Read Online Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen - Free Book Online Page B

hours when the sun, like a tide, sucks them out of the low rooming houses, casts them onto the benches and sandy rim of the walkand sweeps them into decaying enclosures once again.
A few newer apartments glint among the low bleached squares. It is in one of these Lennie's Jeannie has arranged their rooms. ''Only a few miles north and south people pay hundreds of dollars a month for just this gorgeous air, Grandaddy, just this ocean closeness."
She had been ill on the plane, lay ill for days in the unfamiliar room. Several times the doctor came byleft medicine she would not take. Several times Jeannie drove in the twenty miles from work, still in her Visiting Nurse uniform, the lightness and brightness of her like a healing.
"Who can believe it is winter?" he asked one morning. "Beautiful it is outside like an ad. Come, Mrs. Invalid, come to taste it. You are well enough to sit in here, you are well enough to sit outside. The doctor said it too."

 

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But the benches were encrusted with people, and the sands at the sidewalk's edge. Besides, she had seen the far ruffle of the sea: ''there take me," and though she leaned against him, it was she who led.
Plodding and plodding, sitting often to rest, he grumbling. Patting the sand so warm. Once she scooped up a handful, cradling it close to her better eye; peered, and flung it back. And as they came almost to the brink and she could see the glistening wet, she sat down, pulled off her shoes and stockings, left him and began to run. "You'll catch cold," he screamed, but the sand in his shoes weighed him downhe who had always been the agile oneand already the white spray creamed her feet.
He pulled her back, took a handkerchief to wipe off the wet and the sand. "Oh no," she said, "the sun will dry," seized the square and smoothed it flat, dropped on it a mound of sand, knotted the kerchief corners and tied it to a bag-"to look at with the strong glass" (for the first time in years explaining an action of hers)and lay down with the little bag against her cheek, looking toward the shore that nurtured life as it first crawled toward consciousness the millions of years ago.
He took her one Sunday in the evil-smelling bus, past flat miles of blister houses, to the home of relatives. Oh what is this? she cried as the light began to smoke and the houses to dim and recede. Smog, he said, everyone knows but you. . . . Outside he kept his arms about her, but she walked with hands pushing the heavy air as if to open it, whispered: who has done this? sat down suddenly to vomit at the curb and for a long while refused to rise.

 

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One's age as seen on the altered face of those known in youth. Is this they he has come to visit? This Max and Rose, smooth and pleasant, introducing them to polite children, disinterested grandchildren, ''the whole family, once a month on Sundays. And why not? We have the room, the help, the food."
Talk of cars, of houses, of success: this son that, that daughter this. And your children? Hastily skimped over, the intermarriages, the obscure work"my doctor son-in-law, Phil"all he has to offer. She silent in a corner. (Car-sick like a baby, he explains.) Years since he has taken her to visit anyone but the children, and old apprehensions prickle: "no incidents," he silently begs, "no incidents." He itched to tell them. "A very sick woman," significantly, indicating her with his eyes, "a very sick woman." Their restricted faces did not react. "Have you thought maybe she'd do better at Palm Springs?" Rose asked. "Or at least a nicer section of the beach, nicer people, a pool." Not to have to say "money" he said instead: "would she have sand to look at through a magnifying glass?" and went on, detail after detail, the old habit betraying of parading the queerness of her for laughter.
After dinnerthe others into the living room in men- or women-clusters, or into the den to watch TV the four of them alone. She sat close to him, and did not speak. Jokes,