Lisa looks up and stares, stares at Warden as if he's the strangest thing she's ever seen. He sighs, rises to go.
"I should be back from the temple by six," he says, voice flat now. "Remember what I said about your observation notes. Objectivity."
She doesn't watch him walk away.
Everything was the same, being married, and everything was different. That was what Lisa always said to her friends and it drove Warden up the wall. He'd make a disgusted face and she'd turn to him and say that she knew what she meant, she just couldn't put it in words. Which was even worse. Warden was at her constantly for her irrational thinking, though he liked it that she relied on him to make most of the decisions. And when Lisa did make a hard choice by herself, she did it with a coldness and finality that scared him.
But it was her stubbornness when she was being irrational that bothered him the most, her stubbornness when they dis agreed about something. Her irrationality seemed to surface most often in disagreements.
It was the same as before they were married, but with something added, something more at stake.
Being a faculty wife was hard on her, Warden could tell that. It prompted him to apply for the field study. They both invested a lot of hope in the possibility of being funded, and the first year of their marriage came to seem like a lingering disease that only the grant could cure.
Somehow living together was more expensive than living separately had been, and Lisa had to go back to her job caring for the lab animals. They spent long, silent evenings at home, reading, studying, just sitting. Lisa called Warden at his office every day after the department's mail had arrived, to check if there was any word. Gibbons were Lisa's favorite primate, she was thrilled at the prospect of studying them in the field. Gibbons formed long-lasting pair bonds, they were affectionate and peaceful with each other, there were few differences in secondary sex characteristics and the females generally shared leadership and guarding roles with the males. They hadn't been studied at all thoroughly, the research would be important. Often Warden and Lisa would catch each other staring into space, and they would sigh, and one or the other would say, "If only the grant would come through."
Lisa came home one night upset by the gerbils. The gerbils had started eating each other, they had been put in smaller cages usually reserved for the white rats, in order to make room for a new shipment of specimens. There had been seven incidences of cannibalism in one week. Lisa came home upset and there sat Warden clutching the letter of approval from the Foundation. She cried for an hour.
Warden is returning on the temple side of the river, walking upstream to the ford. He sees Lisa first, sitting on the far bank by the overhanging tree, writing in her log book. He shades his eye and squints up at the grape-laden branch for Esau. The branch is gone.
Esau clings to it in the middle of the river, the remnants snagged on a rock, rapidly breaking away. Clusters of grapes tear loose and churn downstream, bursting apart against shoals. Warden looks to his wife.
The rope is in their camp, only a few yards behind her, the bamboo pole is there, she has the machete to cut branches or vines. Esau is only six feet from the bank. The water roars past him. Warden could call and ask her to intervene, to stop her observation and save the ape. He could ask her.
Lisa looks across the water at Warden, looks at him without expression. She goes back to her writing.
Gibbons feed from the trees along the bank, swinging by their long arms. Small, bright yellow birds flit after insects beneath the forest canopy. A wild pig roots along the side of the pathway just upstream. The bearded man stands motionless and watches the woman across the river. The woman writes slowly, in a flowing script. Schiffman's ape grimaces, lips drawn back over his gums as he strains to lift his chin above the rushing water. The branch shifts.
The 7-10 Split
F YOU DON'T HAVE your own shoes they rent you a pair for fifty cents. None of us are any big athletes, we meet at the lanes once a week, Thursday night. But some of us have our own shoes. Bobbi for instance, she got a pair cause the rented shoes have their size on the heel in a red leather number and Bobbi doesn't want everybody seeing how big her feet are. She's real conscious of things like that, real conscious of her appearance, like you'd expect a hairdresser to be.
We play two teams, four girls each, and take up a pair of lanes. It's Bobbi and Janey and Blanche and me against Rose Teta, Pat and Vi, and Evelyn Chambers. We've worked it out over the years so the sides are pretty even. A lot of the time the result comes down to whether I been on days at the Home or if Blanche is having problems with her corns. She's on her feet all day at the State Office Building cafeteria and sometimes the corns act up. I figure that I roll around 175 if I'm on graveyard but drop down to 140 if I already done my shift in the morning. Janey works with me at the Home and doesn't seem to mind either which way, but she's the youngest of us.
"Mae," she always says to me, "it's all in your head. If you let yourself think you're tired, you'll be tired. All in your head."
That might be so for her, but you get my age and a lot of what used to be in your head goes directly to your legs.
And Janey is just one of those people was born with a lot of pep. Night shift at the Home, in between bed checks when all the aides and nurses are sitting around the station moaning about how little sleep they got during the day, Janey is always working like crazy on her macrame plant-hangers. She sells them to some hippie store downtown for the extra income. She's a regular little Christmas elf, Janey, her hands never stop moving. It's a wonder to me how she keeps her looks, what with the lack of rest and the load she's been saddled with, the hand she's been dealt in life. She's both mother and father to her little retarded boy, Scooter, and still she keeps her sweet disposition. We always send her up to the desk when the pinspotter jams, cause Al, who runs the lanes and is real slow to fix things, is sweet on her. You can tell because he takes his earplugs out when she talks to him. Al won't do that for just anybody. Of course he's married and kind of greasy-looking, but you take your compliments where you can.
It's a real good bunch though, and we have a lot of fun. Rose Teta and Vi work together at the Woolworth's and are like sisters, always borrowing each other's clothes and kidding around. They ought to be on TV, those two. The other night, the last time we played, they started in on Bobbi before we even got on the boards. Bobbi owns a real heavy ball, a sixteen-pounder. It's this milky-blue marbled thing, real feminine-looking like everything Bobbi has. Only last week it's at the shop having the finger holes redrilled, so she has to find one off the rack at the lanes. At Al's the lighter ones, for women and children, are red, and the heavier ones the men men use are black. Bobbie is over checking on the black ones when Rose and Vi start up about there she goes handling the men's balls again, and when she blushes and pretends she doesn't hear they go on about her having her holes drilled. Bobbi hates anything vulgar, or at least she makes like she does, so she always keeps Pat in between her and the Woolworth's girls when we sit on the bench. Pat is a real serious Catholic, and though she laughs at Rose and Vi she never does it out loud. Pat's gonna pop a seam some day, laughing so hard with her hand clapped over her mouth.
It was just after the men's-balls business with Bobbi that Evelyn walked in and give us the news. We could tell right off something was wrong — she wasn't carrying her ball bag and she looked real tired, didn't have any makeup on. She walks in and says, "I'm sorry I didn't call you, girls, but I just now come to my decision. I won't be playing Thursdays anymore, I'm joining the Seniors' League."