“What Book of Knowledge?”
His father got up and kissed the top of his head. The radio went on upstairs, and then water began to run in the tub up there.
“She must be getting ready for action,” B.B. said. “Why does she have to take a bath the minute I turn on the dishwasher? The dishwasher’s been acting crazy.” B.B. sighed. “Keep those hands on the table,” he said. “It’s good practice for the auction.”
Bryce moved the two half circles of Times Square so that they overlapped. He folded his hands over them and watched the squirrel scare a bird away from the feeder. The sky was the color of ash, with little bursts of white where the sun had been.
“I’m the same as dead,” Rona said.
“You’re not the same as dead,” B.B. said. “You’ve put five pounds back on. You lost twenty pounds in that hospital, and you didn’t weigh enough to start with. You wouldn’t eat anything they brought you. You took an intravenous needle out of your arm. I can tell you, you were nuts, and I didn’t have much fun talking to that doctor who looked like Tonto who operated on you and thought you needed a shrink. It’s water over the dam. Get in the bath.”
Rona was holding on to the sink. She started to laugh. She had on tiny green-and-white striped underpants. Her long white nightgown was hung around her neck, the way athletes drape towels around themselves in locker rooms.
“What’s funny?” he said.
“You said, ‘It’s water over the—’ Oh, you know what you said. I’m running water in the tub, and—”
“Yeah,” B.B. said, closing the toilet seat and sitting down. He picked up a Batman comic and flipped through. It was wet from moisture. He hated the feel of it.
The radio was on the top of the toilet tank, and now the Andrews Sisters were singing “Hold Tight.” Their voices were as smooth as toffee. He wanted to pull them apart, to hear distinct voices through the perfect harmony.
He watched her get into the bath. There was a worm of a scar, dull red, to the left of her jutting hipbone, where they had removed her appendix. One doctor had thought it was an ectopic pregnancy. Another was sure it was a ruptured ovary. A third doctor — her surgeon — insisted it was her appendix, and they got it just in time. The tip had ruptured.
Rona slid low in the bathtub. “If you can’t trust your body not to go wrong, what can you trust?” she said.
“Everybody gets sick,” he said. “It’s not your body trying to do you in. The mind’s only one place: in your head. Look, didn’t Lyndon Johnson have an appendectomy? Remember how upset people were that he pulled up his shirt to show the scar?”
“They were upset because he pulled his dog’s ears,” she said.
She had a bath toy he had bought for her. It was a fish with a happy smile. You wound it with a key and then it raced around the tub spouting water through its mouth.
He could hear Bryce talking quietly downstairs. Another call to Maddy, no doubt. When the boy was in Vermont, he was on the phone all the time, telling B.B. how much he missed him; when he was here in Pennsylvania, he missed his family in Vermont. The phone bill was going to be astronomical. Bryce kept calling Maddy, and Rona’s mother kept calling from New York; Rona never wanted to take the calls because she always ended up in an argument if she wasn’t prepared with something to talk about, so she made B.B. say she was asleep, or in the tub, or that a soufflé was in the last stages. Then she’d call her mother back, when she’d gathered her thoughts.
“Would you like to go to that auction tonight?” he said to Rona.
“An auction? What for?”
“I don’t know. There’s nothing on TV and the kid’s never been to an auction.”
“The kid’s never smoked grass,” she said, soaping her arm.
“Neither do you anymore. Why would you bring that up?”
“You can look at his rosy cheeks and sad-clown eyes and know he never has.”
“Right,” he said, throwing the comic book back on the tile. “Right. My kid’s not a pothead. I was talking about going to an auction. Would you also like to tell me that elephants don’t fly?”
She laughed and slipped lower in the tub, until the water reached her chin. With her hair pinned to the top of her head and the foam of bubbles covering her neck, she looked like a lady in Edwardian times. The fish was in a frenzy, cutting through the suds. She moved a shoulder to accommodate it, shifted her knees, tipped her head back.
“There were flying elephants in those books that used to be all over the house when he visited,” she said. “I’m so glad he’s eight now. All those crazy books.”
“You were stoned all the time,” he said. “Everything looked funny to you.” Though he hadn’t gotten stoned with her, sometimes things had seemed peculiar to him, too. There was the night his friends Shelby and Charles had given a dramatic reading of a book of Bryce’s called Bertram and the Ticklish Rhinoceros. Rona’s mother had sent her a loofah for Christmas that year. It was before you saw loofahs all over the place. Vaguely, he could remember six people crammed into the bathroom, cheering as the floating loofah expanded in water.
“What do you say about the auction?” he said. “Can you keep your hands still? That’s what I told him was essential — hands in lap.”
“Come here,” she said, “I’ll show you what I can do with my hands.”
The auction was in a barn heated with two wood stoves — one in front, one in back. There were also a few electric heaters up and down the aisles. When B.B. and Rona and Bryce came in the back door of the barn, a man in a black-and-red lumberman’s jacket closed it behind them, blowing cigar smoke in their faces. A woman and a man and two teenagers were arguing about a big cardboard box. Apparently one of the boys had put it too close to the small heater. The other boy was defending him, and the man, whose face was bright red, looked as if he was about to strike the woman. Someone else kicked the box away while they argued. B.B. looked in. There were six or eight puppies inside, mostly black, squirming.
“Dad, are they in the auction?” Bryce said.
“I can’t stand the smoke,” Rona said. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”
“Don’t be stupid. You’ll freeze,” B.B. said. He reached out and touched the tips of her hair. She had on a red angora hat, pulled over her forehead, which made her look extremely pretty but also about ten years old. A child’s hat and no make-up. The tips of her hair were still wet from the bathwater. Touching her hair, he was sorry that he had walked out of the bathroom when she said that about her hands.
They got three seats together near the back.
“Dad, I can’t see,” Bryce said.
“The damn Andrews Sisters,” B.B. said. “I can’t get their spooky voices out of my head.”
Bryce got up. B.B. saw, for the first time, that the metal folding chair his son had been sitting in had “PAM LOVES DAVID FOREVER AND FOR ALL TIME” written on it with Magic Marker. He took off his scarf and folded it over the writing. He looked over his shoulder, sure that Bryce would be at the stand where they sold hot dogs and soft drinks. He wasn’t; he was still inspecting the puppies. One of the boys said something to him, and his son answered. B.B. got up immediately and went over to join them. Bryce was reaching into his pocket.
“What are you doing?” B.B. said.
“Picking up a puppy,” Bryce said. He said it as he lifted the animal. The dog turned and rooted its snout in Bryce’s armpit, its eyes closed. With his free hand, Bryce handed the boy some money.