all tone. As if she’d read the entire self-help section and could now dispense psychological insight and marital advice.

“What do you mean, no one’s making me? Dick is.”

“What about your job?”

“I’ll have to quit. I don’t want to, I like working. But—”

“But you’ll give in as usual.”

This remark seemed not just unkind but unjust. What did Cathy expect Della to do? Divorce her husband after forty years of marriage? Get her own apartment and start dating strange men, the way Cathy was doing when they first met?

“You want to quit your job and go off to Florida, fine,” Cathy said. “But I have a job. And if you don’t mind, I’ve got some things to do before closing up.”