The Operator

by Gretchen Berg

  “Well, I suppose I can finish up work early Thursday,” Edward said.

  “No need.” Vivian’s tone was breezy. “I’m going by myself.”

  “You’re what?” Edward finally laid the newspaper down and gave her his full attention.

  “I am going by myself,” she repeated, with almost Betty Miller–esque enunciation.

  Vivian didn’t wait for any more questions from Edward, and she knew there’d be some. She’d never taken the car out of town by herself. She’d started taking the family car without asking when she went to see Donald McAfee out at the chocolate factory, and Edward hadn’t questioned her about it. After that, she’d done it a few more times. Almost as a dare. I dare you to question me about taking the car, you sonofabitch. Just try me. But, for whatever reason, he just let her take the car.

  She went straight up to their room and began to pack before she lost her nerve. She untaped the envelope of money from the lid of the hatbox that no longer housed the hat. The black straw hat had been passed down to Charlotte ten years earlier for her dress-up box, and the hatbox had become a catchall hiding place for anything she didn’t want Edward to find. Her cigarettes, her little brown notebook, and the money she’d saved for this plan of hers.

  She guessed she’d need maybe seventy-five dollars for gas, food, and at least two nights at a hotel. She’d started putting part of her Bell money into the taped envelope before Christmas, not knowing what was going to happen to her and Charlotte if the rumors proved true. Well, the rumors were true. Edward had admitted it and apologized. He claimed he’d never known the marriage had been legitimate in the first place. “We were young and just joking around,” he’d said. Vivian wondered if she just had the wrong sense of humor. At any rate, Edward was finally in a conciliatory frame of mind that Vivian planned to take full advantage of.

  Conciliate:

  conciliated; conciliating

  transitive verb

  1 : to gain (as goodwill) by pleasing acts

  2: to make compatible : reconcile

  3: appease

  The Buick pulled into the Sunoco station at a slow crawl, and Vivian pressed the toe of her new fur-lined ankle boot firmly onto the brake pedal to stop behind the powder-blue Lincoln Continental. She had expected to be the only car at the filling station at that hour on a Thursday morning. Saturdays were usually the busy days at the Sunoco. When the Lincoln pulled away, Vivian eased the Buick up next to the gas pump and rolled down her window.

  “Fill it please, Albert.”

  “Sure thing, Mrs. Dalton.”

  Vivian rolled the window back up and rubbed her gloves together, shivering more out of excitement and nervousness than physical chill. It was something she’d done hundreds of times, filling the car with gas, but today was different. She’d wrapped a couple of ham-salad sandwiches in waxed paper for herself and packed a thermos of coffee, feeling like she should try to drive straight through and just get there before she had the chance to change her mind. She jumped at the knuckle rap on her window. It was just Albert. She rolled the window back down.

  “Going somewhere special today?” he asked as she pulled five dollars from her pocketbook.

  “Up to Akron,” Vivian lied, again, with a smile.

  “Well, drive careful! A lot of snow on the roads up there!”

  There had been a massive snowstorm in northern Ohio two weeks earlier, and the temperatures had remained below freezing so nothing had melted.

  “Thank you, Albert. Have a good day.”

  Albert Hixson was a little shit who tried to pretend he was a good boy. She knew the type. All polite smiles and brown-nosing to grown-ups, and when no one was watching he’d swipe a pack of cigarettes, stick up a middle finger behind your back, and run his smart-aleck mouth off to his friends. It wouldn’t surprise Vivian one bit if Albert ended up married to two, or even three different women at the same time.

  She stuck both middle fingers up as she held the steering wheel with her other fingers. No one was around, but it felt good. Gutsy. Strong. East Bowman Street stretched out ahead of her as she left Wooster, and would soon turn into Akron Road. Edward always drove when they went up to Akron, or in the summers when they’d head up to Fair Haven, so Vivian had tucked the Ohio and New York maps under the driver’s seat before leaving the garage.

  The road looked different from the driver’s side of the car. More control. She’d been a good navigator on their road trips, checking the route on the map, and calling out the exits well before they’d need to veer off. Edward, on the other hand, was a terrible navigator.

  Once, and only once, she’d asked to drive part of the way back from Fair Haven. And, twice, Edward said, “Take that exit, back there,” after she’d passed the exit. After the second time, she’d pulled over into the gravel shoulder and slammed the gear into park. She got out of the car, slammed the door, and stomped around to the passenger side and whipped open Edward’s door so fast that he fell out onto the gravel.

  It’d almost evened things up for Vivian, who hadn’t even bothered to suppress her smile, winking at Charlotte, whose eyes and mouth were a shocked trio of O’s against the back window. But Edward dusted himself off, readjusted his glasses, and walked around to the driver’s side without a word. She considered afterward that that might have been Edward’s plan all along, to give her late instructions just to get himself back in the driver’s seat. But, no matter.

  She was the good navigator, and felt sure that she could make the seven-hour trip just fine on her own. Her little anxieties about dealing with people along the way, without the backup of her husband, were just that. Little. After all, she knew people. She’d be willing to bet that Albert Hixson had pocketed the money she just gave him back at the Sunoco, instead of putting it in the till. She knew people, that was for certain.

  And how, exactly, had she not known the people (person) in her own life? she wondered, as the light gray of the winter sky almost blended into the endless stretch of snow-covered fields along Akron Road. The woman who prided herself on her keen understanding of people and their personalities. Ha. That was rich, now, wasn’t it? She wondered if she’d have been any smarter about it if she’d had the chance to finish school. It always weighed on her, the education she’d missed.

  The seven hours were long ones, and with no one in the car to talk to, Vivian fiddled with the radio until the static broke and a song came through, or in the long stretches between radio signals she’d talk to herself, noting things she passed on the drive: cars, farmhouses, wildlife. It seemed the only wildlife out at this time of year were crows, cawing and flapping up out of the tops of the naked trees of the woods that lined the snowy highway.

  Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie, Vivian thought.

  Now, there was something she hadn’t tried baking. Blackbird pie. She thought about baking for a few more miles, and then began singing softly. When she realized there was no one in the car to tell her to keep it down, she sang loudly and lustily, laughing at herself when she couldn’t hit the high notes, “my arms wound ’round you tight,” and her voice would squeal or knock mightily against the wrong notes. If a car was passing the Buick in the other lane she’d rush to clamp her lips shut and try to sing without moving them, like Edgar Bergen with Charlie McCarthy, but then as soon as the car was out in front of her she’d go back to full volume, holding the notes until her ears were ringing. “And staaars fell on Alabama laaaast niiiight.”

  “Night and daaaaay, you are the one . . .”

  “I’ll get by, as long as I have you.”

  She sang lots of songs. Lots and lots of songs. And when she was worn out from singing, or if some of the words hit too close to home, she’d cry. Cry for the marriage she’d thought she had, and the life that had gone too wrong.

  “I can’t give you anything but love, baby . . .”

  She only had to pull over once, when she’d been cr
ying so much that her nose was running and she couldn’t reach her purse, which had slid over against the passenger side of the front seat, to get to her handkerchief. She’d put the car in park, but left the motor running. The outside temperatures were below freezing and she needed the car’s heater on, and also didn’t want to risk not being able to start the car again if the motor got too cold too quickly. She finished blowing her nose and then unscrewed the thermos and took several large gulps of coffee before unwrapping one of the ham-salad sandwiches.

  Lunch restored some of her energy. She took a packet of Sen-Sen out of her pocketbook, tore open the top, and shook out a handful of the tiny licorice pieces. As she chewed, the licorice wafted into her nostrils and stung her eyes. Wasn’t it funny how smells could turn your mood right around? She rolled the top of the packet over to keep the rest of the pieces from spilling out, and returned it to her purse, then slid back into the driver’s seat to get back out on the road.

  It was two full hours before another bout of self-pity struck. As the tears began to flow, she reached for the rearview mirror to see if she really looked all that bad while crying. It was probably a skill to work on—looking attractive while crying. She’d have to practice. Then she fumbled with the latch on her pocketbook with her right hand, searching for the Sen-Sen while steering the white wheel of the Buick with her left.

  Vivian had never checked into a hotel all by herself. She and Edward had only stayed in a hotel a few times in all the years they’d been married (ha!). Edward had always made the arrangements, and checked them in and paid the bill, while she’d stood next to the suitcases and checked her powder in her compact mirror. She felt the eyes of everyone in the lobby on her and nervously pulled up her coat collar. The way the desk clerk was eyeing her made her wish Edward were there.

  “I need a room, please,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking.

  “For how many nights?”

  “Oh, uh, two, please.”

  “Just you?” the clerk asked in a suggestive tone.

  It was like that little shit Albert Hixson had aged ten years and was now working the desk at this damned hotel. Vivian wished she could think of something snappy to say. This wisenheimer needed to be put in his place, but all she could do was nod and avoid eye contact with him. As he slid the key across the desk to her he leaned in.

  “Well, I’m right here if you need anything.”

  “I don’t need anything from you,” she managed this time, and snapped up the key, turned on her heel, and walked to the stairs carrying her small suitcase. When she got to the room she dropped the suitcase on the floor, closed the door and locked it, and then looked around at the furniture to figure out which piece she could push up against the door so she’d be able to sleep.

  That was another thing. She’d been sleeping next to Edward for nearly sixteen years, and having a great big bed without him in it was unsettling. The sheets were scratchy. The mattress sagged. Every noise made her jump. The man in the room next to hers hadn’t stopped coughing in the last hour and a half.

  After lying awake in the dark for three hours, she lost her patience and kicked angrily at the covers. She sat bolt upright in the bed, grabbed the extra lumpy pillow, and smashed her face into it and screamed, “GODDAMN YOU, EDWARD!,” allowing each muffled word to vibrate through the fabric and filling for several seconds. The force with which she screamed stiffened every muscle in her upper body, and when she finally let the pillow fall into her lap she felt pretty tired. She set the pillow back next to her head, collapsed onto her back, and fell right to sleep. The sleep was fitful. She dreamed her teeth were being pulled out all over again and she was scrambling to pick them up and jam them back into her gums.

  The next morning Vivian stood on the porch of a late-Victorian clapboard house and pulled a Lucky Strike from the package. She’d quit the moment she knew she was pregnant with Charlotte, and hadn’t planned to start up again, but everything had changed. Edward hated when she smoked. But who was he to have an opinion now? Who was he at all? Who was this man she had married, who’d married someone else before her and kept it a secret for sixteen years?

  “We were just kidding around. It wasn’t serious.” These were Edward’s words about his first marriage that were ringing in her ears as she stood on that porch on South Salina Street in East Syracuse in the biting morning cold, balancing the clipboard on her left forearm. She still held the cigarette between the first two fingers in her right hand, and with her thumb she pressed the doorbell.

  Chapter 31

  Mildred Fischer Dalton Taggart took her time in answering the door, as a small dog barked in the background. Of course there’s a dog. Vivian felt her heart hop a little, and could see a short figure lurching down a long hallway behind the gauze curtain in the door’s small eye-level window. She smoked the Lucky all the way down to the nub by the time the lurching figure reached the door. She quickly stubbed out the butt on the underside of the clipboard, dropped it into a pile of snow that hadn’t been cleared from the porch, and pasted on what she hoped was a winning and official-looking smile as the door opened.

  “Hello,” she began in her sunniest tone of voice.

  “Whaddya want?”

  Edward’s first wife was not fat, as Vivian had predicted, but was short and a little lumpy in the floral housedress that was cinched awkwardly at her bulging middle. Her hair was dyed a harsh mud-brown, which aged her. Already Vivian was feeling better, and she stood a little straighter in her fur-collared coat and new fur-lined ankle boots.

  “I’m Shirley Smith, with the United States Census Bureau,” she said, the way she’d practiced over and over in front of the bathroom mirror in her hotel room that morning. She’d never tried anything like this before and was more nervous than if she’d been walking onto a Broadway stage to sing “Oklahoma!”

  “Census Bureau,” Mildred repeated, looking from Vivian’s eyes to the clipboard. “They already came here.”

  “Yes,” Vivian agreed. “Mercy, aren’t we a nuisance! But there was a small fire that destroyed the 1950 records for this neighborhood.” She smiled apologetically. “We’re having to do them over. Just a few quick questions, if you don’t mind. Would you like a cigarette?”

  “Make it quick.” Mildred pushed open the screen door to step onto the porch, and the small dog made his escape.

  Mildred held out her hand for the cigarette as Vivian gasped and whirled around to see where the dog went. Out into the street, the paranoid voice in her head shrieked. When she whipped back around she knew from the look on Mildred’s face she sure wasn’t going to be invited into the house, and the interview was going to be done right there on the porch, in the cold, as quickly and as hostile as you please. Vivian was torn between feeling giddy that Mildred believed her story and anxious about the goddamned dog, who, unlike poor Rambles, had stayed safely on the porch, and was now burrowing into the dirty piles of snow. She did notice that Mildred’s voice was not the same voice she’d heard calling Betty Miller that night. So, that was one question answered.

  She scrutinized Mildred’s complexion as she held the lighter up to the cigarette, her hand wobbling just a touch. Sallow and patchy, she thought. She also couldn’t believe anyone would answer the door without her lipstick on. Mildred took a drag and then leaned back and away from the lighter and narrowed her eyes as she inspected Vivian. Then it was the dog doing the inspecting. Circling her like a small furry porch wolf, its wet nose snuffling its way all around her ankles. NO, Vivian shouted inside her head, just in case the dog could read her thoughts. It could not. It stretched its dirty paws right up onto her skirt and continued its snuffling. If she didn’t know any better, she’d swear the dog was smiling. She almost smiled back. There was a Mildred had a dog and Bingo was his name-o.

  “Well, I appreciate you taking the time,” Vivian said, fumbling to put the lighter back in her pocketbook and then find the dang pencil she was supposed to use for her interview while trying to g
ently push the dog off of her leg. B-I-N-G-O. “Now, let’s see . . .”

  “Brucie! Quit messing around and get back in the house!” Mildred’s voice snapped as she held the screen door open for Brucie.

  Vivian inhaled deeply through her nostrils and thought that little dog deserved a better name. What kind of a stupid name was Brucie for a dog? B-R-U-C-I-E. It didn’t work with the tune. Stupid name or not, Brucie obeyed Mildred and plopped back onto all fours and tap-tap-tapped his way back inside the house on those dirty paws that’d probably left marks on Vivian’s best skirt. Vivian grabbed the pencil and yanked it from the mess in her purse and then flipped the top page, which she had left intentionally blank, over the back of the clipboard.

  “You were living in this same house in 1950?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fine, fine. And your full name?”

  “Mildred Rose Fischer.”

  Vivian scribbled with the pencil, waiting for Mildred to say one or both of her married names, but she didn’t.

  “Mmm-hmm, could you spell ‘Fischer’ for me?”

  “F-I-S-C-H-E-R.”

  “Thank you. And, miss, missus? Fischer, are you currently married?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been married previously?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Vivian didn’t think she’d be able to get away with asking “To whom?” or anything else specific about Mildred’s previous marriages, so good old Shirley Smith would have to leave it at that.

  “Who else lives at this address with you?”