The Evening Star Read Free Page B

all getting old, and I guess old people have a right to get their kicks some way,” she said nervously.
    They had just pulled into the driveway of Aurora’s home. Rosie covered her nervousness by beginning the lengthy business of aligning the Cadillac with the narrow doors of the garage. The car was nearly as wide as the opening—there was only a little more than an inch to spare on either side: another reason Rosie’s automotive fantasies were so focused on a Datsun pickup. Aurora, who otherwise could scarcely drive, always whipped the Cadillac right into the garage, whereas Rosie, who stubbornly refused to have her cataracts attended to, could scarcely see the width of the front seat and was always in terror of crumpling one of the fenders or scraping one of the doors, in which event she expected to be dismissed instantly despite more than forty years of faithful service.
    “Stop!” Aurora commanded, looking at her maid sharply.
    Rosie was just on the lip of the driveway; she liked to align the Cadillac as a golfer might a long putt, before committing herself to an approach that wouldn’t work.
    “I’m getting it centered, I ain’t gonna scrape nothing,” Rosie assured Aurora, edging ever so slightly to the left in her approach to the garage.
    “You stop!” Aurora said. “I want to talk to you and I want to do it right now. You can destroy my car a little later.”
    Rosie stopped and sat looking at Aurora’s nice Spanish Colonial house. She had helped maintain it for so long that she considered that it was, in a sense, hers, too. At the moment she longed to be inside it—from the look in Aurora’s eye it seemed likely that her remarks about the aged and their kicks had not been well received.

    “I ought to know when to keep my mouth shut, I guess,” she said, hoping to blunt the force of whatever attack might be coming.
    “Oh, stop cringing,” Aurora said. “You ought to consider changing your hairdo. At the moment it’s far too frizzy.”
    “I wish I was bald and had a wig,” Rosie said. “I’ve tried my hair every way there is to try hair, and look at it! Lots of wigs are nicer than my hair, but I don’t know . . . I guess I just ain’t the wig type. Every time I try one on I get the giggles.”
    “I agree you probably aren’t the wig type, but there are always new hairdos one can try,” Aurora said. “I’ve tried quite a variety myself. Now, what was that you were asking about my sex life?”
    Rosie sighed deeply but said nothing. She didn’t want to admit that she had asked Aurora about her sex life.
    “They say curiosity killed the cat,” she finally ventured.
    “Good lord, Rosie,” Aurora said. “We’ve known one another for more than forty years. I’m not going to maul you just because you asked me about my sex life. The truth is, I thought you never would ask me about it.”
    “I’m asking, what about it?” Rosie said.
    “It’s a short story—Hector can’t do it,” Aurora said.
    “Oh,” Rosie said.
    They sat in silence for a minute as the shadows of the great trees began to extend themselves across the house and the yard.
    “I knew that stuff you read in magazines was probably lies,” Rosie said.
    Aurora looked at her calmly. “What stuff?” she asked.
    “That stuff about men being able to do it until they’re ninety-five or a hundred,” Rosie said.
    “Yes, we’ve been reading the same magazines,” Aurora said. “In other words, the ones I subscribe to. Those stories do give a rather misleading impression of male capacities, at least as I’ve experienced them.”
    “You think you’ve got problems? C.C.’s just sixty-eight and he won’t even try,” Rosie said. “Trying to get him to dosomething is like trying to corner a bobcat. Sometimes I feel like giving up.”
    “I’ve considered it myself,” Aurora admitted.
    “Yeah, but you got beaus,” Rosie reminded her. “You got Pascal, and then there’s Louis and Junior and Cowboy Bill.”
    It was