What the hell had happened? She felt again the shiver beneath her hand as Kit drew back, on the day he left, like a horse who'd been spooked.
Annie's emotional schedule took on an almost heartening regularity: days of work, nights of worry, mornings of icy aquatic contemplation leading nowhere. On one of these faded, dun-colored mornings, Annie was slapping through the icy water of Long Island Sound, engaged in her morning swim. The clarity of the cold, the obscurity of the dark water, the sincerity of true solitude: these were things she cherished. As she lost herself in the rhythm of her exertion, as she exhaled into the freezing water, then turned her face to the sky and gulped in the dawn air, she worried about money and her mother's manic widowhood and Miranda's sullen silence; then, what she always somehow came around to thinking about was Frederick. She recalled his appreciative laugh at some remark she had made, the remark itself lost, the laugh clear and ringing in her memory. His eyes, dark and mischievous, looked into her eyes, and they were full of feeling. Or were they? Had she misread his eyes, his feelings? Had she gotten it so wrong? No. No, in spite of the fact that he had not called, in spite of his cool treatment of her on Rosh Hashanah, in spite of this, in spite of that, Annie was somehow sure she had been right about him. Of course, it made no difference. Right or wrong, the facts remained the same: he hadn't called, he had treated her with mere civility the last time they met, he was as far from her as if he had never had any feelings at all.
Miranda had stopped teasing her about Frederick, which was both a relief and a morbid confirmation of her own conviction that the affair was indeed over. But Miranda was so uncommunicative about everything lately. Her new reticence was just as showy as everything Miranda did, Annie thought irritably.
Inside the cottage, Miranda sat in the kitchen, her arms resting on the table. She held a large orange in her hands. She stared at it.
"Honey," Betty said, shuffling in and standing behind her. She watched her daughter listlessly roll the orange back and forth from one hand to the other. "Honey, maybe you need a hobby."
Miranda laughed. "A nobby?" It was part of a joke Josie used to like, about retirement.
An old man who's just retired to Florida asks another old guy, "How do you stand it? After two days already I'm bored."
"Simple," says the guy in a heavy Yiddish accent. "I have a nobby."
"A nobby?" says the first old man. "What's a nobby?"
"A nobby, a nobby--like collecting stemps."
"You collect stamps?" the first one asks.
"Stemps? No. I keep bees. In mine condo."
He takes the newcomer up the elevator, into his condo, takes a shoe box from the closet, and lifts the lid. "There!"
"But they're all dead! This is just a box full of dead bees! What kind of a beekeeper are you?"
"Hey," says the guy. "It's just a nobby."
"Want me to keep bees, Mother?"
"If it would make you happy," Betty said. She paused. "Would it?"
"I'm okay," Miranda said, and turned back to the orange, making it clear the interview was over. The citrus scent drifted up. She waited for the thud of the newspaper on the muddy drive, then went out to lift the gritty blue plastic bag and carry it inside. By the time Annie returned in her lumpy wet suit and showered and dressed for work, Miranda had riffled through all the sections.
"I wish you wouldn't always crumple it up like that," Annie said, picking up sheets of the Times and smoothing them out.
"Just get another paper at the station if you don't like it."
"Typical."
"Of what?"
"Now, girls," Betty said abstractedly. But her heart wasn't in it, and Annie and Miranda, sensing it wasn't, scowled at each other like spoiled children until it was time for Miranda to drive Annie to the station. They left their mother staring blankly out the window, holding a coffee mug against her cheek, where her sinuses hurt.
"I'm sorry," Annie forced herself to say when they got in the car. "It's just a newspaper. I'm too old to act like this." She did not add that Miranda was also too old. "I've lived alone too long."
"You?" Miranda said. "What about me? Talk about living alone too long . . ."