“I hadn’t thought,” Ruby said.
“Nobody thinks any more,” Mr. Jerger complained.
“I got to be going.”
“Yes, it’s been found,” Mr. Jerger said.
“Where at?” Ruby asked.
“I have drunk of it.”
“Where’d you have to go to?” she asked. She leaned a little closer and got a whiff of him that was like putting her nose under a buzzard’s wing.
“Into my heart,” he said, placing his hand over it.
“Oh.” Ruby moved back. “I gotta be going. I think my brother’s home.” She got over the door sill.
“Ask your husband if he knows what great birthday this is,” Mr. Jerger said, looking at her coyly.
“Yeah, I will.” She turned and waited until she heard his door click. She looked back to see that it was shut and then she blew out her breath and stood facing the dark remaining steep of steps. “God Almighty,” she commented. They got darker and steeper as you went up.
By the time she had climbed five steps her breath was gone. She continued up a few more, blowing. Then she stopped. There was a pain in her stomach. It was a pain like a piece of something pushing something else. She had felt it before, a few days ago. It was the one that frightened her most. She had thought the word cancer once and dropped it instantly because no horror like that was coming to her because it couldn’t. The word came back to her immediately with the pain but she slashed it in two with Madam Zolccda. It will end in good fortune. She slashed it twice through and then again until there were only pieces of it that couldn’t be recognized. She was going to stop on the next floor—God, if she ever got up there—and talk to Laverne Watts. Laverne Watts was a third-floor resident, the secretary to a chiropodist, and an especial friend of hers.
She got up there, gasping and feeling as if her knees were full of fizz, and knocked on Laverne’s door with the butt of Hartley Gilfeet’s gun. She leaned on the door frame to rest and suddenly the floor around her dropped on both sides. The walls turned black and she felt herself reeling, without breath, in the middle of the air, terrified at the drop that was coming. She saw the door open a great distance away and Laverne, about four inches high, standing in it.
Laverne, a tall straw-haired girl, let out a great guffaw and slapped her side as if she had just opened the door on the most comical sight she had yet seen. “That gun!” she yelled. “That gun! That look!” She staggered back to the sofa and fell on it, her legs rising higher than her hips and falling down again helplessly with a thud.
The floor came up to where Ruby could see it and remained, dipping a little. With a terrible stare of 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 yean 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.
Ruby’s mouth opened wordlessly and her fierce expression vanished. For a half-second she was motionless; then she sprang from the chair. “Not me!” she shouted. “Not me!”
Laverne stopped and only watched her with the wise look.
“Not me!” Ruby shouted. “Oh no not me! Bill Hill takes care of that. Bill Hill takes care of that! Bill Hill’s been taking care of that for five years! That ain’t going to happen to me!”
“Well old Bill Hill just slipped up about four or five months ago, my friend,” Laverne said. “Just slipped up…”
“I don’t reckon you know anything about it, you ain’t even married, you ain’t even…”
“I bet it’s not one, I bet it’s two,” Laverne said. “You better go on to the doctor and find out how many it is.”