He hesitated for a moment, and then shuffled into the bedroom. Eleanor stood in front of the couch flexing her tired toes. She had a small and rather dumpy figure without her high heels. And though her fashionably dressed body was usually molded into the latest silhouette, now in her more relaxed state she frankly looked her sixty-one years.
Sydney came back with her slippers, and bent to put them on. "Thanks, dear, shopping just kills my feet. But, enough of this," she sighed, "I've got only a few minutes to get dinner ready before 'Manhunt' comes on." And she started for the kitchen.
He followed and caught her heavily by the shoulders, his face stern. "Listen, Ellie—I don't ever want you to come home so late that you have to take an armored car." He shook her to emphasize his statement.
"But why?" she asked with genuine wonder. "They're safe enough. Edith and Ruth often take 'A' cars, and nothing's ever happened to them."
He let her go reluctantly. "Ellie," he said gently, "I just want to be sure that nothing happens to you, that's all. We're at such a dangerous age now, with both of us over sixty. You're all I've got. I'd be so all alone without you."
She thrust out her ample chest indignantly. "Sydney, the trouble with you is that you're still living in the past. You've got to keep up with the times. Sure, things are different now, than they were, say, ten years ago. But what of it? If life is more dangerous now, it's certainly more thrilling—and more intense, too!"
He eyed her steadily. "What's so thrilling about being sixty plus?"
"You've just got to accept," she continued glibly, as though it had been memorized, "the fact that it's a young people's world, now. Live for the day! That should be our motto." She smiled placidly at him. "That's the way I've been living this past year. As though each day was completely separate from the one before it—and the one after. In a young people's world—what else is there to do?"
Eleanor patted her husband's cheek, and then looked past him into the living room, a shocked expression on her face. "Why Syd, have you been sitting here all alone without the T.V. on? Goodness, that's enough to make anyone start thinking! You march right in there and turn it on."
He turned, with a slight shrug, to comply, and Eleanor started to fix dinner. The T.V. screen was in full view of the kitchen cubicle, of course. Apartments had been designed that way for years now. So, she was able to open the few cans and containers that constituted dinner, with her eyes almost entirely on the T.V.