But she doesn't react too strongly; she is more interested these days in her real?estate courses. Janice has completed one pair of ten?week courses and is into another. She has long phone conversations with her classmates about the next quiz or the fascinating personality of their teacher, Mr. Lister with his exciting new beard. "I'm sure Nelson has some plan," she says. "And if he doesn't, we'll all sit down and negotiate one."
"Negotiate! Two hundred thousand disappearing dollars! And you don't have Toyotas to sell any more."
"Were they really so great, Harry1? Nelson hated them. Why can't we get an American franchise2 ? isn't Detroit making a big comeback?"
"Not so big they can afford Nelson Angstrom."
She pretends he's joking, saying, "Aren't you awful?" Then she looks at his face, is startled and saddened by what she sees there, and crosses their kitchen to reach up and touch his face. "Harry," she says. "You are taking it hard. Don't. Daddy used to say, `For every up there's a down, and for every down there's an up.' Nelson will be home in a week and we can't do a thing really until then." Outside the kitchen window screen, where moths4 keep bumping, the early?August evening has that blended tint5 peculiar6 to the season, of light being withdrawn7 while summer's warmth remains8. As the days grow shorter, a dryness of dead grass and chirring insects has crept in even through this summer of heavy rains, of more thunderstorms and flash floods in Diamond County than Harry can ever remember. Out in their yard, he notices now a few brown leaves shed by the weeping cherry, and the flower stalks of the violet hosta dying back. In his mood of isolation9 and lassitude he is drawing closer to the earth, the familiar mother with his infancy10 still in her skirts, in the shadows beneath the bushes.
"Shit," he says, a word charged for him with magic since the night three months ago when Pru used it to announce her despairing decision to sleep with him, once. "What kind of plans can Nelson have? He'll be lucky to stay out of jail."
"You can't go to jail for stealing from your own family. He had a medical problem, he was sick the same way you were sick only it was addiction11 instead of angina. You're both getting better."
He hears in the things she says, more and more, other voices, opinions and a wisdom gathered away from him. "Who have you been talking to?" he says. "You sound like that know?it?all Doris Kaufmann."
"Eberhardt. I haven't talked to Doris for weeks and weeks. But some of the women taking the real?estate program, we go out afterwards to this little place on Pine Street that's not too rough, at least until later, and one of them, Francie Alvarez, says you got to think of any addiction as a medical condition just like they caught the flu, or otherwise you'd go crazy, blaming the addicts12 around you as if they can help it."
"So what makes you think Nelson's cure will take? Just because it cost us six grand, that doesn't mean a thing to the kid. He just went in to let things blow over. You told me yourself he told you once he loves coke more than anything in the world. More than you, more than me, more than his own kids."
"Well, sometimes in life you have to give up things you love."
Charlie. Is that who she's thinking of, to make her voice sound so sincere, so sadly wise and wisely firm? Her eyes for this moment in dying August light have a darkness that invites him in, to share a wisdom her woman's life has taught her. Her fingers touch his cheek again, a touch like a fly that when you're trying to fall asleep keeps settling on your face, the ticklish13 thin skin here and there. It's annoying; he tries to shake her off with a snap of his head. She pulls her hand back but still stares so solemnly. "It's you I worry about, more than Nelson. Is the angina coming back? The breathlessness?"
"A twinge now and then," he admits. "Nothing a pill doesn't fix. It's just something I'm going to have to live with."
"I wonder if you shouldn't have had the bypass."
"The balloon was bad enough. Sometimes I feel like they left it inside me."
"Harry, at least you should do more exercise. You go from the lot to the TV in the den3 to bed. You never play golf any more."
"Well, it's no fun with the old gang gone. The kids out there at the Flying Eagle don't want an old man in their foursome. In Florida I'll pick it up again."
"That's something else we ought to talk about. What's the point of my getting the salesperson's license14 if we go right down to Florida for six months? I can never build up any local presence."
"Local presence, you've got lots of it. You're Fred Springer's daughter and Harry Angstrom's wife. And now you're a famous coke addict's mother."
"I mean professionally. It's a phrase Mr. Lister uses. It means the people know you're always there, not off in Florida like some person who doesn't take her job seriously."
"So," he says. "Florida was good enough to stash15 me in when I was manager at Springer Motors, to get me out of Nelson's way, but now you think you're a working girl we can just forget it, Florida."
"Well," Janice allows, "I was thinking, one possibility, to help with the company's debts, might be to sell the condo."
"Sell it? Over my dead body," he says, not so much meaning it as enjoying the sound of his voice, indignant like one of those perpetually outraged16 fathers on a TV sitcom17, or like silver?haired Steve Martin in the movie Parenthood, which they saw the other night because one of Janice's real?estate buddies18 thought it was so funny. "My blood's got too thin to go through a Northern winter."
In response Janice looks as if she is about to cry, her darkbrown eyes warm and glassy?looking just like little Roy's before he lets loose with one of his howls. "Harry, don't confuse me," she begs. "I can't even take the license exam until October, I can't believe you'd immediately make me go down to Florida where the license is no good just so you can play golf with some people older and worse than you. Who beat you anyway, and take twenty dollars every time."
"Well what am 1 supposed to do around here while you run around showing off? The lot's finished, kaput, or whatever the Japanese word is, finito, and even if it's not, if the kid's half?way straightened out you'll want him back there and he can't stand me around, we crowd each other, we get on each other's nerves."
"Maybe you won't now. Maybe Nelson will just have to put up with you and you with him."
Harry humbly19 tells her, "I'd be willing." Father and son, together against the world, rebuilding the lot up from scratch: the vision excites him, for the moment. Shooting the bull with Benny and Elvira while Nelson skitters around out there in the lake of rooftops, selling used cars like hotcakes. Springer Motors back to what it used to be before Fred got the Toyota franchise. So they owe a few hundred thousand ? the government owes trillions and nobody cares.
She sees hope in his face and touches his cheek a third time. At night now, Harry, having to arise at least once and sometimes, if there's been more than one beer with television, twice, has learned to touch his way across the bedroom in the pitch dark, touching20 the glass top of the bedside table and then with an outreached arm after a few blind steps the slick varnished22 edge of the high bureau and from there to the knob of the bathroom door. Each touch, it occurs to him every night, leaves a little deposit of sweat and oil from the skin of his fingertips; eventually it will darken the varnished bureau edge as the hems23 of his golf?pants pockets have been rendered grimy by his reaching in and out for tees and ball markers, round after round, over the years; and that accumulated deposit of his groping touch, he sometimes thinks when the safety of the bathroom and its luminescent light switch has been attained24, will still be there, a shadow on the varnish21, a microscopic25 cloud of his body oils, when he is gone.
"Don't push me, honey," Janice says, in a rare tone of direct appeal that makes his hard old heart accelerate with revived husbandly feeling. "This horrible thing with Nelson really has been a stress, though I may not always show it. I'm his mother, I'm humiliated26, I don't know what's going to happen, exactly. Everything's in flux27."
His chest feels full; his left ribs28 cage a twinge. His vision of working side by side with Nelson has fled, a pipe dream. He tries to make Janice, so frighteningly, unusually somber29 and frontal, smile with a tired joke. "I'm too old for flux," he tells her.
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harry
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| vt.掠夺，蹂躏，使苦恼 | |
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franchise
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| n.特许，特权，专营权，特许权 | |
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den
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| n.兽穴；秘密地方；安静的小房间，私室 | |
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moths
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| n.蛾( moth的名词复数 ) | |
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tint
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| n.淡色，浅色；染发剂；vt.着以淡淡的颜色 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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withdrawn
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| vt.收回；使退出；vi.撤退，退出 | |
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remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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infancy
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| n.婴儿期；幼年期；初期 | |
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addiction
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| n.上瘾入迷，嗜好 | |
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addicts
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| 有…瘾的人( addict的名词复数 )； 入迷的人 | |
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ticklish
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| adj.怕痒的；问题棘手的；adv.怕痒地；n.怕痒，小心处理 | |
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license
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| n.执照，许可证，特许；v.许可，特许 | |
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stash
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| v.藏或贮存于一秘密处所；n.隐藏处 | |
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outraged
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| a.震惊的，义愤填膺的 | |
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sitcom
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| n.情景喜剧，（广播、电视的）系列幽默剧 | |
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buddies
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| n.密友( buddy的名词复数 )；同伴；弟兄；（用于称呼男子，常带怒气）家伙v.（如密友、战友、伙伴、弟兄般）交往( buddy的第三人称单数 )；做朋友；亲近（…）；伴护艾滋病人 | |
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humbly
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| adv. 恭顺地，谦卑地 | |
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touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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varnish
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| n.清漆；v.上清漆；粉饰 | |
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varnished
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| 浸渍过的，涂漆的 | |
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hems
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| 布的褶边，贴边( hem的名词复数 )； 短促的咳嗽 | |
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attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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microscopic
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| adj.微小的，细微的，极小的，显微的 | |
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humiliated
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| 感到羞愧的 | |
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flux
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| n.流动；不断的改变 | |
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ribs
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| n.肋骨( rib的名词复数 )；（船或屋顶等的）肋拱；肋骨状的东西；（织物的）凸条花纹 | |
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somber
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| adj.昏暗的，阴天的，阴森的，忧郁的 | |
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