Wait For Me Jack

by Addison Jones

  8:12am

  ‘Hurry up! You’ll make us late again!’

  ‘Coming! Sorry, Loulou. Ready now, let’s go.’

  ‘Jiminycrapcricket, Billie. That’s my sweater, you know.’

  ‘Yeah? So what? Whose heels are you wearing?’

  ‘Oh, all right. Come on!’

  ‘And are those my stockings?’

  The two sisters run down the street, with five minutes to cover two blocks. They don’t look at all alike, but there is something sisterly about them anyway. Something in their clumsy tandem run, and their laughter. They both laugh in a helpless way, as if even now – as they run – they have to surrender to a delicious, mysterious mirth. Don’t ask them what’s so funny, you’d never get it. They laugh because the very thought of themselves late for the bus again, arguing about clothes again, tickles them. They’re laughing at the very idea of themselves as friends, when the obvious truth is they can hardly stand each other.

  The fog is dense, but they hardly notice. They live by the bay; it’s foggy nearly every morning and every summer evening about five. But the fog horn is still exotic to them because they are from the valley. It makes San Francisco feel like a foreign country. Just plain better than Redding, that’s all. Every darn thing is better here. Especially the boys.

  The bus driver teases them by closing the door just as they reach it. It’s part of the ritual. He’s their age and flirty.

  ‘You’re just plain mean,’ scolds Billie, dropping her dime in. Her voice is high and soft. Before they reach Market Street, the sun has broken through. A hard blue sky, no clouds.

  People get on and off, and the air is full of cigarette smoke and See you later alligator and In a while crocodile and Not if I see you first, sweet potato. Just before Embarcadero, Billie and Louise get off the bus and join the throng of office workers. This is Billie’s favourite time of the day. Here we are, here I am, she thinks. Will you just look at me? A stylish young secretary, rushing to work. Her face has shut down, despite her inner joy, because part of the joy is in blending in, and they are surrounded by workaday faces. They head up Post, and are in shadow. The sky scrapers block the sun. It’s cold. Thinner crowds, and more serious. Still the seagulls, though. Like the fog horn, the sisters can never quite take a seagull for granted. They know seagulls are like pigeons here, pests, but they adore them. Adore all the different squawks they make, like confused, emotional human cries. Nope, nothing melodic about a seagull.

  Entering the Perkins Petroleum Products building, they quickly dash into the bathroom. Silently comb their hair again and reapply rouge with old soft brushes. Billie curls the ends of her page boy with fingers dampened in the sink, so her face is perfectly framed by two butter-yellow curly cues. A side part, so a hank of hair keeps falling across her face, till she clips it back with a red rose barrette. Louise yanks a brush through her kinky hair, shoulder length, then slides in two bobby pins on either side, so from the top of her ears it bunches straight out like, well, like the hair of that girl Talithia, who used to sweep the floor in their mother’s hair salon. (Looka you, with your nigga hair, you should be Talithia’s child, her mother used to croon affectionately.) In fact, it was Talithia who first showed Louise how to turn frizzy hair to her advantage. Billie would hate frizzy hair, but she’s jealous watching her sister nonchalantly twisting her hair back. It should look ridiculous, ugly, but Louise carries it off. Billie feels uninteresting, next to her.

  ‘Got that new lipstick on you, Loulou?’

  She covets this lipstick, which costs $2.99 from I. Magnins. As soon as pay day comes, she’s going to buy some. But wait – pay day is today. How absolutely wonderful. And tonight, Tommy White from Pacific Heights, if she remembers right. Her obligatory Friday night date. Billie has been in the city for three years now, since she was eighteen. She’s had three Friday nights without a date. Louise has been seeing Chuck for almost five years now, but Billie’s still shopping. She’s looking forward to Tommy White. Or is his name Timmy?

  ‘See you at five?’

  ‘Nah, going home tonight, remember? Chuck’s picking me up early to skip the traffic.’

  ‘Nuts, Loulou! Driving all the way to Redding? Well, just remember the Alamo.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Louise snorts. ‘That had a happy ending, right?’

  Louise often snorts, is often irritated or bored or sarcastic, but somehow her life remains something mysterious and glamorous to Billie. She frequently has to remind herself Louise is a year younger.

  Jacko is drinking a cup of black coffee at Mike’s Meals, his new leather briefcase leaning against his legs. He lights a Viceroy and gets a little light-headed. Love that first smoke of the day! He gives a quick thought to Lizbeth and the way she dumped him last year and ran off to Paris. Crazy girl. She’ll be sorry one day, but it’ll be too late then. He’s decided to get married, start a family. Ernie and Bernice made it look so good. So easy. It’s all waiting out there, he just has to grab it. Like aiming for a college degree and getting one. All a person has to do, really, is just put their mind to something.

  Maybe Jacko looks too young to be smoking, because a middle-aged woman sitting nearby stares pointedly at his smoke. This reminds him of the way his mother used to make a face at him whenever he swore, even mildly. Even Oh God. He blows smoke her way, as if to say: What’s it to you, lady?

  ‘Cocky kid!’ she says, with disgust, and looks away.

  And then because he’s noticed that she’s not all that old, and she’s wearing a low-cut sweater and now that she’s blushing with anger, she actually looks kind of pretty – he smiles at her.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Just, I’m a bit nervous.’

  ‘Oh! Okay, I get it. Trouble?’

  ‘Nah. Just my first day at a new job.’

  ‘Ah, but you’ll be great. You will! Here, let me pay for your coffee. A good-luck gesture, yeah?’

  That’s how charming Jacko can be. And how much he needs even cranky ladies he’ll never meet again, to like him.

  Billie is sitting in front of her typewriter, clacking away a mile a minute. She is not in the typing pool with Louise and all the other girls, because she can type eighty words a minute correctly, take shorthand and has the sweetest legs in the office. Not too thin, not too short or muscular. And she has a way of whistling softly when she works.

  ‘What’s that you’re whistling?’ her boss asks now.

  ‘Was I whistling? Well, I don’t know. Probably ‘Dream a little Dream for Me’. Was it?’

  ‘Could be. Do it again, and I’ll tell you.’

  She whistles the song, a little self-consciously.

  ‘Great song. Great whistle, too.’

  ‘Oh, gee, thanks. I’ve always got a song going in my head,’ she says. ‘Always.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet you do. I’ve noticed you humming a lot too.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No need. You hum and whistle away, honey. Just get those letters typed right, and you can dance too, if you want.’

  Now she’s humming a Glen Miller tune she’s forgotten the name of. Her fingers fly over the keys, clickety clack, clickety clack, in time to the song. She daydreams while she hums and types. She wonders what to wear tonight, and remembers her birthday is next month and she’ll be twenty-two. For heaven’s sake, what kind of age is that for a single girl? Time she was choosing someone. Mentally, she reviews Andy, Harry, Jimmy and Larry. All swell guys, but nope, nope, nope and nope. Andy’s a cook in a diner downtown, not good enough prospects. Too like her high-school quarterback boyfriend, who begged to marry her right up till the midnight before she moved to the city. Harry’s an accountant, white-collar, but a little chubby and both his parents are very fat. Fat is not a good thing. Jimmy’s not fat, and he has a noble career as a social worker, but he’s just so…nice, so very nice. Billie, who never swears, always finds herself wanting to say something shocking in his presence. Larry’s slender, well paid and white-collar, and also a good mixture of corr
uption and goodness, but – and this is a big but – the man cannot kiss to save his life. Dear me, she’s tried enough times, but given up. A man sucking her tongue like a Popsicle is enough to make any girl run a mile. And tonight’s guy. Tommy, or Timmy. Well, she summons his face, and it’s an all right face, not too handsome or homely, just somewhere in between. He works at a high school in the Castro. They’re supposed to go to a movie later, the Fillmore. She’ll give him a whirl, she supposes.

  Time’s getting on; maybe she’s too fussy. Her mother thinks so.

  ‘You just find a man who doesn’t drink or gamble or knock a girl around, and then you work on loving him. There ain’t no Mister Perfect, Miss Milly Mae Molinelli.’

  Her mother loved to use her full name like that. All those m’s. No one else calls her Milly. She renamed herself during junior year in high school after reading novels by Carson MacCullers and Harper Lee. Sophisticated, artistic girls had boys’ names, it was simple as that. Not that she actually enjoyed those novels; she loved them because they looked so marvellous, so out of place, sitting on her mother’s kitchen table. They embodied the world she wanted to find, the life she wanted to live.

  Clickety clack, clickety clack. All the time she’s thinking, her fingers flying and the words appearing. Clickety clack, clickety clack.

  She notices, not for the first time, how when you really think about it, typing sounds a bit like a train. Like one of those big old freight trains at home, rolling down the track. She and Louise hearing the whistle, then dropping everything and racing each other down to the tracks, long weeds scratching their bare legs, their old mongrel, Sally, following them through the vacant lot – just for the thrill of that big noise, that diesel smell, that black greasy smoke, the sight of the caboose man. Sally was used the trains, so she never barked, just sat patiently at a safe distance and watched the girls. They’d absent-mindedly grab some liquorice weed to chew – there was always plenty by the tracks. But, oh, the times their mother gave them each a hard slap up the sides of their heads.

  ‘You gals! When you gonna learn? Tracks ain’t no place for nice gals.’

  Still, they could never resist, right up to the time they left home. The whistle sounding all mournful and excited at the same time. The dust rising and the clickety-clacking filling them up as it whooshed three feet from them. The caboose man, with red handkerchief round his neck, smiling and waving.

  Now, Billie pretends that her true love is the caboose man, and when he spots her, he makes the train slow down so he can leap off and sweep her up. He is Clark Gable. No, he’s actually James Stewart. And he doesn’t so much as glance at Louise.

  Billie is cursed with a vivid imagination. It leads her into all sorts of difficulties, mostly to do with imagining scary things, or impossibly exciting things. She doesn’t sleep well. A constant movie in her head, and the soundtrack too – always the soundtrack. She occupies two realities. Her imagined reality gives the world a pretty good run for its money. She assumes everyone is basically like herself. She has to. There are limits to even her imagination.

  Jacko is being introduced to his colleagues. They are all older. Salesmen in suits, with slicked-back hair. Copywriters in rolled-up sleeves. Boozy red noses, and old man’s aftershave. Not much like his pals from college. He bets none of them read Penguins or shop at Brooks Brothers or listen to real jazz.

  ‘What do you think, so far?’ asks one of these colleagues, a man with bad breath and a stained shirt.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ says Jacko, offhand. ‘What time is lunch?’

  This job is a mistake. His real job is elsewhere, somewhere intellectual and cultured. He sighs and his tour of the building continues.

  ‘The bathrooms are down the hall to your right,’ explains his boss. ‘And the cafeteria is on the third floor. And here, this is your desk.’

  This is the best news he’s had all day. The desk is right by a window, and it is a big desk, with a pencil organiser full of sharp pencils, and a cut-glass ashtray. There’s even a file drawer. He can see a chance of being happy here. Jacko MacAlister, star copywriter: a sudden upsurge in sales since his arrival. Yeah.

  ‘Sorry it’s so far from our offices,’ his boss is saying. ‘My office is on the fifteenth floor.’

  He’ll be unobserved, in his own little kingdom, right here, within the perimeters of this desk. Jacko-land. Truth is, Jacko is not crazy about having a boss at all.

  ‘You won’t mind being down here, will you?’

  ‘Not a problem.’

  ‘Good. Good, I thought you seemed an independent type. Now, you might see Mr Tidmarsh from personnel later. Usually makes a point of introducing himself to the new folk.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And if you need anything typed, or a cup of coffee, just about anything, just ask Billie. Her desk is over there. Guess she’s away now, but you’ll see her later. Nice gal.’

  Billie is delivering her typed letters to the mail department in the basement. This is one of her favourite things to do. So satisfying, to interpret a man’s rambling dictation, condense it with her shorthand, reproduce it on her Remington till it’s a tidy black-and-white document, then see it on its journey. Louise is there, at the new Xerox machine.

  ‘Loulou, I swear those heels look better on you than me. I hate you. Hate you.’

  ‘I know. I’m pretty darn gorgeous, aren’t I? I’d hate me too. I mean, if I was as ugly as you.’

  ‘What you doing tomorrow? Want to go shopping?’

  ‘Nah, can’t. Going to Redding tonight. I told you! Don’t you ever listen to a word I say?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Gosh, Lou, it’s such a long drive. Weren’t you home last weekend?’

  ‘Yeah. Well. Mom’s saying it’s an emergency again.’

  ‘Tell her you’re busy. That’s what I do. You’ve got be firm.’

  ‘Oh, you know I can’t. She needs me. And Chuck’s muscles.’

  ‘You know she’ll try and make you feel bad about moving here again.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Maybe I should feel bad.’

  ‘Oh, no! You better not move back, Loulou.’

  ‘Oh, I like it here fine. But it ain’t home, is it?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Billie says over her shoulder, as she hands her letters to the mail boy. She turns back to see her sister’s face change. Now she looks young, half formed. It never fails to stun Billie, the way her sister can change in a second from cocky to weedy. It makes her think of Louise’s insides as something nebulous and volatile; nothing solid inside that girl, just a bowl of mush.

  ‘Do you think San Francisco will ever feel like home, Billie?’ She keeps inserting memos to copy and a hot inky smell envelops the girls.

  ‘Well, of course it will.’

  ‘Tell the truth, even when I’m having fun with Chuck, I don’t really feel like myself here. Not as much as I do back home. Know what I mean?’

  Billie absent-mindedly strokes Louise’s hair.

  ‘I know. But seriously, Lou, I wasn’t that crazy about the self I was back home.’

  She’s not had a moment’s homesickness, not even a second’s worth. But then she wonders – is she really so very brave? Here she is, in her new life, different routines and rituals, already fearing change. And her sister is a huge hunk of home. Maybe she has merely transplanted Redding to San Francisco.

  ‘Please promise me, Loulala.’

  ‘Hell, no. I like Redding. You’re the one who was miserable there. You going give me my sweater back by Monday? Go great with my black taffeta.’

  ‘Promise me! Don’t move back!’

  ‘Oh, silly Billie, how can I promise? Are you going to cry?’

  She hadn’t planned on it, but suddenly now she is.

  ‘Golly, hon. I have no idea where I’m going to end up. Let’s go powder our noses. I’m done here. ’

  So they link arms, fetch their bags and off they go.

  Jacko leaves the building for lunch. He’s peeked at the cafeteria and de
cided it’s lousy. Old people, fat and ugly people, and it stinks like stale grease. In fact, now he thinks of it, the whole set up is a little stuffy. The furniture, the hair styles, the job itself – call it anything you like, the bottom line is writing stupid lies about stupid products, for the benefit of stupid buyers. Nothing and nobody with any taste at all. Not a soul he’d like to drink beer with. Oh, sure, it’s good money, but for crying out loud, what’s a man like himself to do? Bury himself in a place like this for years? He’s walking swiftly, feeling lighter with every step he takes away from Perkins Petroleum Products. Maybe he won’t go back.

  He arrives in Chinatown, and decides to wander up Grant. He goes into the first restaurant he finds, and orders chop suey. He has a sudden need to use chopsticks, a newly acquired skill. A pretty Asian waitress silently serves him, with a shy smile, and he starts to feel all right again. He orders the strangest food he can find on the menu, just to counter his conventional workplace. In fact, to cancel out his whole rural upbringing too, with the little glass bowls of Jell-O and marshmallows, the polyester shirts, the dearth of bookstores and jazz. He looks around, noticing he is the only Caucasian. No wonder the food is so good. He suddenly decides to take a girl here. He orders another beer, then looks at his watch. Goddammit, he’s going to be late from lunch on his first day.

  Billie is back at her desk, having eaten the baloney sandwich she’d made the night before. In her head, she’s singing ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’. She’s stopped thinking about the possible disaster of Louise leaving, and the dresses, shoes and lipstick she wants to buy. She’s back to thinking about boys. No, not boys. It’s a man she wants, not a boy. She has a clear picture of what she wants to happen in the near future. Her imagination has honed this idea so often, it appears the instant it’s summoned. Like a memory, not a wish. She has a baby in her arms, a pretty, pink, sleeping baby, and she’s in a home that she owns, with walk-in closets and a full-length mirror in the master bedroom and everything is new. There’s a backyard so their golden retriever can come and go. And somewhere near is her husband, faceless for now. This man is mad for her. And she makes him happy. She wants to be a wife with the same fervour other women dream of being famous movie stars, or missionaries in Africa. Making some man happy will be her vocation. She relaxes into her work, filing documents in the big metal cabinet. Humming very quietly, the tune to ‘You Belong to Me’. It’s so calming to know what you really want from life.