There was no answer.
Fearful, she called again, “Cotter!”
She came all the way into the dining room before she saw Jake. He stood outside the screen door, his nose pressed against it. His eyes followed the lamp.
“Oh, Jake. Come on in.” She motioned for him to open the door.
He came in, closed the door carefully behind him and stood just inside.
She gathered up the shirts. “You came too soon. I was going to wash these for you. How often does that girl do them? It don’t seem like these have been done lately.”
She knew he did not understand a word, but she was glad of the sound of her voice in the room; it made this time seem more sociable.
“You know what I’m going to do?” she said, crossing the room. She held a shirt up against him, trying to get some idea of his measurements. Suddenly, without thought or intent, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him lightly. She held him about the neck an instant, quite strongly.
In that instant, she smelled the far-away smell of the hen house, but also something sweet. Stepping back, she saw jelly in the corners of his mouth.
While she watched, there appeared instead the drivel of his thick, foamy saliva.
She thought he was startled. “Jake—” she said.
Then she saw it was more than that. He had the look of an animal chased and caught.
He was terrified.
She put out her hands, but he was gone.
She followed him and was all the way to the front steps before she saw him. He had cleared the yard and jumped the fence. The shirt, caught on him somehow, floated behind in the night like a ghostly thing.
“Jake,” she called. “I didn’t mean …”
Her voice fell away sorrowfully on the night air. She found it again and called again. “It was only me. Only Ruth Edna.…”
Her arms went out to the night and returned to her as they always had, empty.
Chapter Five
Billy Morgan pushed his chair back from the supper table and said angrily to his wife, “All right. All right.” He pushed an arm into each sleeve of a light sweater and scowled as he zipped it. “I’ll be playing pitch at your momma’s store,” he said, and was careful to slam the front door leaving the house.
Frances forgot instantly what they had argued about. Now that he was gone, she was in a hurry. She cleared the table quickly and said to her three-year-old son, “Eat!” in a shout reduced to a sound like steam escaping.
Billy Jr. tried and failed, dropped his spoon into the little well of gravy he had made in his mashed potatoes.
“Oh, God!” Frances said.
She went to the kitchen and returned with a sponge, wiped at the gravy spatters hurriedly while they became circles of grease widening one upon another, giving a dull glaze to the shiny blond furniture. Not that she cared.
Billy had picked out the furniture, and it was his as far as she was concerned. They had argued over it bitterly as they had argued over everything. All they had ever agreed on was getting married. Why that had been was the kind of thing one could go on asking oneself afterward forever, when it was too late.
Carrying the wet sponge, she went to the window, glanced out and saw Cotter May hurrying up the road to her mother’s store: Miss Loma’s, where the pitch game was held every Thursday night. She stared at what she could see of the store’s lights, as if she might will Frank to leave. But it was too early. He could never leave before seven-thirty; now it was six. Waiting out the week between the Thursday nights when he slipped away from the game to come to her was almost more than she could bear.
At forty-four, Frank Patrick was fourteen years older than she. She remembered him first as a gangly boy coming to Sunday dinner with his parents, Brother and Mrs. Patrick. By the time she was grown, Frank was married. But in Marigold’s limited social circles, he was considered still a “young married” when she entered that group. It was the group’s custom to follow about on Saturday nights the dances that moved around the countryside from one lodge hall to another: Sarah, Sardis, Savage, Senatobia, Hernando and Marigold it went.
On these evenings she found herself increasingly in Frank’s company. At first it was not so much by design as by circumstance. They liked the same tunes for dancing and preferred sitting for long periods of the evening merely watching, sometimes not even speaking. Most of the women did not drink at all, but Frances enjoyed moderate drinking very much, and it was companionable as they sat at the table together. To her, they had kindred senses of humor. She said to him once, “I think we’re soulmates.”
He looked perplexed, said nothing, but put out an arm and gave her a surreptitious hug.
After a particularly bitter fight with Billy one Saturday, she cried out, “Oh, if only we could get free of each other!”
And he said, “Well, we never will. We’re going to stick this out for the kids.”
Frances fell onto the bed, a heap of despair, and asked herself, Am I going to live forever, then, without love?
That evening, dancing with Frank, she suddenly moved closer and lifting her face, put it against his. He tightened his arm about her, more quickly than she could have hoped had she planned beforehand what she was going to do. They ceased to dance except in a parody of it, a reason for standing pressed together as they were in the middle of the floor.
She whispered, “I never thought that you …”
“Oh Jesus——.” He let out his breath as if he had been holding it a long while.
They left the floor and went out onto the porch where only lights treated against bugs burned, giving off a murky orange glow. I’ll look terrible, she thought, like I don’t have any lipstick on.
They stood close and stared at one another, prolonging the moment before they would kiss for the first time. When they had kissed, she thought, He’s wonderful! They kissed again, and she put out her tongue and gave him a little lick about the chin and said, “Oh Frank, you’re so sweet.”
Entwined, they went out into the night, and as though through a maze, went about the parking lot seeking his car. Then he stood with his hand on the door handle and said, “I don’t want to do it in a car. I haven’t done that since I was sixteen. But there’s no place else, and I don’t want to wait.”
“Oh, no. Don’t wait.”
What if he doesn’t like me, she thought. What if I’m like I am with Billy. Suddenly she was afraid. What if I am cold?
But she was not.
She cuddled up to him and said, “Frank, was I all right?”
“All right? Baby, you were swell.”
“Swell——. My husband thinks I’m cold.”
“Cold! What the hell does he expect? You’re hot as a little firecracker.”
“I am cold with him. He just never has been able to make me feel the way I did with you just now.”
“Well Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” she said, and tried to smile.
Presently, he said, “I could do it all over again. How ’bout you?”
“I could. But we don’t have time.” She sat up and bit at his ear. “In fact, we’ve been gone so long now, I’m scared. We’d better hurry.”
They got out of the car and went back hurriedly the way they had come. She kept thinking, Now I’m really me. She felt she had been a girl when she came to the dance, but that she would go home a woman. And not a cold one either, she told herself happily.
“Have you done anything like this before?” she said.
He gave her a little slap on the behind and winked. He lit a cigarette, and in the match’s flare she saw gray where his hair was beginning to turn at the temples. She thought this was thrilling. Beneath his eyes was a slight puffiness that had come with age, and she thought this was thrilling too. Oh, I’m going to love him so, she thought. He’s so cute.
“Frank, what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to figure out something. I’d sure like to see you again.”
; “I have to see you. You just don’t know.”
They had come to the lodge. Faintly above the door in the dark the white V.F.W. letters stood out. He said, “You’d better go around to the side entrance, like you’ve been to the women’s toilet. I’ll stay here and smoke like I’ve been here all the time.”
They separated, and when they met again inside, she sat with her eyes on him the rest of the evening.
They did not meet again for many weeks, not until Billy and several others went duck hunting. Then Frances went into the yard early and stayed close by the fence setting out tulip bulbs. As she had known he would, Frank passed by close to ten o’clock on his way to get the mail. When she waved, he pulled his pick-up truck to the side of the road immediately.
“Good morning,” she said. “I thought maybe Eleanora was with you. I wanted to ask her something about these bulbs. She always has such a pretty garden.”
“No, she’s home.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t go to Stuttgart with the rest of the gang.”
“I don’t care too much for duck hunting.”
“Oh, is that right? Well, it’s a nice little overnight trip anyway.”
“That’s so,” he said. He tipped his hat. “I’ll tell Eleanora you want to ask her something about the garden. Nice to see you, Frances.” He drove away.
Did I make a fool of myself? she wondered. Did he understand? Does he care?
But it was no more than an hour before he arrived in her kitchen, freshly washed and shaved, having come up the back way. With few words, they went to bed. Briefly she wondered if that was all she meant to him. Am I just a slut? she asked herself. Why don’t I care that it’s in Billy’s own bed?
But thinking their love was beautiful, she did not care. Her anguish at last was put to rest. Later he made his way out again successfully the way he had come. They had hit upon Thursday nights as their only solution: Billy would be out of his house, Frank would have an excuse for leaving his. There would be risks. Suppose her mother or a neighbor dropped by? Suppose Eleanora found out he left the game early each week? They felt them risks worth taking.
She looked at herself now in a new light. Before, she had been always ready to criticize others. Now she was what they called “the other woman.” She had done what they called “stealing love”—but she had needed the love so much. If she had stolen food for her starving children, would anyone have thought it wrong? Wasn’t it almost the same?
Darkness had come into the room and dusk to the world outside. Street lights made lonesome islands of light. How peculiar that the two men were there playing cards together: the one, a stranger to whom she had been married for five years; the other, who had only had to kiss her once for her to belong to him entirely. She felt she had belonged to Frank forever, even while she was still in the region of darkness and he was born.
When she turned back to the room, Billy Jr. sat still with his supper unfinished. She took away his plate to the kitchen and washed the dishes quickly, furtively, as if Billy might suddenly look over her shoulder. He made the child eat everything on his plate, always! If he were allowed to goof off now, he might goof off forever, he said. Billy had so many rules, Frances’ head ached sometimes trying to keep up with them all.
Her momma had warned her against marrying a Yankee, even though Billy was a child when his poppa, a widower, had moved to Marigold from upper New York State where he had failed at growing apples. Billy had told her what he remembered of the winters there, how the snows had piled on top of one another and stood in dirty heaps, till April sometimes.
April! She had said it in astonishment, thinking what the word meant to her: japonica red as a sunset, fragile dogwood and grass as green and shiny as the shredded kind you put into children’s Easter baskets. And the air! as soft as the tread of a kitten’s paws, as sweet as their little faces.
Billy said they had trudged to school through tunnels dug in the snow, the snow flung on either side making banks taller than the children’s heads.
Why, she had said, didn’t they just stay home the way children in Marigold would have done? Shoot, Yankees just liked to make things hard for themselves. Who in Marigold would have dug through all that snow? Nobody she could think of. It would have been a time for sitting before the fire, popping corn and playing Rook.
She thought it was this feeling of basic alienness from Billy that accounted for the intensity with which she had fallen in love with Frank. She felt she had come home again, back to her own people, back to their ways. Sometimes, lying awake at night, she would think, All that snow, all that cold; it was bound to make a person harder, gruffer, different. She would sleep, to dream that the snow lay next to her in a frozen mound, untouchable.
“Bed,” she said to Billy Jr. He put up his little arms, and she carried him into the bathroom and then to bed. He had to be asleep before Frank came. “Hurry now, hurry,” she said anxiously, while he selected from among a jungle of toys something to sleep with. Then he was beside the bed, and she knelt with him while he said, in his baby’s voice, “Now I lay me down to sleep.…”
She took him into her arms afterward. He was so slight, so tiny, she thought how easily his little bones could break beneath the pressure of her arms. “Oh, my teeny bones, my little boy,” she said, and was overcome with sorrow at the void in her life. If only the man she loved were the father of her children…
When he was in bed she stood a moment and looked at Judy in her crib, her limbs flung wide in sleep, the bottle she had sucked dry resting on one shoulder. Frances moved it slightly, not far. If Judy woke in the night, she had to find it.
She returned to the living room, forlorn with her own unhappiness, aware more than ever of the dimension Frank added to her life. She stared about the room, depressed by it. Once decorating the house had been a consuming interest, but her interest had diminished at the exact pace of her interest in the marriage. Where she had taken the last brushstroke of a new coat of paint halfway up the molding in the hall was evident. She regarded it now as a sort of measure, the way people kept records of children’s heights on the walls. Perhaps the day she left off painting was the day she had decided she was never going to like going to bed with Billy. Perhaps it was the day he had said never again ask him how much money he made or he would never give her any.
At the window, she held aside the lifeless marquisette curtain and, looking out, saw only the empty road. She returned to the center of the room, listening for sounds from the children’s room. Only a moment before she had heard great zoomings and ka-tows, a great many soldiers were meeting their deaths, but now it was quiet. Her heart beat fearfully. She went about the house turning off lights, except for one in her bedroom. She stood in the darkened hallway, waiting, thinking, Suppose it’s tonight we are caught?
Then he opened the door. In two strides, she was down the hall. She threw her arms about him and said, “Honey. Oh, honey.”
They went into the bedroom and sat opposite each other while she told him all she had done during the week. The long week. He told her of the evening, that he had held bad cards and had been glad to leave. Oh, she teased, was that the only reason?
He never mentioned Billy, and she seldom spoke of Eleanora. It was the only area of shyness left between them.
He removed his shirt and his shoes, and she thought how once she had been embarrassed even by that. She had wanted them only in bed and making love, with no preliminaries—nothing to be unbuttoned, unzipped, removed, no words. She had been unrealistic, childish. Now the fact that these ordinary things had to happen between them gave her pleasure. It made their lovemaking even more extraordinary.
When Frank removed his undershirt, she came to him, knelt and put her head against his chest, touched the hair there. He put his hand on the side of her head and held her to him, making her feel quite small. She heard only a sound like that in a sea shell. She considered it her special world; she could smell his soap and his skin, and she thought, I have co
me home. Thank you, God.
“What?” She sat up and took down his hand.
“I said, ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’” He grinned.
While he was gone, she removed everything but her slip and was in bed when he came back. She did not like to be seen naked until they were actually making love, but she was glad he had no embarrassment. He walked without clothes to the dresser and put down his change and his keys and his wallet. Just as Billy does every night, she thought; how often she had watched him.
Looking at Frank now, she could not help but compare him to Billy. Twelve years’ difference in age made a difference. Though Frank was thin, he was slightly flabby, though in good condition. For someone his age, she thought automatically, surprising herself. It was the first time she had felt in the least separate from him, or realized that they did, after all, belong to different generations.
He came to bed with a cigarette and crushed it out in an ashtray on the bedside table. “Remind me to empty that,” she said. “Billy’s started in on those filter tips.”
Surely, he made love to her. She responded so passionately she would have been embarrassed had he ever shown the least inclination to be so. But she had promised herself not to hold back here, not the only place in the world she felt she had ever been herself. Only in childbirth had she ever been taken out of herself before. And then, catapulted into pain, she had cried out helplessly, against her will. It had outraged her to submit to pain. But not to love.
“It was wonderful,” she said. “Was it for you?”
“Sure,” he said. “You’re sure something.”
“Do you think my fanny’s too big? Billy does.”
“I think it’s fine.” He patted it.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing, I’m just tired.”
The Morning and the Evening Page 8