Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories by Janette Turner Hospital Read Free Book Online Page A

assistant professor with a wife and small children. The wife would undoubtedly be doing a master’s degree in something or other and would be an aggressive conversationalist and an insistent inviter-in of neighbours. They would be the kind of people who believed in the triumphant public articulation of certain anatomical words. Penis, vagina, penis, vagina, their playful toddlers would chant to approving parental smiles. Mrs Phillips had known the type in the big cities. She had hoped to escape them. She herself failed to see any intrinsic merit in calling a garden tool a spade.
    But it might be much worse than that. The house might become a rabbit warren for students, with a landlord cramming bodies into every loophole in the zoning by-laws.
    Mrs Phillips had to sit down.
    In the past year the houses on either side of Mrs Watts, who lived opposite, had been converted. It was as though a rowdy motor cycle had ripped through the still life of the neighbourhood, spattering it with mud.
    Mrs Phillips’ son said that property conversions in the area were a clear trend. It meant, he said, that his mother would get a good return on the house (“You sly old lady,” he said), but there would be an optimal time to sell before the neighbourhood slid into irreversible decline. It meant, he said, that she should reconsider the condominiums by the lake.
    It meant, Mrs Phillips did not attempt to explain, that homes with history and lineage were being turned into three-storey filing cabinets for young bodies, that spacious rooms were being mutilated with partitions, and high ceilings defiled with fibre- board tiles bulk-ordered from the Sears catalogue.
    It meant that enough was enough.
    â€œWhat exactly do you have against the condominiums?” her son had asked.
    â€œThere are no mouldings around the door-frames.”
    â€œThat is a frivolous reason,” her son said, to which she had no answer.
    â€œIf it’s peace and privacy you want, you’ll have less and less of it here,” he pointed out.
    It was true. All summer the weekend tranquillity had been desecrated by student parties, the streets untidy with Frisbees and footballs and young men and women wearing suntans and fragments of clothing.
    Everyone’s front lawn and bushes had suffered. Mrs Watts had done a lot of shouting and waving her cane; Mr and Mrs Cotter had sat in canvas chairs on their front porch, watching and sighing; but Mrs Phillips, who was a little distressed by all that dazzling flesh, had responded by leaving the storm windows on even through the hottest weeks to blunt the noise. She had retreated to her living-room and her harpsichord. Once a football, horribly poised for several seconds, had stared at her through the double glass as though astounded by the tonal arrangements of Telemann. Mrs Phillips had played diligently on through the discordant fracturing of her forsythia.
    The sold sign appeared to her now as a score-board prophesying a siege of football games. She turned away from it and went to her writing desk. On her own embossed stationery she penned warmly worded little notes of invitation and delivered them herself to the Hamiltons, who were leaving; to the Cotters on her northern side; and to Mrs Watts who had said often enough that the only way she would leave the house opposite was in a box.
    â€œWe should have done this years ago,” said Ada Watts, easing herself down between her canes. The sofa received her body, following the last few unexpectedly rapid inches of descent, with a soft slurp of surprise. “It takes a crisis. That’s what my Harold used to say.”
    â€œYour Winston,” corrected Mrs Cotter.
    â€œMy what?” Ada Watts cupped her ear toward the speaker.
    â€œYour Winston,” Mrs Cotter repeated, cranking her voice up a few notches. “Harold was your brother.”
    â€œBoth of them,” said Ada Watts with dignity. After fifteen years of widowhood, the