The Operator

by Gretchen Berg

  “Not too many old maids in this batch,” Charlotte pointed out, throwing the few unpopped kernels into a small dish next to her on the floor.

  Vivian murmured an acknowledgment. Old maids. She remembered shrieking, “Old maid!” at her sister Vera, after an argument over the McGinty claddagh ring turned ugly. Vera’d then gone and slapped her across the face. Vera had always been the most aggressive of the McGinty sisters, and wouldn’t hesitate to dole out a slap or two if she was mad enough. Vivian could only bring herself to slap back with words, and they were never great ones. “You’re stupid!” or “I know you are, but what am I?” with her fists clenched so tightly her fingernails left little half-moon indentations in her palms. Poor little Violet would usually just crumple into a sobbing heap on her bed, and Henry and Will would disappear into the backyard, uneasy with how the McGinty females expressed themselves. Family was sometimes more trouble than they were worth.

  Vivian had ended up with the claddagh ring because her Aunt Catharine left it to the first niece to marry. That was the rule. And if everybody was just going to ignore the rules, Vivian thought, what was the point of having them in the first place? Aunt Catharine had, of course, played by her own rules. She’d married three times, which was two more times than the Catholic Church recommended. “Marriage,” Aunt Catharine had said, “is a wonderful thing, but people make mistakes.” She’d made two mistakes, but she knew God would understand that she was just fixing them. No one should get too bent out of shape about it.

  It was an open-and-shut case, as far as Vivian was concerned. She was the first of the McGinty nieces to marry, and Vera shouldn’t have even argued about it. Vera had claimed Aunt Catharine said the ring should go to the oldest niece, but no one else remembered it that way. Vera, like Aunt Catharine, had her own way of looking at rules. As she got older she scoffed that she didn’t want Aunt Catharine’s ugly old ring anyhow, and started calling Aunt Catharine “the slut” of the McGinty family.

  Vivian twisted the gold ring around her right ring finger as the band music swelled from the television speaker and the title words swept across the screen. I Love Lucy drew the Daltons into the merry, lighthearted, brightly lit world of the Ricardos and the Mertzes like cartoon animals following the aroma of pie cooling on a windowsill. For a half hour on Monday nights everything outside the Lucy world was forgotten, left suspended in the air around the television set. Vivian kept a suspicious eye on Edward, but soon felt herself sucked into the show, just like always. The happy families on television seemed to prove Vivian’s mother right. Everyone else has it better than us. Vivian had always been caught between her father’s good nature and her mother’s gloom. She had to push hard against the gloom. It was heavy.

  The Daltons all laughed at Ricky’s anxious overbearing smothering. They all laughed when Ricky, Fred, and Ethel practiced dry runs of taking Lucy to the hospital. They all laughed when Lucy announced, “It’s time,” and the other three flew into slapstick chaos, with Ricky dumping out the contents of Lucy’s overnight suitcase. And they all laughed when Ricky, Fred, and Ethel screamed at each other to get a cab for Lucy, and then all three of them rushed out the door to get the cab, leaving Lucy forgotten and by herself in the apartment yelling, “Wait for me!”

  During the cigarette advertisement, Vivian thought back to the night Charlotte had been born, and how panicked Edward had been; how he’d been all doting and concerned and frantic, and how he’d argued with the nurses and attendants that he wanted to be in the room with his wife. “My wife needs me!”

  When Lucy came back on the television, the doors to the hospital opened with the nurse saying “Another maternity case coming in,” and then Ricky was pushed through the door in a wheelchair, followed by the pregnant Lucy, waddling in carrying her own overnight suitcase. Edward and Vivian laughed the hardest at this. Edward’d had his own fainting spell in the hospital where he, too, was “just a little dizzy” and had to sit himself down on the bank of chairs in the waiting room.

  Vivian watched the screen as Lucy and Ricky kissed each other before Lucy was taken to the delivery room, knowing that the next time they’d be together, they’d have a brand-new baby in their family. Edward looked from the television screen to Vivian, lifted his hand to his lips, and blew her a kiss. His eyes were shining behind the glasses he wore. Vivian pressed her lips firmly together and looked back at the screen.

  Ricky had to use a telephone in the hospital’s waiting room. Since the telephone didn’t have a dial he had to connect through an operator. Even though the operator wasn’t there on the screen, Vivian imagined the girl on the other end of the line and knew she would’ve been wearing the bulky headset and holding the plug cords in one hand, and if she wanted to listen in on the conversation, she could have. Who knew what she would hear? You know somebody named Edward Dalton? . . . He’s married, right? . . . Well, he’s got himself another wife.

  Lucy gave birth to a baby boy, and Vivian held herself together until they showed a close-up of a tiny baby on the black-and-white screen, with its tiny eyes scrunched closed and its tiny hands curled under its tiny chin. As the band theme swelled and the credits began to roll, Vivian felt the tears running down her cheeks, and she knew that if she had to speak, her voice would burst from her throat in choked sobs. Holding her breath, she pushed herself up from the sofa and stepped over Charlotte’s outstretched legs, disappearing around the corner and up the stairs before Edward or Charlotte saw her face.

  The toilet seat lid was cold under her backside and she pulled her knees up to have somewhere to rest her forehead, although her girdle was cutting into her flesh. The tiny baby. The love between husband and wife. She’d had all that, once. The tears flowed over the rims of her eyes and the choked sobs landed in her lap as snapshots from her life flashed across her mind. Happy! Smiling! Loving!

  Vivian’s body shook and she began to rock from side to side, sobbing as tears and drips from her nostrils fell into the valley of her lap. She cried and cried until it wore her out, and until each breath became a big effort. Until she’d figured she’d cried out everything she had, and now just felt empty. Nothing left.

  Her feet slid from the toilet seat to the tiled floor with a thud, and she reached to pull at the roll of toilet paper to blow her nose. In the rational part of her mind, she knew she was mostly upset because of that sweet television baby. But it was just a television show. It wasn’t real. Vivian gave a loud sniff, and final wipe under her nose with the toilet paper, then lifted her head, feeling the crackle of dried makeup that had run down her cheeks. She thought about how Lucy was now trapped in that marriage with Ricky. There’d be no easy escape from that. Now there was a baby.

  The name Sylvia Emerich floated to the surface of her mind. She’d been trapped by a baby, Sylvia Emerich of Apple Creek. Forced to leave school because she’d been trapped by her baby. Men made a whole lot of noise about women “trapping” them into marriage, but women were the ones getting trapped. By men, by their own bodies. Boy, the women who weren’t saddled with a kid were sure lucky, weren’t they? That Flora Parker at the Building & Loan had been lucky. When there was no baby, you could just steal two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and run away, leave all your troubles (and your husband) behind. And the trash ran away with the spoon.

  Vivian’s lipstick had been wiped away over an hour ago with her dinner napkin, but the toilet paper she tossed into the trash bin was still smeared with mascara, Pan-Cake, and pink rouge. The face she tried to show the world, all messily smeared onto strips of soggy tissue.

  She avoided looking at herself in the mirror as she stood over the sink, struggling to pry the lid off the bottle of sleeping pills. It had always been a stubborn bottle, and her hands were already shaking from being so tired and upset. The word “prying” ran over and over in her mind, as she twisted and pulled at the lid, like the word itself would help it come off. Prying. Prying. Goddammit, come off! Her hands began to cramp and she felt a new wave of tears
building up behind her eyes just as the lid gave way.

  The release of the lid snapped something in Vivian’s brain, and she stared into the mouth of the bottle. Prying. Still holding the bottle in one hand, the lid in the other, she moved back to the closed toilet seat and sat down again, feeling like a foggy film had been peeled from her mind. She rested for a few moments, then gave another sniff. A determined sniff.

  Vivian stood again and went to the sink, setting the lid of the sleeping pill bottle next to the soap dish. She looked at the bottle, then shook out two pills and popped them onto the back of her tongue. She twisted the Cold faucet on, and then swept a handful of tap water into her mouth. She wanted to be fast asleep by the time Edward came to bed.

  As she lay there tucked under the covers and turned on her side, away from Edward’s side of the bed, and waiting for the sleeping pills to do their job, she pointed and flexed her toes like she was kick-paddling through the bedsheets, with the word singsonging in her head. Pry . . . (point, flex) . . . ing (point, flex). Pry . . . (point, flex) . . . ing (point, flex). She’d put it off long enough. She scrunched her face up, squeezing her eyes shut as tight as they’d go so the tears wouldn’t start again, and then blew out a tired gust of breath in defeat. She’d have to go see Mr. McAfee this week.

  Chapter 20

  Mr. Donald T. McAfee, private investigator, had been prying into Edward Dalton’s past at Vivian’s request. Two days before Christmas she’d set up a meeting with Mr. McAfee in the Literary Reference section of the Wayne County Public Library. Someplace where Vivian had never been before and didn’t expect to see anyone she knew. They’d talked for twenty minutes, and then Vivian had suggested a special code to use the next time they talked on the telephone.

  “You know,” she’d said to him in a proper library whisper, “because the switchboard operators sometimes listen in on the calls.”

  Don McAfee was the same private investigator Wayne Building & Loan had hired to find Gilbert Ogden and Flora Parker, after their abscondance. Was that the right noun? Absconded, abscondance? It sounded right, but she’d have to check Charlotte’s dictionary.

  As far as Vivian knew, Don McAfee still hadn’t found Gilbert and Flora yet, and she’d thought it’d probably be impolite to ask him about it. With all the newspaper stories of the Wayne Building & Loan robbery, though, she’d have thought he’d have more than enough clues to find those two.

  Don McAfee and Vivian had agreed that she would wait to check in with him about the Edward investigation until after the holidays. When she’d telephoned him on January third Vivian had asked him just one question: “Do I need to come to your office?”

  If Don McAfee had answered, “No,” Vivian would’ve known that the rumor about her husband had been a bunch of nasty nonsense, and she’d have had to set the record straight with one Betty Miller. But when she’d asked Mr. McAfee if she needed to come to his office, Mr. McAfee had answered, “Yes.”

  Vivian had thanked him, replaced the receiver in its cradle, and stormed up the stairs to the bedroom to scream into a pillow. The Daltons’ pillows had had to be cleaned more frequently over the past few weeks, especially if Vivian hadn’t taken the time to wipe off her lipstick first. The pillow-screaming was the only outlet for her rage at life, which had increased tenfold since December fifteenth. Her nerves were raw and frayed at the ends, like some of the old jack cords at Bell that had worn away from the plugs from too much use and improper care.

  The fact that Donald McAfee’s investigation had been a success meant that Vivian’s marriage, and most of her adult life, had been a sham. This was the thought that had been running on repeat through her mind for the two weeks after that call. One week of Vivian simply trying to understand what Mr. McAfee had told her, and another week of her valiantly trying to push the truth out of her mind. Maybe if she avoided meeting McAfee in person as she’d told him she would do (to see the proof, and to pay him), she could pretend it wasn’t real.

  Vivian’s world had closed in on her and she was pretty sure nothing existed outside her brand-new little private hell. Her casual interest in anything outside her limited orbit of the house on South Walnut Street and the brick confines of Ohio Bell suddenly disappeared as the truth about her life sank in, colder than the January temperatures outside. She hadn’t cared that the library had just received some historic journal collection from one of the town’s founding fathers, she hadn’t cared that the hardware store was planning to move its location one block farther north, and she hadn’t cared that on January twelfth the first dial telephone was installed in Wooster, in Dr. Paul’s medical office. Wooster and its technological progress would eventually make Vivian’s job obsolete. If she’d cared at all, she’d have looked up “obsolete” in Charlotte’s dictionary.

  The Lucy episode, and Vivian’s bathroom breakdown, had finally tipped her over the edge. A sliver of new moon shone brightly in the night sky, lighting the usually dark country road that led out toward the Heidelberg Chocolate Factory where McAfee’s office was. It hadn’t occurred to her to question why his office was in the chocolate factory, but if she’d asked, Mr. McAfee would’ve explained that he’d once done some work for Gunther Heidelberg, who’d paid him with the use of the upstairs office in the factory. He’d have also told her that he liked to work around the smell of chocolate.

  Vivian sang out loud in awkward jagged bursts as she steered the Buick over the snow-packed road. It wasn’t the joyous kind of singing she liked to do in church, it was something more troubled and halting.

  “. . . the cow jumped over the moon . . .”

  How did that one go? Was that another one about a farm? Of course the cow lived on a farm.

  “. . . the little dog laughed . . .”

  Goddamned dog. Was this even a song?

  “And the dish ran away with the spoon.”

  I know people, Vivian thought, laughing at herself, and imagined all the things she could’ve done differently, if she’d really known people. She could’ve married one of the other boys who had taken her out riding in their cars, or on hayrides out in the country, or for an ice-cream cone at the soda fountain. Someone who wouldn’t have made a damned fool out of her. John Reed! If she’d married John she’d be four-flushing her fancy self in some nice brick house on the north side right now, instead of slinking around Wooster with her head ducked low, from house to work to private eye’s office.

  Jesus Christ almighty, why in the hell did it have to be Edward?

  If he hadn’t bothered to tell her about his other goddamned wife, what else was lurking out there? Children? Did he have a whole other family living somewhere? A family that didn’t nag him about his nose hair, and who’d let him have a goddamned dog? Vivian never told Edward about Rambles. She’d been seven and Rambles had been just over a year old, really still a puppy, when he’d scrambled off the front porch after a squirrel, out into the road, and into the path of Oscar Buckley’s oncoming new Tin Lizzie, going much too fast for their quiet neighborhood. The pain of that loss was too sharp and too deep and she wouldn’t go through it again. And she wouldn’t have Edward and Charlotte go through it, either. She’d burst into tears every time she saw Mr. Buckley and that godforsaken car, and had crossed her arms with a “Humph!” when it finally went to the scrap heap. It’d been too hard after that to be around dogs; pet them or hold them, stroke their soft ears or look into their sweet faces, so she’d just avoided them altogether. I’m allergic.

  Donald McAfee’s office looked exactly like she’d imagined a private investigator’s office would look, especially if he didn’t have a maid. Almost empty as far as furniture went, but the piles of papers and folders made it seem like an overcrowded newsroom. Vivian went to sit on the only chair opposite the wooden desk and leaned her backside into a stack of papers and books that slid off the sides and front of the chair in a paper avalanche.

  “Oh, mercy!” She sprang back to a standing position and then dropped to the floor, retrievin
g the stray pages. How did this man manage to find anything?

  “It’s all right,” McAfee said in the deep voice that didn’t match the way he looked. “I’ll clean it up later.” He “cleaned up” by just scooping all the papers and files together and patting them into a sloppy light-colored leaf pile. It worked for him, and he knew where everything was, more or less. “Peppermint?”

  The office was not as much of a surprise as Don McAfee had been. Vivian supposed she had expected to see Humphrey Bogart lurking in the library stacks. She hadn’t been able to hide her reaction to the slender, prematurely gray, almost delicate gentleman who’d held out a soft hand to her and given a confident, firm shake. You’d better believe she’d inspected his fingernails, which were cut evenly across the tops of his fingers, not gnawed down to the quick (like a Nervous Purvis), and she’d also made note of the fact that he did not wear glasses. Edward wore glasses. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Shifty, beady eyes, hiding behind their glasses. LIAR, LIAR, LIAR!

  She settled herself back into the now-empty chair with a tight smile, and held her pocketbook in her lap. “No, thank you,” was an automatic response to the peppermint candy. But her mouth felt like the bottom of the kitchen garbage bin, and she reconsidered after running her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “You know?” she said, before Don McAfee had a chance to sit down. “I will have one, thank you.”

  “Well, Mrs. Dalton.” Mr. McAfee leaned across the piles on his desk and handed her a plastic-wrapped candy, then leaned back and placed a hand on the pile of documents directly in front of him. “I’m pleased you were able to find some time to meet.”