Okay, so what if we’re old? Is that such a crime?
No, no. But I’m just so tired of being up all night. Aren’t you?
Oh, it’s okay.
The old man interrupted himself to concentrate on sitting up. He
poked his foot at his slipper and on the fourth try got it on. He
hefted his heavy body up from a couch that, like himself, smelled
of old age. Bending forward at the waist because he sat in chairs
too much and could no longer straighten up, his belly pressing out
the buttons of his pajama top, he went across the room to the hotplate
and heated up a consommé and sat at the table to eat it out of the
pan and continue the conversation.
No, no, no, there’s no crime in getting old. The crime is in living
through it.
What are you talking about? You don’t know what you’re talking about.
I know very well. I’m saying being old is a sad state of affairs.
For one thing, we can’t sleep worth a damn.
He put the empty pan in the sink and returned to the couch. He picked
up the remote, put the old movie on mute and tucked himself in under
a nubby beige bedspread, leaving his slippers on and his feet sticking
out over the edge of the couch. He reached up and turned out the light.
So. Here we are again.
So what?
So nothing.
He closed his eyes and nestled the back of his head into the pillow.
Let’s count sheep.
Okay. Where shall we start?
Let’s start with number one. That college girl.
He drifted far back and found a plaid skirt, red and white and green,
and the softest white leg and the scent of rosewater. He was a townie,
sixteen years old, working in his father’s dry goods store. Even in
1934 people still came in to buy what they had to have. And other
people still had the money to keep their daughters in a little Iowa
college. She came in to buy soap, and because he had the gift of gab
and a thick shock of blond hair and his father’s truck, he had gotten
her to go out with him. Sitting on a blanket in a field one spring
night. That soft white leg stretching out from the little plaid skirt.
No shoe on her foot. Oh, oh, oh. He sighed and diddled his fingers
against the bedspread. A happiness. She was number one.
Two, three, and four skipped past in a quick blur: a white pudgy
tummy and wet hands; a yellow frilly starchy skirt that made his nose
itch; freckles on a little breast. Oh, oh, oh. And then number five,
a snotty girl who made fun of him by acting like it was her
who got him to do it. Oh.
The game was to remember as many as possible, to count as high as
possible. But really the game was to pretend to want to stay awake,
counting and remembering, and then to lose the fight and give up into
the wide elusive fields of sleep.
His breath deepened. Six, seven, and eight waved past beneath twitching
eyelids, brief glimpses through a fog. After that they got all out
of order and started shuffling themselves like cards, queens of diamonds
and hearts. Queen of the backseat of a 1938 Oldsmobile. Queen of a
screened-in sunporch in a closed up summer cabin on a lake in October.
The count was nine and ten but he knew they were out of order and
those two were really something like thirteen and twenty.
To stay awake he decided to focus. He would pick out only the queens
of hearts, the ones who meant something. That would be number one,
the college girl – Ann or Annette was it? – because she was his first,
and it was so truly nice, the blanket, the night wind, the stars.
He supposed there were stars but didn’t really remember that.
Then number twenty-two, the girl he married. The old man’s jaw slacked
open and his flesh softened along the back of his body. Him on leave
in Philadelphia before shipping over. Her sweet friendship to a new
soldier over five days, and then four years of letters and waiting.
He didn’t really wait – in Italy, France and Germany he briefly knew
numbers twenty-three through thirty-five or so, but they weren’t queens
of hearts. He wrote the letters back to Alice and was glad to do so.
Then they married and she was his queen of hearts.
After that there were just a few others. There was even one other
queen of hearts for a long time. Who could have known there would
be one whose eyes would talk to his, when he didn’t even plan to be
listening?
Oh, a happiness. Marian, my love. Alice, my dear wife, my love. Ann,
or Annette. Oh, oh, oh.
He shivered and wiped his eye, then tucked his hand under the cover.
Are we asleep now?
Shhh. Almost.
Judith Day has been writing fiction for over fifty
years. She lives in Sonoma County with her husband.
