The Tides by Melanie Tem Page B

daughter.
     
    The bowl was slowly rotating now; she let the rim slide through her fingers, imagining Adele's earlobe. Jesus. When she straightened up, she saw powdery pancake mix on the floor in the outline of her shoe. She swore. Well, one of the girls could clean it up when they got in at six-thirty. That was another perk of being Director, come to think of it: you could tell somebody else to sweep the floor. They better be on time, too.
     
    Adele had held her face in her hands to kiss her goodbye from the bed, which was now their bed. Adele had whispered, 'I'll be here when you get back, hon,' and Ros, thrilled, was also repulsed. How could she go home to a woman in her bed? How could she stay away, even for an eight-hour shift?
     
    When the pancake batter had been beaten enough that it goddamn ought to be smooth, whether it actually was or not, Roslyn turned off the mixer. The radio was playing a schmaltzy version of 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand,' smoothed out, lots of strings. Ros started to sing along, with feeling. When it dawned on her that she was thinking of — Jesus, fantasizing about, getting off on — Adele, she shut up and turned the radio down. Then off.
     
    A whispering rose like crickets, except that there were words in it. Ros stood still and listened. Tender stroking riffled her hair, the sprayed curls at the crown of her head and up under the hair cut close and tapered at the nape of her neck, raising goosebumps and an urgent desire for sex. Soft insistent hands held her face, and soft lips pressed against hers. For a split-second, her vision blurred lavender, and an idea came into her head, fuzzy, hinting at something terrible, suggesting something unbelievably exciting, something she would never have considered herself capable of thinking about, let alone doing. But she didn't know herself anymore.
     
    'Shit.' This was getting ridiculous. It was hard enough to be like a kid in love when you were a kid and it was the opposite sex you were head over heels for. Pushing sixty and in love with another woman was too much. It wasn't that she thought it was wrong. She didn't think she'd ever thought it was wrong, really. But it was such a shock. She didn't have the faintest idea what the rules were. Everything she did these days surprised her. She could not believe she was in this particular fix. This was not what she'd expected to have to worry about at this time in her life.
     
    Out of Roslyn's field of vision, on the other side of the kitchen wall with the steam tables and serving counter, the gauzy presence hovered in the half-lit dining room. When it settled, briefly, over tables and chairs, it altered their contours and outlines for as long as it stayed there.
     
    When it bounced up to suspend itself, fleetingly, from the ceiling, it was like a giant cobweb, a spreading place where the paint was melting, where the very concrete was dissolving. When it raced toward the hall, where fluorescent lights were on all night, it blurred both light and harsh shadow, sound and silence. There was an aura of playfulness about its antics, overlaying menace.
     
    Even when the dining room was full, four people to a table, it didn't sound like a room full of people eating breakfast anywhere but in a nursing home. Plasticware against plastic trays didn't ring or really even clatter, but made scraping and sliding sounds as muted as the colors, grayed pink, brownish yellow. There wasn't the hum of restaurant diners or the separated-out conversations, friendly or hostile, of a family at table. It was a noise all its own. Roslyn thought that when she was a hundred years old and senile — not that she'd have to live that long to get senile — she'd still recognize the sound of a meal in a nursing home. Maybe not, though. Maybe she wouldn't remember any of this. Like a year-old kid, maybe she wouldn't remember anything that was happening to her right now, no matter how real and interesting, even amazing, it was while it was