The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  “You are a callow, ignorant girl,” he said, “and you have the impertinence to imagine your little political scrapings have something to do with the real world.”

  She thought she would be able to leave the bench in a minute or two, if only her eyes would stop rolling around like a frightened cow’s. She caught sight of the tall metal can provided for trash. Walking in a crouch she took the remains of her lunch and threw them into the already overflowing can. She’d left her cigarettes on the bench, but she didn’t go back for them, and Max didn’t call her back. She walked the whole length of the shed to where Hannah Groops was talking with some other women and slipped in among them. One thing about the proletariat—they didn’t pay much mind to one’s comings and goings.

  She’d been aware, off and on throughout the day, of the Catalan watching her. Just before her shift was finished, she met him near his locker.

  “I can’t see you again today. I’m not feeling well.”

  He took her hand in his. Involuntarily, she looked around to see if Max could see them. The Catalan touched each of her fingers. “I don’t understand,” he said gravely. “Please,” she said gently, holding his steady gaze with her own. Please what? She didn’t know herself what she was asking him.

  Dreading the long drive back home alone, she offered a ride to one of the men who lived in Los Angeles. He had always spoken pleasantly to her, a tight-limbed, small man who reminded her physically of Walter’s friend, Junior.

  “This is an old buggy,” he said, looking at the panel. He told her that when the war came to the United States, he was going on the graveyard shift, where you could make a lot more money. First thing he was going to buy was an Oldsmobile. He explained why in exhaustive automotive detail. She hardly listened. Then, without any change of tone, he told her how his wife’s sister, who’d come out to stay with them in the hope of getting a good job in the plant, had climbed into bed one night with his wife and himself. He described what had followed. Annie looked at her pocketbook and wondered if a stray cigarette might be lying in the bottom. They were driving along Sunset Boulevard. They passed an enormous nightclub, but it wasn’t a nightclub; it was a funeral parlor.

  She said, “Is that true, what you’ve been telling me? And if it is, what the hell makes you think I want to hear it? And if it isn’t true, why are you making it up? Aren’t you embarrassed? What are you trying to do anyhow?” Her voice rose. “You’re just scaring me! Why don’t you unbutton your fly, you little runt!”

  She came to a full stop in front of the Trocadero. The man was trembling, his hands clutching his lunch box, and his breathing whistled as though someone were choking him. Annie trembled along with him. The pain that had bothered her the night before came back with violence as though her shouting had alerted it.

  “No!” the man said to her hand as it started to turn the handle of the door. “No! Please! Drive me to Hollywood! I’m sentimental about my wife and her sister’s a hag…I made up part of it …but it could happen. She, the sister, sits around with her legs up on the furniture. I’ve got a very soft heart. You ask anybody. …What’s the matter? I didn’t mean to make you feel so bad!”

  “I’ve got a terrible pain in my stomach.”

  She leaned back against the seat, and he got out and waved her to the passenger seat and drove her to the boardinghouse. As she started to open the door, he said, “Is there something I could do? You look bad. I know a doctor in Pasadena. He’s a chiropractor but my wife says he’s good. You want me—”

  “No, no. I’ll be okay. I’ll lie down for a while.”

  “I want to say I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too, that I yelled that way.”

  He gave her a somewhat sly look, then walked down toward the boulevard.

  She got out of the car quickly.

  The pain worsened. She vomited up a bitter substance that left her mouth sour. At some point, she dropped the wet washrag she was holding against her face and acknowledged to herself that she had a fever. She called Theda.

  At the emergency entrance of the hospital she could barely walk. A nurse pushed her into a wheel chair.

  “Where?” the doctor was asking irritably. “Now, wait! Where did it start? Here? Here?”

  A blood count was taken. She held Theda’s hand and stared up at the white ceiling. “Her appendix is about to blow up,” someone said nearby.

  “Prep,” said the nurse and shaved off her pubic hair. An intern put a needle in her arm. She was wheeled into an elevator. Theda’s long worried face was the last thing she saw, until a kidney-shaped white enamel pan tried to eat her. She threw up, gripping her belly, “Oh, Oh!”

  “Here,” said the nurse. A glass straw protruded from a glass of ginger ale. It was morning. A mustachioed man was looking down at her. His white coat was heavily starched, especially over a breast pocket from which protruded a pen.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Awful.”

  “It was pretty rotten. I’m surprised you didn’t have warning earlier. It’s a good thing your friend brought you when she did. You might have gotten peritonitis.”

  She tried to smile since the worst hadn’t happened.

  “Gassy?”

  “It hurts.”

  “It’s gas. This little tube will help no end. Or I should say, help your end.” He permitted himself a little medical heehaw.

  Later, Theda was sitting in a chair near the window. The dark circles around her eyes aged her. In her partly drugged awareness, Annie suddenly saw Theda all alone. How tired, how strained she looked! Theda was staring at a picture on the wall of a vapid Pierrot. Slowly, she turned her head and saw that Annie was awake and looking at her. She got up and came to the bed.

  “And what do you intend to do for your next number?”

  Annie smiled weakly.

  “I’ve gotten you a private nurse for a couple of days until they take that tube out of you. My new job has started, otherwise I’d stay. Don’t look so scared. It’s over. Cletus is bringing you books in a couple of days. Max is coming tomorrow. He’s taken care of telling the shop foreman you won’t be in for a while. I think you’ll get some kind of sick pay. Don’t worry.”

  A nurse came in, and Theda left.

  At night, Annie waited for the shadow of the nurse to fall across the doorway. That shadow brought oblivion. When she made sure she was alone, she moaned. There was pleasure in moaning. Then she discovered that she was not alone. An elderly nurse was dozing by the window. “Are you there?” whispered Annie.

  “I’m here,” a voice whispered back.

  “I can’t stand the tube,” Annie groaned.

  “Poor tube,” murmured the voice.

  “Won’t it come out soon?”

  “After the poison’s all gone. I love the tube. And go to sleep.”

  Max stood in the doorway the next afternoon. He held a bouquet of varicolored daisies. “Which tube?” she asked hopefully. She saw a look of anguish cross his face. It wasn’t the nurse.

  The nurse took the flowers from him, first burying her nose in them. “Is it you who smells so good or the flowers?” she asked Max.

  “You have a nice nurse,” Max said stiffly.

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry…” he said suddenly, and came close to the bed and bent over and kissed her damp forehead.

  “I was working out on you,” he said.

  She slept; the pain had diminished; she felt cradled in a delicious softness and warmth. Someone had forgiven her.

  On the third day, the nurse left. The tube came out. The nurse said, “Now that your appendix is gone, be sure and hold on to your table of contents!” A Negro woman, who was mopping the floor beneath the bed, gave the nurse’s back a scornful look. “She was nice,” Annie said to the woman. “Yeah. They all nice,” said the woman and departed with bucket and mop.

  Cletus arrived with a small bottle of champagne and a book which he placed on her chest.

  “
Put your mind on that book and you’ll wish you’d never been born,” he said cheerfully. A nurse came in to take her temperature, then wrote down the results on the chart which hung on the metal bar at the foot of her bed. She was fully conscious now, and she saw the nurse look at Cletus. Cletus was talking to her about something. She was thinking about the nurse’s look. It had been full of—of what? Dislike? Something else. Disgust? Her mind closed painfully around the word as though it were a thorn.

  “Don’t you skip any part of that book,” Cletus said. “You Russian lover! Wait’ll you read about these boys.” He plucked the book from her chest and held it up. She saw a picture of a church with an onion-shaped dome. The Brothers Karamazov.

  Cletus sat down. “How are you feeling, girl?”

  “Better,” she said. “Fine.”

  “Fine,” he said and grinned.

  “What’s the champagne for?”

  “You. They say you can have that. I asked the nurse to put it in the refrigerator.” They both looked at the bottle in its silver foil on the chest. The nurse hadn’t taken it.

  “She didn’t take it.”

  “No,” Cletus said. “She expected me to bring watermelon.”

  She was in the hospital ten days. Max and Eva came together once. Eva had changed. Maybe it was because she was so thin. Eva hardly took her eyes from Max in the hospital room. She had lost some basic confidence of her body; she didn’t seem to know how to sit down any more.

  The nurses pretty much ignored Annie. It had something to do, of course, with her getting better. It had something to do with Cletus, but especially with the appearance of big Melvin in his sailor suit roaring down the corridor and bursting into her room, shouting, “Hey, baby! What’s doing?” After that, nobody said more than was absolutely necessary to her, except the doctor with the mustache who had operated on her.

  Although she was prone most of the time, she felt a storm had blown up and furniture and houses were flying around her. Max came alone. As he bent over to kiss her cheek, she felt she must tell him something. He whispered in her ear that Ethel Schaeffer had died, in this same hospital, yesterday. She began to cry. Max said, “Oh, Annie, don’t cry.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Jesus wept,” he said.

  “What?”

  “A noun and a verb. Life beats stronger in short sentences, ‘Exalted, Satan sat.’”

  “Oh, Max, don’t talk to me about those things.”

  “What shall I talk to you about?”

  “I love you, Max,” she said between tremulous sobs.

  “I hope you do,” he said gravely. “I hope somebody does.”

  Theda had a plan. Annie must get out of that plant. She didn’t care if Annie did know how to work a drill press or whatever it was. Theda had found a secretarial training school with night classes. It was only an eight-week course. She’d learn typing and shorthand and then Theda could get her a job at the studio. It was really nice there. The offices were cool and the corridors clean, and they treated you not half bad what with cheap lunches and relaxed supervision, and since all the girls wanted to go into the defense plants, secretaries would be prized. Annie assented without thinking about it.

  “You’re coming out of this joint tomorrow into a different world,” Theda said. “The U.S.S.R. was invaded yesterday and Calvin Schmitter has run off with a seventeen-year-old whore named Ginger Snaps in a stolen Cadillac.”

  “What!”

  “I mean—he’s politically disheveled to the point of insanity. I heard that the folk down at the party headquarters are turning out fourteen directives a minute to explain the ‘new position.’ Well, you can see how it would be! Now it is a war against Hitler with our glorious new ally. Monopoly capitalism? Imperialist war? Words, words. Old words. There’ll be new words now.”

  Ethel Schaeffer was dead. Max wanted to run off to the wars. It had been comforting in those bare meeting rooms, people saying “Hello, Comrade.” Nothing seemed of any consequence. “I’ll go to secretarial school,” she said listlessly. “What day is it?”

  “June twenty-third,” Theda answered. “But the Russians aren’t so dumb. They’ve been building up their armies—”

  “The doctor says I have to take it easy for a few weeks because of adhesions. How much is all this going to cost?”

  “Cletus and I are loaning you the money. You’ll pay us back later.”

  “I’ve got some money, saved, in a box in my room.”

  “You’ll need it to live on. I want you to go see that lawyer and get the divorce started.”

  “All right.” There didn’t seem any point in swimming, the currents were strong enough to carry her, for a while at least. On her last night in the hospital, Dr. Eagle came to see her.

  “You’ve done well. No mountain climbing for a bit. Is someone coming to get you in the morning?”

  “Yes,” Annie replied viciously, “a nigger friend of mine.”

  The nurse, who was closing the window, gave her a pitying, disgusted look and left.

  “Why did you say that?”

  She sat up and swung her legs over the bed. “They’ve been treating me like a leper, the nurses, ever since two Negro friends showed up here.”

  “What do you imagine they feel? Have they been bad to you, really? It’s something to regret, not to be so self-righteous about.”

  “I’m not self-righteous.”

  “Yes, you are. Let’s see you walk around.”

  She paced the room in her hospital gown.

  “Like a wounded stork,” he said.

  She riffled through the pages of the Dostoyevsky.

  “Did you read it all?”

  “No, parts.”

  “What are you going to do when you leave here?”

  “I’m going to live a proper life,” she said noisily.

  “You sure sound sore.”

  She looked at him defiantly. He had soft brown eyes, a rather blank expression, perhaps because of the mustache that hid most of his mouth. He looked plump in his white smock.

  “Isn’t that possible?”

  “Oh, I guess it’s possible,” he said. “I wanted to go to China years ago, I wanted to be a doctor in China.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  He shrugged. “Circumstances,” he said.

  “Do you live a proper life?”

  “I guess…”

  ———

  Uncle Greg had sometimes talked about the “colored people” moving into Nyack. They had strange ways which Uncle Greg said he didn’t much care for. But he didn’t much care for Catholics either, and he had the impression that Italians had a criminal streak and all Russians were violent. But live and let live, he would sigh.

  Annie had an elusive memory of a maid Bea had hired once during a flush period in Tony’s life. In the afternoon, Bea would curse her out for her slovenliness, then as twilight and depression approached apace, insist the woman drink with her. Annie did remember that—the two women crocked at a table, a bottle of whiskey between them.

  In the way of things, Annie saw a Negro child now and then at the various schools she slipped through. They had been slaves once; they had been freed by Abraham Lincoln but in the South they were hanged from trees and set on fire, and they were not permitted to look at or speak to white people in certain ways lest they give away the odious secret of their emancipation. Cletus had once read her a story, “Bright and Morning Star,” by Richard Wright. She had begged him to stop—the torture of the young black boy made her feel faint. Cletus was unrelenting. “Don’t interrupt. Don’t be craven,” he had said and continued.

  The people who tormented Negroes were low-class people with long narrow heads and baleful eyes. She had seen photographs of lynchings, gray blurs of men, women and children crowding close to one black body. Were they listening for the last pulsation of its burning heart?

  The party had trouble recruiting Negroes. They tended to be elusive, and wary, and besides, as certain pa
rty members had remarked, belonged largely to the lumpenproletariat and were therefore less susceptible to political education than industrial workers.

  For Annie, who had not joined anything, even in the ordinary sense that children imperceptibly absorb some community of feeling, of outlook and aspiration, Negroes carried an abundant provision, of surprise, of amplitude of being, the rewards of their exclusion. There was a lot of space around them; their triumph, their defeat.

  Yet, she thought, and it even made her smile, she had involved herself with a kind of community, the party. In ways she only vaguely perceived, she found the party community a very conventional group indeed. She must tell Max that. It would amuse him …the party was teaching her to be middle-class.

  Theda stopped by most evenings Annie’s first week home. But it was Cletus, triumphantly a week ahead of his serial-writing schedule, and Melvin, who got an extraordinary number of passes —“They don’t mess with this good-looking hornplayer,” he said —who saw to it that she ate and had company.

  One evening, Cletus arrived with a small victrola and an armful of records. A few minutes later, Melvin marched into the room carrying a bag of groceries.

  “I’m going to make you a hangtown fry,” he announced.

  The hangtown fry was pork chops with a covering of biscuits. “Look at here,” Melvin said. “When the chops get this far done, you drop a little cold water in them. See!” The frying pan emitted a great breath of steam. “That drives the fat up inside them and cooks them through.” Then he stirred up the Bisquick and poured the batter over the chops.

  Cletus, watching from an easy chair, said, “Melvin, don’t feed that girl pork chops after her illness. You’re crazy.”

  “No, no, no,” Melvin said. “Good for her.”

  They drank beer and Cletus played the records. “Listen to this, honey,” he said. Louis Armstrong sang, “If I could be with you one hour tonight…”

  They ate Melvin’s pork chops and listened to Louis Armstrong and then Cletus taught them a card game, Hearts.