Dottie had to allow a minute for this to sink in. “And what did she say?” Dottie asked.
Shelly cocked her head. “I don’t really remember. She had the gift of not saying much, just listening, and you thought it was all going to be okay.”
Dottie thought that Shelly had put Annie in quite a tight spot that day, saying no one would ever again tell her she was pretty. Shelly Small did not have the remnants of pretty on her. Perhaps she had once had the remnants of pretty, but Dottie could not see it.
“And I told her other things,” Shelly said. “I told her how worried I was about my children’s marriages. My younger daughter, well, she’d become quite…overweight, and I really didn’t understand it. And just the weekend before they had been at the lake and I’d watched while her husband encouraged her to eat more. I told Annie all about it. I said, Why would he do that? And Annie said she didn’t know. And I told her how my other daughter was just desperate for a different job— Well, I told her private things.”
“Yes, I see,” said Dottie.
“But here’s the thing—” Shelly pressed her legs together and leaned forward, her hands held together in her thin lap. “After Annie and David broke up, I called Annie and said she could come to the lake herself, we’d be happy to have her anytime, I left a message, and she never called back. Never called me back. And so when David arrived in one of his weeping states—just weeping away, like he did after Isa left him—I told him this, that Annie had never called me back, and he said, ‘Of course she didn’t call you back, Shelly. Annie thought you were pathetic! She thought you were an idiot!’？”
She didn’t think that, Shelly had answered, and even Richard told David to go easy. “She did,” said David. So Shelly, of course shaken, said, Oh, David, the whole thing was a little unrealistic anyway, you know. Just with the age difference alone. And David said, staring out at the water, “The age difference. Here’s what I have learned about the age difference. People think girls like older men because they want a father. Classic theory. But girls want older men so they can boss them around. They’re wearing the pants, I can tell you that. She was nothing but a whore.”
This made Shelly very uncomfortable, and she told the men she was going to start dinner, and then she hesitated and said, David, I put your stuff downstairs in the guest suite, but maybe you don’t want to stay there because, you know—that’s where—
“That’s where nothing,” David said. “That’s where Annie recoiled from me and said she hated this huge new house. She said, ‘This house is Shelly’s penis.’ That’s what she said.”
Here Shelly stopped telling the story. Unmistakably, tears popped into her eyes.
Dottie wanted to laugh out loud. Oh, she really did. Dottie thought it was one of the funniest things she’d heard in a very long time. And then she glanced up at Shelly and saw that in spite of what Dottie always thought was a placid front that she—Dottie—presented to the world, Shelly Small had felt Dottie’s desire to laugh, and she was furious. Well, she would be furious, Dottie understood. After all, the point of the woman’s story was that Annie had humiliated her. Humiliation is not to be laughed at; Dottie knew that well.
Still.
Dottie arranged the crocheted doily that covered the armrest of the chair she sat in. She was aware within herself of some contest of feeling. She felt for Shelly. And yet Dottie could tell by the light that had passed through the room that Shelly must have been talking for almost two hours. About herself. Oh, about Annie and David and her daughters, but really she was talking about herself. Had Dottie talked about herself for so long, she’d have felt that she had wet herself. This was a matter of different cultures, Dottie knew that, although she felt it had taken her many years to learn this. She thought that this matter of different cultures was a fact that got lost in the country these days. And culture included class, which of course nobody ever talked about in this country, because it wasn’t polite, but Dottie also thought people didn’t talk about class because they didn’t really understand what it was. For example, had people known that Dottie and her brother had eaten from dumpsters when they were children, what would they make of it? Her brother for years now had lived in a huge expensive house outside of Chicago and ran an air-conditioning company, and Dottie was trim and neat, and really quite caught up on world events, and ran this B&B very effectively, so what would people say? That she and her brother, Abel, were the American Dream, and that the rest who still ate from dumpsters deserved to do so? A lot of people would secretly feel this way. Shelly Small with her big husband and thinning hair might very well feel this way.