Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,110
but only when it was inconvenient (the physical therapist, whose name was Lola, was often working with Dennis when they rang, and I wasn’t always home) did they adopt the habit. “Frances, the house looks lovely,” said Gloria as she stepped down the ramp that led from the hallway to the living room—when we’d installed them, Dennis had compared the house to an Escher drawing, saying that all the ramps went in both directions, which of course wasn’t true but seemed true: it was as if our two-story home, with all its steps down and up, had been suddenly transformed into one tilting story. We hardly used the upstairs anymore. Gloria had brought a casserole, which Marse shuttled to the kitchen. When I’d met her, Gloria had made large, colorful salads and tender pot roasts and pans full of stuffed shells. But since they’d moved to the condo, she had abandoned all culinary efforts, which I thought was her right. Still, she appeared to think it was inexcusable to arrive anywhere empty-handed, which made for creative offerings—this casserole, I guessed, had probably been in the freezer for months, since Grady’s gallbladder surgery.
Gloria was wearing a pink bouclé suit and an ALS pin like Marse’s, acquired on the same day at the same place. I thought maybe I saw my lack of a pin register in her eyes, but she was too smooth to be caught in judgment. He was my husband, after all—what did I need a pin for?
Grady passed us to greet Dennis. He bent at the waist and embraced Dennis’s shoulders, and Dennis’s right arm came up, the fingers crooked into a half-grip, and lay across his father’s back. “My boy,” said Grady, and then Dennis said something I didn’t catch, and Grady laughed. They started to collect the CD cases and put them back on their low shelf.
“What can I do?” said Gloria.
“Margo and Stuart went for cream cheese, for the cake,” I said.
“You baked your own cake?”
“I did,” I said. I hadn’t realized that I wanted one until that afternoon, so I’d run out for the ingredients before showering, but I’d forgotten the cream cheese. “It’s carrot cake. It collapsed a little, but I don’t care.”
“Did you get candles?” said Grady.
“Fifty candles?” I said. “No, I didn’t.”
“We’ve got to have candles,” he said, then left for the kitchen, touching Dennis’s back as he went.
Marse told me to take Dennis outside. “It’s your party,” she said. “Have a drink.”
But Dennis wanted to change his shirt, so I wheeled him up the ramp into the hallway, then down the hall into the guest room, where we had both taken to sleeping at night, he in a low cot and me in a single bed. (Yes, I missed having my husband in bed with me, and every night I curled up against him for an hour or so before moving to my own bed, because I knew neither of us would be comfortable all night in the tiny cot. And he needed his rest, now more than ever.) I held up three shirts for him; he pointed to the one on my far left. I knelt to help him pull his T-shirt over his head, and though I kept my hand at the cuff, it was really he who did the lifting and pulling. When it was off, he dropped it on the floor, and I kicked it toward the hamper. I handed him the fresh shirt—a white linen button-down—and knelt to help him free his hands from the sleeves and button the buttons. “You,” he said. The sound he made was much like the speech of a deaf person, but also had a tone to it that was exactly the same as it always had been. It was this similarity I clung to. “You,” he said again, softly. I sat at his feet, my hands in his lap. I could smell the soapy smell of his skin—he was still bathing himself, albeit with some help into and out of the tub, though before long he would need someone there the whole time, and surprisingly, more often than not that person would be Stuart. “You are fifty,” he said.
I smiled and brought his hand to my lips. “Isn’t it ridiculous?” I said. “It’s not what I thought it would be.”
He made a jerking gesture with his head. “Under the bed,” he said, and I crawled awkwardly in my skirt until I could reach under his cot, where there was