And so he left. They always did leave.
She kept his registration form the way a child would keep a ticket stub as a souvenir of a special day. Honest as a brook in spring, the entire thing had been. She never looked him up on the Internet, nor was she ever tempted. Charlie Macauley was his name. Charlie Macauley of the unspeakable pain.
The next morning at breakfast Shelly did not acknowledge Dottie. Not even a thank you for the whole wheat toast. Dottie was very surprised; her eyes watered with the sudden sting of this. But then she understood. There was an old African proverb Dottie had read one day that said, “After a man eats, he becomes shy.” And Dottie thought of that now with Shelly. Shelly was like the man in the proverb; having satisfied her needs, she was ashamed. She had confided more than she had wanted to, and now Dottie was somehow to blame. As Dottie thought about this, going back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, she saw Shelly Small as a woman who suffered only from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be. Shelly had taken life’s disappointments and turned them into a house. A house that, with the clever use of the right architects, had managed to stay within the legal code yet became a monstrosity as large as Shelly’s needs. Tears had not popped into her eyes over her daughter’s obesity. No, they came to her when she reported the assault upon her vanity. She had won against her husband the War of the House, but it had not been enough. What Dottie had not said to her, because it was not her place, was that Shelly had a husband who would break into song at the breakfast table with her in a room with strangers sitting nearby, and that was no—excuse me, Dottie thought—small thing.
To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened. And Dottie thought that Shelly’s problems, her humiliations, were not large when you considered what was happening in the world. When you considered the people dying of starvation, getting blown up for no reason, being gassed by their own government, you choose it—this was not the story of Shelly Small. And yet Dottie had felt for her small—yes, Small—moments of human sadness. And now Shelly could not return the decency of even looking her in the eye. This kind of thing Dottie did not care for, she would like to know who would!
When Shelly did glance over her shoulder to inquire whether there was more jam to be had, Dottie said there was, of course. In the kitchen—and while it was a terribly conventional form of revenge—she spit in the jam and mixed it up and spit again, as much as she could gather in her mouth, and took some pleasure in seeing the jam bowl empty by the time the Smalls left. People had been spitting in the food of those they served most likely since the beginning of time. Dottie knew from experience that the ease this provided was very short-lived, but then most ease was short-lived, and that is how life was.
Shelly was out for the entire day, and the couple did not return to their room until very late. That night Dottie heard—and she was surprised—so much suppressed giggling coming from the Bunny Rabbit Room that she got out of bed and walked in her slippers down the hall. And what she heard was Shelly Small making fun of Dottie in terms Dottie found outrageous. These terms had to do with Dottie’s body parts ostensibly not having been made use of in quite some time, and Dr. Small, not surprisingly, was quite graphic during his part of the discussion and they had a very merry time doing this, as though Dottie was a clown on stage tripping over shoes too large; their humor was like that. And then began, as Dottie realized would happen, the sounds of people, as her decent Aunt Edna had put it, who love each other. Only Dottie did not hear the sounds of love—she heard sounds from the man that made her think how some women thought of men as pigs. Dottie had never thought of men as pigs, but this man did a good imitation; it was revolting—and intriguing—in the most ghastly way. Listening in the hallway, she did not hear the sounds of a woman enjoying the love of her husband. Instead she heard the sounds of a woman who would do anything to make herself feel superior to an old lady who was, as Shelly had put it only minutes earlier, so puritanical as to object to almost anything. In other words, the unhappiness of Shelly Small was something she could ease by being a sexual woman, unlike Dottie. But she was not a sexual woman, Dottie could tell. Shelly got into the shower promptly after, and to Dottie this was always the sign of a woman who had not enjoyed her man.
—
In the morning only Dr. Small was at the breakfast table. “And will your wife be joining you?” Dottie asked.