Free Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates Page B

awhile.”
    Myra laid her coat over the back of the bedside chair and satdown. “Hello there, Mr. Chance,” she said to a very long Negro in the next bed who was nodding and grinning at her.
    “How’re you, Mrs. Wilson?”
    “Fine, thanks, and you?”
    “Oh, no use complaining,” Mr. Chance said.
    She peered across Harry’s bed at Red O’Meara, who lay listening to his radio on the other side. “Hi there, Red.”
    “Oh, hi, Mrs. Wilson. Didn’t see you come in.”
    “Your wife coming in tonight, Red?”
    “She comes Saturdays now. She was here last night.”
    “Oh,” Myra said, “well, tell her I said hello.”
    “I sure will, Mrs. Wilson.”
    Then she smiled at the elderly man across the cubicle whose name she could never remember, who never had any visitors, and he smiled back, looking rather shy. She settled herself on the little steel chair, opening her handbag for cigarettes. “What’s that thing on your lap, Harry?” It was a ring of blond wood a foot wide, with a great deal of blue knitting wool attached to little pegs around its edge.
    “Oh, this?” Harry said, holding it up. “It’s what they call rake-knitting. Something I got from occupational therapy.”
    “ What -knitting?”
    “Rake-knitting. See, what you do, you take this little hook and kind of pry the wool up and over each peg, like that, and you keep on doing that around and around the ring until you got yourself a muffler or a stocking cap—something like that.”
    “Oh, I see,” Myra said. “It’s like what we used to do when I was a kid, only we did it with a regular little spool, with nails stuck in it? You wind string around the nails and pull it through the spool and it makes sort of a knitted rope, like.”
    “Oh, yeah?” Harry said. “With a spool, huh? Yeah, I thinkmy sister used to do that too, now that I think of it. With a spool. You’re right, this is the same principle, only bigger.”
    “What’re you going to make?”
    “Oh, I don’t know, I’m just fooling around with it. Thought I might make a stocking cap or something. I don’t know.” He inspected his work, turning the knitting-rake around in his hands, then leaned over and put it away in his bed stand. “It’s just something to do.”
    She offered him the pack and he took a cigarette. When he bent forward to take the match the yellow pajamas gaped open and she saw his chest, unbelievably thin, partly caved-in on one side where the ribs were gone. She could just see the end of the ugly, newly healed scar from the last operation.
    “Thanks, honey,” he said, the cigarette wagging in his lips, and he leaned back against the pillows, stretching out his socked feet on the spread.
    “How’re you feeling, Harry?” she said.
    “Feeling fine.”
    “You’re looking better,” she lied. “If you can gain a little weight now, you’ll look fine.”
    “Pay up,” said a voice over the din of the radios, and Myra looked around to see a little man coming down the center aisle in a wheelchair, walking the chair slowly with his feet, as all TB patients did to avoid the chest strain of turning the wheels with their hands. He was headed for Harry’s bed, grinning with yellow teeth. “Pay up,” he said again as the wheelchair came to a stop beside the bed. A piece of rubber tubing protruded from some kind of bandage on his chest. It coiled across his pajama top, held in place by a safety pin, and ended in a small rubber-capped bottle which rode heavily in his breast pocket. “Come on, come on,” he said. “Pay up.”
    “Oh, yeah!” Harry said, laughing. “I forgot all about it,Walter.” From the drawer of his bed stand he got out a dollar bill and handed it to the man, who folded it with thin fingers and put it in his pocket, along with the bottle.
    “Okay, Harry,” he said. “All squared away now, right?”
    “Right, Walter.”
    He backed the wheelchair up and turned it around, and Myra saw that his chest, back and shoulders were crumpled