LOST. White wedding dress size 10. No questions.
He grinned around his cigarette.
Now here came Bonny, slumping in, still buttoning her housecoat, trying to keep her slippers on her feet. Her hair was uncombed and 'there was a crease down one side of her face "Did it freeze9" she asked bun "Is there frost 'on the ground? I meant to cover the box-woods." She lifted a curtain to peer out the window. "Oh, Lord, it froze"
"'Mm?" She opened a cupboard door and clattered something. A blackened silver ashtray arrived inside the partition of Morgan's newspaper He tapped Ins cigarette on it Listen to this," he told her "FOUND Article of jewelry, in Druid Hill Park. Caller must identify. I would' call and say it was a diamond ring."
"How come?" Bonny asked She took a carton of eggs from the refrigerator."
"Well, chances are no one wears real pearls to the zoo, or platinum bracelets, but plenty of people wear engagement rings, right? And besides, you can be so general about a ring. Yes, I would say a ring. Absolutely."
"LOST Upper denture Great sentimental value" Morgan read out Bonny snorted He said, "I made it up about the sentimental value."
"I guessed." Bonny told him.
Re could bear bare feet pounding upstairs, water running, hairdryers humming. The smell of percolating coffee filled the kitchen, along, with the crisp, sharp smoke from his Camel. Oh, he, was hitting his stride, all right. He had managed it, broken into another day. He spread his paper wider. "I love the classifieds," he said. "They're so full of private lives. "
"Are you going to: get those shoes fixed this morning?"
"Hmm? Listen to this: M. G. All is not forgiven and never will be." Bonny set a cup of coffee in front of him.
"What if that's me?" Morgan asked.
"Did you do something unforgivable?"
"You can't help wondering," Morgan said, "seeing a thing like that you can't help "Oh, Morgan," Bonny said "Why do you always take the papers so personally?"
"Because I'm reading the personals," he told her. He turned the "WANTED," he read, "Geotechnical lab." (For the past nineteen years he bad supposedly been looking for a better job. Not that he expected to find it.) "Ha." He was employed by Bonny's family, managing one of their hardware stores. He was a puttering, hardware sort of a man. Back in graduate school, his advisor had once complained because Morgan had spent a whole conference period squatting in the, corner, talking over his shoulder while he worked on a leaky radiator pipe WANTED. Barmaid, dog groomer, forklift operator. What he liked were those ads with character. (Driver to chauffeur elderly man. Knowledge of Homer desirable) Occasionally he would even answer one. He would even take a. job for a couple of days, vanishing from the hardware store and leaving his clerk in charge Then Bonny's Uncle Ollie would find out and come storming to Bonny, and Bonny would sigh and laugh and ask Morgan what he thought be was doing. He would say this for Bonny: she didn't get too wrought up about things. She just sloped along with him, more or less. He reached out for her; now, as she passed with a pitcher of orange juice. He crooked an arm around her hips, or tried to; she had her mind on some-thing else. "Where's Brindle? Where's your mother?" she asked him. "I thought I heard your mother hours ago." He laid the classified ads aside and tugged another, section from beneath him: the news. But there was nothing worth reading. Plane crashes, train: crashes, tenement fires… He flipped to the obituaries. "Mrs. Grimm. Opera Enthusiast," he read aloud. "Tilly Abbott, Thimble Collector. Ah, Lord." His daughters had begun to seep downstairs. They were quarreling in the hall and' dropping books, and their transistor radios seemed to be playing several different songs at once. A, deep, rocky drumbeat thudded beneath electric guitars. 'Peter Jacobs at 44' Morgan read "Forty-four! What kind of age is that to die?"
"Girls!' "Bonny called. "Your eggs are getting cold."
"I hate it when they won't say what did them in," Morgan told her. Even a long illness'-I mean, a lengthy illness would be better than nothing. But all they have here is 'passed on unexpectedly' He hunched forward to let someone sidle behind him. "Forty-four years old! Of course it was unexpected. You think it was a heart attack? Or what"
"Morgan, I wish you wouldn't put such stock in obituaries," Bonny said… She had to raise her voice the girls bad taken over the kitchen by now. All of them were talking 'at once about history quizzes, boys and more boys, motorcycles, basketball games, who had borrowed whose record album and never given it back. A singer was rumored to be dead. (Someone said she would die herself if that was true.) Amy was doing something to the toaster. The twins were mixing their health-food drink in the blender. A 'French book flew out of nowhere and hit Liz in the small of the back. "I can't go on living here any more," Liz sajd. "I don't get a moment's peace. Everybody picks on me. I'm leaving." But all she did was pour herself a cup of coffee and sit down next to Morgan. "For heaven's sake," she said to Bonny, "what's that he got on his head?"
"Feel free to address me directly," Morgan told her.
"I have the answer, as it happens. Don't be shy."
"Does he have to wear those hats of his? Even in the house he wears them. Does he have to look so peculiar?" This was his thirteen-year-old. Once he might have been offended, but he was used to it by now. Along about age eleven or twelve, it' seeme4 "they totally changed. He had loved them when they were little. They bad started out so small and plain, chubby and curly and even-tempered, toddling devotedly after Morgan, and then all at once they went on crash diets, grew thin and irritable, and shot up taller than their mother They ironed their hair till it hung like veils They traded their dresses for faded jeans and skimpy little T-shirts.
And their taste in boyfriends was atrocious lust atrocious. He couldn't believe some of the creatures they brought home with them. On top of all that, they stopped thinking Morgan was so wonderful. They claimed he was an embarrassment. Couldn't he shave his beard off? Cut his hair? Act his age? Dress like other fathers? Why did he smoke those unfiltered cigarettes and pluck those tobacco shreds from his tongue? Did be realize that be bummed incessantly underneath his breath, even at the dinner table, even now while they were asking him these questions?' He tried to stop humming. He briefly switched to a pipe, but the mouthpiece cracked in two when he bit it And once he got the shorter haircut than usual and trimmed Ms beard so it was square and hugged the shape of his jaw. It looked, artificial, they told him. It looked like a wooden beard, they said.
He felt he was riding something choppy and violent, fighting to' keep 'his balance, smiling beatifically and trying not to blink.
"See? See that? He's barefoot," Liz said.
"Hush and pour that coffee back," Bonny told her. "You know you're not allowed to drink coffee yet." The youngest, Kate, came in with a stack of schoolbooks. She was not quite eleven and still had Bonny's full-cheeked, cheery face. As she passed behind Morgan's chair, she plucked his hat off, kissed the back of his head, and replaced the hat.
"Sugar-pie," Morgan said.
Maybe they ought to have another baby.
With everyone settled around this table, you couldn't even bend your elbows. Morgan decided to retreat. He rose and ducked out of the room backward, like someone leaving the presence of royalty, so they wouldn't see the comics section he was hiding behind him. He padded into the living room. One of the radios was playing "Plastic Fantastic Lover" and he paused to do a little dance, barefoot on the rug. His mother watched him sternly from the couch. She was a small, hunched old lady with hair that wasp still jet black; it was held fiat with tortoise-shell combs from which it crinkled and bucked like something powerful. She sat with her splotched, veined hands folded in her lap; she wore a drapy dress that seemed several sizes too large for her.