Nobody's Fool

bottles

Of Lydia Pinkham’s

And they piped her to the sea
.
    Miss Beryl wondered if Sully would be amused. That probably depended on whether he knew what Lydia Pinkham’s was. One of the problems of being eighty was that you built up a pretty impressive store of allusions. Other people didn’t follow them, and they made it clear that this was
your
fault. Somewhere along the line, about the time America was being colonized, Miss Beryl suspected, the knowledge of old people had gotten discounted until now it was worth what the little boy shot at. Had Miss Beryl been a younger woman, it might have made an interesting project to trace the evolution of conventional wisdom on this point. Somehow old people, once the revered repositories of the culture’s history and values, had become dusty museums of arcane and worthless information. No matter. She’d share the jingle with Sully anyway. He could stand a little poetry in his life.
    Upstairs, the alarm clock continued to buzz. According to Sully, the only deep sleep he got any more was during the hour or so before his alarm went off. He’d recently purchased a new alarm clock because he kept sleeping through the old one. Also the new one. The first time Mrs. Beryl had heard that strange, faraway buzzing, she’d mistakenly concluded that the end was near. She’d read somewhere that the human brain was little more than a maze of electrical impulses, firing dutifully inside the skull, and the buzzing, she concluded, must be some sort of malfunction. The fact that the buzzing occurred at the same time every morning did not immediately tip her off, as it should have, that it was external to herself. She’d assumed that the time Clive Jr. was always alluding to had indeed come. It was the abrupt cessation of the buzzing, always followed immediately by the thud of Sully’s heavy feet hitting the bedroom floor, that finally allowed Miss Beryl to solve the mystery, for which she was grateful, because, having solved it, she could stop worrying and shaking her head in search of the electrical short and giving herself headaches.
    Perhaps because of her original misdiagnosis, the distant buzzing of Sully’s alarm was still mildly disconcerting, so she did this morning what she did most mornings. She went first to the kitchen for the broom, then to her bedroom, where she gave the ceiling a good sharp thump or two with the broom handle, stopping when she heard her tenant grunt awake, snorting loudly and confused. She doubted Sully was aware of what really woke him so many mornings, that it was not the new alarm.
    Perhaps, Miss Beryl conceded, her son was right about giving Sully the boot. He
was
a careless man, there was no denying it. He was careless with cigarettes, careless, without ever meaning to be, about people and circumstances. And therefore dangerous. Maybe, it occurred to Miss Beryl as she returned to her front window and stared up into the network of black limbs, Sully was the metaphorical branch that would fall on her from above. Part of getting old, she knew, was becoming unsure. For longer than any of her widowed neighbors, Miss Beryl had staved off the ravages of uncertainty by remaining intellectually challenged and alert. So far she’d been able to keep faith in her own judgment, in part by rigorously questioning the judgment of others. Having Clive Jr. around helped in this regard, and Miss Beryl had always told herself that when her son’s advice started making sense to her, then she’d know she was slipping. Perhaps her fearing Clive Jr.’s wisdom on the subject of Sully was the beginning.
    But she’d not concede quite yet, she decided. In several important respects Sully was an important ally, just as he had been a month ago when she’d taken a tumble and sprained her wrist painfully. Fearing it might bebroken, she’d had Sully drive her to the hospital in Schuyler Springs, where the wrist had been X-rayed and taped. The whole episode had taken no more than two hours, and she’d been sent home with a prescription for Tylenol 3 painkillers. She’d taken only two of the pills because they made her drowsy and she didn’t mind the pain once she knew what it was. As soon as she’d learned the wrist wasn’t fractured, she felt better, and the next day she made a gift of the remaining Tylenols to Sully, who since his injury was always in the market for pain pills.
    Sully could be