The New Yorker Stories полностью

Milo and Bradley are creatures of habit. For as long as I’ve known him, Milo has worn his moth-eaten blue scarf with the knot hanging so low on his chest that the scarf is useless. Bradley is addicted to coffee and carries a Thermos with him. Milo complains about the cold, and Bradley is always a little edgy. They come out from the city every Saturday—this is not habit but loyalty—to pick up Louise. Louise is even more unpredictable than most nine-year-olds; sometimes she waits for them on the front step, sometimes she hasn’t even gotten out of bed when they arrive. One time she hid in a closet and wouldn’t leave with them.

Today Louise has put together a shopping bag full of things she wants to take with her. She is taking my whisk and my blue pottery bowl, to make Sunday breakfast for Milo and Bradley; Beckett’s Happy Days, which she has carried around for weeks, and which she looks through, smiling—but I’m not sure she’s reading it; and a coleus growing out of a conch shell. Also, she has stuffed into one side of the bag the fancy Victorian-style nightgown her grandmother gave her for Christmas, and into the other she has tucked her octascope. Milo keeps a couple of dresses, a nightgown, a toothbrush, and extra sneakers and boots at his apartment for her. He got tired of rounding up her stuff to pack for her to take home, so he has brought some things for her that can be left. It annoys him that she still packs bags, because then he has to go around making sure that she has found everything before she goes home. She seems to know how to manipulate him, and after the weekend is over she calls tearfully to say that she has left this or that, which means that he must get his car out of the garage and drive all the way out to the house to bring it to her. One time, he refused to take the hour-long drive, because she had only left a copy of Tolkien’s The Two Towers. The following weekend was the time she hid in the closet.

“I’ll water your plant if you leave it here,” I say now.

“I can take it,” she says.

“I didn’t say you couldn’t take it. I just thought it might be easier to leave it, because if the shell tips over the plant might get ruined.”

“O.K.,” she says. “Don’t water it today, though. Water it Sunday afternoon.”

I reach for the shopping bag.

“I’ll put it back on my windowsill,” she says. She lifts the plant out and carries it as if it’s made of Steuben glass. Bradley bought it for her last month, driving back to the city, when they stopped at a lawn sale. She and Bradley are both very choosy, and he likes that. He drinks French-roast coffee; she will debate with herself almost endlessly over whether to buy a coleus that is primarily pink or lavender or striped.

“Has Milo made any plans for this weekend?” I ask.

“He’s having a couple of people over tonight, and I’m going to help them make crêpes for dinner. If they buy more bottles of that wine with the yellow flowers on the label, Bradley is going to soak the labels off for me.”

“That’s nice of him,” I say. “He never minds taking a lot of time with things.”

“He doesn’t like to cook, though. Milo and I are going to cook. Bradley sets the table and fixes flowers in a bowl. He thinks it’s frustrating to cook.”

“Well,” I say, “with cooking you have to have a good sense of timing. You have to coordinate everything. Bradley likes to work carefully and not be rushed.”

I wonder how much she knows. Last week she told me about a conversation she’d had with her friend Sarah. Sarah was trying to persuade Louise to stay around on the weekends, but Louise said she always went to her father’s. Then Sarah tried to get her to take her along, and Louise said that she couldn’t. “You could take her if you wanted to,” I said later. “Check with Milo and see if that isn’t right. I don’t think he’d mind having a friend of yours occasionally.”

She shrugged. “Bradley doesn’t like a lot of people around,” she said.

“Bradley likes you, and if she’s your friend I don’t think he’d mind.”

She looked at me with an expression I didn’t recognize; perhaps she thought I was a little dumb, or perhaps she was just curious to see if I would go on. I didn’t know how to go on. Like an adult, she gave a little shrug and changed the subject.