The Standard

They looked to me worthy enough or at least quite standard—Mrs. Ryan and her lathy twin, adult daughters—who asked if they could join me.

The threesome is frequently at The Sweetgrass when I am.

I don’t know them—but I was, in fact, sitting solo at a table for four.

And it was an eye-catching article near Mrs. Ryan’s neck that exerted its charm at first—an impressive brass brooch—floral—whose tendrils curled at the tips.

A daughter held her mother’s hand and tapped at her mother’s big glassy ring. Then the mother took the end of her daughter’s nose between her fingers and lightly pinched it.

“Iris, please!” she asked that daughter, “do me a favor.”

And my name is also Iris. No, really.

I thought for a moment that I should rise too, while the daughter did as she was bidden, and then she dropped it on the table—the full goblet of water her mother had asked for—and she made a spill that wetted several of us when the goblet bucked and rolled.

“I do not understand!” her mother said, and to the other daughter, she said, “Please!”

“She’s very cranky,” the daughters told me.

The girl called Iris went after her—because her mother was leaving, using a walker that caused the early stage of her departure to be wobbly.

“Don’t touch me!” the mother screamed. “Don’t ever speak to me!”

As her daughters left the premises, the old lady was unbudgeable in that cradle—her walker that braced her for a minute more.

Then she drooped and her collapse looked effortless, but she wasn’t dead and I didn’t stay to wait for any crew who must have taken her away.

 

I had a good talk recently with my own daughter, who is still very daughterlike, it’s true. Although, she’s aged now and cinereal.

She has been undergoing her life—and it’s not gone too badly—blow by blow.

I climbed the front steps to my town house by pulling myself up them, by the wrought iron railing.

My daughter was there and she waved to me and she had about her an uncharacteristic—unofficial-sort-of-person aspect.

So then I wasn’t immediately cast down, by what I most prefer her to be—and that’s my lamblike lady’s maid.